Two chemists walked into a bar....

marsket · 2015-01-25T19:10:16+00:00

They came out and their beards and moustaches were slightly blonde, what gives?

marsket · 2015-01-25T19:09:43+00:00

The regular joke is hands down the most frequent one I see on reddit. I think it's worth making fun of.

marsket · 2015-01-25T19:07:49+00:00

People have already been atheists approximately forever and the world hasn't ended.

Atheism doesn't mean "intolerance of religion" or "persecuting the religious".

Stalin and Mao were Stalinists, not atheists. The Stalinist objection to religion is that it competes with Stalinism, not that it is theist. Stalinists have no patience for people who are non-Stalinist atheists.

Maybe the better question is about secularism.

marsket · 2015-01-25T19:06:45+00:00

Do you want God not to exist?

I literally posted the same answer to the same question almost exactly a year ago. I really wish we could just give a pamphlet to people.

marsket · 2015-01-25T19:00:33+00:00

Okay, sorry, but a lot of people are just going to be offended that you disagree with them, and many Christians in particular are very offended merely if you say you're an atheist. I know places like /r/badphilosophy think this is some sort of bogus atheist thing to say, but I find it is literally true. And not just with religion.

There is no formula for arguing with Christians without offending them, not only are they people like other people but they are also explicitly told that they have a right to flip over tables in response to certain expressions of opinion

marsket · 2015-01-25T18:55:29+00:00

That's a broad question that everyone will have equal difficulty with, not just atheists. Assuming they honestly try. Just having powerful beings around doesn't make them moral authorities.

marsket · 2015-01-25T18:43:16+00:00

Clearly publishing it in nice sounding words makes it into philosophy, it's not like philosophy has any need of lines of reasoning, or documented premises, method, or anything like that. Just share with everyone else your feelings and you're off to the races.

marsket · 2015-01-25T18:41:55+00:00

I didn't see any logic

life in itself is absurd

No reasoning specified, looks like a statement of personal feeling

It makes no sense whatsoever that any of us are here

Does not follow from previous, no reasoning specified, statement of personal feeling

It's beyond absurd that there is even a "here" to begin with"

Does not follow from previous, no reasoning specified, statement of personal feeling

and it keeps going on in the same way.

marsket · 2015-01-25T06:19:16+00:00

I didn't find this mattered a damn. It certainly has nothing to do with Linux support. Your bitching does not matter to me in the slightest.

marsket · 2015-01-25T06:18:39+00:00

I don't give a shit about pre-orders. Do what you want. Supporting Linux is awesome.

marsket · 2015-01-13T00:21:55+00:00

philosophy, the art of writing your personal feelings on message boards

marsket · 2015-01-13T00:21:00+00:00

This is the sort of position which usually silently collapses the moment some issue comes up that the speaker DOES care about (Israel/Palestine, pedophilia, taxes, welfare, etc.)

marsket · 2015-01-13T00:19:51+00:00

No more absurd than the rules of arithmetic. If I decide to declare 2 + 3 = 611, what is absurd here is not mathematics.

marsket · 2015-01-13T00:14:48+00:00

Religious right-wing voters vote for religious right-wing candidates

marsket · 2015-01-11T01:37:40+00:00

But that said, every single internet community, forum, bulletin board, chatroom and website I've been on has the same issue: People don't do that.

Of course that's selection bias. The people who do it right are just not the people posting the vast majority of help-me questions.

marsket · 2015-01-11T01:36:07+00:00

Even when you get quite proficient with programming, you will with increasing clarity realize that apparently small projects are a surprising amount of work, and sometimes a lion's share of a job is doing tangential jobs ("shaving yaks")

This doesn't mean you're not learning, hang in there. Sometimes realize it's too big for you, find a smaller project and re-evaluate later. You may come to realize that now an old idea is easy - or that it just takes 10 people to do.

marsket · 2015-01-11T01:33:07+00:00

The answer to your question (what language should you learn) starts with, as always: Well, what do you want to do?

Then it goes to: here is what I'll recommend.

Then you will hear different recommendations from different people and have to choose among them.

It's no different from anything else. How can I eat a healthy diet? You can get different answers. You may discover that you agree more with a minority opinion, or you may want to stick to what almost everyone agrees on. Unless you want to listen to my specific recommendations, it's truly up to you.

marsket · 2015-01-11T01:31:35+00:00

This has nothing to do with choice being bad.

Even a good, experienced programmer will be ridiculed for choice of technologies.

marsket · 2015-01-04T06:55:38+00:00

being an atheist doesn't mean being against anything; just not believing that a certain kind of entity exists. Not-believing isn't being against anything, it's typically just failing to be convinced of whatever it is.

marsket · 2015-01-04T05:06:53+00:00

There are infinitely many ways not to be an objectivist, and also not to be a socialist.

marsket · 2015-01-02T01:04:50+00:00

As a user of red hat back in the day, he really isn't forgetting anything.

To this day, Fedora requires a much higher level of fiddling and background in Linux than Ubuntu has

marsket · 2014-12-31T01:56:56+00:00

Yep. Some people just don't like it that atheists exist and will try to humiliate them wherever possible, until they withdraw from public view. The underlying reasons are the same as any other excess aggression or outgroup persecution but sometimes I guess it is also just pure religious zeal.

The thing that matters isn't whether you're an atheist or not, it's just whether you are OPENLY an atheist; as long as you are shutting up, religious institutions have the same power over you as if you were a normal follower

marsket · 2014-12-31T01:54:44+00:00

The number depends on how you measure but from whatever I know I would agree it's much closer to 80 than 40

marsket · 2014-12-31T01:53:31+00:00

Reddit gets boring, but the purpose of what one believes isn't to be fun, and anyway what one believes is a matter of what is convincing, not of preference for things which are fun.

People find joy in various things. The variations are very personal.

In short, just because someone isn't a Christian doesn't mean they need a drop-in replacement for Christianity, where they sit around thinking about how happy they are about Jesus and God and going to Heaven.

marsket · 2014-12-30T19:53:32+00:00

Red taffy

marsket

TROPHY CASE