You're right with me up to the point we reach the kinds of censorship you happen to support.

What's the penalty for incurring the ire of the social justice elite? Well, only that you'll be branded a sexist or whatever by the entire gaming media, perhaps have your Twitter account banned or your videos taken down from YouTube, or maybe you'll just be arrested on false charges of harassment. It's a storm that a strong individual might weather, but from which any company will steer away automatically. Of course it's censorship.

Games are being censored (they came for the japanese bikini simulators and I said nothing...); social media is being censored: Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia and any number of even less reputable sites are being censored - all in response to social justice histrionics. This crybaby, zero-offence, closed-minded, closed-mouthed malaise is damaging to our culture: damaging to art, to academia, to journalism. And if you acknowledge the need for open expression, you will oppose it.

"There is more than one way to burn a book," wrote Ray Bradbury of interest groups taking offence, "...each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever." You don't recognise any of this?

Yes, 'critics just don't have the talent to create' is a tired old fallacy and I regret echoing it, but there I was thinking particularly of the likes of Wu and Quinn: loathsome reptiles and degenerates whose own creative efforts are so miserably inept that to garner sales, patreon donations, and fraudulently positive reviews they resort to pretending themselves the brave minority voices raised against the misogynistic, LGBT-phobic, uni-racial establishment - in an industry that has never actually had any of those problems.

As for Anita Sarkeesian; that liar, mountebank, fascist collaborator, and 21st century Jack Thompson; that professional victim and demagogue who harnesses manufactured outrage for profit; or in the most generous possible light, that half-educated nincompoop who somehow rode a tide of hysterical activists-without-a-cause to a broadcast platform for her worthless, narcissistic rambling:
It isn't the fact of her fuck-witted critique to which the gaming community so righteously objects but the baffling inaccuracies and outright slanders therein, her self-promotion via false claims of harassment, her attacks on artistic expression and internet freedom.

And these are exactly the kind of sub-intellectual trash who will presume, against all standards of rectitude and conscience, to instruct their betters on what kind of jokes they're allowed to tell.

You never cede an inch to these fucking people. That's how you get Mary Whitehouse, or the Comics Code Authority, or McCarthy, or the FCC, the BBFC, the OFLC, the IWF.

If you did high school bio, think about what you covered that has any sort of influence on medicine... =)

Frog or rat dissection? Covered that in Bio 101 in the first year of my Applied Chemistry degree (and yes, you can give a rat a Columbian necktie... . Photosynthesis? Mating?

Yeah, Bio was pretty much introducing you to broad concepts and it's nothing that doesn't get rehashed in the first 6 months of Uni via intro subjects. I think of it more as a way to dip the toe in the pool and see if the subject matter excites you enough to try and turn it in to a career.

eg. At 40 now (and having forgotten my chem degree and gone in to IT as a sys admin after working as a chef, bouncer etc), I could go back to uni barely remembering anything about chemistry and start from scratch and be none the worse for it. The keystones you talk about are literacy and numeracy, that's about it. And they are learned in primary school.

Oh sure, it helps if you can do some higher math, but English lit? Physics? Drama? Almost nothing you do at high school has any real defining affect on most of what you do as an adult. It's more like a sampler platter, and of course a way of grading students (on a curve of course, we can't have people's scores based on their own merit) to distinguish what tertiary studies they should be eligible for.

School should be about igniting curiousity as much as practical skills for life. I did "Home Economics" (ie. cooking/sewing/budgets etc) and typing (on real mechanical typewriters no less) as opposed to wood/metal shop ( I was awful at shop). My home ec teacher was always interested in making different food, so we tried some pretty out there things in grade 8 (~13 years old), and I've always been interested in cooking since. Similarly, learning to touch type has made my life radically simpler, particularly in IT (try writing a 40 page instruction manual hunting and pecking).

Most of the high school grads we see as cadets or trainees are essentially useless and have to be taught from scratch anyway. Most of the codified BS we have these days doesn't prepare kids for life, doesn't encourage critical thinking or creativity, it a self justification to keep schools open.

I disagree. You can't show up at Uni at 18 expecting to do medicine without having spent the preceding years learning biology, and probably maths as well. Of course, it's true that this knowledge is eventually eclipsed, but I don't think you can look at the cap stone and dismiss all the stones at the bottom as unnecessary.

