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rliant1864

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Everything posted by rliant1864

  1. We were all waiting for Qwerty to translate that Italian page.
  2. Mafia 1 and the old Destroy All Humans games (especially the first, which I think was console only).
  3. Halo 3 had a Steam DB listing for a while. That never even began production. Steam DB listings mean nothing.
  4. Alright then, "genius."
  5. You're surpised that people who've spent years publishing their own work on top of many years of schooling laugh you off when you tell them "I've learned as much as you did in 20 years in a few months of Googling!"?
  6. If you commute the cost is more like 40K from a normal public university. And not only is your tuition waved at the vast majority of STEM graduate schools, they pay you in the form of a stipend, on top of the fact that STEM graduate school only has a year of courses. The remaining years would be spent during research under grant, which you claim to have already done. So it should be a breeze, no? You could cut years off your doctorate if you've already done the work. As for less educated than you...you have nothing to back that claim up, so I see no reason to do much other than dismiss it. The same as everyone else already has. As for Tesla, he took 3 years of engineering school before being kicked out and spent a fourth year taking lectures for no grades. He already has more education than you do. And of course we're talking about someone who did their major works in the 1890s. There's much more prerequisite knowledge you need, especially in physics, before you can claim to be an authority on anything in 2015.
  7. Not educated enough to have a doctoral degree in it, apparently. And thus have no formal research training either. And you know, the perpetual energy generator theorists have 'working models' as well...
  8. Hm. Never encountered it before. Though, granted, all the forums I'm on directly message replies to the original poster and allow them to respond from that menu, so editing your comment is seen as pulling the rug out from under someone.
  9. What's wrong with double posting? That's the first time I've ever had that be a moderator complaint before.
  10. 1. But what you said is that you wanted an exception made for yourself. As part of a systemic thing, you can't say "don't rain on my parade" or "leave me in particular alone, it makes me happy." It cannot be like that. It's like trying to eradicate a nest of ants without murdering any one ant. 2. The fact that it's confusing is a popular point of criticism. It would point to the God of the Bible being fairly hypocritical, no? And of course I'm talking about the major ones a lot of people know about: The Flood, the bears and the bald man, etc. 4. Self-defense, killing an enemy in times of war, hanging a criminal. Few people would have many qualms about shooting a thief or bank robber, or a member of the Waffen SS on the battlefield. If you have justification, good people will readily kill, and feel damn good about it. And frankly, if they're right in their justifications, they should be. But the problem is that religion provides as much justification as anything else, as well as twisting the rules. Suddenly things that were fine before are seen as personal wrongs to you or your god, and that's as much justification the good man needs, just as much as the robber's actions are. 5. The idea of religion just being 'faith in something, anything' is a very very recent idea. A direct counter to the rise of science in the past few centuries, actually. Prior to that (and still true for the vast majority today) religion was what provided you with truth in your life. Explanations, justifications, values and morals. All provided in one neat package. The problem is that science is providing its own explanations now, and quite well. Who are we, what are we meant for, where did we come from, where did life come from, where is our universe from, what existed before us? It's answering those questions that are the foundation of every religion that has ever existed. That's what makes it a threat. Combine that with the (very common but not necessarily obligatory) ethical systems of humanism and its brethren, and now we have our values, justifications, and morals. Starting to look like the religious package of yore, no? Of course, we have people who scamper around these answers, the God of Gappers. The real question is, when those gaps are gone, what then? When we find what has happened before our universe came to be and what happened when it did (yes, when, not if. If we do not blow ourselves to oblivion, we will have our answers eventually.), if isn't God, what then? The biggest, nicest benefit you have right is that there are still holes where you can put God. But those holes are shrinking all the time, and it would be foolish to think that they'll always be there. Then we will have our answer one way or the other. EDIT: Wow, this changed tacks a whole lot in just two pages.
  11. >Just don't go raining on my parade. While I'm on board with the idea that religious people aren't inherently doing wrong (whether the religion itself espouses it depends on the text in question), it is a systemic problem (or at least systemic, you must admit). Like crime and taxes, this cannot be a 'leave me alone, it makes me happy' situation. You are as equally a part of it as everyone else, and inviduals constitute the whole matter. >Okay, so thousands of people died in the Bible. Thousands of people died in your history text book Except that the vast majority of the deaths in the Bible were righteous actions of God. The vast deaths of history are rarely seen as righteous outside of martydom or heroism, and some are seen as downright evil. And certainly the most rare of all historical deaths are ones where one says "And he fully deserved it and more besides!" as we are encouraged to say about those smote, flooded, bear-ed or otherwised to death by God. >Also, human nature is TOTALLY a thing. It comes a lot from evolution, how we behave, what we want, what we desire. To a certain extent. I think he's more getting at the "Humans aren't all saints and we're not all sinners, we're not all pacifists and we're not all murderers, we're not all greedy and we're not all voluntary beggars, we're not all leaders and we're not all followers" thing. >The people who kill in religion's name will also kill without religion. They'll find some excuse to murder people. Only if they're truly psychotic. As the saying goes, "With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." >As for religion dying out, thaaaat's not going to happen. Oh no. Don't be so sure. Religions have come and gone nonstop throughout history, each one being replaced by the new 'truth.' Animalists replaced by polytheists replaced by monotheists, and the thousands of religions come and gone under that. The thing that's different this time around (thanks to several scientific revolutions in only the last 300 years or so, a very short time compared to past religions' lifespans) is that science offers as much an answer to what the 'truth' is and in a compelling enough way to be a serious competitor. And unlike past religions, science has too much practical use to be discarded and forgotten. It will remain a constant challenger. Sure there may be some that call themselves Christians in the far future, but if the modern American liberal Christian is anything to go by, they'll be close enough to a reaosned individual that the label is irrelevant.
