I dont get dilbert stuff , every gag seems so stupendously obvouse its just not funny ( to me) .
I realize its a reflection on Real world office life and futility of work life things but i don't see how thats funny. and Dilbert to me comes across as really arrogant and smug ( not sure if he is meant to but if he is then that makes him harder as a character to identify with and i realize thats not his primary function in most the gags its the scene in its totality and the situation. But still I would have thought you would want the audeance to identify and like the main chachtor more)

I guess to some people it must be really funny, I know I find somethings funny that i'm sure to others are totally brainless or just don't make sense on a humor level.

Its just normaly i can appreciate how something is funny to other people, I suppose with Dilbert part of it is it highlighting things you see in your daily life and u identifying with that but then saying that I cannot really see that as "funny". More sum one just stating facts in cartoon form.


If its factual comedy like that then for me to find it amusing or worth while it would have to be about something complex and the comedy itself explains things in a way thats clear and entertaining or allows sum-one to understand something that they have not identified before sort of a comedic analogy.

Oh well it seems pretty popular and its not doing anything bad. Just it sometimes gives me a headache trying to really understand other peoples perceptions of things.



maby a Dilbert fan can tell me specifically why its funny to them ?

DFT, been there, done that, tuned out. I tuned out from national (german) politics, because each time a politican here opened his/her/its mouth, my blood pressure jumped 100 points. It was obvious they didn't get it, and they didn't care, since there was no electable alternative.

After a while I gave up and stopped following german news, watching US politics instead. Much easier on the blood pressure, because without any immediate impact of what your fools in power are doing, it has a much higher entertainment value (though at times very infuriating, when those in power bought by BigMoney(tm)(c)(r) get the masses to vote against their own self interest YET AGAIN).

After a break, I went into politics for a year or two for a small opposition party but gave up in disgust after seeing what kind of weirdos crawl around the parties with reasonable views. Tuned out again.

The biggest argument against tuning out on a personal level is that the world starts to pass you by and you'll only notice it when the tail lights disappear behind the horizon. Other than that, it does make daily life a bit less stressful. And thus more healthy.

Hmmm... I am familiar with the concept of fractional reserve banking and money as debt, but not how that works in the context of the Fed. As people have been saying quite a lot recently, The Federal Reserve Bank is not federal, it has no reserves, and it is not a bank.

The system is so different from what I am used to in my daily life that it is almost impossible to wrap my brain around it enough to understand all the implications. But I'm pretty sure that the outcry of "they're just printing money!" is quite pointless and merely a demonstration of ignorance.

I still use the line "ASSAULT WITH A CONCRETE DILDO??" in my daily life

Glad to hear everything's okay in RL!

So, to answer your first question, yes, I have read the Bible and many Buddhist sutras (particularly the Lotus Sutra). I'm familiar with some parts of the Koran, but have not read it in its entirety. What knowledge I have of Hinduism comes from Hindu friends.

Your interpretation of these religious texts is that they promote an obedience to a God or gods. For sure the Buddhist sutras do not, as most sects of Buddhism do not believe in sentient gods per se but in an innate (non-sentient) life force that we all share. But leaving that issue aside, I don't see how you can't have both themes (love thy neighbor/obey god). You couched it as an "either/or" solution, but why does it have to be? There's no logical reason why you can't follow your individual deity and treat other humans with compassion and respect. In fact, in most cases the themes go together--by treating other people with compassion and respect you are following the commands of your deity.

But let's take it further than that. I'm just going to quote you here: Of course you dont have to [interpret the Bible that way], and most religious people dont, read or interpret it that way. Wouldn't you agree that if most people don't interpret the Bible as a form of control, then really your interpretation is not the representative of Christian belief? For certain some people do interpret those religious texts as you have-- fundamentalists, for instance. But I would hardly consider them the majority of religious people or the average representative of religion. In short, just because you’ve interpreted a particular religious text in a particular way, it doesn’t mean your interpretation is by any means “correct” or mainstream.

