Might as well move some of the stuff here. Was unaware blogger had that 200 comments thing, and figure I might as well give him a blank slate to start explaining what he's trying to claim.
This is fucking pointless. Gabe comes here trolling and now demands to be treated with some respect after making blatantly racist comments. That, and now he's had two thread created for him. He's had plenty of time and space to build a case, so I'm quickly losing interest in anything he has to say. I expect more of the same old bullshit. Nothing new.
Meh. Sometimes if you give a troll miles and miles of rope, they'll hang themselves in the most entertaining way. That is, after all, why I allowed Wo[is]MI to continue posting after I "banned" (and later unbanned) him. It was fun watching him meltdown into essentially arguing that GPS works by dumb luck with his relativity and nuclear physics denialism.
I'm just curious what Gabriel can do if we manage to keep poking him in soft spots.
You're right, they don't exactly die off. I just had fun squeezing entertainment out of WoMI until all he could offer were poorly spelled gay chimp jokes.
Of course, I'll get to work on some other posts today, so you can have something else to do over here.
Jealous heathens. One small female and her massive E-wood should not dishearten you.
You have done an excellent job with this little e-drama of "whack a troll". I commend you on your fortitude really, though DJ has a teeny tiny temper, just a smidge, heh.
I am sorry Bronze Dog, I would love to debate and educate you bout my views, but with a thread starting with 'This is fucking pointless' from one the less mature commenters, who continue to insult me and been rather respectless, its clear it would be pointless wasting time.
If you put up some good threads in the future, I will give it a good response, I alweays keep an eye n your blog here, but if these childish kids are going to insult me because they do not agree, well, what is the point.
It is quite sad really, Creationists always complain about how they are treated badly and do not get respect, and when I see attitudes like this, its clear that in some cases, they are right. They do not get a none-biased debate opportune because you got people like djfav to call them 'idiots' or 'assholes' or whatever he think of, and everyone agrees, very mature and highly skilled debating argument indeed.
Anyway, I will send a line when I see something worth correcting you on, the rest of the gang here are clearly afraid of a real debate, I can't imagine seeing them in real life not having a chance to call you 'liar' or 'asshole' and repeat it endlessly.
I will also be in Peru in not to many hours, the internet is somewhat limited as you can understand, even if it is a 'highly advanced nation' according to you, but I will try to solve it with one of these 3G USB sticks, I've been to lazy to get one and for Peru, the price is just bad. (Peru is a country in South America as a note).
I'll post this response to Gabriel here rather than on the other thread so he can keep up:
Its quite sad seeing people like this, you are jealous that other people travel and you dont. I just cant help but wonder, Why dont you travel? If you feel so much anger and jealousy towards me that you need to call me a 'liar', well, shouldn't you do somethin about it then ranting?
So, still got nothing then? What a surprise. I call you a liar not through anger or jealousy. That amounts to a really see through attempt at diverting attention from your unsupported claims and refusal to support them. Pathetic.
No you fool, not McDonalds, they can have hambrugers (frozen) shipped on the plane and the Chef (or you) can prepare it, they have talked about it and I wouldnt be surprised if they did a sort of mini McDonalds, all stations have contact so other stations so the guys over at Halley or Scott would come over to 'use' the facilities, but money is no issue so thinking about it, there would be no point, only if they wanted the crew to be happy but they wouldn't do that, not if there is no monetary gain.
Really?
And they don't use the M/V American Tern to bring food supplies in then?
The guys in Halley base fly from one side of Antarctica to the other just to use the facilities at McMurdo?
What do they use to do this?
Why doesn't the BAS web page on use of the BAS aircraft mention this?
And you really think money is no issue to the BAS?
And why does the Halley base website not mention this?
Do they do this all year round?
And is it just Halley base, or do all the other BAS teams do this?
What about all the other nationalities down on the ice?
that you even question where people have been is a clear sign that somethings is a bit weird about you.
So, you just accept everything that everyone says at face value then do you? That would certainly explain a lot. That you can't prove you have been to any of the places you claim is interesting, don't you think?
I am in Peru in about 20 hours as well, ur obviously I am lying
You also said you wouldn't be able to respond for two days because you were travelling to Peru. And yet, here you are.
I cant go there, its impossible, Because You haven't been there...
Strawman. I never said that, nor would I.
And once again, you didn't bother to answer the questions. What a surprise.
Please define what you mean by 'white people'.
How do you prove that modern technology and knowledge is only produced by white people with no input from any others?
"It is quite sad really, Creationists always complain about how they are treated badly and do not get respect, and when I see attitudes like this, its clear that in some cases, they are right." I wonder why cretinists are treated badly? Could it be that they are so retarded that they deny reality?
"They do not get a none-biased debate opportune because you got people like djfav to call them 'idiots' or 'assholes' or whatever he think of,"
Disregarding your abuse of the english language there why on earth would you want to be NEUTRAL in a debate with a cretinist? You'd have to display bias towards their utter stupidity if you had more than half a brain cell.
".. and everyone agrees, very mature and highly skilled debating argument indeed."
Right because everyone knows how mature and highly skilled at debating (no masturbating) cretinists are. Gabe you're an asshole!
Wow. You heard it here. Gabriel's such a delicate flower that some other commentator who isn't me can use a few harsh words that will utterly deflate any motivation he has to spell out what he means.
Perfect excuse for him to continue the "Straw man" red herring.
It's the same tactic as so many Creationists and concern trolls: Blame a few other people's sharp tongues for their inability to make a cogent point on fundamental questions.
Seriously, Gabe, I've gone out of my way to humor you, and all you do is stall, stall, stall. How can you win a debate if you won't even try to explain your point of view.
Whining about someone who decided to hold up an ugly mirror to your initial immature trolling doesn't make you more mature. Pressing on with a calm tone of voice and presenting your logic and evidence will be far more convincing to the bystanders than acting exactly like so many woo stereotypes we've had to deal with. Don't blame your immature stalling and evasions on external factors.
I'm going to write a little mini-essay here that should be required reading for most of the trolls here, past, present, and future.
On the null hypothesis: in the quest for knowledge, many unsupported claims may be made. In the absence of evidence for or against such claims, they may be regarded as 'equally true'. Post-modernism seems to have degraded to the point that this 'equally true' is considered true, but this is logically untenable. As such, a claim with no evidence to back it up may be regarded as provisionally false, and a claim that can never be supported by any evidence is meaningless.
To explain by example: suppose some explorer happened upon a tribe of cave-dwellers. Because they are hypothetical, they have never had to venture outside their cave. If the explorer stayed with them and learned their language, he would be able to make some unsupported claims that we would regard as obvious, for example, that the sky is blue. Given that the best way to explain the 'sky' would be within the context of a larger cave outside the cave, the natives would be justified in doubting that this 'other cave''s walls and roof are blue instead of gray, and even that the 'other cave' truly exists. If they have never seen the sky, it is more reasonable to assume that the outsider is delusional.
The default response to an unsupported claim is doubt, and the default response to an unsupportable claim is derision. Now, to combat doubt, evidence for the claim must be rallied. It is reasonable for a claim that has just been made to have no solid evidence (though this has been getting rarer in some fields), so absence of evidence is not, itself, evidence against the claim, at that point. If repeated attempts have been made to obtain evidence, to no end, then the weight of the fruitless attempts may be considered evidence against the claim. This assumes that, given a prediction of how many attempts would fail before a single success, the number of failures is vastly greater.
In the context of debate, the null hypothesis regarding a given idea is that it is false. Asking for evidence from whoever is making the claim constitutes an attempt to find evidence.
tl;dr: In spite of numerous attempts to get Gabe to support his initial claims from several threads ago, he has provided nothing but anecdotal evidence. Given this, we may assume that he either won't, or can't, support his initial claims.
This claim that I make may be falsified by an argument from Gabe that supports his claims.
Like I said, i've been on travelling foot and to tired to really put any efforts to it, this happens when you travel, lets see, since Tuesday i have been on travelling foot, thats just not to fun, most of the time I had to wait for something, be it a flight, boat or bus, which I am waiting for now, a 8 hours buss ride until I am finished (im in Peru at the moment, Lima, it is the capital of Peru).
Now in Lima, you see alot of advancements, like cars, and cellphones, most of it is 10 or more years old, but they got it, so I was awestruck by this, 'wow, the technology these people have, I am in awe'. You would also notice the, whats the word, wide Corruption, thats it.....
