What a clumsy thief. : funny

A - Also prevented him from continuing his chosen career as a scumbag thief for quite some time as well. if this post were actually true, it indicates that he was not a fuctioning member of society, but instead a scumbag who thought the rules shouldn't apply to him, and he should be allowed to just take what he wants.

B - the law was upheld. stealing is illegal. the theft was prevented and the thief was subdued and prevented from escaping. Justice. as opposed to drawing things out in a court for months, where he might get away with his crime because of a scumbag lawyer.

C - first, it was a joke. if you didn't get that, i can't help it. it's not my fault if you want to hop around on reddit and find things that offend your idea of logic and your sense of sensibility to the point you don't understand facetiousness when it fuck-starts your head. if we go by THAT example, you sound a lot like a fundie christian yourself, going "LALALA i don't like it so i can't see it!" with your fingers 2 knuckles deep in your ears. or a mindless new-age, Neo-Hippy, desperately trying to find a cause to protest so that you can feel superior - a rabble without a cause - unlike the neanderthals around you, still wearing leather and eating meat and generally not giving a shit about the whales or the owls or the plight of the tigers in Bangladesh who are slowly disappearing off the earth because they are running out of people to eat while you drink your no foam, half caff, skinny mocha grande - tucked all snug into your hemp pants and hemp shirt you washed with your hemp soap - with your Beats headphones plugged into your iPhone, listening to some band no one but you has ever heard of, smirking, and thinking to yourself what unevolved sperm-bags are surrounding you while you read a book by Kerouac or Walden by Henry David Thoreau that you don't understand but damn if you don't look enlightened while you read it , while you contemplate how openly awesomely liberal and pacifist you are, when in truth you're just a sad little douchebag who tries to make themselves feel more important by downvoting and criticizing people who dare to think for even a millisecond " what goes around comes around, karma is a bitch, and that bastard just got buttpumped by her. that's great."

finally - if you had noticed that the original post was all semi-fake anyway, you might have realized there was little reason for you to reply to my post at all. the original post, tho a repost, and only quasi-true, was kinda funny. so my comment was, to me, in the same vein. silly, pointless, and amusing. if you didn't get the joke, tough shit. i got the joke and that was the purpose. it's not my job to amuse you.

if you have problems with sudden, harsh and violent karma landing on a person who richly deserves it, you're going to spend your remaining years all sad and pissy, because that kinda shit happens ALL the time. i refer you to the darwin awards. natural selection at it's finest. also an incredibly mediocre movie with winona ryder. you should watch it.

if you decide to watch it, here's a Brotip - it's funny, there are a lot of jokes in it. pay attention, so you can laugh when you're supposed to.

reply... don't reply... i giveth not a shit. i have better things to do than waste anymore time with someone so in love with their own opinion that anyone who thinks otherwise must be a illogical barbarian who believes in sky faeries.

i bid you good day, Sir.

[–]rtg35 3 points4 points5 points 2 months ago

[–]thenagel 1 point2 points3 points 2 months ago

[–]ilikekingdomhearts 5 points6 points7 points 2 months ago

[–]thenagel 1 point2 points3 points 2 months ago

[–]griff-labarum 0 points1 point2 points 2 months ago

[+][deleted] comment score below threshold (16 children)

[–][deleted] -7 points-6 points-5 points 2 months ago

A - I didn't say he shouldn't be punished. He should go to court and likely jail, though, have his legs and arms broken.

B - But drawing things out in court is the law. Don't you understand? Just because you think the justice system is fucked because he'll get away, and you think his lawyer is a scumbag for doing his job doesn't make it true. However, Marines permanently injuring and likely crippling this man is illegal. Theft is illegal, as well, I'm not denying that. But who do you think is doing more damage here, the guy who stole a TV or some shit and stabbed a dude (not severely), or the Marines who went all gung-ho and took revenge on this poor thief and cost taxpayers at least tens of thousands of dollars in damages?