On a side note, I agree with you that there's a lot of f'd up stuff in many religious texts. Take the Old Testament for example and the bloodshed and wars described within it. However, we’re looking at religion as a whole--not just superficially at the religious text but how that text is interpreted and how the people who follow that religion conduct themselves in daily life. One problem with this, as I mentioned in the last post, is that the most vocal nutcases are usually the ones that you see in the media and not your "average" religious person, so it is easy to form a biased perception of virtually all religions if you’re not associating with members of that particular religion on a daily basis. If you ask the majority of Christians what the major theme of the Bible is, you’ll almost certainly get some answer regarding love and redemption—not your interpretation or violence and control.

To address your second question about empirical evidence about the benefits of religious belief--there's lots. I don't have time now to find all the links. You’ll just have to Google it. I've seen the studies--legit ones on both physical and psychological health published in JAMA and other peer-reviewed sources--and they were enough to convince me. Very few counter-examples have been published with the exception of a recent one in 2010 that showed a correlation between religious belief and obesity, but it was such a small sample size that it could have been a chance finding or attributable to other factors (it drew its participants predominately from African-American /Hispanic communities which typically have worse health-care access than other ethnic groups).

Frankly, I’m a bit surprised at your next argument about MLK. You seem to be stating that it wasn’t MLK’s religious beliefs that prompted him to take action. All I need to do to refute this is point you to any biography of the man or his numerous speeches where he clearly states that his religious beliefs have led him to believe in both the moral imperatives of equality for all people and non-violence as a means of achieving this. Was religion the thing that made him what he was? Absolutely. Same with Ghandi. And Mother Theresa. And the Dalai Lama. And a host of other people who have attempted to or succeeded in changing the world for the better.

Next, let’s talk about the Hitchen’s challenge. I find the challenge ridiculous. Why should religion have to be somehow separate from daily life? All religions are deeply concerned with secular life—with how we live and act. Furthermore basic psychology tells us we don’t act because of any one reason but due to a complex interaction of many reasons, some of which are conscious and some unconscious, and which in the end are in our own self-interest. Hitchen’s challenge is a straw-man argument—replace religion with some other construct such as democracy or music and you will be equally unable to find anyone who meets that challenge (by promoting democracy you protect your own rights; musicians may love music but even they need to sell songs in order to pay the rent and will compose for money).

I think equally ridiculous is the argument that things such as genital mutilation have no other possible explanation or cause than religion. Wouldn’t misogyny be a much better and more rational explanation than religion? Clearly religion is used to fuel the misogyny but it would certainly be a mistake to assume that the misogyny couldn’t exist without religion. Let’s take another example—the Spanish Inquisition. The cause of that tragic slaughter was clearly secular in nature—having finally wrested the southern part of the country from Muslim rule, Ferdinand and Isabella chose Catholicism to unify a country in which many different religions co-existed. In short, religion didn’t cause the Spanish Inquisition; plain old political power-struggles did. Religion was simply the vehicle through which it was carried out.

And this is really what I’ve been saying all along—that religion is not, as you keep painting it as, the cause of humanity’s problems. It is a tool—a tool that, can be used for great good or great evil. As the folks at religioustolerance.org state: “Religion has the capability to generate unselfish love in some people, and vicious, raw hatred in others. The trick is to somehow change religions so that they maximize the former and minimize the latter.”

Later on, they go on to state that they feel that religion overall has a positive effect on society. That pretty much sums up my view of religion. If you do away with religion, you throw out the baby with the bath water. You lose the Martin Luther King Jr.’s, the Ghandi’s, the Mother Teresea’s, the Dali Lama’s of the world. It’s too a high a price to pay. For me, it’s all about dialogue—talking with others, getting them to see the common ground we all share, respect each other, and, as they said on their website maximizing the good and eliminating the bad.

As long as we keep talking—as you and I have been doing through these threads--we will keep moving forward. But I believe the instant dialogue ends—the instant you demonize the” other” and refuse to engage with them--you’ve planted the seeds of the next conflict: the next Spanish Inquisition, the next Bosnian massacre, or the next 9/11.

I do - I see them everyday in malls, on buses, and on 'the streets'.

I laugh at scene hipsters too.>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

who still encounters enough of these type people in daily life to justify a song?
I thought scene hipster was the new bandwagon.

who still encounters enough of these type people in daily life to justify a song?

