Epicedion: bfahle: After all, if the universe has no meaning, where did meaning come from?

Your own mind.

Your mind's estimation of your neighbor's mind, actually.

Just because you say something is a strawman, doesn't make it one. A wise old man told me that so it has to be true. No, wait, valid. No, wait, valid and true. No, wait, true but not valid. No, wait...

JeopardyDavid: Anyone going to mention that Johnson won his awards for his performance during World War *One*, and the bonehead's argument is based on Johnson being permitted or not permitted to shoot Nazis during World War *Two*?


While that is +5 funny, doesn't the guy have a point hidden somewhere under his anger, stupidity, and conspiracy theory?

Johnson wasn't assigned to a combat unit. And combat units were segregated until an Executive Order by President Truman in 1948... right?

Saiga410: Remember a time when facts settled arguments?

No, I do not.

Well said.

I do remember a time, however, when discussion was a little more civil and a little less obviously biased to political parties. It is freaky to think that there are entire networks dedicated to promoting a political parties' agenda, disguised as news channels.

equilibrium: Hobodeluxe: I blame Fox News. they mainstreamed ignoring facts. they even won a lawsuit that said they could lie to the public with impunity.

It isn't a new issue: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (new window)

Unfortunately, with the advent of Fox News and the AM radio pundits, the willfully ignorant are having their particular mental defect mirrored back to them as normal.

More people should read that book in high school.

/I wish I had.

Wow...I don't speak whinese. Article makes no sense.

/Just the facts, ma'am.

... in other words ... Christians

... in other words ... liberals

... in other words ... Muslims

... in other words ... global warming theorists

Okay, that covers everyone I think is retarded.

radical dude.

Barakku: Saiga410: Remember a time when facts settled arguments?

No, I do not.

Yes you do.

Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.

I think people willingness to throw away logic, goes hand in hand with the beleif that everything is some big conspiracy.

Unfortunate of this fellow to mention the Iraq War. There is plenty of estrangement from critical thinking, illogic, and alienation from objective truth about that on the Left.

Oh, we don't need oil. We can just drive electric cars. We haven't been at war in the Persian Gulf for 30 years. The Democratic party has a fundamentally different position from the Republican Party on Iraq.

And so on.

If facts would shut people up there wouldn't be Fark for very long, and I would be like a god.

To a large degree, this conversation has been about nostalgia for a golden age of reason that never existed, and that's fine

It existed. The Enlightenment here and the Age of Reason in Europia are well documented. Not to mention the later onset of American pragmatism cum scientific method that straddled the Industrial Revolution.

But, these things exist in cycles and in contrasts. For every Enlightenment Figure there's a countervailing Jonathan Edwards. For every pragmatic Calvinist immigrant New Englander there is an emotional, artsy-fartsy border-line Deist yeoman southern farmer.

jwa007: WTFDYW: Welcome to FARK

Done in one.

But it is greenlit and that means that soon the little liters will be here to spew venom at each other and attempt to crush each other with logical fallacies and lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Bah...it's not just liters...everyone on here is mentally challenged.

Trawg: A padded wall is still a wall. Ask the crazies.

The belief that these four walls and jacket constrain me is your madness, not mine.

Tyee: If facts would shut people up there wouldn't be Fark for very long, and I would be like a god.

The problem isn't facts, but is in getting everyone to agree that a fact is a fact.

Ivan Dobski: facts are scary

That guy was 100% correct on global warming? Uh huh.

Please look up the term "petititio principii".

canyoneer: Unfortunate of this fellow to mention the Iraq War. There is plenty of estrangement from critical thinking, illogic, and alienation from objective truth about that on the Left.

Oh, we don't need oil. We can just drive electric cars. We haven't been at war in the Persian Gulf for 30 years. The Democratic party has a fundamentally different position from the Republican Party on Iraq.

And so on.

Yeah I need oil. Specifically I need petroleum jelly so that I can easily lube up and butt-bang your grandmother.

make me some tea: VictoryCabal: After a lifetime of experience and consideration, I've come to the conclusion that there never was a golden age of reason where people carefully considered all the evidence, weighed all the facts, and then came to conclusions and formed opinions, yet were always ready to change their minds in the face of new evidence. I'm pretty sure that time never existed.

Rather, I believe people think the way they always have: They form their opinions, and then go searching for facts and other people that make them feel smart and justified for holding those opinions. Your only hope is lucking into forming the correct opinions from the start, otherwise you're condemned to a lifetime of tinfoil hats and freeper threads.

Agreed. In fact, in the past, people were quite a bit less informed than they are now. These days, there seems to be a consistent 25% of us that actively wish to live in their own little worlds regardless of the facts. And there are plenty of people perfectly happy to profit by keeping their minds satiated.

