I dont like cenk for two reasons.

His treatment via completely misrepresentation of Sam Harris is so bad its intellectual dishonesty comparible to and sometimes worse than a fox news talking head.

Secondly, what kind of jerk names his network after co-perpatrators of the armenian genocide? At best a genocide denier.... yuck, no thanks.

I don't think I've read something so imbecilic in quite a while. I actually started quoting you to point out all the ridiculous contradictions in your statements but then realized that, in the words of Wolfgang Pauli, "It is not only not right, it is not even wrong".

I'll simply say this: purporting to know something, while simultaneously claiming that no one could possibly know that thing, is an excellent example of intellectual dishonesty, which you demonstrate with an impressive level of obliviousness.

I was clear from the beginning that I came to lend a Christian voice to the sift. I enjoyed videosift and had been using it for some time before I created an account. I registered an account specifically because of the number of anti-christian videos that I was noticing were hitting the top ten. I wanted to engage with the people here over the topic of Christianity because the sift was, and primarily still is, an echo chamber for the worldview of secular humanism. That's the way the sift likes it, and the sift is intolerant of any voice which challenges that viewpoint. Period, end of story.

There's nothing wrong with my coming to represent Christ, here. Have I utterly failed to do so? Yes, most definitely. However, it is up to me how I want to use this site. I have commented here almost exclusively on religious topics, either on my videos or someone elses it. Occasionally I will comment on a political video or something else, but usually only on religious topics. The point being is that, that is the way I have chosen to use this site. I don't run around and dictate to anyone else how they could or should use the sift, so why should I be singled out? I didn't cause any material harm to anyone, I wasn't off topic, I didn't flout the rules. I was on topic on the videos I commented on, and I brought a Christian viewpoint to the discussion. The sift, being inhabited primarily by atheists, agnostics and anti-theists, utterly rejects that viewpoint. It's not any different if I were to go to the comments section of any major website and say anything positive about Christianity. I would instantly get 2 to 3 comments mocking everything I said.

I stated in my post that I realized that bringing a Christian viewpoint to the sift would get me a lot of flak. I didn't always react well to that, and I acted like a jerk at times. I am sorry for that. I could have done more to build relationships here and I never put in the time. There is some truth to what you have said, that I brought the way I was treated on myself. But your rant is also a product of the simplistic and distorted lens that you view me through. I mean, you on one hand call my treatment here a persecution fantasy and on the other hand say I brought it upon myself. That's just intellectual dishonesty, pure and simply. The truth is, there was a concerted campaign to deny my participation on this site, and whatever you think the reason may be, it did happen.

As to the video, if this video was of a senior consultant from the Bush administration admitting that they systemically deceived the American people this would be #1 on the sift. You're deceiving yourself if you think that the reason this video is being suppressed is due to anything other than the ideological bent of the sift.

The Gist:

Guy in business suit looking thoughtfully out of window.
(Doubtful anyone who designs fine consumer goods, *actually designs consumer goods*, wears a suit). Maybe its supposed to be you! You avant-garde millionaire, you!

Person sketching watch designs. This is probably semi-close to reality, though they don’t show the hundreds of designs the visual designer creates that are dismissed at whim by the aforementioned, assumed (but inevitable even if not shown) suits.

People fiddling with plastic representations of what one would assume as the model for said watch design. Maybe realistic, though with the caveat that two people are sitting there going over said physical design, in any serious discussion concerning the actual physics of the end product. I can *not* imagine that nearly the entirety of this process today, both visual and mechanical design, are not done digitally.

Okay, there’s some CG. Because CG is the next step, rather than the first, least expensive step in any design process today. Who wants to quickly model everything in a matter of hours when you can fabricate expensive, physical material for iterative testing?

Holy shit, was that guy just looking at a wood cutout? I can’t even think of a shitty, sarcastic/realistic remark about that one. I might have misunderstood that shot.

Alright, now we’re machining shit. You can’t really fake that with a few grand for marketing. That’s the real stuff. (1.5m in)

No, they don’t sand/polish things by hand during the fabrication phase. That’s entirely too inaccurate and subjective to the assembler to leave up to human hands. (But hey: it’s a 2.5 million dollar piece of metal, so lets make those buyers feel good about their money spent).

Oh look: gemstones! (???) That's kingly.

More faux machining that is veritably inferior to quality mechanical assembly.

