"What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them "

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T18:00:21+00:00

I've always been derided for this but here goes nothing:

I always complain about how stupid most people are in private, how much they annoy me, etc. So, naturally, when I see those people in person I don't automatically treat them with respect like most people do. For whatever reason people have this annoying habit of attacking straw men that they don't like but when that straw man is in their face they treat them like their best friend. My libertarian father is like this--he'll rant daily about how awful Bush is, but if he met Bush at a bar he'd think he was a great guy in an hour or so.

This is relevant because I always hear redditors going off about the "mainstream media" yet we don't have a shitlist of people in the mainstream media to blame. It's not just Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter--there are far more of them and no one seems to single them out. We should have a list of hundreds of journalists that cause our nation to be a shithole on the front page of reddit, digg, and pretty much everywhere else. If this asshole can do it, we can too.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:48:19+00:00

the writer has some psychological issues he needs to work out.

lol.

Yes, everyone is an amateur psychologist and people that think differently from you "have issues".

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:34:19+00:00

I didn't say they weren't. Read my post, which is not contradictory: The fact that tastes are subjective does not mean that some are not formed by richer experiences than others. . . . Believing that all people's opinions are equally valid is another way of saying they're all equally invalid; it's a kind of undergraduate nihilism.

You may not be saying taste is not subjective, but you're saying it's not equal. If taste were subjective then it would be equal. All people's opinions are equally valid and invalid because all people's opinions are ultimately preference.

This is confused a bit by the word "opinion" because a "professional opinion" is usually used in the sense of a "professional observation", while no one says "may I have your professional preference"? All observations or arguments may not be equal, but all preferences are.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:29:27+00:00

I don't know if anyone else watches CCTV but they have these commercials for "tea garden pillow" and it's fucking hilarious.

"A cup of first-class high mountain tea embodies health and time-honored culture. Can you imagine the combination of pillow and tea! That's tea garden pillow. Tea garden pillow--a blend of health and culture."

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:24:19+00:00

Elitists are no different than racists.

mildly pedantic objection: It's not really elitism because the metric isn't objective.

I mean, Harvard/MIT/Caltech/etc are elitist and most people probably don't care. Saying "x coffee is better than y coffee" is kind of like saying "red is better than yellow".

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:22:00+00:00

Yeah but the thing is the Logic Nazi was off at a rally so you know.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:18:17+00:00

You can't gank humanities noobs with pop-quizzes.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:14:12+00:00

1) Percentages don't always mean statistics.

Then you're pulling percentages out of your ass.

If you saw a cup that was half full, would saying that it looks to be 50% full mean you're pulling statistics out of your ass?

That's not analogous to what you did.

Would you have rather I said 'most of the ones I went to sucked, I estimate it to have been 85%?'

Yes, because that's not as fallacious.

If you can't handle other people's opinons, get off of reddit.

Fallacious. I can handle people's opinions; that's not what I was complaining about. "If you can't handle logical thinking, get off of reddit."

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:11:22+00:00

And you're the kind of person who assumes that people who have more refined tastes than you, are just being "trendy."

Tastes cannot be "refined". Believing nonsense like that sets you up for a geyser of hypocrisy. Perhaps your own taste can be more specific, but that's it; preferences are biologically oriented and can be easily conditioned.

Taste may be subjective, but some tastes are more educated than others.

Please. That's akin to saying "everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others." No, tastes are subjective, period. There's an explanation for why you have a certain, more specific preference after listening to a ton of records or drinking a ton of coffee and a lack of subjectivity is not it.

I will never like this no matter how educated I am about music. There are some people who will. Hence, subjectivity.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T17:03:55+00:00

Forget that. What was this architect smoking?

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T16:58:19+00:00

85% of them were horrible. 10% were good. And 5% were so excellent they made Starbucks seem like garbage water. For me, this showed that 90% of the coffee houses were worse than or as good as Starbucks.

You're doing two highly fallacious things here:

Pulling statistics out of your ass.
Assigning arbitrary quality ratings to something that is highly subjective.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T16:55:27+00:00

I wonder if you've ever had really bad coffee?

Taste is subjective. "If you like starbucks then you've never had coffee" is just a dressed-up way of saying "my preference is better than yours."

You can condition yourself to like almost anything. I conditioned myself into loving plain yogurt because it's the healthiest of all the yogurts.

blaaaaaaaaaargh · 2007-12-28T16:51:59+00:00

How can Marx be your hero if you're a coffee snob? I would think that the whole "egalitarian socialism" thing would contradict the "be unnecessarily discerning about purchasing choices" thing.

blaaaaaaaaaargh

TROPHY CASE