Anyway, I would recommend you to come here, worth a visit so you would see the world a bit, do you speak spanish? Well if you don't you may manage anyway, they will treat you like scum anyway, all whites are gringos here, your spanish skill does not matter, other then if you do speak it decently, you can tell them you are not a bloody idiot tourist but something else, say a local? And then will give you more respect for showing you know how it works.
Anyway, this town just stinks, its big, filthy and well, third world, and the Incas, which where the marvel of the world, as stated earlier, apparently stopped there and never evolved again, im curious, as its clear these people do not have the same social structure as the Incas, which was powerful and advanced, what happened? Did they de-evolve?
Correction, Tuseday is suppose to be Saturday, left on Saturday, took boat, buses and flights and all the fun inbetween waiting. Damn its wednesday already.
I'm sure European imperialism didn't really help, either.
Fun fact: the proportion of white Peruvians to total Peruvians is about equal to the proportion of black Americans to total Americans. I'm not going anywhere with that, I just thought it was interesting.
Unfun question: is there a reasonable-sounding word for 'resident of the USA'? 'United Statesman'?
Funny you would mention that, it seems that even when the Incas was So Advanced, and got Integrated with the Advanced Europeans, it went DOWNHILL, normally two good makes one big good, why couldn't they do it? Could it be that lazy people went to South America? (Do they speak Spanish of English here? Oh yes.........)
When the vikings went to North America, centuries before Colombus, they created great settlements that then got mixed with the European settles centuries later. Some of us still have that blue blood in us, others have had it deluded and some none at all (Latins maybe?) It was the former Vikings who started this country, wrote our constitution and created the most powerful nation on the planet, have you read our history? Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians? Why not? Oh, because they are inferior, whatever you say, which Dog admitted but wanted to call it 'Meme' and a complete seperate notion, people are NOT responsible for their poor culture, its the magic 'Cultural Meme' that is, and I was not responsible for breakin that Window, it was the magical gnome who did it...
Superior Viking Blood aside for the moment, are people personally responsible for their genes? Are cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and Huntington's disease all moral or personal failings of the individual?
I can't even figure out what you're trying to say.
I mean... quite aside from the fact that you're fucking begging to be godwinned, much of the basis of mathematics, one of the things that enables our technology, was developed by Arabs and Indians. Were only the Arabs genetically capable of developing algebra, while everybody else is merely capable of using it? Similarly for Indians and positional notation?
Every computer out there uses binary logic, and pretty much all programs rely on binary arithmetic, which is adapted for circuitry from decimal arithmetic, which was developed by Indians ere long ago.
(This, incidentally, is part of the reason that 'technology is evil/doesn't work/is destroying souls' rings false for me, even in fiction. Such a situation would seem to damn the predecessors of the technology in question by association, for workable ideas never come into being ex nihilo.)
Actually, wait... if you're so confident that you have Culturally and Intellectually Superior Viking Blood™, do you have a genealogy handy? I'm mostly curious at this point, because my family history is apparently fairly extensively documented. (And also because, even though I'm 'less white' than you are by your standards, I think, my cousins in the past have done some fairly impressive stuff.)
Vikings wrote the Constitution. Wow. Just wow. Got any evidence?
And given Gabe's utter dismissal of memes, apparently he does indeed believe that the Wright brothers would have invented the airplane, no matter where they grew up, even if they didn't have access to easy sources of combustion engines to power the thing.
It seems in Gabriel's world, libraries, schools, and conversation serve no purpose for thinkers: Their genes will make their ideas pop in their heads, fully formed.
Seriously, Gabriel, is that what you're arguing? That the memes (ideas, concepts, so forth) a person grows up with have no effect whatsoever on their potential? That the absence of wealth to afford a good education has no effect? That growing up in an environment with risks of famine doesn't affect how much time a person has to devote to creative thought?
You speak as if people were genetically hardwired insects, and yet you talk about personal responsibility, as if people chose to be born in situations that don't afford them the time and resources to learn the foundations of knowledge necessary to invent or research new things.
Oh look, Gabe still doesn't want to actually prove where he has travelled to. No surprises there.
And why is your posting language set to Swedish Gabe? It explains your new found obsession with Vikings I suppose.
But since you want to touch on history, which is my forte, let's go. Where were these great Viking settlements and where and how did they mix with later European settlers?
Some of us still have that blue blood in us, others have had it deluded and some none at all (Latins maybe?)
Some of us are certainly deluded that's for sure...
Which former Vikings started this country and wrote the Constitution?
And I did have to laugh at this:
Well if you don't you may manage anyway, they will treat you like scum anyway, all whites are gringos here, your spanish skill does not matter
How does it feel you racist hypocritical windbag?
have you read our history? Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians?
Yes - apparently you haven't done either.
The fact that you think Bronze Dog agrees with you just shows how far down the rabbit hole you've gone.
Huh... looking over that link makes me think there's some controversy that should have been taught... Back in History, five years ago, we just learned the Aryan invasion theory of cultural development that Wiki says the British raj promulgated.
I mean, this isn't something that I feel strongly about, but it does look like there's some genuine controversy there. Anybody with more knowledge of history (aka NOT GABE) have anything to say to my barely-informed opinion?
Well, it says that this is likely because of recent mixing. Now, Europeans were in contact with Africans because of slavery, among other things. Slavery predated the industrial revolution by a fair bit.
Now, I'm not actually stating anything definitive, but I'm amused by what that seems to imply, if we figure that there's any genetic component to any of this.
I prefer articles like this one: http://archaeology.about.com/od/indusrivercivilizations/a/aryans.htm (pardon my HTML) over Wikipedia. It's brief, though. I'm somewhat familiar with the linguistic arguments against the existence of the Aryans, if anyone's interested.
And given Gabe's utter dismissal of memes, apparently he does indeed believe that the Wright brothers would have invented the airplane, no matter where they grew up, even if they didn't have access to easy sources of combustion engines to power the thing.
"Well, as long as you agree with my unstated but simple reasoning."
If you're thinking what I'm thinking, then we've heard quite sufficient from Gabe. I mean, the thread is supposed to end when someone calls someone else a Nazi, unless, of course...
Anyway, this town just stinks, its big, filthy and well, third world, and the Incas, which where the marvel of the world, as stated earlier, apparently stopped there and never evolved again, im curious, as its clear these people do not have the same social structure as the Incas, which was powerful and advanced, what happened? Did they de-evolve?
1. There's no such thing as "de-evolution."
2. Do you seriously expect us to believe that some magical, unspecified genetic event came along to explain the fall of the various empires, rather than socioeconomic reasons? If so, what was this unspecified genetic event?
Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians? Why not? Oh, because they are inferior, whatever you say, which Dog admitted but wanted to call it 'Meme' and a complete seperate notion, people are NOT responsible for their poor culture, its the magic 'Cultural Meme' that is, and I was not responsible for breakin that Window, it was the magical gnome who did it...
Funny, I thought you admitted that they were genetically equal, and that the circumstantial dominance of bad memes was a factor in their bad situations. Of course, since you apparently don't believe in the "magical" powers of libraries, schools, and internet-based science projects to expose a person to good memes they can build on.
Science is, after all, a "build on the work of others" enterprise. Only by knowing what other people have worked on, can a person expand on it.
...Not that we've been given any reason to believe Gabe will agree with us, there. He does seem to believe that science works by revelation and the prophets who receive them, given his earlier appeal to a Nobel Prize winner's anecdotes, as if they were somehow made more valid by his divine nature.
"Anyway, this town just stinks, its big, filthy..." Get yourself an air freshener, then. :D
"and the Incas, which where the marvel of the world, as stated earlier, apparently stopped there and never evolved again, im curious, as its clear these people do not have the same social structure as the Incas, which was powerful and advanced, what happened?" Conquistadors happened, that's what. Oh, and smallpox.
I think you should se this as a war between Good and Evil, Advancement and Dark Ages, GDI versus NOD.
Playing on the C&C reference lets se what we got.
We have the good guys (GDI), America, the most advanced nation the world has ever seen. Help everyone (even our enemies) on the planet for nothing in return (what could they give the ones having all?). And then we have the spicks, negroid and rest wanting to destroy the good. The negroid, lacking technology as well as understanding to use it had to find another way to attack us: HIV/AIDS, The predominantly negroid disease was to be inflicted on America, they started to rape our woman and children and it did not take long until it spread. The faggots dykes helped as well.
The asians are slowly building up armies similar to ours because of stolen and given Technology.