Oh shit, someone just turned a nob!

3.5 minutes in, and we see some actual hand-polished work that is legitimately viable to perform by hand.

Hey lets sand those nodules off the finished pieces, and micro-inspect those printed markings, because nothing about us says “accuracy” without a fallible human to do it. Also: what are they printing shit on there for? Was it pushing the price to $3mil to engrave the timestamps on the faces? That better be the highest quality electroplated coating, but even then I can't imagine that's superior than a tactile, physical representation.

Now they’re hand-engraving the sculpted ornamentation, but it’s one more point I can gladly give them because those kinds of human touches let you know at least some sort of artisan was involved. I can appreciate that, though realizing what I just said causes me to reflect on the inaccuracies of mass-production, and why we would take one over the other…

More microscopes. (Because if one notch is off, it’s back to the furnace for you!)

Awe shit, payday. A guy in a suit looking confident is walking towards your building!

Finally, the gear assembly. It certainly looks fantastic, photographically speaking. I can’t help but notice that all that detail is lost to hundreds of textural indentations or are due to stylized alternating polish/grinding. However, I’m confident that spending $2.5mil on this product would get me the absolute, most accurate, unnoticeable details (hand-made!) within a micro-millimeter of accuracy. Those indentations are like chrome on a street-racer in the 90’s: the more you have, the greater they perform.

@~8min, I’m pretty sure no one works like that at their desk. That posture would kill you in a month.

They know you can’t spin the head of a watch while it’s on your wrist, right?

Awe! It’s got 5 ringtones! That’s way more than any other watch I’ve even heard of! Except everything that doesn’t cost $2.5mil.


If I can take anything away from this that’s even remotely positive, it’s that at least millionaire shitheads are now being just as suckered as the rest of the consumer base. Let me sell ONE of those watches, and I would have enough money to overtake their business within a year, except for that I don't have the greed, dishonesty, and overall lack of morals that it would take to set up a quality factory, and trick such dickheads into buying (even superior BS) products.

Drop the passive aggressive tone. It's not intellectual dishonesty to recognise that not all situations are the same.

Texas doesn't have a right to secede. There is no legal framework for it to do so under US law. That has nothing to do with my opinion, that is reality.

Scotland, OTOH, did have a right to secede based on the Edinburgh Agreement.

Whether they should secede is a different argument, and one of sufficient complexity that I don't feel a blanket yes or no could cover all cases.

I see no reason for Texas to secede, so I don't believe it's warranted.

I sorta wanted Scotland to secede, partly out of interest, partly because of my aforementioned dislike for monarchy, but even then I wasn't sure it was in Scotlands best interests. Since I don't live there, my interest really didn't go much beyond Groundskeeper Willie and John Oliver.


As for whether the US can learn lessons from monarchical governments, of course it can. Just because you shouldn't adopt their system of a head of state, doesn't mean there aren't aspects of their government/society that aren't vastly superior to your own (arguably broken) democracy.

To claim otherwise would be hubris.

Sure. But it makes it hard to take you seriously when you cite monarchical governments as examples of ways to do things better in the States, is all. And further sillier to claim somehow Scotland has a right to secession while, say, Texas does not.

Just making sure we shine a light on intellectual dishonesty, is all.

I didn't enjoy this as much when I saw it. Stewart was in the right as he often is, but to enjoy it I felt I would just be serving catharsis, rather than media justice.

I did love the Ted Nugent bit, but ultimately this wasn't nearly as amazing as the Jim Cramer episode. That was something that every politician deserves to go through to this day; true, deserved defamation for hypocrisy and dishonesty.

Hannity just deserves to be ignored, because he's too small to be worth the trouble.

(Coprolite Preservation Managed)

chingalera says...(Chingalera Profile Page)
Below is an example of 'baiting'. I made the public announcement that I would be taking a hiatus from the site to draw-out the quarry: A person who would use his time spraying graffiti on a user's private personal area with a view to no resolution or truth, no self-awareness with the hope of a mutual understanding, rather than engaging in a civil and private discussion about his particular beef with me, chicco now comes with Krylon in-hand.

Unable to defend the indefensible, he degrades into personal-attacks and provocation with a single goal in mind-To attempt to compromise my integrity and provoke some public outburst.

