--------------------- I saw this on the interweb and laughed and laughed.

I would hope shineyblurry is NOT a creationist with his strong religious beliefs, but if so it's dedicated to him.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists,
You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

Deconstructing opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West has been added as a related post - related requested by enoch on that post.

I am probably being too critical based on a 5 minute routine. And I never said he wasn't funny. But again, it's more than the delivery. He doesn't have to outright copy a joke to be unoriginal (though some get pretty close). The stylistic content as well as the delivery is just too similar for me not to notice. It's more than just using puns, it's the nature of the word play he's using that is so similar. (I'm having a difficult time describing that nature, mainly because I've never found it necessary to deconstruct a comedic act this way.) In any case, I realize it is worth an upvote - if only to counter ant's inscrutable whims.

I think her point wasn't to just go scuba-diving. Sure she could have just paddled around in the water if she wanted a nice swim.

It was to deconstruct/reconstruct the preconceived icon that is "The Wheel Chair" into something that would be as empowering and symbolic to everyone else as it is to the artist.

"Transcendent" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Hmmm. Ok fucj it. I'll go and find a video with Aussies praising the confiscation of their property and rendering the place crime-free...ish.

This is more for the country that's headed towards a colossal fist-fuck because of politicians (criminals), pharmaceutical companies (insulated from mention by all major media and, not surprisingly, self-pimping turds without a clue like TYT, one of THE most flaccid, non-journalistic cretinfests on the web) who help to "create" mental-health problems larger than they need to be by unleashing damaged goods full of legal drugs prescribed by complicit doctors. Step in, the magic wand of unraveling and deconstruction of the U.S. Constitution by appointed and approved, so-called scholars from Harvard(oh hey, the same place not a few of the cunts who run the country hailed-from) to "provide" a solution for a problem that they created and you have the slow-motion train-wreck of the coming police state in one of the best places to be on the planet.

Everything is propaganda sparky, it's your job to wade through what you perceive to be bullshit, kinna like I'm wading thorough yours without really wanting to argue.

Brave New World. Newsflash: Eliminate gun-free zones, arm yourselves against an agenda to let mental health monstrosities roam the place un-checked on hardcore psychotropics with guns STOLEN from their fucked-up mommy, and don't ask a country who will hide their guns from a government determined to take them ALL away to accept anything less than a sane solution to what is primarily a problem created by the people with the MOST money, power, and influence.

Tell me why the pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be having their asses dragged across the coals on television for their part in mass-murder? Answer: Because they have more power and money than a gun lobby.

Again, I give fuck-all about loaded facts and figures form any side of the aisle, they mean dick because the real issue lies in governments fist-fucking their citizens. Shame on the the Brits for letting their government take their shit away and shame on the Aussies for letting the Crown fuck them as well.

10/10 for trolling. You got me. Responded to my comment where I said, verbatim, "NO ONE IS SUGGESTING THIS," to ask for number-clarification. This put distance between my comment, and then you could accuse me of saying that I think we should do that. Mad props.

Or maybe you weren't trolling. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and very politely explain the discussion, assuming you just forgot.

QM said something silly and hyperbolic:

If the liberal dream of seizing all the wealth of the rich came true (minus, I'm sure, Hollywood weirdos) they'd loot about 250 billion, enough to fund our entire precious thugverment for 10-12 days.

At least get your math right, man. No one is suggesting this, but if you seized 100% of the top 1%'s income, you'd get around $1.2T more from them than now, and that would just about cover 2012's deficit.

And $250B would cover 24 days.

In short, LEARN TO MATH.

Edit: Oh, yeah, and if you took all of the top 1%'s wealth, (which is what *you* said), you'd get $16T, enough to pay off our national debt or fund the federal government for 4-5 years.

Where did you get your figures? I don't believe.

http://videosift.com/video/The-National-Debt-and-Deficit-Deconstructed-Tony-Robbins

Where did you get your figures? I don't believe.

http://videosift.com/video/The-National-Debt-and-Deficit-Deconstructed-Tony-Robbins

I'm not expecting anything good out of this one. I mean, I didn't care for Star Trek (2009) either, but at least that one had some of the elements of what Star Trek was about. This looks like a run of the mill comic-book action movie.
I remember when Star Trek was about exploration, philosophy, politics, and discovery. Now it's become something much more mundane, and that's kind of sad, not just on the part of Hollywood, but also on the part of the general public, who can't seem to appreciate the deeper things nowadays.

Also, just because it's a movie doesn't mean you need to focus on some villain on a quest for vengeance all the time. Anyone remember Star Trek VI? I actually consider that to be the best of the Star Trek movies, with its deconstruction of the collapse of communism and how it affected those who lived in that era. Sure it wasn't as tight as Star Trek II, but it had a much greater impact.

Besides, whenever they try to do an amazing, new villain to rival Khan, they always forget to make the villain compelling and interesting. Khan had this advantage because of his background in Space Seed, whereas villains like Shinzon and Nero are bland and undeveloped. (Well, at least effort was made with Shinzon, but they failed to make him a compelling, sympathetic villain. Nero wasn't supposed to upstage the origin story of the crew, but in that case, was he really needed?)

Anyway, I've been kind of ranting about this with friends lately, and I guess that's spilled over to VS now. But that's my position, and I stand by it.

