Comic Genesis Forums

squidflakes wrote:I wouldn't even have gotten in to this thread if you (faeoori) and jetset hadn't started ganging up on Swordzie and telling him he was wrong, then substituting your opinion for fact. You're also lucky that Honor isn't around, or you would have gotten a double screen load from the both of us.

And precisely how is what you just did to faeoori any different? And since when has "ganging" meant anything on this board anyway? In practically all of the big contentious debates held here, there have developed two general sides which tend to reinforce each other; this one is no different.

Now that you mention it though, Honor has been away for a while, hasn't she? And I've also noted that her foil in these debates, Tellner, has also been absent.

And to faeoori, I will say, please don't leave. I will admit that things sometimes get heated... Sometimes very much so; I know the feeling, I've been in your position on more than one occasion. But one good thing I can say about this board is that, by in large, what happens in a thread stays in that thread. Once this thread is down off the bottom and list and died out of memory, the hard feelings will die with it. Only once or twice have I seen this not occur, and the people who carry things out over threads tend not to stick around very long anyway.

Honor is getting her CDL permit at a school for truck drivers, and Tellner.. uhhh.. no idea. I heard a rumor that someone kissed him, and how he's wearing tights and puffy sleeves, but.. you know, just a rumor.

As for ganging up, it was Swordzie vs. the world a couple of pages ago, and you know we have to have at least two people arguing a side.

Hey, look, I'm all up for debate. I had a lotta fun making those posts.

Me and squiddy are/were not trying to criticize your views. What was being criticized was your arguements, which seems to me to be the thing to do in a lengthy debate.

I didn't say "belive is God is for wimps" or some crap like that. I said 'this arguement is crap'.

Saying things like 'science supports the existance of God' is a false statement. I'll not let anybody get away with that.

If you wanna say 'I believe in God'...you certainly can say that. It's true, after all.

Creationism and the like have gotten a strong hold in the United States because the educated have been too polite to say "BULLSHIT!". There is no debate in other parts of the world. Seriously. In Japan, arguments over whether evolution is fact or not are not happening. This is true for many other countries as well.

A lot of pseudo-scientific arguments have been trotted out. If you're going to say that your arguments are scientific and logical then they have to stand up to the light of reason. Hand waving doesn't count.

I think most of them have been handled but this is one that I haven't seen an answer to and it's been bugging me for a while now:

Just as you aren't going to see a computer glitch out, and create a full OS from it's random 1's and 0's anytime soon,

Given mutations and natural selection (that is an environment that the OS is more or less suited for) you just might. The amount of time required would be fairly long (millions to billions of years probably). Genetic algorithms are doing exactly that - having an algorithm be evolved out of random 1's and 0's.

the possibility of all the things left up to chance that are required in order for us to reach our current state of existence, with the current life forms on our planet, the state of our planet supporting our kinds of life forms, and the positioning of our planet from the sun so it's gravitational pull is not to strong to suck us in or to weak to let us drift out of orbit

The positioning of the planets is well explained by cosmology and physics and does not need "God" to explain how they got in their orbits. You're arguing backwards. Oh, I see a planet in an orbit. Therefore something must have placed it just so. An orbit is defined as being where the pull of gravity and the centripetal force on a body are in balance. It's a description of how things are, not a place that you go to.

Most of these arguments are simply driven by a misunderstanding of the numbers and timescales involved (billions of planets in the galaxy and billions of years for evolution to work) and a belief that we are unique.

, the structure of the universe and the laws of nature

Now here you can start having a discussion

(I'd like to see you explain how gravity works )

Umm, God makes things fall? Is that the answer you want? Gravity is well described but the mechanism is not understood yet. No one ever claimed that science knows everything. That's why people become scientists - to learn how things work. 150 years ago we did not understand quantum mechanics or even have more than an inkling that it existed but today a large piece of our civilization is based on it (semiconductors or "chips" are quantum mechanical devices)

, you could hardly be surprised that many people, when faced with these facts, would think to themselves "Gosh! It's almost like it's all been set up intentionally!"

When you don't understand what you're talking about (like orbits above) yah, it's pretty easy to come up with some weird conclusions. People like to make up explanations. Doesn't mean their explanation has any validity. Leaving God and religion out of it entirely, I have had people who were mystified by the things a computer was doing come up with some pretty interesting hypotheses about what was going on. And, in those instances being the author of the software, I knew their hypotheses were dead wrong.

I'm going to have to say... wow. And also "tl;dr" to a handful of those posts. My head hurts because of all of the circling.

As much as I'm saddened that a thread-fight made somebody uncomfortable enough to leave the forum, I figure if they can't just peacefully bow out of the thread and ignore it without feeling compelled to prove themselves when they feel its going awry, (which is what I do with most of the threads lately ) which was waaaayyyy at the beginnning, maybe they just aren't the type for this forum. *shrug*

I feel that a quote from Confucius is relative to this thread, and I guess I'll end on that note...

"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge. "
- Confucius

PS I love you all. You're insane but I love you guys.

I just finished catching up with the pages I've missed, and I've just about got the biggest brainboner ever. This thread is AWESOME.

Since I don't want to regress to earlier topics, and since Swordsie and Squiddy have spoken better on behalf of science than I could hope to, I'll mention someting about debate. Civility is fine, but when logic starts getting thrown out through the window, backhanded insults get tossed in, and things just start to get all-around messy, it's time to start getting serious. Anyone who, after losing the debate, complains that "I was being lighthearted" or "you were being too serious" shouldn't be getting involved anyway. If you lose, you should suck it up, hope the winner is magnanimous in victory, and try to learn something from the event.

