JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
While I'm sure that Fermi was a very smart guy, being very smart does not exempt one from being lazy or sloppy. I can't help but notice that you are shouting at me in all-caps while making appeals to authority, rather than pointing to some flaw in my logic.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
Agreed, if it were up to me I would do away with the whole upvote/downvote system entirely.
@JeSuisCharlie correctly senses that this is not a red tribe forum, and concludes that it must secretly be a leftist one.
Not "secretly leftist" so much as that while the state of Colorado may be West of the Mississippi River, that does not preclude it from being well to the East of Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Et Al.
I'm saying that
Fermi's leap from "there is at least one planetary system that supports life" (Earth) to "life is more likely to exist than not" is completely unsupported by logic or observation.
Being a brilliant physicist does not mean that your are exempt from making bad arguments as your own XKCD link demonstrates. The "Renaissance Italy" example was placed there intentionally to preempt the inevitable counter argument that "if there were other civilizations in our galaxy we would know". I don't think we would.
For all we know someone did in fact colonize a large proportion of the galaxy, and we're just not seeing them because O'Neil Cylinders and Bishop Rings don't have much of a sensor signature at interstellar distances.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
Then prosecute him for adultery.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
Upvotes and downvotes are not posts.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
I think 2/3rds of the posters here are either lifelong democrats, or would at least agree that being ruled by woke technocrats is preferable to being ruled by right-wing populists a la Trump or Le Pen. Do you disagree?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
...and my reply to you is to ask If a "right winger" is voting for Hakeem Jeffries, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, or James Talarico, are they really a "right winger"?
Ok, but "Harris and Biden voters here out number Trump voters by a solid 2 to 1 is delusional.
As I asked @seething_spendcel, are you arguing that Republicans make up more than 33 percent of the regular posters here? Because that's not the impression I get at all.
Even if the margin is closer than than that I don't think it's so close so as to make anyone who disagrees "delusional".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
Of the regular posters here, do you really believe that Republicans make up more than 33 percent? Because that's not the impression I get at all.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
No you haven't. You are trying to apply a rules-based objective framework to something that is fundamentally neither objective nor rules-based.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
I am reminded of an apocryphal (likely satirical) story of a scientist who placed a sign in front of his home stating "lobsters welcome" and then, when after several years no lobsters had presented themselves, he was forced to conclude that lobsters do not exist, and that any indication to the contrary must be part part of an elaborate hoax.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?
No, they should be married. Our ancestors understood this.
No, as i said in my own reply, if there were a civilization comparable in sophistication to Renaissance Italy 150 light years away from us right now how would we even know? Its not like we're going to pick up their radio signals.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
The traditional Anglo/Western means of squaring the circle was to say that legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed but that kind of thing is considered a bit "cringe" these days.
I've always found the "Fermi Paradox" and "Great Filter" to be kind of dumb for the same reason as @magicalkittycat. Fermi's leap from "there is at least one planetary system that supports life" (Earth) to "life is more likely to exist than not" is completely unsupported by logic or observation. Fact is that we have no idea what the base rate for any of the terms in the Drake Equation actually are.
If we posit that are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and of those stars 1 in 10,000 produces a planet with advanced multi-cellular life, and of those planets 1 in 10,000 produces a technological civilization, that works out to there being around 1,000 civilizations in our galaxy ranging in complexity from stone-age hunter-gathers constructing stone circles to Type II on Kardashev scale constructing Dyson Spheres. Given the shear size of the Milky Way (Hat Tip to Douglas Adams) I feel like the odds that 2 of us would be situated close enough to detect one another would be rather low. For example, if there were a civilization comparable in sophistication to Renaissance Italy 150 light years away from us, right now, how would we even know? It's not like we're going to be picking up their radio transmissions.
We can have normative concepts, but we have to discuss them as such.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
9d ago
Yes Rogers, my bad.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
9d ago
Why are you talking like I'm arguing for atheism?
Because you are.
Maybe but I would bet good money that Harris and Biden voters here out number Trump voters by a solid 2 to 1. Ditto Talarico vs. Paxton, and El-Sayed vs. Stevens Rogers. While this space has a reputation as being a "right wing" space it's important to remember that it is really only "right wing" within the context of it's founding population of Berkley Area contrarians and edgy-reddit atheists. Pretty much everyone in this forum from @Opt-out to @magicalkittycat would immediately find them selves sorted into the "authoritarian left" quadrant of the political compass if they were dropped into the comments section of someplace like frieghtwaves, ar15.com, or the median IRC channel from the mid 2000s.
I think Fuentes has a lot of pull with the sort of person who posts here, but I also don't believe that anyone here (with the possible exception of @Shakes and @100ProofTollBooth) is voting for a Republican (much less working for one).
Okay but I'm not trying to unconvince you of Narnia,
Yes you are. That is exactly what you are trying to do.
This is pure sneering.
If so, what are this and this then if not "pure sneering"?
What you dismiss as "unwestern falsehoods" I view as the very sine qua non of western civilization. "Western Civilization" as I see it is the synthesis of Middle-Eastern Mysticism and Greek/Roman Formalism. If Christ had not existed it would be necessary to invent him. Or as Terry Pratchett put it, we are taught to believe the small falsehoods like Tooth Fairies, Santa Clause, and the Easter Bunny as children so that we may learn to believe the big falsehoods like Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Duty, as adults.
The Hanania and Fuentes crowd were never going to vote for a Republican of any stripe, and are generally viewed with contempt by the voter base (to the extent that the voter base is aware of them at all). Have you ever seen a more "punchable" face than this one? I don't think I have.
Now while I would never underestimate a Republicans' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, fact remains that as of today Rubio's Gulf-Coast Coalition remains the most powerful faction within the GOP's internal politics and anyone looking to win the nomination will either have to go through them or get approved by them.
The thing about HEMA is that weapons are a huge equalizer.
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