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[GiglameshDespair]

Shot every single one.

[Yoink]

Psst - FYI, Greatorder, I'm pretty sure that was Dwarfy's alt you were talking to.



My WTF for this morning: holy heckin' gosh, this is the first time I can remember it actually being hotter outside my stuffy little room than inside, and the front door's open and everything. No wonder I slept badly, having tonnes of dramatic dreams (which I have since almost entirely forgotten, sadly).   

[Lord Shonus]

Eh, you're on shaky ground there. The English didn't cause the Potato Famine, so it's a matter of them not doing as much good as they could have, not of them doing bad.

In a very real sense, the English DID cause the potato famine. It was England's fault that the Irish were almost entirely dependent on potatos for food while growing cash crops for the English. England didn't directly introduce the potato blight, but it is their fault that the failure of one crop caused mass starvation.

[Hanslanda]

I recall reading that many, if not most dictators are actually quite likeable on a personal level. That's how they got to be dictators in the first place.

This is what I was trying to say yeah.

[bloop_bleep]

I was gonna say, did the english kill all the potatoes?

Eh, you're on shaky ground there. The English didn't cause the Potato Famine, so it's a matter of them not doing as much good as they could have, not of them doing bad.

This:

There was also the whole "We'll keep pulling food out of Ireland while half the Irish starve" thing.

The Irish worked as tenant farmers for wealthy English landowners. They grew potatoes for themselves and wheat for their landlords as rent. When the potatoes started dying out, the landlords wouldn't let the Irish take one bushel of the wheat they themselves grew. So as a result the Irish labored endlessly on empty stomachs to produce craploads of wheat that were immediately exported without a single cent of returns to them. And the British Empire did zilch about it.

[Frumple]

Sudden realization that barracuda and diarrhea have the same number of syllables and a similar rhyming profile, and consequently there's a pretty literally shitty song parody in that.

Why do you do this to me, brain?

[scriver]

I just realised that my favourite local eco farm is likely run by antroposofists.

I feel tricked.

In case you're not aware, the antroposofists are basically a new-age anti-science/anti-intellectual sect. Very vocal about anti-vaccimationism, for example.

[bloop_bleep]

I just realised that my favourite local eco farm is likely run by antroposofists.

I feel tricked.

In case you're not aware, the antroposofists are basically a new-age anti-science/anti-intellectual sect. Very vocal about anti-vaccimationism, for example.

"We believe that bacteria are a myth invented by the coastal/intellectual elite and Jewish lizard bankers. That is why we're dedicated to violating every FDA rule that exists and make sure we thoroughly scrub our farm products in manure before taking them to market!"

"Every time they come to inspect us we pay a scruffy bearded man with a rifle to show up and yell constantly and incoherently about freedom of religion. That usually scares them off."

[wierd]

I just realised that my favourite local eco farm is likely run by antroposofists.

I feel tricked.

In case you're not aware, the antroposofists are basically a new-age anti-science/anti-intellectual sect. Very vocal about anti-vaccimationism, for example.

"We believe that bacteria are a myth invented by the coastal/intellectual elite and Jewish lizard bankers. That is why we're dedicated to violating every FDA rule that exists and make sure we thoroughly scrub our farm products in manure before taking them to market!"

"Every time they come to inspect us we pay a scruffy bearded man with a rifle to show up and yell constantly and incoherently about freedom of religion. That usually scares them off."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy

Sounds more like new-age drug-induced spiritualism to me. "spiritual worlds experienced outside normal senses" pretty much says one of two things:  1) Drug induced hallucinations, or 2) Sensory Deprivation induced hallucinations.

Now, antivaxx, homeopathic quackery, et al, often co-exist with that... but it is not required.

[bloop_bleep]

It's my understanding (from whatever limited knowledge I gleaned from a glance at the Wikipedia page) that the official organization associated with this religion endorses very anti-scientific viewpoints, which may or may not be because some religious principles conflict with those of experimental science.

[wierd]

Anything and everything about "Spiritualism" is anti-scientific, because "Spiritual" things are outside of nature, (eg, Super-natural) and cannot be examined by the scientific method. (the cornerstone of the scientific method is repeatable results; specifically, results that are repeatable by OTHERS following a stated process, allowing refinement of true knowledge about the world through experiment. EG, OBJECTIVE study. The " imagination, inspiration and intuition" that they proclaim to use, by their nature, CANNOT be objective. These are inherently SUBJECTIVE things.  As such, "Science!!" cannot be applied.)

So... Once that door is open, there's no telling how deep they will go down the rabbit hole.  BUT-- this is true of ANY religion that asserts the existence of a supernatural world.

[Trekkin]

Anything and everything about "Spiritualism" is anti-scientific, because "Spiritual" things are outside of nature, (eg, Super-natural) and cannot be examined by the scientific method. (the cornerstone of the scientific method is repeatable results; specifically, results that are repeatable by OTHERS following a stated process, allowing refinement of true knowledge about the world through experiment. EG, OBJECTIVE study. The " imagination, inspiration and intuition" that they proclaim to use, by their nature, CANNOT be objective. These are inherently SUBJECTIVE things.  As such, "Science!!" cannot be applied.)

So... Once that door is open, there's no telling how deep they will go down the rabbit hole.  BUT-- this is true of ANY religion that asserts the existence of a supernatural world.

That's subtly but critically wrong.

Methodological naturalism does not technically assert that only natural causes exist, as philosophical naturalism itself does; it assumes arguendo that all causes are natural, but assumptions differ operationally from assertions. Spiritualist claims are perfectly testable where they intersect with the observable universe, which they often do during the sales pitch. We can test crystals for magic healing, see if mediums can recall factual information about deceased persons, test the clairvoyant with Zener cards, quantify the power of prayer, put alternative medicine through controlled trials and so forth. The critical thing is this: we do not need to believe the supernatural exists in order to investigate the allegedly supernatural. Moreover, this still allows for putatively supernatural results. If it works at all predictably, we can make predictions about it, and then it's not supernatural anymore. It's just natural. Subjective things can be tested by this method too, most familiarly through double-blinding and certain statistical methods to normalize bias. It is even possible to test for the physical relevance, if not the existence, of various spirit realms and so forth supposedly in communication with the physical world, just by varying the effervescent aetheric flux or whatever woo they're claiming and seeing what changes.

It is true that the existence of things that have never and will never interact in any way with the observable universe is not testable, but that does raise the obvious question of how the spiritualists learned about them and claims of that sort are definitionally irrelevant anyway and make a poor basis for a religion.

Just because it's not worth testing nonsense doesn't mean we can't, you know.

(Oh, and we're not producing 'true knowledge'. We're making predictions with mechanistic implications. It's an important distinction when looking at how theories change.)

[Kagus]

Like how flies can't hear without their wings.

[overseer05-15]

Like how flies can't hear without their wings.

Neither can I, so...

[dragdeler]

-snip-