C - See, this is where you show your true colors. You judge everyone. You stereotype them. You think you know everything about someone because of a couple pages of text, yet think they can't understand a book that they read hundreds ofpages of. You assume I'm either a fundie christian, which is ridiculous because I'm making fun of you for acting illogically like christians, or a neo-hippy who hates leather and meat, except I wear leather and love meat. You think I'm trying to find a cause a protest, but I have hundreds of causes to protest. You think I somehow don't care about environmentalism, which has nothing to do with this issue, but fuck you. Save the manatees, bro. I like my lattes with whole milk (organic, and fuck you for judging that, I don't need to grow tits from bovine growth hormones), with real espresso: That is, not that starbucks shit. And that's if I ever drink coffee, which is rare, as it's not great for my health, and because coffee is widely used by the first world to exploit third world resources, so quit acting like you care or know so much or are so much better than anyone else. And fuck your Beat by Dre, which sound the same as $20 headphones, which I wear because I'm not a presumptuous audiophile prick: Yes, I hear the difference, yes I appreciate it, but if I'm not making music, then I don't need to hear every note at every moment throughout the day. I just need something to listen to and love. I like wearing hemp/cotton blends. They're warmer than cotton. And I like my iPhone. Every single electronics company exploits third world labor, so there's no getting around that, so I might as well get a user-friendly device that I can spend as little time fucking around with as possible, one that will do what I want with little trouble, because it's just a fucking phone, and I'd use a goddamned brick if the iphone's service wasn't better.

And I like all sorts of music. Sure, you haven't heard of some of the bands. But then again, you've probably heard of lots of others that I do listen to, and listen to stuff I haven't heard of, unless you're a complete tool who only listens to shit that makes the top 40. You'll call me a hippy if I tell you I listen to the Beatles, and Bob Marley, and Led Zeppelin and Hendrix, or pretentious if I mentioned that I like classic blues and jazz, from Miles Davis and Buddy Guy to Roy Buchanan and others, or you'd call me a dork or ultra-pretentious if I say I like Sergei Rachmoninoff, and you might have to google him to find out who he is. And then if I said I listened to Childish Gambino and Notorious BIG and Jay Z you'd call me a wigger or some other childish name, because you have no depth.

And you know what? I also like Thoreau. And Hemingway, and Vonnegut (I just opened Welcome to The Monkey House, a collection of short stories, today), and Twain and Fitzgerald and I can almost tolerate Faulkner, because I see what he's trying to do and say even if I find it horrendously boring to read. And I like Kant, and Plato, and I've been meaning to read Hume, and so much more. And so that I don't sound like a pretentious douche who only reads "classics", I like Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiassen and George RR Martin (maybe he'll get me an upvote, at least, as reddit is obsessed with his show). And I don't think any of this will make me any more "englightened" than I am. It won't make me reach some mystical state of nirvana where I understand everything in the universe, but it all might help me understand others and myself a little bit, and enjoy myself in the meantime. I don't give a shit how liberal and pacifist I appear. When people become violent, I try to remain civil, but I'm not perfect so sometimes I punch a motherfucker. I feel bad afterwards, though, and I certainly don't think it would be acceptable to break all their bones. In general, I don't downvote people. However, I also think that gross, violent revenge isn't a solution to anything, especially in cases like this where the punishment in the form of revenge does not at all fit the crime.

See, the problem that I have with all of this that you don't understand, and if you read nothing else, read this. Karma is about balance. This is unbalanced. This fictional man will already spend years of his life in prison for a few minutes of poor decisions, and he deserves that. That is balance. Even being horribly beaten by the Marines would be balance. Having all his bones broken, though, is excessive. And having the cops not arrest the Marines means the Marines now have some uneven karma, as they have ruined a man's life permanently, with no repercussions, and likely with a pat on the back.

None of this is karma. This is gross, violent misapplication of the law, and disgusting, immoral revenge taking place out of anger rather than a sense of justice. I'm aware of the darwin awards, and they have nothing to do with this.

You don't seem like the type to bid anyone good day and truly mean it. You're Fez. You think good day is meant to be an insult, because you have no love for your fellow man.

[–]LordOfTheSkeptics 0 points1 point2 points 2 months ago

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points0 points 2 months ago

[–]LordOfTheSkeptics 0 points1 point2 points 2 months ago

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 2 months ago

continue this thread

[–]LordOfTheSkeptics -1 points0 points1 point 2 months ago

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points1 point 2 months ago

continue this thread

[–]thenagel -1 points0 points1 point 2 months ago

first and foremost -

i'm Fez? who the hell is Fez?

ok. now on with the rest. using what seems to have become the standard format...

A - Agreed.

