The Sage Garden

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it usually goes without saying that the decision to get married is a bad decision.

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He's not 'proving you right'.

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it usually goes without saying that the decision to get married is a bad decision.

I don't believe this meets the criteria for this thread.

I'm pretty sure that it qualifies as a 'failed attempt at edginess or profundity'. You may not think that it failed. I do.

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I'm pretty sure that it qualifies as a 'failed attempt at edginess or profundity'. You may not think that it failed. I do.

That's basically Tweed's tagline, after all.

...true. Looking at it that way, his posting history is enough of a sage garden already, so I suppose in that sense seatown is right.

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Cathcon can be an arrogant prick sometimes. Sure, he's no Snowstalker, but that's not a reason to make him immune of any criticism.

The only way I can see someone thinking this is if you assume Cathcon isn't intentionally being hyperbolic 99% of the time.

I'd say constant intentional hyperbole is a form of arrogance. Obviously, it's something we're all guilty of, but it can be a great thing or a horrible thing depending on how often you do it, the way you do it, and the topics in regard to which you do it. Cathcon's just rubs me the wrong way sometimes, though I'll admit it's entirely subjective.

I understand. Personally I enjoy Cathcon as an example of how a schtick (in his case the jaded conservative horrified and pessimistic and the social collapse around him) can be entertaining without being obnoxious.

Yeah, I agree with you for the most part but it's definitely got to be a bit much for me on a few occasions, so I understand where Antonio's coming from too.

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Did Snowstalker seriously end two consecutive posts in the SOTU thread with the exact same Thomas Sankara quote or am I dreaming?

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Legitimate question: why are all of our Latin American posters awful right-wingers?

Why would the fascists need to start an uprising in Venezuela? They have been in power for the last 15 years. Against whom would they be rebelling?

I think ag and deadflagblues have been burdened with the knowledge of basic economics.

Be that as it may, I'm really, really wondering how exactly ag is defining 'right-wing' in his subsequent post in that thread. Criticizing Chavez's and especially Maduro's policy, rhetoric, and actions in office is completely reasonable but the specific descriptors that he's using seem, well, odd in this context.

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Obviously a scam but so is religion so what does it matter anyway.

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Context:

Religion

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Posted here for lack of a 'Whig Historiography Millinery', because Whiggery is the sage of mainstream modernist thought.

The assumption that "progress" (apologies for my scare quotes) has a universally shared definition.

I would consider scientific progress (and therefore destruction of religion) a universally accepted progress. I mean, you can be a religious and SAY it's not, but it's the same as a religious pointing at a duck and saying "NO IT'S A COW!". 

It seems HockeyDude was at least in part just kidding around, but if we're going to make lack of seriousness a defense then that calls into question so many writings of our fearless leader himself that the Sage Garden loses much of its raison d'etre.

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Oh, fantastic, tarheel leftist is back. The original True Leftist and one of our few posters who literally should  be institutionalised.

I don't know, I for one find his 'gai marriage for bankster brahs' argument original, fascinating, and compelling.

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China and Vietnam have been at war for 1,000 years. This specific incident is part of Obama's "Asian Pivot" to contain China/expand American influence in the Pacific.

This is not sage.

Yeah, I'd go so far as to say it's a simple truth, even, except it's a bit too banal and unadorned for that. This is...just a post. I know, what a shocking concept.

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So, BigSkyBob is back, and his inimitable combination of grammar-Nazi (pun intended, for reasons that we shall see) sagery and willful ignorance as to substance is back with him:

Sbane, could you please stop hijacking this thread? This isn't the Indian equivalent of RedState: socialism isn't a slur and privatization is objectionable from the standpoint of many academic economists. We get it, you like Modi and hate the Indian left. You've made your point.

Privatization may very well be "objectionable from the standpoint of many academic economists," but, isn't the real issue here whether, or not, it is objectionable from the standpoint of the Truth? And, more to the point, since this is an Indian election the question is whether, or not, it is objectionable from the perspective of the Indian electorate.

Seems it isn't based on the most recent election.

Aside from the fact that Sbane seems more in line with reason.com than readstate.com, I find it odd that in a thread that seems dominated with poster after poster issuing content-less ad hominem slurs about Modi being a "murderer" and a "fascist,"  [A quick lesson. A communist is a person who believes in nationalizing the means of production without compensation. A socialist is a person who believes in nationalizing the means of production with compensation. A fascist is a person who believes in nationalizing the goals of the means of production while allowing it to remain in private hands. A market liberal believes that the owners of the means of production should set their own goals.] one poster has the audacity to take the side of the governing plurality in India, and question the validity of the ad hominems and is accused of "hijacking" the thread as a result.

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Oh, God. Wasn't he banned?