HIV/AIDS: You do realize that there are plenty of whites who buy into that sort of quackery, right? Of course, a lot of it prospers because it feeds on conspiracy theories about the pharmaceutical companies:
1. Poison everyone. 2. ??? 3. Profit!
The same thing happens whenever first world countries try to raise vaccinations in many third world countries: They assume all first world nations are like you, and out to poison them. Didn't you know that?
Of course, how can a disease be "negroid"?
Good and Evil: Wow, you actually believe that?
"Stolen" technology: All "white" technology is built upon "stolen" technology. The mathematics we use has a lot of components "stolen" from "non-white" sources. Does that make it not count as "white"? Or do you have to invoke a double standard?
Light and Darkness: Have you been paying any attention whatsoever to what I've been saying about you? Your arguments all seem to be based on the exact same collection of logical fallacies as Creationists, quacks, psychics, ufologists, and so forth. Like them, you claim to be a source of light, but you seem rather like the dim Newagers out there.
You are saying, I believe, that gay people wish to destroy all that is good in this world? That is what you're saying, is it not?
Continuing in that vein, do you think that gay people have made any important contributions to the societies you care about? Do you believe it is possible that even one 'faggot' could have made an important contribution to science, one that you are taking advantage of even as you read these words?
I have my suspicions, but I'll let him hang himself, by outright saying it, blubbering out an incomprehensible gobblety-gook of non-sequiturs, or, as we've come to expect, ignore the question and continue with his eternal stalling game.
He's striking me as the sort of person who complains that no one understands him, yet he's unwilling to give the time of day to anyone who tries.
I wonder, Preview... Was the previous version of my comment tasty? How did you feel as you ATE IT?
Ahem.
Towards the end of previous version, I came back to something that Gabe ignored: by claiming that positing memes removes personal responsibility for things, did Gabe mean to imply that observable physical characteristics somehow cause moral turpitude, or that moral fiber influences appearance?
Both sound reprehensible, and both ignore over a century of research and experimentation regarding heredity. Now, let's get something clear:
Talking about "blood" and blood being 'diluted' ("deluded") implies a continuous model of heredity. With the volume of evidence in support of the basic ideas of Mendelian genetics, talking about "blood" in continuous rather than discrete terms is batshit insane ior* fantastically stupid ior intensely uninformed.
So, before you go any further, Gabe, be prepared to explain why over a century of evidence does not apply to human heredity in this one aspect.
Every time we bring up genes, he claims "straw man", so I have to ask, if he thinks different "races" are stupider or smarter than others, what exactly makes them stand out, if not genes? Does he think a generation "inherits" the mistakes of their predecesors? Does he think not only that one's decendants are guilty of the crimes of their elders (in other words, a murderer already dead? Arrest his son), but that if someone kills someone, their young will inherit bloodthirst in some sort of mental lamarcism?
I'm ASKING if he thinks this because if he keeps saying we're not getting him when we accuse him of racism based on genes, then what IS he saying?
But really this is all beside the point. The evidence is all very much stacked against any idea of the group "black people" being mentally inferior to the group "white people" and visa versa. It doesn't matter what mechanism he's suggesting for it if the idea doesn't even match the evidence. The best he can come up with is his biased eyes viewed some lazy or "stupid" people in his travels and he decided to label the ENTIRE group as "having" that trait.
Here's another thing. He's finally revealed that yes, he IS in fact a racist, and he isn't ashamed of that. He DOES think that one race is superior or inferior to another, and he DOES think that races are discrete entities as opposed to the reality of the gene pool, that it is a gradiant scale slowly drifting across all sorts of traits, with many traits completely unattached to others. Futher he DOES think that "mixing" (which humans ALWAYS have done, and so does every species on the planet) is somehow bad, in spite of the evidence that most human selective breeding projects, especially purely cosmetic ones, tend to narrow the pipe of traits down so far that there's nothing to add to make up for any bad traits such as poor breathing in persians or heart failure in maine coons (no you racist, I'm talking about cats in the above sentance, not persian people).
He also seems to think that nations, back in some golden age, were ALWAYS entirely one race, and that borders were actually able to magically prevent "cross breeding". Further, he ignores the reality that ALL breeding except between identical twins is by it's very nature cross breeding, that's what it's FOR in an evolutionary sense. That aspect drastically speeds up the "mutations" natural selection has to work with in sexually reproducing creatures. The very concept of making a "pure strain" is not just unjustifiably egotistical, it is the antithesis to evolutionary "flow" (the word progress is too strong). Something remaining exactly the same without a large pool of alternative genes doesn't deal well with disaster after all.
There ARE some genetic combinations that will result in mental problems. These traits, he seems to ignore, are not bound to any previous ideas of race, because the GENES are not locked or otherwise in any way related to genes for melanin content or other basic outward cosmetic features.
One single person's adventures through a country can never be as thorough as decades of consistant and double blinded thorough research, and indeed can't be relied on for ANY real observations especially in the admission that he already pretty much thought this to start with.
If you want us to believe any of your claims, don't bother talking about how that one time this one guy was napping IN PUBLIC or whatever, give us the science. That's all that matters. In it's absence, there's no good reason at all to assume your claims. In it's presence, we'll accept it. But hey, we'll STILL completely disregard your silly moral outrage over "cross breeding".
The fact is, he thinks he's on the same "side" as the rest of "white people", but most white people at least in the more civilized parts of the world want NOTHING to do with him. They're too busy having actual relationships based on common ideas, with, heaven forfend, maybe even some black people they find themselves far closer to than this guy. Get it? You are the ENEMY of most of "your" race, they don't consider you "part" of their group! The average person in modern society considers the ideals of people a far better method of defining in and out groups. You are part of the "out group" of racists. Does that sting? Does the fact that people you ignorantly decided were your "brothers" don't consider you a part of them just feel like "betrayal" to you? If so, why? Why should anyone form group lines like that? Heck, why those SPECIFIC genetic traits? Would the idea of forming groups based on having innie or outie belly buttons make any less sense than your idea?
"Those outies are a bunch of lazy good for nothings that just stole all their innovations from us innies." Sounds pretty danged stupid and baseless right? I didn't list a single thing there. But wait! I go to gyms all the time and I'm always seeing those "outie" guys doing stupid stuff! Now you HAVE to believe me!
Oh let me expand on the "gradiant scale" concept of genes. The idea is that it's a multi-dimensional array, like at least as many dimensions as phenotypic effects one might track genetically.
Further, genes aren't a lock, a lot are basically "potential". I just have to keep pointing out that two computers, completely identical in every way, will have totally different behavior if differet software is installed. There's nothing inherant to the computer itself. You keep saying that a culture is some sort of ultimate proof of the weakness of someone's "race", but that's silly. "White people", for example, have had societies that have widely varied from barbarism to feudalism to modern democracy. Do you really intend to suggest that it was entirely race that determined that? Social change is a software issue. Yes, you need human brains to RUN that software, but our brains can run DIFFERENT KINDS of software. The proof is the one thing you keep failing to explain, the very existance of things like white lazy stupid people or gangsters and black super scientists and presidents.
You went on and on about scandenavians having longer life spans. When we pointed out that they have better health care and all that keeps them, and anyone else that would recieve it, living longer is modern medicine, you suddenly shift the goal post. It was very clear you were claiming they were literally physically superior, until we shatter that idea. Now they're just old fasioned "mentally superior" for HAVING that health care. Really? That's your argument? How many scandenavians are doctors? Did the ENTIRE nation develop their medicine in some group effort? Or to put it as I did before, did YOU ever invent anything in your entire life or are you just stealing the credit because they happen to be in your definition of your "in group"?
Oh, oh! I'll drop some history on these fat beats.
His basic excercize in excuse making when it comes to invention is that, say, asians just "stole" computers from "white people" (as though white people are in this club and some japanese guy broke into the place, as opposed to a worldwide group effort).
What does he think invention is? Does he think computers were invented just as they are now in one fell swoop? I'd like to see the genius that could go from an abbacus to a Duel Core by "hwimswelf". No most inventions are just small modifications of previous inventions. Computers started out as "analytical engines" before eventually fading into obscurity. The very first computers weren't much of anything, and few could see much use for them. It took a lot of refinement and changing of fundamental components before we got to the current state of the game with semiconductors. There are still many more refinements and unless this guy is a computer engineer, he's in no position to say that the advancements of one country, say Japan, are any less than those of another.
The car is similar. It didn't just spring up. They didn't go straight to the model T. It took a lot of work. All sorts of different individuals had to add their share of work to get things going as they did.
Scientific progress is similarly staggared. You've got to do one small experiment at a time to work up to where scientific knowledge is now, and there more than ever it was a global effort where you can't pinpoint just one race as making the "most important" discovery.