Ain't gonna happen this time sir. I call bullshit when I see it, always have, always will.
5 hours 24 minutes ago up0downflag spam (0)ignore

chingalera says...
As I have asked civilly of you many times chicco, I would appreciate you not making comments to my profile page anything but a private matter. Again, and as have others I have asked (as I extend the courtesy to all, up-front) you simply ignore my requests of decorum because you understand that it is perhaps a type of balm for your self-injury this pestering me and poking at me personally. You rudely disregard this civil request made several times.

Ok, if you think it's a clever trap then that's what it is...a simpler explanation may very well be that once again one or a team of sophomoric pricks have a personal hard-on to see someone burn so they come to shit all over their profile page in that user's absence. This has been perpetrated before by other pricks with the same m.o. and those all tend to remain long-gone, but the flavor after the waft of their of shit continues to linger.

Again, no respect for my privacy.

(To the community-at-large, I continually ask chichorrea whom I have rubbed the wrong way by exposing his unilateral weakness to having his lying and cruelty exposed to remain private in spewing bile upon my profile page an in my absence, he instead litters it like some billboard advertisement announcing 'horseshit for sale')

If you are bound and determined with your unilateral project chicco and you know I'll bite to defend my integrity, why not wait until I come back to participate on this site with the community in-mind before throwing pebbles at my back door?

Who is actually displaying the cowardice here? Really?!

chicchorea said:
...oh, and here too....

There have been a number of posts whereby your conspicuous and transparent absence of response amply confirms all of my, and others' long before me, assertions about your dishonesty and cowardice. Further, your uncharacteristic cleaning house via deleting your profile pages of comments and most notably mine but retaining those of Newtboy whom you think you have bettered is telling as well.

...jailbaited you with this rat trap and you were all over it though. Weak minded and predictable you are.

You cannot refute that which I have repeatedly and amply purported and you dare not challenge me to evidentially support what I have lain down so you run and hide just occasionally sticking your head up to spew your drivel only to duck and cover again.

Run,,,run 'little...thing"...run.

I will be waiting. As you said where you should have not, "ain't done bruhh..."
6 hours 42 minutes ago up0downflag spam (0)ignore

@chingalera, Alrighty then...

There have been a number of posts whereby your conspicuous and transparent absence of response amply confirms all of my, and others' long before me, assertions about your dishonesty and cowardice. Further, your uncharacteristic cleaning house via deleting your profile pages of comments and most notably mine but retaining those of Newtboy whom you think you have bettered is telling as well.

...jailbaited you with this rat trap and you were all over it though. Weak minded and predictable you are.

You cannot refute that which I have repeatedly and amply purported and you dare not challenge me to evidentially support what I have lain down so you run and hide just occasionally sticking your head up to spew your drivel only to duck and cover again.

Run,,,run 'little...thing"...run.

I will be waiting. As you said where you should have not, "ain't done bruhh..."

I agree with most of your last paragraph, namely that greedy and inhumane capitalism causes huge amounts of damage (arguably more so than religious ideologies), but that is not the discussion here. What, pray tell, is wrong (both morally and factually) with strongly denouncing Islam?

As for that appalling, intellectually dishonest hackjob of an article you link to (which of course uses the term "Islamophobia" non-ironically, displaying it's dishonesty from the get-go), PZ Myers expresses better than I would* how such atheist-bashing fails hard, with the bonus of putting Sam Harris in his place viz. "the war on terror" (Harris lost most of his credibility for me when he defended racial/religious profiling, and Dawkins when he took the wrong side in the feminism debate, but I digress).

If you really agree with the lines you quoted, you might want to read a history book or, you know, watch the news. I would snidely suggest you go live the life of a woman, atheist or homosexual (to name only a few) in a place ruled by religion if you still adhered to such a belief, but that would be meanness beyond even me.

*http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/03/both-wrong-both-right/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/12/why-should-anyone-have-to-read-your-goofy-holy-book/

Your first two posts to this thread were trolls. You don't get to take the high road now because you were called on it, and you don't get to imply that people are uninterested in serious discourse just because they disagree with you or recognize your "facts" as regurgitated bullshit. Intellectual dishonesty, indeed.

As a bona fide VS troll, (I've read through some of your previous posts as well), you will always only be a source of entertainment for me.

Edited: sentence clarity to closer reflect reality

@EMPIRE said: "As opposed to conservatives who see sex and gays everywhere?"