Funny about that statistic, as I remember reading that 1 out 5 people in the world carry with them some sort of personality disorder.



And the other 80% are just plain crazy. I've worked with plenty of nihilists who call themselves "christians" who dismiss anyone with real education on a particular subject as merely being brainwashed by a "liberal university". You see it on television every day.

People with almost NO formal education always seem to be the most vehement in their opinions, and always seem on the cusp of violence when challenged on their notions. Religious fanaticism is considered by every shrink in the world to be a symptom of serious mental illness for good reasons. This is borne out by the devotion by the Russians to communism as an economic model, even in the face of their nearly total economic collapse in the mid-1980s. This is now being manifested in the Randian capitalists here in this country, with their devotion to the Corporation as being the ultimate manifestation of the human socioeconomic model, to be protected and worshiped at any and all costs to our society. It is merely a return to the old feudalistic system that humans had to suffer through throughout their entire history up to this point.

You cannot reason with a nihilist. You cannot use logic in a discussion with someone that was raised to question everything, even when it is presented to them right in front of their eyes for themselves to analyze and study. Most such people flat refuse to even look. Their too terrified of reality to allow their personal belief system to be challenged in any way, even when the evidence may even support their position in the argument.

There are no "sane" human beings, anywhere.

ihatedumbpeople: jwa007: WTFDYW: Welcome to FARK

Done in one.

But it is greenlit and that means that soon the little liters will be here to spew venom at each other and attempt to crush each other with logical fallacies and lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Bah...it's not just liters...everyone on here is mentally challenged.

I prefer the politically correct term "retarded".

Americans ARE NOT stupid...
Link (new window)

I was with them until they linked Birthers and GW deniers in the same camp. Sorry Seattle PI no cookie for you.

I believe that Obama is legit AND I deny most conclusions drawn up by "environmentalists"

. So where does that put me? Am I a fact denier or just not convinced since there is plenty of evidence to the contrary (least of which is the fact that the current climate doesn't support the notion of warming...)

By that I don't mean all environmentalists are cranks, I think the ones clamouring for press attention are.

Did he use his "5th leg" to give you a pink sock?

More fark.com genius.

How did I stumble across such a compendium of intellect?

It's like a living encyclopedia up in here!

The right wing was totally hating on the French but then they thought, hey, denying objective reality has a use! The rest is our misery.

Who'd a thunk that the right wing would be the guys to adopt PoMo. With, as they say, a vengeance?

Orgasmatron138: Saiga410: Remember a time when facts settled arguments?

No, I do not.

Well said.

I do remember a time, however, when discussion was a little more civil and a little less obviously biased to political parties. It is freaky to think that there are entire networks dedicated to promoting a political parties' agenda, disguised as news channels.

The primary industry of American governance is to keep people assured that the reason that their lives are are crap is the fault of the white/black/male/female/Christian/Muslim/ person up the road who hasn't got a pot to piss in, either.

It's working.

Seems like the only fact he introduced to the argument was that someone with that name was buried in arlington cemetery.

The "aggressor" was apparently challenging the fact that this was a black man and that the events ocurred as stated. If approaching what is beleived to be a fabricated story, he was looking for support of the information being presented, such as witnesses, and the "weakness" of the defending "fact" likely made him feel like he'd definately found a weakness to the story.

I guess the days of arguing with APPLICABLE facts is gone.

I suppose Chewbacca is a wookie and you must acquit, rather than pointing out those books and recounts of the events from various sources.

I can't recall exactly when, but someone submitted a link to Fark about a celebrity/politician debating another about the issue of waterboarding.

It quickly turned into a screaming match.

Entertaining? Maybe. Thoughtful and intellectually challenging? No.

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I think its very cute, how liberals intone that their views are based on "the facts" - when, in fact, their entire inventory of beliefs is ultimately based on an epistemology and metaphysics that are fluid and subjective.

Its like a little kid trying on Daddy's ties - when the kid is a girl.

But it is still cute.

Facts get in the way of my constitutional right to lie. To hell with em!

Fluff Girl: I may be myopic here, but I blame talk radio and Fox News. There are no consequences for lying outright any more. And some wharrgarbl spouted by Rush Limbaugh in the morning is plastered all over facebook and free republic in the afternoon, parroted by people who smugly present the "facts" that support their worldview.

They think it is possible for someone to be simultaneously a Nazi, a socialist, and and communist, since they've been told Obama is all three. They want the current president impeached, although they are a little fuzzy as to what "impeached" means. But they know if it would somehow remove the Nazi, socialist, communist negro, they are all for it. They have turned into lolcats, and the talking heads are getting rich by ginning up the fear and loathing.