PS, I don't think anyone here actually "hates their own race" or whatever you've convinced yourself is the only way we don't accept your nonsense.
I'm loving all the comments I get from my fellow skeptics. It's so life-affirming for people to point out the "build on the work of others" cooperative nature of science, and by extension, of society in general.
You know, I wonder if Gabe might have sympathies with Ayn Rand. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged, but if I'm remembering the reviews I've read correctly, it fed into the "lone genius" model of science, where the protagonist was able to rediscover a lot of lost technology because he was A) a Marty Stu, and B) coincidentally ran into a shack with a working electric generator and some equipment he could reverse engineer.
Science almost never works that way, especially in the modern world. The "Asian" world was able to catch up with the rest of us developed nations because they did the hard work of studying and understanding. They no more "stole" computers than we "stole" many mathematical concepts from the Arab world and beyond. The "stealing" only exists if you create this fictional barriers Gabriel seems to have so much faith in.
When you drop these so-called racial distinctions, and see the world in terms of distributions of memes and resources, everything still makes sense. To me, that pretty much means race can be shaved off by Occam's Razor as a superfluous, unnecessary entity.
One more level of fractal wrongness I see in Gabe's arguments thus far is essentially his inability to communicate the source of the problem.
One thing that I've heard plenty of people talking about is the proportion of Hispanics/Latinos/whatever growing in Texas, due directly or indirectly to immigration. (Indirectly in the form of immigrants having native-born children.)
The way I perceive that: "Uh-oh, we've got what may be a bunch of people raised in a country with sub-standard educational facilities, and possibly dominated by very poisonous faith memes, since Catholicism is popular down there. To prevent that from being a problem, we should, as always, support good, affordable education so they and their children can educate themselves and contribute to society. We should be doing that anyway, of course, since we've got a lot of poisonous religious memes in our high proportion of anti-intellectual redneck culture anyway."
The "problem" isn't that their alleles, but some transfer of problems of their circumstance, many of which are already dominant in our "white" population. Said anti-intellectual "rednecks" are just resting on the laurels provided by the educated segment of the population. Their "whiteness" or "latinoness" are pretty much irrelevant, cosmetic alleles.
To change my perception, Gabriel has to prove that education, communication of memes, government policies, and availability of material resources aren't the only useful explanations for civilization's scientific progress. He has to find a way to show us that when all those things are pretty much equal between two "races," there's still a difference.
Either he can do all that to filter out the mass of noise in his historical and anecdotal data or he can present us with data that rings loud and clear on its own: The genetic kind. Point out these offending mystery alleles/genes/whatever.
I'm really not convinced that his ideas fit into any sensible genetic framework at all. As I said, his talk of 'dilution' convinced me of the exact opposite. Heredity just... does not work like that.
Yeah, I got that point loud and clear. I mostly want to give Gabriel some genetic rope to hang himself more overtly.
If he does believe heredity is continuous, rather than discrete/digital, that pretty much puts him in the woo crowd, somewhere in the vicinity of Creationists. One of the biggest things that supported Darwinian evolution and lead to modern synthesis, after all, is the discovery of discrete units of heredity in the form of genes.
If it wasn't discrete, the theory that would have grown to become modern synthesis would have instead come crashing down in its infancy.
Generally I put ALL racists firmly in the "woo" camp, no matter where they put their explanation, it's never backed by the evidence, just their own beliefs.
I listen to their dumb speeches on specials on the history channel and it's the same rhetoric over and over again, they don't HATE "them", they just want to support "their own" race, and what's wrong with that? Well mainly that such a position lies firmly embedded in a number of false premises that I already talked about. Again, why would that be any more sensible than my hypothetical innie vs outie racists?
A gene is basically an all or nothing thing. Either you have it or you don't. Sometimes errors in copying produce a new mutant form, but that exception has no bearing on the question of how inheritance works.
It's rather idiotic to take credit or feel guilty about the actions of your ancestors. I don't consider myself great because some my ancestors were inventors, and I don't consider myself evil because some of my ancestors were cruel to others. I didn't inherit any of that. Years ago, my entire method of thinking was completely different, the poor magical thinking religious young earth creationist (transformed from what was previously a wishy washy "all the woo is true" sort of magical thinker that believed in ghosts and ESP and all that noise at that). Now I make the attempt to cleanse myself of any and all false ideas the best way I know how, applying critical thinking skills. It's a complete change of character. "Free will" is one way to describe it, another is that chance exposure and my tendancy to explore and read things led me down that path thanks to online skeptics and so on. My point is simply that in one mind, one single gathering of genetic expression, I went through a number of really drastic ways of thinking. The genes create a super computer which is set up to be adaptive and learn. There are a number of preset things built in, but once that brain IS built, the genes lose all control of what the brain does from there.
And again I must make one thing clear, I said all that simply to make it clear that I'm fully aware that people can act individually and brushing a whole group sharing nothing but one cosmetic phenotypic expression as "lazy" is simply ignorant. That's the most apt word to use here. That said, I don't even think that such "tendancies" ARE in any way related to those other mostly cosmetic genetics.
Here's the most you can say when it comes to "superiority" of one gene or another. Having a thick shell of melanin helps to protect someone from overexposure to sunlight. In a tropical environment, that's a plus. Having lesser melanin helps one to get BETTER exposure to sunlight to generate some previous vitamin D, and in an arctic climate, THAT is a big plus. Having larger folds of fat in one's eyelids can help to protect the eyes from snow blindness, another plus in that specific scenario, where in yet another climate losing the fatty layer would allow one more visibility when snowblindness is not a threat. I'm not saying that all genes are "balanced" like some fighting game, I'm just saying that they are inherited seperately from other genes by the nature of it, and that in a LOT of case, alternate alleles are adapted specifically to certain environments.
Now it is certainly true that some genes can have totally unexpected effects on other genes and their expressions, but there's not a single bit of evidence that genes that result in more melanin have any effect on brain development. They seem largely unaffected by each other. Heck melanin isn't produced in brain cells so it's very likely that the section where those two possible alleles would sit is just "skipped over" during protein production. The majority of DNA in any ONE specialized cell is ignored after all, only using that specific set that has to do with it's own functions, most of the time (there are exceptions).
Gabe, learn something about genetics. Learn, study, find out about how phenotypic expression works, how reproduction and inheritance works, the nature of how genes can be cut away from each other and need not be inherited in an "all or nothing" form, the way that all of them DO depend and interact with each other, but those specific interactions vary and can be studied. Sometimes one gene can cause a chain reaction in all expression, and sometimes one gene will only change a small expression, like eye color. Learn that the vast majority of mutations are neutral, with the code either ignored or easily "coped" with as the generations go by. Learn what a gene pool actually IS, that you don't at all share ALL your genes with the group you label as "your race" and only have labelled it that based on some specific phenotypic expression, a VERY small smattering of genes relative to the vast numbers that are actually relevant. Learn that two different genes can express the exact same thing. Learn.
If you're still a racist after that, then we'll talk.
Might as well move some of the stuff here. Was unaware blogger had that 200 comments thing, and figure I might as well give him a blank slate to start explaining what he's trying to claim.
62 comments:
This is fucking pointless. Gabe comes here trolling and now demands to be treated with some respect after making blatantly racist comments. That, and now he's had two thread created for him. He's had plenty of time and space to build a case, so I'm quickly losing interest in anything he has to say. I expect more of the same old bullshit. Nothing new.
Fuck you, Gabe. Fuck you.
Rage, rage, againt the dying of the "troll interest". DJ, ya big puss.
Booya.
Fine, I suppose we'll just let the trolls shit all over everything.
Meh. Sometimes if you give a troll miles and miles of rope, they'll hang themselves in the most entertaining way. That is, after all, why I allowed Wo[is]MI to continue posting after I "banned" (and later unbanned) him. It was fun watching him meltdown into essentially arguing that GPS works by dumb luck with his relativity and nuclear physics denialism.
I'm just curious what Gabriel can do if we manage to keep poking him in soft spots.
Hang themselves? Silly, trolls never die.
You're right, they don't exactly die off. I just had fun squeezing entertainment out of WoMI until all he could offer were poorly spelled gay chimp jokes.
Of course, I'll get to work on some other posts today, so you can have something else to do over here.
They seem to keep coming back, but it's kinda fun "killing" them over and over again, and I'm getting massive E-wood watching you guys do it, heh.
TMI.
"...and I'm getting massive E-wood watching you guys do it, heh."
Well, in that case...
