Great Quotes III: Source and Context are Key

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"When judging a philosophical theory, I imagine how embarrassing it would be to explain to an advanced alien race that humanity believed it." -Corey Mohler
I think the following applies:
A theory may be wrong or at least one-sided and imperfect and yet extremely practical and useful. That has been amply shown by the history of science. In fact a theory whether philosophical or scientific is nothing else than a support for the mind, a practical device to help it to deal with its object, a staff to uphold it and make it walk more confidently and get along on its difficult journey.
 
He gave as an example thermometers being conscious (which is apparently something David Chalmers came up with).
 
"Final score for No Man’s Sky is 10/10

Final score for No Man’s Sky is FIVE STARS OUT OF FIVE STARS

Final score for No Man’s Sky is 100/100

Final score for No Man’s Sky is 5/5

Final score for No Man’s Sky is 10/10

Final score for No Man’s Sky is FIVE STARS OUT OF FIVE STARS2

(the document loops for 300,000 pages with slight variations)"
-Dennis Farrell, "Our Procedurally Generated No Man’s Sky Review", Something Awful
 
what about complaining (alright CFC it seems you can't take female dogs well that's completely okay) about no multiplayer
 
Britain: truly the masters of civilized savagery.
"If you cannot place them in the care of neighbours, it really is kindest to have them destroyed."
-National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee, "Advice to Animal Owners"
 
From Sven Birkerts "Strange Days" in which he details extended convalescence. The prompt is people asking him how he spends "the" time, and him finding that idiom curious:

I know it's a casual figure of speech, not a reasoned proposition, but all the more reason to ponder it. For it is in terms of the assumed and collectively accepted logic of such phrases that we live and take our basic bearings.
 
“One of they key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government.” -Donald Trump
 
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.
A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.
With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.
The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
... It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.
They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.
Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.
With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.
 
"Final score for No Man’s Sky is 10/10

Final score for No Man’s Sky is FIVE STARS OUT OF FIVE STARS

Final score for No Man’s Sky is 100/100

Final score for No Man’s Sky is 5/5

Final score for No Man’s Sky is 10/10

Final score for No Man’s Sky is FIVE STARS OUT OF FIVE STARS2

(the document loops for 300,000 pages with slight variations)"
-Dennis Farrell, "Our Procedurally Generated No Man’s Sky Review", Something Awful

:rotfl:

Nice.
 
"If you’re a Jew fighting anti-Semitism, the absolute minimum you can do is not actually kill Christian children and use their blood to make matzah. Likewise, if you are a principled classical liberal fighting the social justice movement’s attempt to smear anyone who disagrees with them as an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal, the absolute minimum you can do is not actually be an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal."

-Scott Alexander, on Trump
 
Michelle Goldberg, a commentator on Chris Hayes' "All In": Trump is the end product of a long process, the "systematic deranging of the Republican electorate."

It's a notion that we've been employing a lot in the various threads devoted to the American election; I just like the phrase "systematic deranging."
 
ı daresay this has made it here already , but it's of such educational value ...

 


The Belgians had expected to rule their colony for more than a century, but increasing violence in the capital convinced them to step aside and grant the Congo its independence in 1960. They left behind not so much a country as a plantation. There were only seventeen university graduates left to run a new nation of sixteen million people. With American backing, a twenty-nine-year-old army officer named Joseph Désiré Mobutu seized power in a coup and would, over time, set himself up as a secular messiah even as he looted the nation as systematically as had King Leopold. The currency, the major river, and the entire country itself were renamed Zaire. New parents were discouraged from giving their children European names, with the president setting the example by renaming himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which officially meant the “Warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.” (A translation in a related dialect is “Fierce warrior and a cock who jumps on any chicken that moves.”)



Uranium by Tom Zoellner
 
"How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form."

—Rod Serling on commercial television
 
In honour of Civ6:

"Me, Tolkien, and George RR Martin... we've all written dialog for Sean Bean."
Howard Tayler
 
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"Truth is the enemy of the state." Joseph Goebbles
Funny thing about that quote, nobody's ever found the original German version of that. Only "re-translations" from English. Which casts some doubt on its authenticity.
 
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