You're right!! You are myopic. And, you're saying the same thing that both sides say, every time, all the time.

Meh.

Davey Croquette: To a large degree, this conversation has been about nostalgia for a golden age of reason that never existed, and that's fine

It existed. The Enlightenment here and the Age of Reason in Europia are well documented. Not to mention the later onset of American pragmatism cum scientific method that straddled the Industrial Revolution.

But, these things exist in cycles and in contrasts. For every Enlightenment Figure there's a countervailing Jonathan Edwards. For every pragmatic Calvinist immigrant New Englander there is an emotional, artsy-fartsy border-line Deist yeoman southern farmer.

The American enlightenment period was more or less coterminous with the evangelical movement which was pretty anti-reason.

There were plenty of people that were hostile to reason during the enlightenment, and arguably the enlightenment was an elite phenomenon anyway.

Not to say that it wasn't groovy, but it wasn't quite a universal American mode of thought, either.

Deathfrogg:
People with almost NO formal education always seem to be the most vehement in their opinions, and always seem on the cusp of violence when challenged on their notions. .

THIS.

Mediocrity recognizes nothing above itself.

Don't know about five legs, but I've heard of dogs growing second tails.

I had a dog that grew a second tail. We called him "Love-dog" after the nearby canal he liked to play in.

DjangoStonereaver: Code_Archeologist: Babwa Wawa: There are plenty of historical examples, from the infancy of science through the practice of racism, where people showed deliberate ignorance of evidence.

It is not just a deliberate ignorance of evidence, there is a sub-culture in our nation that celebrates the ignorant and spurns the expert. And it is not just regarding one issue, or one aspect of knowledge, it is about EVERYTHING.

They deny the evidence of global warming, they deny the evidence of evolution, they deny the evidence that inoculation doesn't cause autism. They reference folk wisdom and religious text as the be all and end all of scholastic achievement. They refuse to examine their own ideas, and turn to sources that will echo their own beliefs rather then challenge them. In short Americans have not just become physically lazy and obese, but intellectually lazy and stupid.

Its not a new phenomena; modern anti-intellectualism started with
William Jennings Bryan (new window), who dubbed
himself "The Great Commoner" and who railed against anything
that wasn't in the Bible, but it dates back as long as people have been
believing in the mystical and religious over concrete scientific proof.

Americans have always had a perverse notion that common sense always
trumps specialized knowledge. Even that paragon of rationality and scientific
reasoning, Robert Heinlein, was prey to it with his famous quote:

That is true for a segment of the pop culture, but for another segment the complete opposite is true. Look at the network nightly news and there is always at least one story (usually medical) about how everything we assumed true is wrong and the opposite is true. Every few months there is a history book published that seeks to overturn every other book on the subject.

I think it's part of the human condition - some like the comfort of tradition and conventional wisdom, some rebel and are more prone to believe anything that "proves" that conventional wisdom is wrong.

On the extremes, we see the craziness: People that believe the literal interpretation of religious texts (and it ain't always the Bible). And those that believe and promote conspiracy theories because they call the popular wisdom into question.

bfahle: Trawg: imfallen_angel: schattenteufel: Has anyone mentioned how religion ignores facts and has become estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, and alienated from objective truth yet?

And so does the Fark atheist butt bumping militant team.

/was waiting for someone to go this route...

Just because someone else acts stupid doesn't put you in the clear for acting stupid.

Also, Atheists use a HELLUVALOT more critical thinking and logic than someone who believes some guy put two of every animal on a boat to repopulate the world after some "god" decided to kill everything.

Yes, but at the expense of open-mindedness (referring to the proselytizing form of atheist here, who fights for the cause of atheism on the internets, and has this weird faith that what they say matters or will have any effect on the reader). For the record, I don't believe in God as a literal sky-daddy who capriciously kicked some earthlings out of a garden (who then found other humans from where?). But I do believe in the value of the subjective experience, particularly the spiritual experience, and I believe in meaning as an inherent part of the universe, and I choose to call that God. After all, if the universe has no meaning, where did meaning come from?

One gigantic vacuum fluctuation?

bookman: Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I think its very cute, how liberals intone that their views are based on "the facts" - when, in fact, their entire inventory of beliefs is ultimately based on an epistemology and metaphysics that are fluid and subjective.

Yeah, Glenn Beck gets on my nerves too.

I couldn't care less what colour he was. He's still a

Oh_Enough_Already: Deathfrogg:
People with almost NO formal education always seem to be the most vehement in their opinions, and always seem on the cusp of violence when challenged on their notions. .

THIS.