B - you are correct when you say i think the justice system is fucked. i think it's so fucked we no longer have a Justice System - we have a Legal System, and the winners are the people who can afford the sleaziest lawyers, and the truth isn't relevant. there are cases where the crime is caught on videotape, but the criminal walks because the lawyer cares more about winning and getting his name in the news than trying to see justice served.

i think the greater damage was cause by the thief who cut the marine - because his actions were the cause of the marines reaction. you cut a marine in front of other marines, any beating you sustain afterwards is the result of self inflicted injuries. if you don't want to get beat down by marines, don't cut a marine. all of the (fictional) damage was a direct result of the thief.

C - nope. sorry. i don't pretend i know you from adam, i just started typing, and something i wrote tickled me, so i kept writing whatever amused me. to be totally honest, i have no idea where the majority of all of that came from. a couple of lines are from movies, a couple are from stand up comedians, and pretty much all of the rest of it just amused me as it spilled onto the screen. i don't know if you care about the environment or not, and i don't really care either way.

i have no idea how you prefer you coffee. don't care. know how i like my coffee? i like it tossed out the window, the cup rinsed and a nice darjeeling poured into the cup instead. i don't give a shit about 3rd world labor, but i also don't have an iphone. i don't have a cellphone at all. there are times i leave my house to get away from the landline phone i do have.

i have no causes to protest, because we've gone past the point in this country where a protest will do any good. did ' occupy wall street' change one damned thing of significance? nope. protests still work elsewhere but here? nah.. the powers that be will just wait until the protesters get tired of it and go home, or get stupid and are put in jail.

i like the beatles. true, i prefer pre-acid beatles better, love me do, i wanna hold your hand, etc, better than the white album and sgt. pepper. i like marley, zepplin is probably my fav classic rock band, i like miles davis and buddy guy, but i like charlie parker and dave brubeck more. i'm fond of Rachmoninoff, but i usually listen more often to mozart, beethoven and bach. ( johannes sebastian, rather than Offen ). i don't know who childish gambino is, don't care for Biggie. Jay-Z is ok, but i'd rather listen to Dre, Eminem or nelly. lately i've discovered that i like Pitbull, and i have a serious thing for Pink and Shakira, as well as grace potter and joss stone. but none of them will ever match Etta. but i guess that's because i have no depth.

I've never read thoreau. was never interested. i don't like hemmingway, vonnegut, i think, is overrated. i don't like faulkner and i despise melville with a bloody steaming passion. i want to dig up his bones just so i can piss on them for retribution for ' moby dick'. i've gotten about 1/2 through hammerhead motel.. it's either dorsey or hiassen that you mentioned, but a new one by christopher moore came out, and in the time i spent reading that i lost the other one. i found george RR martin to be generic - as tho he were trying to hard to be tolkien. i even loved reading the little house books by laura ingalls wilder when i read them in the 70's. i spend most of my time reading terry pratchett and douglass adams, tho right now i've decided to re-read a few stephen king books i haven't read in a while. i'm a big fan of the percy jackson stories by rick riordan, and of course all of the potter books. any story that gets todays children to WANT to read again, i'm fully in favor of. except twilight. fuck that bitch. i just finished shadowland and the talisman, working on IT right now. i like novels, i like stories... not ' literature'. and defiantly not 'philosophy'. what has philosophy ever given us except a very badly misspelled and mispronounced Tupac album?

Never bother with plato, kant, or any of that lot. why do i want to read what someone else thinks about the world around us? they've been dead for a year or two now, and i'm more concerned with what people today think about it. Descarte said ' i think, therefore i am."

what insufferable drivel. i walk, therefore i also am. no man is an island. horsefeathers. no man is a giant sequoia either. they all need to be rounded up and lumped in with sigmund fraud.. i mean sigmund freud's idea that everything is a penis and tossed into the sea. one of those buggers proved, mathmatically, that if you fire an arrow at a turtle walking away form you, that the arrow is incapable of ever catching the turtle. me, i say, go pick up the turtles carcass and enjoy the soup. if you put a cat in a box with a radioactive isotope, blah blah blah, the cat will exist as both alive and dead until you collapse the field and open the box. Horse shit. is the cat howling? probably alive. does your lab smell like a dead cat? probably dead. the entire exersize is a waste of time for everyone involved, especially the cats.