Jealous heathens. One small female and her massive E-wood should not dishearten you.
You have done an excellent job with this little e-drama of "whack a troll". I commend you on your fortitude really, though DJ has a teeny tiny temper, just a smidge, heh.
"Silly, trolls never die."
No, they just blaze away.
Most of the time ineffectually.
I am sorry Bronze Dog, I would love to debate and educate you bout my views, but with a thread starting with 'This is fucking pointless' from one the less mature commenters, who continue to insult me and been rather respectless, its clear it would be pointless wasting time.
If you put up some good threads in the future, I will give it a good response, I alweays keep an eye n your blog here, but if these childish kids are going to insult me because they do not agree, well, what is the point.
It is quite sad really, Creationists always complain about how they are treated badly and do not get respect, and when I see attitudes like this, its clear that in some cases, they are right. They do not get a none-biased debate opportune because you got people like djfav to call them 'idiots' or 'assholes' or whatever he think of, and everyone agrees, very mature and highly skilled debating argument indeed.
Anyway, I will send a line when I see something worth correcting you on, the rest of the gang here are clearly afraid of a real debate, I can't imagine seeing them in real life not having a chance to call you 'liar' or 'asshole' and repeat it endlessly.
I will also be in Peru in not to many hours, the internet is somewhat limited as you can understand, even if it is a 'highly advanced nation' according to you, but I will try to solve it with one of these 3G USB sticks, I've been to lazy to get one and for Peru, the price is just bad. (Peru is a country in South America as a note).
Gabe
Aw, I hurt his precious little feelings.
Of course, he would rather whine about being insulted rather than answer any direct questions or acknowledge any substantive criticism.
Lame troll is lame.
I'll post this response to Gabriel here rather than on the other thread so he can keep up:
Its quite sad seeing people like this, you are jealous that other people travel and you dont. I just cant help but wonder, Why dont you travel? If you feel so much anger and jealousy towards me that you need to call me a 'liar', well, shouldn't you do somethin about it then ranting?
So, still got nothing then? What a surprise. I call you a liar not through anger or jealousy. That amounts to a really see through attempt at diverting attention from your unsupported claims and refusal to support them. Pathetic.
No you fool, not McDonalds, they can have hambrugers (frozen) shipped on the plane and the Chef (or you) can prepare it, they have talked about it and I wouldnt be surprised if they did a sort of mini McDonalds, all stations have contact so other stations so the guys over at Halley or Scott would come over to 'use' the facilities, but money is no issue so thinking about it, there would be no point, only if they wanted the crew to be happy but they wouldn't do that, not if there is no monetary gain.
Really?
And they don't use the M/V American Tern to bring food supplies in then?
The guys in Halley base fly from one side of Antarctica to the other just to use the facilities at McMurdo?
What do they use to do this?
Why doesn't the BAS web page on use of the BAS aircraft mention this?
And you really think money is no issue to the BAS?
And why does the Halley base website not mention this?
Do they do this all year round?
And is it just Halley base, or do all the other BAS teams do this?
What about all the other nationalities down on the ice?
that you even question where people have been is a clear sign that somethings is a bit weird about you.
So, you just accept everything that everyone says at face value then do you? That would certainly explain a lot. That you can't prove you have been to any of the places you claim is interesting, don't you think?
I am in Peru in about 20 hours as well, ur obviously I am lying
You also said you wouldn't be able to respond for two days because you were travelling to Peru. And yet, here you are.
I cant go there, its impossible, Because You haven't been there...
Strawman. I never said that, nor would I.
And once again, you didn't bother to answer the questions. What a surprise.
Please define what you mean by 'white people'.
How do you prove that modern technology and knowledge is only produced by white people with no input from any others?
"It is quite sad really, Creationists always complain about how they are treated badly and do not get respect, and when I see attitudes like this, its clear that in some cases, they are right."
I wonder why cretinists are treated badly? Could it be that they are so retarded that they deny reality?
"They do not get a none-biased debate opportune because you got people like djfav to call them 'idiots' or 'assholes' or whatever he think of,"
Disregarding your abuse of the english language there why on earth would you want to be NEUTRAL in a debate with a cretinist?
You'd have to display bias towards their utter stupidity if you had more than half a brain cell.
".. and everyone agrees, very mature and highly skilled debating argument indeed."
Right because everyone knows how mature and highly skilled at debating (no masturbating) cretinists are.
Gabe you're an asshole!
Wow. You heard it here. Gabriel's such a delicate flower that some other commentator who isn't me can use a few harsh words that will utterly deflate any motivation he has to spell out what he means.
Perfect excuse for him to continue the "Straw man" red herring.
It's the same tactic as so many Creationists and concern trolls: Blame a few other people's sharp tongues for their inability to make a cogent point on fundamental questions.
Seriously, Gabe, I've gone out of my way to humor you, and all you do is stall, stall, stall. How can you win a debate if you won't even try to explain your point of view.
Whining about someone who decided to hold up an ugly mirror to your initial immature trolling doesn't make you more mature. Pressing on with a calm tone of voice and presenting your logic and evidence will be far more convincing to the bystanders than acting exactly like so many woo stereotypes we've had to deal with. Don't blame your immature stalling and evasions on external factors.
"Whining about someone who decided to hold up an ugly mirror to your initial immature trolling doesn't make you more mature."
Damn skippy.
I'm going to write a little mini-essay here that should be required reading for most of the trolls here, past, present, and future.
On the null hypothesis: in the quest for knowledge, many unsupported claims may be made. In the absence of evidence for or against such claims, they may be regarded as 'equally true'. Post-modernism seems to have degraded to the point that this 'equally true' is considered true, but this is logically untenable. As such, a claim with no evidence to back it up may be regarded as provisionally false, and a claim that can never be supported by any evidence is meaningless.
To explain by example: suppose some explorer happened upon a tribe of cave-dwellers. Because they are hypothetical, they have never had to venture outside their cave. If the explorer stayed with them and learned their language, he would be able to make some unsupported claims that we would regard as obvious, for example, that the sky is blue. Given that the best way to explain the 'sky' would be within the context of a larger cave outside the cave, the natives would be justified in doubting that this 'other cave''s walls and roof are blue instead of gray, and even that the 'other cave' truly exists. If they have never seen the sky, it is more reasonable to assume that the outsider is delusional.
The default response to an unsupported claim is doubt, and the default response to an unsupportable claim is derision. Now, to combat doubt, evidence for the claim must be rallied. It is reasonable for a claim that has just been made to have no solid evidence (though this has been getting rarer in some fields), so absence of evidence is not, itself, evidence against the claim, at that point. If repeated attempts have been made to obtain evidence, to no end, then the weight of the fruitless attempts may be considered evidence against the claim. This assumes that, given a prediction of how many attempts would fail before a single success, the number of failures is vastly greater.
In the context of debate, the null hypothesis regarding a given idea is that it is false. Asking for evidence from whoever is making the claim constitutes an attempt to find evidence.
tl;dr: In spite of numerous attempts to get Gabe to support his initial claims from several threads ago, he has provided nothing but anecdotal evidence. Given this, we may assume that he either won't, or can't, support his initial claims.
This claim that I make may be falsified by an argument from Gabe that supports his claims.
Like I said, i've been on travelling foot and to tired to really put any efforts to it, this happens when you travel, lets see, since Tuesday i have been on travelling foot, thats just not to fun, most of the time I had to wait for something, be it a flight, boat or bus, which I am waiting for now, a 8 hours buss ride until I am finished (im in Peru at the moment, Lima, it is the capital of Peru).
Now in Lima, you see alot of advancements, like cars, and cellphones, most of it is 10 or more years old, but they got it, so I was awestruck by this, 'wow, the technology these people have, I am in awe'. You would also notice the, whats the word, wide Corruption, thats it.....
Anyway, I would recommend you to come here, worth a visit so you would see the world a bit, do you speak spanish? Well if you don't you may manage anyway, they will treat you like scum anyway, all whites are gringos here, your spanish skill does not matter, other then if you do speak it decently, you can tell them you are not a bloody idiot tourist but something else, say a local? And then will give you more respect for showing you know how it works.
Anyway, this town just stinks, its big, filthy and well, third world, and the Incas, which where the marvel of the world, as stated earlier, apparently stopped there and never evolved again, im curious, as its clear these people do not have the same social structure as the Incas, which was powerful and advanced, what happened? Did they de-evolve?
Correction, Tuseday is suppose to be Saturday, left on Saturday, took boat, buses and flights and all the fun inbetween waiting. Damn its wednesday already.