Mediocrity recognizes nothing above itself.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

ihatedumbpeople: jwa007: WTFDYW: Welcome to FARK

Done in one.

But it is greenlit and that means that soon the little liters will be here to spew venom at each other and attempt to crush each other with logical fallacies and lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Bah...it's not just liters...everyone on here is mentally challenged.

Ra-tard, rather.

What people are failing to understand is that technology is allowing us to widely voice our opinions these days. There are an estimated over 1 billion Internet devices world wide. That means around 1/6 of the population is online. So, yes, more people online will also parallel more idiots voicing their opinions.

Morons have existed since the beginning of time and they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. It is just now with things like the Internet they can reach a broader audience.

Davey Croquette: Which is perhaps the dumbest argument for Gay Rights anyone could ever make.

The fact you single out the fact that homosexuals face legal and social oppression as the "dumbest" argument for gay rights impeaches opponents of gay rights and their apologists (like yourself) far more than it impeaches the people fighting for equality.

winterwhile: Hide the decline??? comes to mind?

Perfect example of what the author was talking about. They were referring in those emails to reconciling problems with the recent (but not ancient) Ural Mountain tree ring dataset, and footnoted it properly in their paper, and yet douchebags like you feel free to interpret it however you like, and DAMN THE FACTS, GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!!!11!!!

imgod2u: Yup, the good old days. I mean, blatantly ignoring scientific fact? When people first noticed the sails of ships appearing first beyond the horizon or saw how the eclipse on the moon was a round shadow, that was the end of it; the people opened their eyes, saw the evidence, and concluded without wharrrblll that the Earth was round.

They did, in fact; Earth was widely believed to be round since ancient Greece. The myth that Columbus believed the world was round and everyone else thought it was flat is just that - a myth. Columbus was trying to prove that the world was smaller than everyone thought, and he was wrong.

imgod2u: And then there's that little rascal Darwin. Man, people didn't see that one coming. But sure enough, all those fossils showing gradual change in various species of animals were solid evidence. Once people saw it, they knew it had to be true.

Also generally true. The Catholic Church and most religious bodies accepted evolution early on. The Scopes Monkey Trial began an era of decreased belief in evolution compared to what occurred before.

I think the media has contributed greatly to the rejection of fact. We are forced to endure two sides on every issue. I mean, on medical advice, we first hear from an idiot who thinks volcanos are spewing evil alien bits, then we hear from a doctor. It's like everything seems to have two sides. The other day I was talking with a friend about the need for healthcare reform... I mentioned the numbers regarding the number of uninsured and average premium prices for ppo's and hmo's... and he said "well, that's your opinion." I just totally blew the f*ck up on him that while I'm fine with having different goals, different avenues of achieving goals, and other variations... there is a fundamental difference between a fact and an opinion. We need to stop this stupidity where people think they can argue whether or not the number of uninsured has increased, whether or not vaccines work, whether more civis have died in the war in Afghanistan or 9/11... I mean, the things that are quantitatively provable should not be in debate... 2+2=4 is not a matter of opinion, it is not subjective...

Honestly, I think the biggest loss to arguments these days are "professional opinions."

There used to be a day when a film reviewer, or a professional Engineer, could formulate an opinion based on their personal experience, and it would hold weight in a discussion because the person in question, was well-versed with the subject.

These days an opinion of an inexperienced person, with only a basic overview of events to go by, will argue a point relentlessly against people who clearly are in the position to truly know what's going on.

It's the whole "Cab-driver-should-be-the-president-one-day" routine. What drives it is the person conviction of their perspective, rather than a full understanding of what's going on.

Sometimes, folks know more, and have access to more information than you do, and that's apparently a bitter pill to swallow.

There were plenty of people that were hostile to reason during the enlightenment, and arguably the enlightenment was an elite phenomenon anyway.

Not to say that it wasn't groovy, but it wasn't quite a universal American mode of thought, either

Which is why I say it occurred in cycles and in contrasts.

Facts smacts. You can use facts to prove anything thats even remotely true.

tombotia: I was with them until they linked Birthers and GW deniers in the same camp. Sorry Seattle PI no cookie for you.

I believe that Obama is legit AND I deny most conclusions drawn up by "environmentalists"
. So where does that put me? Am I a fact denier or just not convinced since there is plenty of evidence to the contrary (least of which is the fact that the current climate doesn't support the notion of warming...)

By that I don't mean all environmentalists are cranks, I think the ones clamouring for press attention are.

Where AGW crosses over from skepticism to nuttiness iIMO is when it is claimed to be a worldwide communist conspiracy to create one world government and destroy capitalism. That and the nut jobs who claim that global warming can't exist because it snowed uyesterday.