I thought scene hipster was the new bandwagon.

@mgittle :
Interesting about the Plutonomy Report. It seems pretty straight-forward to say Plutonomies like the US, the British Empire, and the Roman Empire brain-drain the rest of the world. That's why the young creator of Chatroulette recently moved to Silicon Valley, instead of staying in Russia,* same as Google's Sergey Brin.

I remember a study from a few years ago that concluded when human were migrating out from Africa, each group that kept moving to a new location had slightly higher novelty-seeking genes than the group that stayed... fascinating... with the end result being in places at the end of the longest migration paths, like the Americas and the Pacific Islands there were significant differences. However, the paper connected that with higher rates of attention-deficit type learning disabilities in those areas, rather than with higher rates of entrepreneurship.

Ultimately, though, there are myriad differences between groups, so looking at just one trait or theory, as seems to be done in the Plutonomy Report, isn't necessarily very helpful in the big picture.

@mgittle :
Interesting article about time perception. I think it's a good reminder to practice mindefulness in daily life... and I see they mention the Dalai Lama in that article

Tags for this video have been changed from 'stand up, housewife, mom, coping, children, daily life' to 'stand up, housewife, mom, coping, children, daily life, oxycontin' - edited by calvados

Basing the algorithms and overall system organization on brain biology seems very cool to me, particularly in light of what he says about the cortex being essentially uniform across its surface.

Think about what we see human brains doing under exceptional circumstances. Someone who is born blind can develop "superhuman" ability to process auditory information and use it in ways that average people scarcely believe possible. Autistic people often have obsessions with some particular system or activity, which can turn into savant-like proficiency in it.

So much of what our brains process is linked to rather mundane human survival and daily life, but if we could make an artificial intelligence like this that takes input only from a very narrow area of interest and focus, perhaps it would eventually display savant-like proficiency in processing, understanding, and predicting that particular field of input.

Very cool!

It's a rare comment that strikes me as both worthy of a downvote and intelligent or thoughtful enough to warrant a reply. They do happen, but far more often I downvote a comment because of its utter stupidity, blatant trolling, etc.

>> ^choggie:

Hmmm. I've always considered it another form of passive-agression;Clicked-down without a response to one of my comments, I get a gauge on who has big brass balls, and who has little,mincy, faggot balls. I consider those who use it frequently, to be compulsive, lonely masturbators in their daily life., or simply haters.

"I always thought this was a really important part of the Sift experience, akin to glancing around the room to see who's nodding and who's frowning."

Hmmm. I've always considered it another form of passive-agression;Clicked-down without a response to one of my comments, I get a gauge on who has big brass balls, and who has little,mincy, faggot balls. I consider those who use it frequently, to be compulsive, lonely masturbators in their daily life., or simply haters.

Oh and by the way, you can tell who voted your comment up or down by holding two butter knives and shoving them into a wall socket,while standing in a puddle of water!!
Sorry schmawy,spilled the beans innit??

I avoided watching this video for a long time, but wow, that was just masterfully done. The delivery in the typical video tutorial tone while doing something so juvenile and utterly ridiculous made me sad that there isn't this much whimsy in my daily life.

I just want to say that this is the meme of the year! I've gotten everyone I know to use phrases from this video in daily life. Whenever my little dog stands on people we say "She's acting like she's the queen, and we're the sorry people!"

And there are endless opportunities to say "I've been nice to you, but now I'm coming to the EDGE!"

And I can't order anything with bacon without informing everyone that "Bacon, is good for me!"

Thank you for adding another 3:09 of random, disorganized thoughts to an already noisy debate. And thank you to everyone who upholds this dribble as Socratic rational and a high watermark of intellectualism. All this consists of is a series of emphasized negative interactions strung together by his uneducated hypothesis and passed off as truth.

And just one quick comment about his argument against the concept of God-fearing. First, there is a sharp distinction between fear and paranoia. Second, there are countless examples in everyday daily life that represent how a healthy dose of fear serves us quite well. I have a healthy fear of the heat that comes from my stove top when it's on, and thanks to that fear I take appropriate caution. His misunderstanding of the benefits of fear struck me as particularly asinine.