Responding to criticism with "but conservatives are just as bad as liberals" doesn't seem like enlightened liberalism.

I haven't advocated conservativism. I'm simply someone who was a liberal until I grew up and realized there's an entire intellectual world that liberals don't know they're not aware of. And they'll fight to keep that way.



@Fletch @Deano:

It sounds like intellectual dishonesties don't bother you guys, as long as you're entertained.

"Let's just lie and say people with different opinions than ourselves are the source of our high violent crime rates."

The bible is very highly contested, even among Christians. Heck, the major denominations can't even agree with which books belong as part of the Bible. Compare the Old Testament (of any bible) to the Torah and tell me they're the same... They were 99% the same 2000 years ago, but while the Torah hasn't changed, the OT definitely has.

The bible isn't contested between any of the major denominations and I can't think of any denominations where it is contested. This simply isn't true. The only bone of contention is that the catholic bible contains a few more books, which were taken from the Septuagint.

Compare the books of the Old Testament to the books in the Hebrew bibles found in the dead sea scrolls. The manuscripts are pretty much exactly the same and they date to before Christ.

Here is just one hotly debated topic: The Q Source... or, how did the order of the writing of the Gospels affect each other?... and as it's obvious that some other writing inspired two of the gospels, and hence is the Word of God, how could it have gotten lost? (and keep in mind, again, these are Christians arguing over it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

Watch this series to get a better understanding of what has really happened over the years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70SYwkoH_yc

I am familiar with higher criticism, and there is no proof there was a Q source. How can you use it to try to discredit the bible when there is no evidence it existed? If you want to present evidence for it, I'll be happy to address it.

I am such a huge fan of your blatant intellectual dishonesty. I've seen you here enough to know that you aren't naive, so you're either dishonest or delusional. Seldom do I find someone that can switch back and forth as much as you do... Claiming that Empiricism is only ineffective in finding the truth when God isn't involved... but when he is involved, Empiricism is the only way TO the truth. Nice.

I'd accept your charge of intellectual dishonesty if it were true but that isn't what I said. I said that you couldn't actually be sure of anything you found out through empiricism without God confirming it. Meaning, God is the only one who can tell you what is true, empirically or otherwise.

And it really is a secret what God can do. I certainly haven't heard anyone predict lightning at a specific time and had it happen, and for every person that is "cured" through prayer, millions die despite their piety.

You haven't heard it because you're not looking for Him. If you were you would hear it. Everone dies; the important thing is where you go afterward.

Anyways, I'm yet again reminded of how futile it is to have any sort of discussion with you, so I'll end it here.

God bless.

The bible is very highly contested, even among Christians. Heck, the major denominations can't even agree with which books belong as part of the Bible. Compare the Old Testament (of any bible) to the Torah and tell me they're the same... They were 99% the same 2000 years ago, but while the Torah hasn't changed, the OT definitely has.

Here is just one hotly debated topic: The Q Source... or, how did the order of the writing of the Gospels affect each other?... and as it's obvious that some other writing inspired two of the gospels, and hence is the Word of God, how could it have gotten lost? (and keep in mind, again, these are Christians arguing over it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

Watch this series to get a better understanding of what has really happened over the years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70SYwkoH_yc



I am such a huge fan of your blatant intellectual dishonesty. I've seen you here enough to know that you aren't naive, so you're either dishonest or delusional. Seldom do I find someone that can switch back and forth as much as you do... Claiming that Empiricism is only ineffective in finding the truth when God isn't involved... but when he is involved, Empiricism is the only way TO the truth. Nice.

And it really is a secret what God can do. I certainly haven't heard anyone predict lightning at a specific time and had it happen, and for every person that is "cured" through prayer, millions die despite their piety.


Anyways, I'm yet again reminded of how futile it is to have any sort of discussion with you, so I'll end it here.

>> ^chilaxe:

As bad as it is, this video doesn't apply to normal passengers who keep even $500 of cash in their luggage.
"All the luggage made it past TSA safely."
It only applies to people who leave behind valuable items.


Incorrect. While this particular study was focused on whether TSA agents would be willing to steal items that were left behind, it did reveal dishonesty within TSA which applies to any situation where they are handling your property. There are documented cases of TSA agents stealing items from luggage, not just items that were left behind. Not sure what you're trying to do here - defend TSA? Say that it's ok to take an iPad now and then if someone leaves it behind?