C - on to karma. who's to say? you say a few minutes of bad decision doesn't balance the beat down. i say the beatdown covers all the crap the guy did that was never written up in the paper. the stuff no one but himself knows about. the newspaper story doesn't cover when he raped his little old lady neighbor for her SSI check. maybe that didn't happen. maybe it did. we don't know, but if it did, there's your balance. is it plausible to think the guy's first ever crime was to pull some shenanigans in full daylight, in public, right in front of a flock of marines? or is it more plausible to think that he's lived past the line of legal for a good long time now, gotten comfortable with it, and because he hasn't been caught after years of douchebaggery, he has begun to feel a little cocky? either way, it was stupid.

you say throwing a beatdown and not getting nailed for it is unbalanced. i say them walking away from it is balanced by the simple fact they are in the USMC and are a minutes notice away at any given time from being deployed someplace where people will be trying to kill them.

if it was unprovoked? yes, the marines should be held accountable. however, one of them was attacked, and marines are trained and trained and trained to respond in one way when they are attacked.

You don't seem like the type to bid anyone good day and truly mean it. You're Fez. You think good day is meant to be an insult, because you have no love for your fellow man.

part of that is actually true. partially. i don't think it's an insult. i've often said it and meant it, genuinely wishing that the remainder of the person's day went well after we parted company.

however, i do have little love for most of my fellow man, because for the most part they prove themselves to either be scumbags, douchebags, or stupid beyond comprehension. or a combination of all three. to steal a line from a great TV show - mostly people are Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. occasionally someone will surprise me and prove to me that there are decent people left in this world.

i've come across some golden people here on reddit. i've also come across some total asshats as well. so again... balance.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 2 months ago

A - That was a typo. I meant not have his legs broken.

B - Yes, the legal system is fucked, but it's fucked in such a way that the dude stealing a tv from best buy that stabs a marine is going to jail for a while, so having his arms and legs broken on top of that is cruel and unnecessary, as well as illegal.

Yes, he provoked the assault, but that does not mean he deserved it, and it does not mean it was necessary or not overzealous. If a small kid punches a big kid, does that give the big kid the right to break his bones? I thought not.

C - It's sad that you don't care about the environment. You affect it, and it affects you, and it will affects people a hundred years from now when you're dead.

I like tea. I like turning off my cell phone. I don't have to leave my house to do so, but can also leave it at my house and leave, or just ignore it, or silence it at my leisure. Or I can screen calls. It is superior technology. Plus now I don't have to remember a bunch of otherwise useless ten digit numbers.

Yes, traditional protests are ineffectual, but there are other forms of protest.

Etta is wonderful. I respect your tastes, except pitbull seems pretty awful, and shakira is kind of annoying at times. Childish Gambino is Donald Glover, from the TV show Community. I enjoy him, perhaps look him up.

Christopher Moore is funny. Lamb is probably my favorite. The thing about literature is that it was once just stories, and you have to treat it as such. When presented in an academic, over-analyzing format, I find it intolerable. I hate The Great Gatsby the first time I read it, but it's funny and a lot of it applies to the modern world more than you'd think. It's about a bootlegger turned rich, trying to join the world of the rich and get his old love back. You could compare him to a modern day weed grower/dealer, almost. Fighting unjust prohibition (other drugs are more of a grey area, but clearly cannabis should be legal, whether you smoke it or not, and his was certainly a form of protest), wooing a girl of a different social order, and more.

Philosophy is a way to help look at and understand the world. Descartes was, as a friend recently mentioned, a prick who tried to undo the prior ~2000 years of philosophy. To really appreciate philosophy, you have to understand that in large part it was the precursor to modern science, once called "natural philosophy". Also appreciate that many of these men were amazing mathematicians in their day. The reason their works of philosophy are so appreciated is that they were great and brilliant men, who offered to share their thoughts with the world. Without philosophy we would not have ethics, which creates the basis of law and order. It is what defines what is just and what is not. There is so much to philosophy and ethics that one may never think of were another not to write of it, and almost all great men in the world are philosophers, or have at least read the major philosophers.

Philosophers are nothing like Freud. Freud was a psychologist, who are all know-it-all pricks. They're all in a race to dethrone the prior generation, as Freud has long since been rejected. Philosophers are in it to appreciate and build upon the prior generations of philosophy, and throw out only what is necessary to reject. Perhaps you could read Sophie's World, which is a nice introduction to philosophy in a story format.

