** STICKY ** Post any notable quotes you can find here.

[Inferno]

Sir Charles Popper: "We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."

We just had elections in Austria and the far-right won substantially. I'll be blogging again soon so stay tuned.

 

[Engelbert]

Sir Charles Popper: "We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."

We just had elections in Austria and the far-right won substantially. I'll be blogging again soon so stay tuned.

I've been to Austria a few times and loved it. I never really thought about it politically. I've just browsed an article, that says the coalition is still in power, although the far right has made large gains. Just out of curiosity, where abouts do you live? - 'cos I've been to a few places in Austria and thought it was great.

 

[Inferno]

I've been to Austria a few times and loved it. I never really thought about it politically. I've just browsed an article, that says the coalition is still in power, although the far right has made large gains. Just out of curiosity, where abouts do you live? - 'cos I've been to a few places in Austria and thought it was great.

The coalition is not yet in place, though it will likely continue (and ruin itself even more).

I live in Vienna, but I've got family in lower Austria and I visit them regularly.

 

[Engelbert]

I've been to Austria a few times and loved it. I never really thought about it politically. I've just browsed an article, that says the coalition is still in power, although the far right has made large gains. Just out of curiosity, where abouts do you live? - 'cos I've been to a few places in Austria and thought it was great.

The coalition is not yet in place, though it will likely continue (and ruin itself even more).

I live in Vienna, but I've got family in lower Austria and I visit them regularly.

Surprised by those election results. Seems like something happening to several European countries at the moment.

Never been to Vienna... feel as though I should have been. Do you get to the mountainous villages much? I would love to live in Austria to be so close to the slopes.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

The setters up, therefore, and the advocates of the Christian system of faith, could not but foresee that the continually progressive knowledge that man would gain by the aid of science, of the power and wisdom of God, manifested in the structure of the universe, and in all the works of creation, would militate against, and call into question, the truth of their system of faith; and therefore it became necessary to their purpose to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their project, and this they effected by restricting the idea of learning to the dead study of dead languages.

They not only rejected the study of science out of the christian schools, but they persecuted it; and it is only within about the last two centuries that the study has been revived.

- Paine, Thomas (2011-03-24). Writings of Thomas Paine — Volume 4 (1794-1796): the Age of Reason (p. 31).​

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

- Zora Neale Hurston - Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography​

 

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

Two friends of mine were having a discussion in regards to banning things that people like to do that, though are known to be hazardous to health and publicly known, they choose to do so anyways. (Cigarettes, drinking, narcotics, etc.)

One friend said: "Look, people don't have the right to be stupid and do dumb things."

My other friend took it to note: "Like hell people don't. Freedom is about how you spend your time dying. If it's not hurting anyone besides myself, to hell with your holier-than-thou ideals. The pure essence of freedom is the ability to fuck up your own life with your own time with your own decisions."

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the—surely very slight—strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does not move round the sun need have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravity.

- Teddy Roosevelt​

 

[Foxcanine1]

“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”---Dr. Who

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”---Dr. Who The Doctor

Fixed that for you.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Creationist misappropriation of punctuated equilibrium​

Since modern creationists, particularly the "young earth" dogmatists who must cram an entire geological record into the few thousand years of a literal Biblical chronology, can advance no conceivable argument in the domain of proper logic or accurate empirics, they have always relied, as a primary strategy, upon the misquotation of scientific sources. They have shamelessly distorted all major evolutionists in their behalf, including the most committed gradualists of the Modern Synthesis (their appropriations of Dobzhansky and Simpson make particularly amusing reading). Since punctuated equilibrium provides an even easier target for this form of intellectual dishonesty (or crass stupidity if a charge of dishonesty grants them too much acumen), no one should be surprised our views have become grist for their mills and skills of distortion. I have been told that Duane Gish, their leading propagandist, refers to his compendium of partial and distorted quotations from my work as his "Goulden file."

Standard creationist literature on punctuated equilibrium rarity goes beyond the continuous recycling of two false characterizations: the conflation of punctuated equilibrium with the true saltation of Goldschmidt's hopeful monsters, and the misscaling of punctuated equilibrium's genuine breaks between species to the claim that no intermediates exist for the largest morphological transitions between classes and phyla. I regard the latter distortion as particularly egregious because we formulated punctuated equilibrium as a positive theory about the nature of intermediacy in such large-scale structural trends; the "stairstep" rather than the "ball-up-the-inclined-plane" model, if you will. Moreover, I have written numerous essays in my popular series, spanning ten printed volumes, on the documentation of this style of intermediacy in a variety of lineages, including the transition turn to terrestriality in vertebrates, the origin of birds, and the evolution of mammals, whales and humans—the very cases that the usual creationist literature has proclaimed impossible.

- Stephen Jay Gould - The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)​

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

So, in the hands of people at the Discovery Institute, epigenetics becomes a paradigm-breaker because it contradicts “Darwinism.” But in the hands of someone who actually understands evolution, epigenetics is a relatively new and very cool addition to our knowledge of the genome and its dynamic capabilities.

-Stephanie Keep​

 

[Gnug215]

Sooo... I hope these haven't been posted before, but here goes:


H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."


G.B. Shaw: "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."



And then I found a couple by me that I'd like to test out here, if people don't mind.


"Rationalization is rarely a rational process."


"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who think there are only two kinds of people in the world, and the rest, who are actually sane and reasonable enough to realize that people are way too complex to be divided into two simplistically divided groups."


No? Yes? ... no??

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Seriously, if someone says evolution is wrong because there aren't fossils between monkeys and men, find a monkey and hit him with it.

- Keith Law​

 

[Collecemall]

"Science leads you to killing people." Ben Stein
http://youtu.be/zRxCg1w-iJ8?t=2m25s

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

I can kind of understand why people practice and/or participate in the various SCAMs [So-called Complementary and Alternative Medicines] given my understanding of the various fallacies and dysfunctional ways the mind works. It is easy to see how both the practitioners and patients misjudge the efficacy of pseudo-medicine. We have evolved to survive reality, certainly not to understand it.

- Mark Crislip​

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.

― Martin Luther King Jr.​

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Hiroshima was not a glorious victory. It was ugly, heartbreaking, and avoidable. War is not an end in itself, it is the failure of peace. War is not an instrument of foreign policy—it is an admission that you don't have a foreign policy.

- Laurence A. Moran​

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Scientists are doubters, not deniers; skeptics, not cynics.

- Kenneth Feder​

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Jason Colavito[/url]"]Newton (and Bernard of Chartres before him) once claimed that he saw farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants. We shouldn’t, then, stare up at the giants and consider that view to be equally informative.