  12. I'll be enrolling in German 101 next semester as part of my university studies. Should be interesting!
  13. A better example is the SS creed, the last four lines of which are, in officer/soldier question and answer format: Also glaubst Du an einen Gott? – Ja, ich glaube an einen Herrgott. Was hältst Du von einem Menschen, der nicht an einen Gott glaubt? – Ich halte ihn für überheblich, größenwahnsinnig und dumm; er ist nicht für uns geeignet. Translation: So you believe in a God? – Yes, I believe in a Lord God. What do you think about a man who does not believe in a God? – I think he is overbearing, megalomaniacal, and foolish; he is not suitable for us. I wouldn't go after the crosses either. Yes, they're Christian in origin for sure, but they're so old a symbol of Germany in Hitler's time that they symbolized Deutschland more than they did Christ. And of course that's just the Iron Cross. The Balkenkreuz (the squared one) was created during the First World War to aid identification of German aircraft, and was implemented in the last year of the war.
  14. Gonna need a lot of coffee for this one.
  15. "Gott mitt uns" is more literally "God is with us." The Wehrmacht wore that on their buckles while the SS did not. It's actually a very old motto. But yes, we can very much attribute a lot of very old anti-Semetic elements to the days when the RCC controlled Europe.
  16. Pretty much as Alyxx put it, as long as it works they see no need to upgrade.
  17. Honestly, overall I've been finding the Paradox games much more fun when it comes to nation controlling. Since I can barely run those, Reddit text games like /r/globalpowers have been satisfying my international desires.
  18. Graphics were were around medium. It wasn't those that were slowing down, it was the 5 minute turns as my CPU chugged out the equations.
  19. Could play halfway on a pirated copy. Lappy is too crap to ever finish.
  20. >Prison is two of them, sometimes three, four and occasionally five. Imprisonment isn't done with intent to destroy any one group. That's as important as the method, if not more so. >But using the same term for Jim Crow as you use for the Holocaust just seems wrong. How it feels doesn't matter. Jim Crow also wasn't made with the intent to imprison, it was made with the intent to segregate. >The term is too loose, and only exists now as a buzzword for politicians to exploit. Everything is a buzzword for politicians to exploit. Ignorance and cynicism don't make something actually useless as a term.
  21. You have to hit several of them. Murder, torture, prison and abduction only cover 1 point each.
  22. 2/3. Political enemies aren't an ethnic, religious, national etc. group. 4. I'm still not sure where you got these facts from. Most of the leaders of the CUP's enemies ended up in exile, not death. The commoners who actively resisted engaged in war, e.g. the Greek conflicts. This whole bit is primarily based on you gaining your knowledge of what 'genocide' means and where it should be applied from news outlets and opinion pieces. It's like learning what 'fascism' means from Tea Party forums. Let's look at the actual definition of genocide according to the UN, written by Lemkin himself, the who coined the term: ...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; © Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. That's what defines a genocide. The Turks engaged in genocide by covering A, B, C, and D to an extent. A and B were performed by the assigned gendarme without punishment, C was directly ordered by the government with their death marches, labor battalions and the deliberately horrible conditions of the deportation centers, and D...well, let's just say that rape and murder go together when you're a Turkish rear line gendarme. North Korea doesn't fall into this because 'political enemies' are not one of the defined groups, because political enemies can be extremely diverse. America with the Japanese does not, because the intention was not to destroy them, and conditions were kept at an adequate level, even if not 'Maui hotel' nice. America with the Native Americans counts because A-E were performed many times in America's subjugation of the natives. The Charleston Church shooting REALLY doesn't count because it doesn't even come close to touching the definition. Instead of this 'the news and politicians are playing games with us' thing, how about you go by the definition of the act? By the definition of the act, what the Ottomans did to the Armenians during the first world war was genocide. Textbook definition (it inspired the creation of the term, after all). Case closed.
  23. 1. Says the person who brought no sources. 2. So putting people on death marches and labor battalions doesn't count as murder? Hm, well, looks like we can substract several million deaths from the Holocaust now that those deaths don't count. 3. The goal was the total removal of the Armenians one way or the other. That's the point of forced deportation. And the idea that the political leadership didn't know that forced marches and labor would result in death is laughable. Do you honestly believe that the entire Turkish leadership was that stupid? 4. The persecution of the Muslim population was never perpetrated by the Turkish government. This was by foreign nations during the dissolution of the Empire. It's tough to call it a genocide because the deaths were not coordinated. Most died as refugees from wartorn areas, or from combat in those areas. This is very different from death on forced marches, deportation camps, and labor units. It's laughable to say that the word genocide doesn't fit. Lemkin created the word to describe the Armenian genocide.
  24. >mostly Turks, not Armenians, figure that one out Who the hell told you that?
  25. Find me an island to do so, and I'll prove you wrong... Make sure it has the capability of sustaining me for the whole year though. (food, fresh water, etc.) sorry, I'm busy with life... Good chance to get into realty/reality TV.
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