@GeeSussFreeK

I tried to stay way from issues specific to the use of nuclear technology for a reason. There's very little in your reply that I can respond to, simply for a lack of expertise. So bear with me if I once again attempt to generalize and abstract some points. And I'll try to keep it shorter this time.

You mentioned how construction times and costs are pushed up by the constant evolution of compliance codes. A problem not exclusive to the construction of power plants, but maybe more pronounced in these cases. No matter.

What buggers me, however, is what you can currently observe in real time at the EPR construction sites in Olkiluoto and Flamanville.
For instance, the former is reported to have more than 4000 workers from over 60 nations, involving more than 1500 sub-contractors. It's basically the Tower of Babylon, and the quality of work might be similar as well. Workers say, they were ordered to just pour concrete over inadequate weld seams to get things done in time, just to name an example. They are three years over plan as of now, and it'll be at least 2-3 more before completion.
And Flamanville... here's some of what the French Nuclear Safety Authority had to say about the construction site: "concrete supports look like Swiss cheese", "walls with gaping holes", "brittle spots without a trace of cement".

Again, this is not exclusive to the construction of NPPs. Almost every large scale construction site in Europe these days looks like this, except for whatever the Swiss are doing: kudos to them, wonderful work indeed. But if they mess up the construction of a train station, they don't run a risk of ruining the ground water and irradiating what little living space we have in Europe as it is.

Then you explain the advantages of small scale, modular reactors. Again, no argument from my side on the feasability of this, I have to take your word on it. But looking at how the Russians dispose of their old nuclear reactors (bottom of the Barents Sea) and how Germany disposes of its nuclear waste (dropped down a hole), I don't fancy the idea of having even more reactors around.

As for prices, I have to raise my hands in surrender once again. Not my area of expertise, my knowledge is limited to whatever analysis hits the mainstream press every now and then. Here's my take on it, regarding just the German market: the development, construction, tax exemption, insurance exemption, fuel transport and waste disposal of the nuclear industry was paid for primarly by taxes. Conservative government estimates were in the neighbourhood of €300B since the sixties, in addition to the costs of waste disposal and plant deconstruction that the companies can't pay for. And that's if nothing happens to any of the plants, no flood, no fire, nothing.

That's not cheap. E.ON and RWE dropped out of the bid on construction permits for new NPPs in GB, simply because it's not profitable. RWE CEO Terium mentioned ~100€/MWh as the minimum base price to make new NPPs profitable, 75.80€/MWh for gas-powered plants. Right now, the base (peak) price is at 46€/MWh (54€/MWh) in Germany. France generates ~75% of its power through NPPs, while Germany is getting plastered with highly subsidized wind turbines and solar panels, yet the market price for energy is lower in Germany.

Yes, the conditions are vastly different in the US, and yes, the next generation of NPPs might be significantly cheaper and safer to construct and run. I'm all for research in these areas. But on the field of commercial energy generation, nuclear energy just doesn't seem to cut it right now.

So let's hop over to safety/dangers. Again, priorities might differ significantly and I can only argue from a central European perspective. As cold-hearted as it may sound, the number of direct casualties is not the issue. Toxicity and radiation is, as far as I'm concerned. All our NPPs are built on rivers and the entire country is rather densely populated. A crashing plane might kill 500 people, but there will be no long term damage, particularly not to the water table. The picture of an experimental waste storage site is disturbing enough as it is, and it wasn't even "by accident" that some of these chambers are now flooded by ground water.

Apologies if I ripped anything out of context. I tried to avoid the technicalities as best as I could in a desperate attempt not to make a fool of myself. Again.

And sorry for not linking any sources in many cases. Most of it was taken from German/Swiss/Austrian/French articles.

Your video, Owen Jones deconstructs the Gaza situation on BBC's QT, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I think it's a great deconstruction of the film, which admittedly left many open questions. Good job piecing together so many disparate clues. Now to look at the other "twin perfect" titles...

>> ^Deano:

The clip deconstructing the Dark Knight chase sequence is really good. Sifted?


I am not sure, but go for it!

The clip deconstructing the Dark Knight chase sequence is really good. Sifted?

Louis CK's rape joke is brilliant.

Because it is brilliant, I suspect it is going over the heads of those who could learn the lesson embedded in it.

He deconstructed rape. He described the sense of entitlement that some men feel about their penises and their desires. He shied away from blatantly naming it, but really he is describing date rape.

Men who get women drunk, or take advantage of women who are drunk, need to listen to this joke over and over, letting it seep into their consciousness.

This joke also describes the violent offender, the man who attacks women with a knife or a gun or their fists. But the heart of this brilliant, brilliant joke is the uncovering of the motivation and blindness of date rape.

Before anyone goes ballistic on me, let me say that women have got to fight back in date rape situations. Punch, hit, yell, push. Being frightened and meek when a guy is pushing his sexual desires on you is absolutely the "wrong" response. I know women have been trained differently, but we women have got to claim our voices and push the hell back. We women (rather insultingly) joke about men being "clueless" -- well, if you believe that, then accept it fully. Yelling NO, pushing him away, if you need to a nice head butt to the nose -- those actions will clue him in but FAST.

If women claimed that power for themselves, the rate of date rape would plummet.

0:51 is a footbridge in deconstruction, nothing wrong with that.