That said, I do think there is too much focus on Uni as the sort of aspiration for everybody. Vocational routes have been looked down upon for much too long. The stigma is real. Every politician will applaud apprenticeships as a vital and honoured progression route...but how many will be happy with their kids dropping out at 16 to do one?

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

I'd wager that this lass went to uni in Edinburgh, all I hear is someone who's picked up a Scottish accent

Gets my vote for the worlds most intriguing uni-brow.

Just to preface this, i got this info from a number of Beijing university physics students, in Beijing.

Many things, in Chinese, are a bunch of descriptions. For example i wanted to find a little statue of a rhino, and my chinese friend taught me to ask shopkeepers for a "xi niu", with a certain inflection. This is when he told me that your inflection can change the meaning of a Chinese word as can the words that follow and precede it. Whenever he asked shopkeepers - and subsequently whenever i asked them - for a xi niu, they always thought i wanted a bull, because i was asking for, literally translated, a "horny cow" as Gary put it. We had to make a mime of a central horn before they understood.... and told me no (different story, hunting a rhino statue across china and finding nothing).

When they gave me a Chinese name, it was some words from a well known and overly flattering Chinese proverb. This makes me think that the same could be true of "coffin man" which could easily come from a provincial saying, or a description the meaning of which escapes these two. I know that my friend from Xi'an struggled to understand phrases and words when he went to uni in Beijing, and his friends used to rib him about being so different. Massive country, the people are diverse. I don't think these guys are expert linguists, and it could just be regional differences.

Everyone made this out to be a big deal but at least with my uni you could almost always find it available in the library reverse and grab it a few weeks out before the semester started.

Also, most of the big name textbooks can be found in convenient PDF format for a ... very low price, if you are willing to look.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/06/30/trickle-down-economics-fails-to-deliver-as-promised/

Article discussing the trickle-down idea. Refers to a paper from a respected uni which shows that there is little evidence to believe that it works, and if it does work it a) doesn't work as well as widely touted and b) hardly works at all.

I also read another article from more recent than 2009 from some kind of financial group on or associated strongly with Wall Street itself that concluded even the wealthy see more spending power if their money is more evenly spread; they may have less money in a mathematical sense, but their money will be worth more and provide more because the flow of the economy is so much more active. I'll keep looking and edit if i find it.

*learn as i had no idea what those things were for when i saw them in videos.
Damn that's a crazy uni-brow at the end.

She looks familiar... I think we attended the same Uni in the early 90s (although different classes, and I never spoke to her).

@enoch

I'd agree Friedman wasn't directly responsible, but served more as an academic influence and a proponent of a particular approach because many of the Chilean economists who influenced policy had studies in Chicago.

As far as exploiting a crisis, arguably the crisis itself warranted dramatic action. High levels of inflation caused by Allende's money printing to support wholesale nationalisation of industries pretty much required this.

As inflation is self perpetuation by its continuous expectation and can continue even after the original stimulus is gone, there was little choice here. After all it took Volker nearly half a decade of high interest rates to tame it in the US in the early 80s, to do that after an economic and political crisis in a undeveloped country was an entirely different scale of difficult.

Successive governments likely reversed some of the economic policies enacted under his regime, but the foundation I meant was particularly the budgetary position, free trade, and a competitive cadre of private sector exporters. The welfare, health and educational spending were all made possible by this. Without a credible tax base, trying to enact spending on this level while also raising the tax rises would have just precipitated another crisis.

Coming back to inflation and economics, I believe policies against inflation especially, are generally misunderstood in the short term and their benefits unrecognised in the long term. I would probably say the reverse of what you said, economic policy rarely shows tangible results in the short term but almost always in the long term.

It's certainly not perfect. After all economics has the unfavourable position of being the combination of social science, lacking the ability to test results in clinical conditions isolating a single factor and yet requiring highly specific answers to solve its questions. At its best, it offers answers based on the cumulative knowledge accrued from iterative policies, at each point being based on the 'best available knowledge at the time'.

But it has worked, as I like to often mention, with independent central banks, essentially the most technocratic and pure application of economic theory, inflation has become a thing of the past in those countries that have adopted it.

Then again I'm biased as I majored in it at uni

Friedman was an extremely smart man in absolute mastery of his area of expertise. Seeing Moore try to take him on at his own game reminded me of my uni days.