Speaking of stories, the Potter books, in my eyes, were like Twilight. Maybe a little more morally sound, but they're all the same poorly written, with little depth, conflict, or inner turmoil. To me, they are closer to an attempt to recreate Tolkein, but in a format that doesn't force one to ever pick up a dictionary, which I think is a crime. One of the joys of reading is expanding your vocabulary. I learned what organdy and batiste are today. George RR Martin's books are almost the opposite of Tolkein. Tolkein created a story about the growth of children, that was altogether positive and loving and while it contained conflict, had mostly clear lines of good and evil. George RR Martin's books are about humans. They are about lies and deceit and betrayal and growth and life and death and how man lives for himself, and while many do what they think is right and necessary, what they think is right and necessary varies greatly. Others care only for money and power. It is closer to real life, and more about a world and less about one man or one group's journey.

And back to the philosophy, or in this case science. If you put a cat in a box with a radioactive isotope...well, that's not exactly how the experiment was created. And that experiment was simply created as an analogy for very complex quantum physics, not as an exercise in philosophy. In a larger sense, it was a thought experiment about the effects of random, unknown occurrences, but was only created to help explain a solution to a much greater problem. You, as all people, should appreciate this sort of thing. Without all of this, it is unlikely we would have much of the technology and resources we have today.

I say the balance for the marines is that they have made a conscious choice to sign up for military service, and are compensated for it. They need no other recompense, and in my opinion shouldn't be treated as honorable individuals. They're soldiers for hire, at this point, doing the bidding of rich men for money. This isn't 1940. They're not defending the homeland and fighting the nazis. They're invading sovereign nations which were fucked up by the previous generation of US military actions.

They are trained and trained and trained to respond, and they are also trained in such a way that others are not, and so need to be held accountable when they go too far. They are trained not to attack US civilians, for one, as their military training has been paid by those civilians' tax dollars, and they should be punished adequately if they go too far.

Fez is from that 70s show. Funny show. Look it up. If you know who Mila Kunis is, it's the show that made her famous. Also, Topher Grace, sadly, but you win some you lose some. Scrubs is good, too, though. Even Cox had a soft side, though. And any doctor as smart and educated as Cox would have read some fucking philosophy.

[–]thenagel 0 points1 point2 points 2 months ago

My first impression of pitbull was indeed that he was pretty awful. after a little while of hearing him here and there, i've come to appreciate him a little more. his voice sound like he's the gold medalist for the olympic glass and acid gargling team, and his lyrics are pretty ... well... lame. but he seems to pretty remarkable timing and a musicality that so many other rappers right now just don't have. he's certainly better than Lil Wayne or kanye. and the truth about Shakira is purely eyecandy. she's ok, musically. better than nikki minaj and (gods helps us) kesha. but while i have none of shakiras cds, i have all of her videos :)

A - I wasn't trying to imply the guy 'deserved' it, not really. truth is, i don't believe in karma. a person isn't comfortable and wealthy and happy in this life because he was a good guy in the last life... or even comfortable in his 50s because he was a good guy in his 20s. mostly i was just saying if he hadn't robbed the store and stuck the marine, the marines wouldn't have put a hurtin on him.

but all of that is fictional anyway, so it's really a bit silly for us to argue the point, unless you want to take it to a completely theoretical situation.

B - perhaps i phrased that poorly. it's not that ' i don't care' about the environment, it's that i am not concerned about the environment. the environment is fine. the environment is always fine, and it always will be. it's been here for 6.5ish billion years. it will be here many millions of years after we've gone the way of the dodo. we simply CAN NOT hurt the environment. the earth and everything about it is a self contained, self correcting system.

what we CAN do is screw up the system just enough to kill ourselves off. a few thousand years later, the whole system has reset, and it's happy days again. except for us. if people would just be honest and say ' hey we're screwing with stuff that could kill us all off' instead of trying to pretend we're saving the earth.... the earth isn't going anywhere. we are. and it seems very dishonest to me to try and get people to be environmentalists by making them think that it's the planet we are saving. it's not. that's why i say i don't care about the environment. i don't care about environmentalists and the sneaky ways they operate, and i'm not worried that we are going to hurt the earth. sure, we might extinct ourselves, but who's to say that WE are the final point of evolution anyway? we might be as big of a dead end as the dinosaurs.

i didn't mean to imply that ~~fraud~~...freud was a philosopher, or that they were like him, other than it's all crap. cat poop, or dog poop, poop is poop. i've read some philosophy. i can't say i've finished any of the books i've started. it's not that i didn't understand the concepts within the pages, it was that my bullshit alarm kept going off and i couldn't get past that.