Empires collapse; do you deny that?
I'm sure European imperialism didn't really help, either.
Fun fact: the proportion of white Peruvians to total Peruvians is about equal to the proportion of black Americans to total Americans. I'm not going anywhere with that, I just thought it was interesting.
Unfun question: is there a reasonable-sounding word for 'resident of the USA'? 'United Statesman'?
Funny you would mention that, it seems that even when the Incas was So Advanced, and got Integrated with the Advanced Europeans, it went DOWNHILL, normally two good makes one big good, why couldn't they do it? Could it be that lazy people went to South America? (Do they speak Spanish of English here? Oh yes.........)
When the vikings went to North America, centuries before Colombus, they created great settlements that then got mixed with the European settles centuries later. Some of us still have that blue blood in us, others have had it deluded and some none at all (Latins maybe?) It was the former Vikings who started this country, wrote our constitution and created the most powerful nation on the planet, have you read our history? Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians? Why not? Oh, because they are inferior, whatever you say, which Dog admitted but wanted to call it 'Meme' and a complete seperate notion, people are NOT responsible for their poor culture, its the magic 'Cultural Meme' that is, and I was not responsible for breakin that Window, it was the magical gnome who did it...
Just had to come back, didn't you?
You really are a fucking moron. Vikings wrote the Constitution? I had no idea...
And don't even get me started on your one drop rule.
Superior Viking Blood aside for the moment, are people personally responsible for their genes? Are cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and Huntington's disease all moral or personal failings of the individual?
I can't even figure out what you're trying to say.
I mean... quite aside from the fact that you're fucking begging to be godwinned, much of the basis of mathematics, one of the things that enables our technology, was developed by Arabs and Indians. Were only the Arabs genetically capable of developing algebra, while everybody else is merely capable of using it? Similarly for Indians and positional notation?
Every computer out there uses binary logic, and pretty much all programs rely on binary arithmetic, which is adapted for circuitry from decimal arithmetic, which was developed by Indians ere long ago.
(This, incidentally, is part of the reason that 'technology is evil/doesn't work/is destroying souls' rings false for me, even in fiction. Such a situation would seem to damn the predecessors of the technology in question by association, for workable ideas never come into being ex nihilo.)
"...quite aside from the fact that you're fucking begging to be godwinned..."
Gabe is a fucking Nazi. There. I said it.
"Some of us still have that blue blood in us, others have had it deluded . . ."
I think I might have to get that on a bumper sticker.
"There. I said it."
Well, as long as you agree with my unstated but simple reasoning.
There was something else I wanted to bring up, but I'd need permission from a few of my friends to pull it off.
Actually, wait... if you're so confident that you have Culturally and Intellectually Superior Viking Blood™, do you have a genealogy handy? I'm mostly curious at this point, because my family history is apparently fairly extensively documented. (And also because, even though I'm 'less white' than you are by your standards, I think, my cousins in the past have done some fairly impressive stuff.)
"have you read our history? Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians?"
Which parochial backwater did you get such a scandalously crap education at, Gabe?
Vikings wrote the Constitution. Wow. Just wow. Got any evidence?
And given Gabe's utter dismissal of memes, apparently he does indeed believe that the Wright brothers would have invented the airplane, no matter where they grew up, even if they didn't have access to easy sources of combustion engines to power the thing.
It seems in Gabriel's world, libraries, schools, and conversation serve no purpose for thinkers: Their genes will make their ideas pop in their heads, fully formed.
Seriously, Gabriel, is that what you're arguing? That the memes (ideas, concepts, so forth) a person grows up with have no effect whatsoever on their potential? That the absence of wealth to afford a good education has no effect? That growing up in an environment with risks of famine doesn't affect how much time a person has to devote to creative thought?
You speak as if people were genetically hardwired insects, and yet you talk about personal responsibility, as if people chose to be born in situations that don't afford them the time and resources to learn the foundations of knowledge necessary to invent or research new things.
Seriously, is that what you believe?
Oh look, Gabe still doesn't want to actually prove where he has travelled to. No surprises there.
And why is your posting language set to Swedish Gabe? It explains your new found obsession with Vikings I suppose.
But since you want to touch on history, which is my forte, let's go. Where were these great Viking settlements and where and how did they mix with later European settlers?
Some of us still have that blue blood in us, others have had it deluded and some none at all (Latins maybe?)
Some of us are certainly deluded that's for sure...
Which former Vikings started this country and wrote the Constitution?
And I did have to laugh at this:
Well if you don't you may manage anyway, they will treat you like scum anyway, all whites are gringos here, your spanish skill does not matter
How does it feel you racist hypocritical windbag?
have you read our history? Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians?
Yes - apparently you haven't done either.
The fact that you think Bronze Dog agrees with you just shows how far down the rabbit hole you've gone.
What a surprise, Gabe believes in the Aryan race. SPOILER: It doesn't exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race
Huh... looking over that link makes me think there's some controversy that should have been taught... Back in History, five years ago, we just learned the Aryan invasion theory of cultural development that Wiki says the British raj promulgated.
I mean, this isn't something that I feel strongly about, but it does look like there's some genuine controversy there. Anybody with more knowledge of history (aka NOT GABE) have anything to say to my barely-informed opinion?
Ended up following a link from there to here. Apparently "race" is about 0.008% of the human genome.
Another interesting thing: Apparently Europeans are more similar to Africans than all the other continental groups. If I'm reading that chart right.
Well, it says that this is likely because of recent mixing. Now, Europeans were in contact with Africans because of slavery, among other things. Slavery predated the industrial revolution by a fair bit.
Now, I'm not actually stating anything definitive, but I'm amused by what that seems to imply, if we figure that there's any genetic component to any of this.
I prefer articles like this one: http://archaeology.about.com/od/indusrivercivilizations/a/aryans.htm (pardon my HTML) over Wikipedia. It's brief, though. I'm somewhat familiar with the linguistic arguments against the existence of the Aryans, if anyone's interested.
Posting comments as they occur to me. As such...
And given Gabe's utter dismissal of memes, apparently he does indeed believe that the Wright brothers would have invented the airplane, no matter where they grew up, even if they didn't have access to easy sources of combustion engines to power the thing.
This thread needs more TVTropes.
"Well, as long as you agree with my unstated but simple reasoning."
If you're thinking what I'm thinking, then we've heard quite sufficient from Gabe. I mean, the thread is supposed to end when someone calls someone else a Nazi, unless, of course...
Going back a bit:
Anyway, this town just stinks, its big, filthy and well, third world, and the Incas, which where the marvel of the world, as stated earlier, apparently stopped there and never evolved again, im curious, as its clear these people do not have the same social structure as the Incas, which was powerful and advanced, what happened? Did they de-evolve?
1. There's no such thing as "de-evolution."
2. Do you seriously expect us to believe that some magical, unspecified genetic event came along to explain the fall of the various empires, rather than socioeconomic reasons? If so, what was this unspecified genetic event?
Noticed any Latins? Blacks or Russians? Why not? Oh, because they are inferior, whatever you say, which Dog admitted but wanted to call it 'Meme' and a complete seperate notion, people are NOT responsible for their poor culture, its the magic 'Cultural Meme' that is, and I was not responsible for breakin that Window, it was the magical gnome who did it...
Funny, I thought you admitted that they were genetically equal, and that the circumstantial dominance of bad memes was a factor in their bad situations. Of course, since you apparently don't believe in the "magical" powers of libraries, schools, and internet-based science projects to expose a person to good memes they can build on.
Science is, after all, a "build on the work of others" enterprise. Only by knowing what other people have worked on, can a person expand on it.
...Not that we've been given any reason to believe Gabe will agree with us, there. He does seem to believe that science works by revelation and the prophets who receive them, given his earlier appeal to a Nobel Prize winner's anecdotes, as if they were somehow made more valid by his divine nature.
Comic Relief
"Anyway, this town just stinks, its big, filthy..."
Get yourself an air freshener, then. :D
"and the Incas, which where the marvel of the world, as stated earlier, apparently stopped there and never evolved again, im curious, as its clear these people do not have the same social structure as the Incas, which was powerful and advanced, what happened?"
Conquistadors happened, that's what. Oh, and smallpox.
I think you should se this as a war between Good and Evil, Advancement and Dark Ages, GDI versus NOD.
Playing on the C&C reference lets se what we got.