Great sift.

Ok firstly for ChaosEngine, your paraphrased quote of statements which voiced a sentiment I have had since engaging in conversation with seekers about the existence of 'God or no God': The same mechanism of filtering the words you read through your own belief system is a time-honored technique of the most fundamentalist of back-assward Christians and theologians who read the words of the Bible and fit them conveniently into their limited world view filtered through a similar limited and linear, perception of existence.

(*edit-I now realize that you did not in fact, paraphrase my statement rather, bcglorf's , but the sentiment remains true)

My statement was (and yes Dannym3142, that was NOT supposed to be a question mark, edited with the appropriate period): "I have a legitimate beef with rabid supporters of any particular ideology or philosophy when the shit becomes tiresome and repetitious when tinctured with rage and anger and intolerance."

Your paraphrase of sentiment ChaosEngine, "evangelical atheists are as bad as fundamentalists," then followed by "bollocks" (bullshit), is indicative to me of the rage and anger I attributed to the average atheist's consternation with these 'stupid', 'backwards', 'hillbillies' etc.,(who are too dumb or dense to wrap their heads around the very idea that an omnipresent uni-being does not exist, yadda yadda yadda.) Further, the example used 'When was the last time atheists shot a young girl for wanting to go to school?' to justify your position is reminiscent of any Southern Baptist preacher using similar extreme examples of the human condition to support their own arguments for the infallibility of their 'god'. The words used connote a similar intolerance and ignorance of that which is wholly metagnostic or, 'the unknowable' and I regard the mechanism as the selfsame dynamic.

"So, sorry if I'm not going to sit down and STFU about it." Good. It means you are on the path to enlightenment and intend to continue to seek truths which satisfy the gnawing curiosity that ALL humans are frought with in our tenure here on Earth. Keep at it.

dannym3142: (sorry for the question mark, it confused me as well when reading it again) I used Crowley and Planck's observations as an exercise in tossing a non-linear curve-ball into the circle-jerk of those whose search for absolute truth and the nature of the universe, of matter/non-matter, seemingly ended when they decided that it's a no-brainer as to whether or not faith has a place in the argument for or against the existence of a supreme being. Faith can't be argued either, we all need it to perform the simplest of our daily monkey-tasks.

Yes-I was chastising VooDooV for the blanket of down-votes to my comments because I sense his rage and anger at my input on threads similar, and recognize in atheists the same robotic mechanism they accuse Christians of which litter blog after blog when God is mentioned, by the ever-incrasing rabid anti-god fan-boys who attack with guns blazing at the very mention of that which is unable to be understood when approaching it from linear patterns of thought. That, and I refuse ever-again be ganged-up on on this site by a few well-be-nots who have it out for me because they can't understand what the fuck I am trying to communicate. I let my guard down in the past and it cost me over a year in SIFTJAIL (to all you fucking wannabe cops here present and future, suck my balls!)

Your fight is not with God but with the exponentially-increasing non-linearity of the world we inhabit, and the chaotic desire to process the information coming into the grid with time-honored methods of argument. IMLTHO this doesn't work.

All the seemingly trollish statements I make on similar threads are made with a view to wrenching another way of thinking out of the stubborn adherents to any one pattern or direction of mental process.

It can't be argued that a realm of universes exist outside of our own limited perceptive apparatus and all argument ends there for myself for the sake of my own insanity.

Point taken, changes made to title and for NEWT-BOY:
'Opinionated zealots' create sustainable programs in the form of either rectrification of dying paradigms or completely new models-Who founded your own country's constitution? I don't know where you reside so, how's your government doing?

You have a real hard-on for anyone with faith in my opinion, be that faith in man or some, omnipresent uni-being.

Places like Bulgaria and Switzerland don't have a large segment of their citizens in prisons or are making more and more laws to facilitate their incarceration so..perhaps the shits broken and needs fixing?? At the very least, a major douche.

I vote, kill the douchebags and put THEM in a box...Not the caring, thinking, passionate people trying to navigate the onslaught of the shit created by those in power for anyone but themselves and their buddies to remain comfortable and in control.

I am comfortable and in control of my own world to a great extent and see my way of being threatened as well as that of my countrymen, and it pisses me the fuck off.

A reasonable man would call a man like this, sane and healthy-