i'll tell ya what turned off of the grrmartin stuff. i was 200 pages in when i realized there wasn't one character that i liked, and there wasn't one that i hated. i liked his style of writing well enough... it flowed smoothly, i thought. but the characters were all 1 dimensional. flat and empty. they were, to me, as engaging as going to work at the job you've had for 40 years. almost as exciting as watching ice cubes melt in the sink. i called him a tolkien wanna be, not from the subject matter ( i didn't read enough of martin to make that judgement) but because of the heavy wordy style of writing. as much as i love JRR, the man had diarrhea of the manuscript. but with him, it worked for me. with martin is just seemed like he was trying to imitate that grand sweeping style, and failing miserably.

and as for harry potter - they weren't trying to teach anyone anything. their job wasn't to make you pick up a dictionary. those are the books that kids hate to read. harry potter's job was to get kids to put down the gameboy and pick up a book instead, and in the process, to tell a decent story.

the rule of thumb i've raised my children with is "if you can teach a child to love to read, they can learn anything else." so harry potter, and percy jackson after him, held the simple task of getting kids to feel the love of reading. once that happens, they'll continue on and pick out the books they'll need to carry a dictionary for - but if you hand them those books before they've developed a love of the written word, you're making sure that you are raising a generation of TV watchers.

as to That Darn Cat.. i know it's more quantuumumum than philosophical. i can understand the philosophical aspect of the exercise, but my brain isn't wired with a mathematical bent. numbers are not, and never have been my friends. perhaps that's why the books on philosophy mean little to me.

as to the marines.... i'll leave that alone. with what you've said there seems no point in continuing that topic. i'll leave the marines with this one thought to you. just food for thought, kinda thing. since that shitty september, the us military has been aggressively hunting and tracking al qaeda members. they were mired down in iraq, yes. they should not have been there, yes. they brought an end to the reign of hate and murder and evil by capturing saddam hussein and turning him over to his own people who hung his ass. and all through this time, we still had people in afghanistan on the heels of the taliban and al qaeda. my point is this - 1, whether or not we had any business in iraq, our involvment there lead to the death of a man i believe to be second only to hitler himself on the scale of evil. maybe we should not have been in iraq, but it's hard for me to be critical of that when it resulted in saddam's death. it was a damned stupid thing that resulted in something very good for the world as a whole. -2, if the us military had not kept pressure on the taliban and al Qaeda and al cohol and al bundy and all those als, then they would have been free to sit and plot and plan and wait and sept. 11 would have been repeated -often.

it's just 2 little points for me - saddam is dead, and the military prevented much in the way of additional attack on this country. there is no proof of this, because there cannot be. it didn't happen that way so all we can really do is speculate. it just makes sense to me. if you leave the bad guys to their own devices, they will do bad things. if you prevent the bad guys from ever taking a breath, they can't go back on the offense.

anyway. that's my thoughts on the military, marines and all. doesn't seem much point in continuing this topic cause i'm pretty sure we shan't agree.

ah. now i know who Fez is. i saw a few episodes, it didn't appeal to me. a chuckle here and there, sure, but not worth watching a 30 minute show for a 30 second laugh. not even for mila kunis. i tried community and was disappointed, tho not as badly as i was when i tried to watch ' the office'. by all rights the office should have been my favorite tv show of all time, but it just annoyed me. i watch big bang theory. i watch castle, and now and then i remember to watch the mentalist. then there is dexter. dexter is the only "must see" tv show i watch. that's pretty much it for my tv viewing.

tho.. a thought - i love the terry goodkind books, and the abortion they put on the tv made me want to strangle puppies. i don't like the george rr martin books, maybe i would like the tv show. hmm. something to think about for me.

Lamb is probably my favorite Moore book as well, tho 'you suck' and ' bloodsucking fiends' are a close second. there is just something about Chett the huge shaved undead vampire cat. FYI, in case you didn't know - they are working on a screen adaptation of ' the stupidest angel'.

i get that todays 'literature' were yesterdays 'stories'.. but the thing is, if i were of the age when those were written, i don't think i'd have liked them then, either. it's why i read moore and king and riordan and straub and rowling and so on instead of the junk on oprahs book club list. i did read Beloved. i wanted to jab my eyes out with a spork before i was done with it. i want fun, i want interesting, i want magic. i want tolkein or goodkind or heinlein or asimov or bradbury or clarke. i want entertainment. reading a book about a psychopath with a whale fetish isn't entertaining.