We have the good guys (GDI), America, the most advanced nation the world has ever seen. Help everyone (even our enemies) on the planet for nothing in return (what could they give the ones having all?). And then we have the spicks, negroid and rest wanting to destroy the good. The negroid, lacking technology as well as understanding to use it had to find another way to attack us: HIV/AIDS, The predominantly negroid disease was to be inflicted on America, they started to rape our woman and children and it did not take long until it spread. The faggots dykes helped as well.
The asians are slowly building up armies similar to ours because of stolen and given
Technology.
You may want to live in darkness, but I do not.
So, back over here.
HIV/AIDS: You do realize that there are plenty of whites who buy into that sort of quackery, right? Of course, a lot of it prospers because it feeds on conspiracy theories about the pharmaceutical companies:
1. Poison everyone.
2. ???
3. Profit!
The same thing happens whenever first world countries try to raise vaccinations in many third world countries: They assume all first world nations are like you, and out to poison them. Didn't you know that?
Of course, how can a disease be "negroid"?
Good and Evil: Wow, you actually believe that?
"Stolen" technology: All "white" technology is built upon "stolen" technology. The mathematics we use has a lot of components "stolen" from "non-white" sources. Does that make it not count as "white"? Or do you have to invoke a double standard?
Light and Darkness: Have you been paying any attention whatsoever to what I've been saying about you? Your arguments all seem to be based on the exact same collection of logical fallacies as Creationists, quacks, psychics, ufologists, and so forth. Like them, you claim to be a source of light, but you seem rather like the dim Newagers out there.
You might want to read up on Occam's Razor, Gabe. So far, I see no reason to believe in any of the new entities I suspect you're positing.
And no, Occam's Razor has nothing to do with how easily you can sloganize an "explanation".
You are saying, I believe, that gay people wish to destroy all that is good in this world? That is what you're saying, is it not?
Continuing in that vein, do you think that gay people have made any important contributions to the societies you care about? Do you believe it is possible that even one 'faggot' could have made an important contribution to science, one that you are taking advantage of even as you read these words?
Answer carefully.
Funny thing that's occurred to me:
What's your solution, Gabe? How do you suggest we prevent the oncoming Dim Age?
My solution is easy to summarize: Improve science education wherever possible. Spread pro-intellectual memes and ridicule anti-intellectual ones.
I have a feeling his solution is a bit like, you know, The Final Solution.
I have my suspicions, but I'll let him hang himself, by outright saying it, blubbering out an incomprehensible gobblety-gook of non-sequiturs, or, as we've come to expect, ignore the question and continue with his eternal stalling game.
He's striking me as the sort of person who complains that no one understands him, yet he's unwilling to give the time of day to anyone who tries.
I wonder, Preview... Was the previous version of my comment tasty? How did you feel as you ATE IT?
Ahem.
Towards the end of previous version, I came back to something that Gabe ignored: by claiming that positing memes removes personal responsibility for things, did Gabe mean to imply that observable physical characteristics somehow cause moral turpitude, or that moral fiber influences appearance?
Both sound reprehensible, and both ignore over a century of research and experimentation regarding heredity. Now, let's get something clear:
Talking about "blood" and blood being 'diluted' ("deluded") implies a continuous model of heredity. With the volume of evidence in support of the basic ideas of Mendelian genetics, talking about "blood" in continuous rather than discrete terms is batshit insane ior* fantastically stupid ior intensely uninformed.
So, before you go any further, Gabe, be prepared to explain why over a century of evidence does not apply to human heredity in this one aspect.
*Inclusive or.
Every time we bring up genes, he claims "straw man", so I have to ask, if he thinks different "races" are stupider or smarter than others, what exactly makes them stand out, if not genes? Does he think a generation "inherits" the mistakes of their predecesors? Does he think not only that one's decendants are guilty of the crimes of their elders (in other words, a murderer already dead? Arrest his son), but that if someone kills someone, their young will inherit bloodthirst in some sort of mental lamarcism?
I'm ASKING if he thinks this because if he keeps saying we're not getting him when we accuse him of racism based on genes, then what IS he saying?
But really this is all beside the point. The evidence is all very much stacked against any idea of the group "black people" being mentally inferior to the group "white people" and visa versa. It doesn't matter what mechanism he's suggesting for it if the idea doesn't even match the evidence. The best he can come up with is his biased eyes viewed some lazy or "stupid" people in his travels and he decided to label the ENTIRE group as "having" that trait.
Here's another thing. He's finally revealed that yes, he IS in fact a racist, and he isn't ashamed of that. He DOES think that one race is superior or inferior to another, and he DOES think that races are discrete entities as opposed to the reality of the gene pool, that it is a gradiant scale slowly drifting across all sorts of traits, with many traits completely unattached to others. Futher he DOES think that "mixing" (which humans ALWAYS have done, and so does every species on the planet) is somehow bad, in spite of the evidence that most human selective breeding projects, especially purely cosmetic ones, tend to narrow the pipe of traits down so far that there's nothing to add to make up for any bad traits such as poor breathing in persians or heart failure in maine coons (no you racist, I'm talking about cats in the above sentance, not persian people).
He also seems to think that nations, back in some golden age, were ALWAYS entirely one race, and that borders were actually able to magically prevent "cross breeding". Further, he ignores the reality that ALL breeding except between identical twins is by it's very nature cross breeding, that's what it's FOR in an evolutionary sense. That aspect drastically speeds up the "mutations" natural selection has to work with in sexually reproducing creatures. The very concept of making a "pure strain" is not just unjustifiably egotistical, it is the antithesis to evolutionary "flow" (the word progress is too strong). Something remaining exactly the same without a large pool of alternative genes doesn't deal well with disaster after all.
There ARE some genetic combinations that will result in mental problems. These traits, he seems to ignore, are not bound to any previous ideas of race, because the GENES are not locked or otherwise in any way related to genes for melanin content or other basic outward cosmetic features.
One single person's adventures through a country can never be as thorough as decades of consistant and double blinded thorough research, and indeed can't be relied on for ANY real observations especially in the admission that he already pretty much thought this to start with.
If you want us to believe any of your claims, don't bother talking about how that one time this one guy was napping IN PUBLIC or whatever, give us the science. That's all that matters. In it's absence, there's no good reason at all to assume your claims. In it's presence, we'll accept it. But hey, we'll STILL completely disregard your silly moral outrage over "cross breeding".
My feline friend pretty well summarizes why eugenics is essentially a denial of everything we've learned from evolution.
The fact is, he thinks he's on the same "side" as the rest of "white people", but most white people at least in the more civilized parts of the world want NOTHING to do with him. They're too busy having actual relationships based on common ideas, with, heaven forfend, maybe even some black people they find themselves far closer to than this guy. Get it? You are the ENEMY of most of "your" race, they don't consider you "part" of their group! The average person in modern society considers the ideals of people a far better method of defining in and out groups. You are part of the "out group" of racists. Does that sting? Does the fact that people you ignorantly decided were your "brothers" don't consider you a part of them just feel like "betrayal" to you? If so, why? Why should anyone form group lines like that? Heck, why those SPECIFIC genetic traits? Would the idea of forming groups based on having innie or outie belly buttons make any less sense than your idea?
"Those outies are a bunch of lazy good for nothings that just stole all their innovations from us innies." Sounds pretty danged stupid and baseless right? I didn't list a single thing there. But wait! I go to gyms all the time and I'm always seeing those "outie" guys doing stupid stuff! Now you HAVE to believe me!
Oh let me expand on the "gradiant scale" concept of genes. The idea is that it's a multi-dimensional array, like at least as many dimensions as phenotypic effects one might track genetically.
Further, genes aren't a lock, a lot are basically "potential". I just have to keep pointing out that two computers, completely identical in every way, will have totally different behavior if differet software is installed. There's nothing inherant to the computer itself. You keep saying that a culture is some sort of ultimate proof of the weakness of someone's "race", but that's silly. "White people", for example, have had societies that have widely varied from barbarism to feudalism to modern democracy. Do you really intend to suggest that it was entirely race that determined that? Social change is a software issue. Yes, you need human brains to RUN that software, but our brains can run DIFFERENT KINDS of software. The proof is the one thing you keep failing to explain, the very existance of things like white lazy stupid people or gangsters and black super scientists and presidents.
You went on and on about scandenavians having longer life spans. When we pointed out that they have better health care and all that keeps them, and anyone else that would recieve it, living longer is modern medicine, you suddenly shift the goal post. It was very clear you were claiming they were literally physically superior, until we shatter that idea. Now they're just old fasioned "mentally superior" for HAVING that health care. Really? That's your argument? How many scandenavians are doctors? Did the ENTIRE nation develop their medicine in some group effort? Or to put it as I did before, did YOU ever invent anything in your entire life or are you just stealing the credit because they happen to be in your definition of your "in group"?