No, he just goes away for a while and then comes back, goes away and then comes back, like certain lingering venereal diseases, or a serial killer with the most petty and obnoxious MO imaginable.

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The last paragraph is really the only highest-quality sage part of this, but the first two make for a nice slow buildup:

I have problems with both the goals and the methods of eugenics. While the desire to improve the genetics of the population sounds good, comparative advantage dictates that society is better off if people specialize in different skill sets. Thus, it does not really make sense to select for the same characteristics in the entire human population, except for possibly fatal genetic disorders.

With regard to implementation, both positive and (especially) negative eugenics seem to contradict their stated objectives of selective for genetic fitness, for if a trait is truly desirable one would think that such a trait would require no active encouragement to encourage its propagation.

While advocates of the welfare state seem to have a Pavlovian association of social Darwinism with eugenics, the irony I see is that welfare statism is itself a form of positive eugenics, only with traits such as sloth and dependency considered more desirable than productive economic output.

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https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=profile;u=1442;sa=showPosts

I'd imagine this would what Snowstalker smoking weed would be like.

Weed? Try PCP. Just Say No, Snowstalker.

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Of all the myriad cases where a mainstream religion gets a free pass and people refuse to pass judgement because religion exists in a realm where critical thinking and reason dare not trespass, routine male genital disfigurement is the most thoroughly revolting.  To impose such an irreversable thing on a baby who, obviously cannot consent, should be a felony and cause for widespread social disgust. I don't know how people can willingly chose to ignore such a gross and commonplace violation of personal autonony.

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Anything critical of Christianity will inevitably be posted by Nathan in this thread.

memphis's post wasn't critical of Christianity, but you've already established that you don't care about what Christianity as a religion is actually like, just the caricature of it that exists for you, so I'm not surprised that you think it was.

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I was involuntarily mutilated in the name of your Redeemer. I would like to take a scourge into a convent and flay the breasts off a nun, as a token of my appreciation.

Don't blame the nuns for your birth denomination's apparent unfamiliarity with Acts 15.

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It wasn't even religious, except in a second-hand cultural sense. I was mutilated because, fifteen centuries ago, my Gallic ancestors did not have it in them to defend their traditional faith from the Cross.

My point is only that I believe in doing to others what has been done unto me. In this case it means showing the Christian Era the door, as it did the Aqe of Antiquity before it. And all because it's indirectly responsible for my absence of a foreskin.

No, you still don't know what you're talking about, sorry.

Anything critical of Christianity will inevitably be posted by Nathan in this thread.

It has nothing to do with religion in this case. His contempt for all things masculine is the issue in this circumstance. Should the issue be genital cutting on female babies, he would be the first to break out the victimhood rhetoric.

memphis: Defender of the defended! Voice for the vocal! He Helps The Well-Served!

He is a Christian; of course he loathes genuine masculinity. Even the most stereotypical Southern Bible-thumping outdoorsman is basically an anti-masculine sentimentalist - his "God is Love", after all.

The problem is you seem to be going out of your way to define masculinity in such a way as to make it something that richly deserves to be rooted out and extirpated. It needn't be that way.

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That goes doubly so for those absurd homosexuals in spandex who bend phone books and break bricks to impress children at tent revivals, incidentally.

Somehow I find the fact that you use 'homosexual' as a noun in informal writing completely unsurprising.

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I use nouns for everything. They're wonderfully forceful.

That's actually part of why I find it unsurprising. It suits your writing style and it's something that a lot of people consider impolitic and unkind, so it makes perfect sense for you on no fewer than two levels.

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Those who have had parts of their genitals cut and removed as babies are universally "defended" and "well served?" Is this before or after they are shipped off to war and shoved down into coal mines? What a strange, delusional world you live in, Nathan.

Not All Men

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Ugh, Nathan's posts here and in the original thread are literally disgusting.  Both the indefensible position he is defending and the way in which he does it.

Fortunately, I don't care about your proudly and apparently invincibly uninformed opinion on anything even tangentially related to religion.

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See?

Describing opposition to criminalizing an important practice of a major religion as 'indefensible', even if it's a position with which one disagrees, is exactly the sort of pat and self-congratulatory nonsense I'd expect from someone who believes seemingly in all sincerity that Christians worship a sort of airborne Gandalf and refuses to be told otherwise by people who actually know something about the subject. Treating the word 'disgusting' as one to which 'literally' can be applied in a way that makes sense is an interesting choice, though, and as always the form of your magisterially ignorant pronouncements on such matters is of far greater value than their content.

Anyway, if this is going to continue at all, can we get back to the argument about masculinity? That showed at least signs of going somewhere that could be new, because, much like the presence of Ebirah in Godzilla, Ebirah, Mothra: Big Duel in the South Seas, Einzige's thoughts aren't ones that memphis and I have had the chance to interact with or respond to in previous installments of our running feud on that subject.