Life is to short for moby dick and tolstoy.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 2 months ago

A - That was pretty much my point. Of course the attack was provoked, but the response was disproportionate, unjust, immoral, and wrong. Obviously all theoretical.

B - Of course the giant hunk of rock isn't going anywhere, but the point is that we all live on the giant hunk of rock, and our prime directives as people is to continue the existence of people, and if we fuck up the planet so much that we all die, then yeah, we're making ourselves no more significant than dinosaurs. Perhaps less so, because there won't be fossils or anything of us.

My problem with the Harry Potter books isn't that they're bad kids books, though they are lacking in originality (though quidditch was kind of cool, if basic), it's that they're presented as these wonderful works of literature and wonderful stories, when they're neither. They're mediocre kids' novels.

Yeah, George RR Martin is verbose, and yeah, 200 pages in you're still not sure who to like and who to dislike. Hell, two hundred pages in I don't think you've gotten the perspective of some of the characters you get in the first book. Five books in I still am not sure I should like the people I like. One's a sociopathic murderer, another a drunken whoremonger, but that's hardly the point. The point is that it's a well crafted story, with varied and interesting characters. You might think they're one dimensional after two hundred pages, but hell, you've had maybe one or two chapters from any particular character, how can you tell? They all grow and change throughout the series, and certainly none of them are one-dimensional. I think that's why the series is so longer, because the author has a plan for where the characters will go and what they'll do, then along the way he is writing from their perspectives and he realizes that in whatever situation they're in, they'll do something unexpected.

As for Schrodinger's Cat, well, math isn't about numbers. Arithmetic is about numbers. Math is about logic, just like philosophy. If you don't understand logic, then you won't understand or enjoy math or philosophy, but anyone can understand logic if they apply themselves. It's just about connecting the dots without skipping any steps.

Look, I'm not saying Saddam was a good guy. But there were better ways to remove him from power, and he was no where near a second Hitler. To even compare him to Hitler means you clearly don't understand the scope of the Holocaust. Mao Zedong of China caused the death of something like 50 million people. Hitler killed in the range of 12 million, and Stalin killed around 6 million. Saddam, by contrast, killed roughly 600,000. By no means a small number, and certainly a heinous crime, but to compare him to Hitler? Insanity. Hitler shit on commanders like Saddam. Kim Il Sung, former leader of North Korea, caused the death of more than twice as many as Saddam. You said you're bad with numbers: Saddam killed 1/20th as many people as Hitler, and 1/10 as many as Stalin.

Furthermore, Bush led us into Iraq under false pretenses, and committed war crimes in G-Bay. He is no better than Saddam in that context, just richer and wearing a cleaner suit. Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until the US invaded, so the invasion probably did more harm than good. And there almost certainly wouldn't have been another 9/11, and never will be. Pretty much the only reason 9/11 was successful was because of lax cockpit security and surprise. Everyone on the planes and ground alike thought they were hijacking the planes for ransom. No one expected them to fly the planes into buildings. These days, if there was a hijacking, the hijackers would be put down by their hostages long before there was any kind of major issue. Bombs have always been a threat and will continue to be so, and no amount of war in Afghanistan will assist that. In all likelihood, and according to most security reports I've read, US military presence in the middle east simply causes more insurgency and "terrorism", as you may put it. Most analysis, helped largely by the mathematicians you seem not to hold much respect for but ought to, as they're the ones churning out computers that allow you to access the internet, say that continual military engagement reduces national security.

As for Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino, I don't watch Community either, but that's what he's known for. Also, Bro Rape. I can't stand Dexter. The whole premise is ridiculous. Dude's a professional who doesn't leave any trace? Someone somewhere would notice the incredibly weird amount of purchases he makes, and that would be the end of it for him.

Well, the junk on Oprah's book club list is junk. Classic literature isn't junk. Some of it is, but the ones I mentioned aren't. Slaughterhouse Five is hilarious. Beloved, by Toni Morrisson? Yeah, fuck that book. Awful. She tries to be Faulkner, and everyone claims she's like Faulkner, but while she writes in a slow style like Faulkner, she doesn't have any of his wit or appeal. Go read The Great Gatsby and Slaughterhouse Five and anything by Hemingway, especially his shit about nature. His nature shit is beautiful.

Life is too short to learn everything yourself. Tolstoy has a lot to offer, and a lot to teach, if you keep your eyes open.

continue this thread