Technically, his in-group is blond-haired blue-eyed white people. I'm in class right now, so...
*scans room*
We don't have super-many of those.
(Wait, why defend Einstein? Jewish people are not normally known for that...)
Shit. Corollary to what I just said: does anybody know a good source for demographics by stuff like hair color?
Oh, oh! I'll drop some history on these fat beats.
His basic excercize in excuse making when it comes to invention is that, say, asians just "stole" computers from "white people" (as though white people are in this club and some japanese guy broke into the place, as opposed to a worldwide group effort).
What does he think invention is? Does he think computers were invented just as they are now in one fell swoop? I'd like to see the genius that could go from an abbacus to a Duel Core by "hwimswelf". No most inventions are just small modifications of previous inventions. Computers started out as "analytical engines" before eventually fading into obscurity. The very first computers weren't much of anything, and few could see much use for them. It took a lot of refinement and changing of fundamental components before we got to the current state of the game with semiconductors. There are still many more refinements and unless this guy is a computer engineer, he's in no position to say that the advancements of one country, say Japan, are any less than those of another.
The car is similar. It didn't just spring up. They didn't go straight to the model T. It took a lot of work. All sorts of different individuals had to add their share of work to get things going as they did.
Scientific progress is similarly staggared. You've got to do one small experiment at a time to work up to where scientific knowledge is now, and there more than ever it was a global effort where you can't pinpoint just one race as making the "most important" discovery.
PS, I don't think anyone here actually "hates their own race" or whatever you've convinced yourself is the only way we don't accept your nonsense.
I'm loving all the comments I get from my fellow skeptics. It's so life-affirming for people to point out the "build on the work of others" cooperative nature of science, and by extension, of society in general.
You know, I wonder if Gabe might have sympathies with Ayn Rand. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged, but if I'm remembering the reviews I've read correctly, it fed into the "lone genius" model of science, where the protagonist was able to rediscover a lot of lost technology because he was A) a Marty Stu, and B) coincidentally ran into a shack with a working electric generator and some equipment he could reverse engineer.
Science almost never works that way, especially in the modern world. The "Asian" world was able to catch up with the rest of us developed nations because they did the hard work of studying and understanding. They no more "stole" computers than we "stole" many mathematical concepts from the Arab world and beyond. The "stealing" only exists if you create this fictional barriers Gabriel seems to have so much faith in.
When you drop these so-called racial distinctions, and see the world in terms of distributions of memes and resources, everything still makes sense. To me, that pretty much means race can be shaved off by Occam's Razor as a superfluous, unnecessary entity.
One more level of fractal wrongness I see in Gabe's arguments thus far is essentially his inability to communicate the source of the problem.
One thing that I've heard plenty of people talking about is the proportion of Hispanics/Latinos/whatever growing in Texas, due directly or indirectly to immigration. (Indirectly in the form of immigrants having native-born children.)
The way I perceive that: "Uh-oh, we've got what may be a bunch of people raised in a country with sub-standard educational facilities, and possibly dominated by very poisonous faith memes, since Catholicism is popular down there. To prevent that from being a problem, we should, as always, support good, affordable education so they and their children can educate themselves and contribute to society. We should be doing that anyway, of course, since we've got a lot of poisonous religious memes in our high proportion of anti-intellectual redneck culture anyway."
The "problem" isn't that their alleles, but some transfer of problems of their circumstance, many of which are already dominant in our "white" population. Said anti-intellectual "rednecks" are just resting on the laurels provided by the educated segment of the population. Their "whiteness" or "latinoness" are pretty much irrelevant, cosmetic alleles.
To change my perception, Gabriel has to prove that education, communication of memes, government policies, and availability of material resources aren't the only useful explanations for civilization's scientific progress. He has to find a way to show us that when all those things are pretty much equal between two "races," there's still a difference.
Either he can do all that to filter out the mass of noise in his historical and anecdotal data or he can present us with data that rings loud and clear on its own: The genetic kind. Point out these offending mystery alleles/genes/whatever.
I'm really not convinced that his ideas fit into any sensible genetic framework at all. As I said, his talk of 'dilution' convinced me of the exact opposite. Heredity just... does not work like that.
Yeah, I got that point loud and clear. I mostly want to give Gabriel some genetic rope to hang himself more overtly.
If he does believe heredity is continuous, rather than discrete/digital, that pretty much puts him in the woo crowd, somewhere in the vicinity of Creationists. One of the biggest things that supported Darwinian evolution and lead to modern synthesis, after all, is the discovery of discrete units of heredity in the form of genes.
If it wasn't discrete, the theory that would have grown to become modern synthesis would have instead come crashing down in its infancy.
Generally I put ALL racists firmly in the "woo" camp, no matter where they put their explanation, it's never backed by the evidence, just their own beliefs.
I listen to their dumb speeches on specials on the history channel and it's the same rhetoric over and over again, they don't HATE "them", they just want to support "their own" race, and what's wrong with that? Well mainly that such a position lies firmly embedded in a number of false premises that I already talked about. Again, why would that be any more sensible than my hypothetical innie vs outie racists?
A gene is basically an all or nothing thing. Either you have it or you don't. Sometimes errors in copying produce a new mutant form, but that exception has no bearing on the question of how inheritance works.
It's rather idiotic to take credit or feel guilty about the actions of your ancestors. I don't consider myself great because some my ancestors were inventors, and I don't consider myself evil because some of my ancestors were cruel to others. I didn't inherit any of that. Years ago, my entire method of thinking was completely different, the poor magical thinking religious young earth creationist (transformed from what was previously a wishy washy "all the woo is true" sort of magical thinker that believed in ghosts and ESP and all that noise at that). Now I make the attempt to cleanse myself of any and all false ideas the best way I know how, applying critical thinking skills. It's a complete change of character. "Free will" is one way to describe it, another is that chance exposure and my tendancy to explore and read things led me down that path thanks to online skeptics and so on. My point is simply that in one mind, one single gathering of genetic expression, I went through a number of really drastic ways of thinking. The genes create a super computer which is set up to be adaptive and learn. There are a number of preset things built in, but once that brain IS built, the genes lose all control of what the brain does from there.
And again I must make one thing clear, I said all that simply to make it clear that I'm fully aware that people can act individually and brushing a whole group sharing nothing but one cosmetic phenotypic expression as "lazy" is simply ignorant. That's the most apt word to use here. That said, I don't even think that such "tendancies" ARE in any way related to those other mostly cosmetic genetics.
Here's the most you can say when it comes to "superiority" of one gene or another. Having a thick shell of melanin helps to protect someone from overexposure to sunlight. In a tropical environment, that's a plus. Having lesser melanin helps one to get BETTER exposure to sunlight to generate some previous vitamin D, and in an arctic climate, THAT is a big plus. Having larger folds of fat in one's eyelids can help to protect the eyes from snow blindness, another plus in that specific scenario, where in yet another climate losing the fatty layer would allow one more visibility when snowblindness is not a threat. I'm not saying that all genes are "balanced" like some fighting game, I'm just saying that they are inherited seperately from other genes by the nature of it, and that in a LOT of case, alternate alleles are adapted specifically to certain environments.
Now it is certainly true that some genes can have totally unexpected effects on other genes and their expressions, but there's not a single bit of evidence that genes that result in more melanin have any effect on brain development. They seem largely unaffected by each other. Heck melanin isn't produced in brain cells so it's very likely that the section where those two possible alleles would sit is just "skipped over" during protein production. The majority of DNA in any ONE specialized cell is ignored after all, only using that specific set that has to do with it's own functions, most of the time (there are exceptions).
Gabe, learn something about genetics. Learn, study, find out about how phenotypic expression works, how reproduction and inheritance works, the nature of how genes can be cut away from each other and need not be inherited in an "all or nothing" form, the way that all of them DO depend and interact with each other, but those specific interactions vary and can be studied. Sometimes one gene can cause a chain reaction in all expression, and sometimes one gene will only change a small expression, like eye color. Learn that the vast majority of mutations are neutral, with the code either ignored or easily "coped" with as the generations go by. Learn what a gene pool actually IS, that you don't at all share ALL your genes with the group you label as "your race" and only have labelled it that based on some specific phenotypic expression, a VERY small smattering of genes relative to the vast numbers that are actually relevant. Learn that two different genes can express the exact same thing. Learn.
If you're still a racist after that, then we'll talk.
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