This isn't really related, but for what it's worth, I also miss our forum valkyrie.

I remember a couple of pages back that somebody said something along the lines of, "this thread being more intelligent/heated than usual."

No it's not.

That, and the obviously high feelings of some of this threads' participants makes me want to suggest that perhaps some of our lovely newer forumites might want to have a look at pages and topics created before their time on GCC foum began...

Theological, political, sexual, environmental etc. etc. discussions, heated arguments and rants have all graced the pages of GCC forum before. In fact, anything that can be given the suffix "al" has most likely been debated here before. And, despite sometimes having ragingly disparate opinions, we've all been able to kiss-and-rape-up at the end of the topic, or outside of the topic in other threads if the topic continues - even if our views are still different at the end of it all.

One of the most wonderful things about this forum is that amongst all the fondling, groping and discussions about tentacles, there are some godammned intelligent people here discussing intelligent things. If this bothers you, or anyone else, may I suggest fecking off to the /b/ forum on 4Chan - it will be more to your liking.

One of the things that brought everybody here in the first place was a liking for "different" things - to suddenly get all het up and cranky because someone doesn't agree with your world view (to the point where you feel the need to leave altogether) strikes me as somewhat hyprocritical.

*is still missing our Valkyrie *

squidflakes wrote:As for ganging up, it was Swordzie vs. the world a couple of pages ago, and you know we have to have at least two people arguing a side.

Wait, I don't count as a person any more? When did that happen?

I myself lurked here for over a year before I signed on, so I've seen a number of kickass threads that match the intellectual level of this one. There's just something about the hostility in this one that felt different, though.

I like /b/, too. Go figure.

Seth Marati wrote: This isn't really related, but for what it's worth, I also miss our forum valkyrie.

That made me really want a chibi-Honor plushie...

awkwardschoolgirl wrote:

Seth Marati wrote: This isn't really related, but for what it's worth, I also miss our forum valkyrie.

That made me really want a chibi-Honor plushie...

With a monkey wrench, seriously.

Indigo Violent wrote:

squidflakes wrote:As for ganging up, it was Swordzie vs. the world a couple of pages ago, and you know we have to have at least two people arguing a side.

Wait, I don't count as a person any more? When did that happen?

There was a whole page where it was just Sword on the one side, and Jet and Fae on the other. That's the part I was referring to. You did pop up and swing the clue by four a few times, and it was appreciated.

awkwardschoolgirl wrote: That made me really want a chibi-Honor plushie...

How come I'm now picturing an Honor futanari plushie with a giant penis. There's something wrong here. I blame the other thred.

putaro wrote:. . . I have had people who were mystified by the things a computer was doing come up with some pretty interesting hypotheses about what was going on. And, in those instances being the author of the software, I knew their hypotheses were dead wrong.

Conversely, I have had discussions with programmers, about the behavior of their software, where they had no clue that their program was doing X, or accessing resource Y - and I have to show them trace logs or set up elaborate demonstrations and point to them and say; "LOOK! You're writing temp files in the root of C:! Fix it!" (one example).

To be fair - it's usually some black-box function they're using, that they don't understand. The best example of this I've seen anywhere is Windows Installer - most developers don't even try to understand all the crap and cruft their programs blast into the registry when they install. Not necessarily their fault, though -

wow this is an awkward situation

pfft, not to worry Spiral Zero, we've only got ourselves to blame

Where did you get to anyways?

Lulujayne wrote:pfft, not to worry Spiral Zero, we've only got ourselves to blame

Where did you get to anyways?

I feel so much better now that I'm not the only one that forgot that he told us where he'd be in his original post.

Welcome back, Spiral.

*slaps forehead*

Shit, I'm sorry Spiral Zero - I guess I just got caught up in all the agression that got vented after your first few posts

Did you survive ok?

I disappear due to workload and this thread has changed to creationism? We have gone from moral philosophy to mythology? We're arguing over ancient superstition?

Anyway, I see this.

Just as you aren't going to see a computer glitch out, and create a full OS from it's random 1's and 0's anytime soon,

Who wrote that? It's just a rehash of the 'watch found in a field' argument and it's just as inapplicable. Just as evolution does not apply to watches because they don't reproduce, evolution doesn't apply to computer operating systems because they don't reproduce. The theory of evolution cannot be said to be flawed due to incorrect predictions about computer OSes because it cannot make predictions about OSes in the first place.

If that was an argument for incredularity of complexity from chance, it doesn't take into account that pretty much anything is possible if lots of smaller, less improbable steps can get you there, vast quantities of energy from the Sun drive the process, billions of years elapse and the correct steps are more likely to reproduce and continue the process. It is a mind boggingly inefficient process but who needs efficiency when you've got vast amounts of time and energy? Decent engineers shouldn't think too much about that, in the same way they shouldn't think too much about that quantum physics is the basis of modern, microelectronics.

well yes I am still alive.

I've come to terms with my father and we've reached a mutal agreement of don't ask don't tell. regardless of the impression that I gave I still love my father very much and he loves me as well.

nothing else really matters the more that I think about it.

right now I'm in atlanta georgia, I'm going back to my new home in winchester virginia tomorrow.