All the Reasons America is Retarded (Dona

[kthx]

I am questioning why you are genuinely mad at Epine and posting pictures of your father who was a soldier. And then come on here and defend an Un-American ideology in Socialism.

[kthx]

We need more true patriots like Joseph McCarthy

[Jerome Scuggs]

We need more true patriots like Joseph McCarthy

edit: i posted a pic of nixon but i forgot you don't know history so let me turn this into text

even your heroes didn't do shit, Nixon was the HUAC member who actually led an investigation that resulted in a conviction




weird how such an American Patriot would then float the idea of Obamacare 40 years before its time

[kthx]

It is just that he got rid of the treasonous people trying to poison the country, he was a true hero. People like him and soldiers.

[Dierienow]

to be fair I wouldn't say these are all the reasons

There are so many reasons why America isn't go great. Or maybe there's just a few. Actually I was just reading something yesterday by Christopher Langan, the person with the one of if not the highest known IQs. He invented something called 'meta-language' - basically there are problems in math where a statement is undecidable, or unprovable. Here's what he has to say:

""This formula is unprovable". If the given formula is in fact unprovable, then it is true and therefore a theorem. Unfortunately, the axiomatic method cannot recognize it as such without a proof. On the other hand, suppose it is provable. Then it is self-apparently false (because its provability belies what it says of itself) and yet true (because provable without respect to content)! It seems that we still have the makings of a paradox…a statement that is "unprovably provable" and therefore absurd.

But what if we now introduce a distinction between levels of proof? For example, what if we define a metalanguage as a language used to talk about, analyze or prove things regarding statements in a lower-level object language, and call the base level of Gödel’s formula the "object" level and the higher (proof) level the "metalanguage" level? Now we have one of two things: a statement that can be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, and thus recognized as a theorem conveying valuable information about the limitations of the object language, or a statement that cannot be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, which, though uninformative, is at least no paradox. Voilà: self-reference without paradox! It turns out that "this formula is unprovable" can be translated into a generic example of an undecidable mathematical truth."


I think something similar happens when you try to define problems in a complex society. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely chaotic but it is a lot like trying to un-mix paint. What you need is a meta-language that turns the lower level political debates, steeped in unknowns, multiple causes and effects, and the inconsistent definitions that everyone brings along for the ride. It seems clear to me that approaching political debate without a higher level language will result in a toxic sludge that slows down all progress. Everyone is familiar with pub chat: people calling each other demonic, sociopaths, nobody ever sticks to a subject long enough for it to be settled, and if they do stick on the topic little progress is made and certainly no one approaches the argument with the possibility that they could be wrong. Political debate is no different. I think that is one principle that will never let you down: always accept the possibility that you are wrong.

I didn't even cover one of the worst problems in America: the education system. I'm not even talking about all-day kindergarten or teacher involvement/pay or the poor funding of American schools. All of these are important but they are smaller pieces. The education system is fundamentally flawed. I went to a "multicultural" high school in Canada where many of my friends and fellow students were Indian or Chinese. Some of my teachers were Romanian/Eastern European. In all of these places the emphasis on education is so much greater that they think Canadian schools are a cake walk. They could do the math I struggled with in their sleep. That's only one aspect of education, and I admit that simply making kids do 3 hours of math a day won't make them smarter per se, but if that's the situation in Canada I can't imagine what it's like in the American public schools.

The approach towards education shouldn't be focused on memorization or even specific subjects. What good will knowledge do you without the ability to apply it in the correct way? What will knowing the base that was bombed in Pearl Harbor prove? There has to be an emphasis on higher understanding and critical thinking that can be applied to all subjects and walks of life. Presently they give you the materials to make a boat but don't give you the instructions. And what good is that? Here you have an education system that simply hopes you will be able to figure it out - which is a far smaller set of people than could have built the boat if only they were given the proper instructions. We teach people geography and history and music but don't teach kids how to think, how to understand things properly, how to synthesize all the knowledge they've accumulated through school into something meaningful for their lives and society as a whole. What ever happened to philosophy and classics? What ever happened to the idea that not every idea is equal, for if it doesn't withstand the fury of sound logic it is to be discarded or improved upon? The cynic in me says that these processes or institutions were dismantled solely for the power they posses, and that it's easier to rule people in a poor form than in a proper one. Does anyone disagree with the statement, "correct reasoning is available to everyone, and there is no law that states for every reasonable person there must be 5 unreasonable. Reason is not a resource - a bar of gold or pail of water which, if I possess it you cannot, if I have drank it or I have spent it, you cannot?"

Of course every problem in a society is interrelated, like the mix of paint I mentioned above. Remove one colour and you just have a slightly different shade of dooky. You need funding for public schools, you need to solve the problem of wealth inequality because Jimmy White Trash isn't going to learn that well if he grew up without the resources or proper parenting. You don't need a lot of money to provide a blank slate and much of it comes down the parent's own poor education and just the facts of life such as crime and drugs. By the way if anyone thinks that they're going to solve drugs & crime by putting more people in prison they are sorely mistaken - but that's exactly what for-profit prisons are all about. That aside, many of the problems in society start to unravel and even fix themselves once you educate and provide for people. The mix of paint turns out to be two colours mostly, to your surprise, and the rest of paint is easily dealt with. There is no magic spell to automatically fix the problems in the world - you have to take the proper actions that are dictated by sound reasoning! America is not the only country that has failed to do this, but it is essentially why America is such a backwards country: the steps you guys are taking aren't towards progress, they don't fix anything - do you think Donald Trump is somehow brilliant? I think he's just shitting all over your country and making a mockery of something that was already quite the joke to begin with. But hey, why even try to fix the issues in your society when you can debate on a fucking spaceship forum about who's more of a nazi and who's more patriotic and what gender people are. Faggots.

Also Eph your website owns these tards harder than anything. It's free and idiots like myself who spend all day on a 2d spaceship can learn a lot. Thank you for providing such an interesting (for stamp collectors and enthusiasts) and sharp resource. Seriously that website is better than most I've seen so kudos to whoever made that and I especially like the section on Online Buying seems like a lot of great info there.

[kthx]

Why are you guys actually talking to political Tone with a new account?

[Jerome Scuggs]

Pps. I dont know what we are arguing here

Thread overview:

OP posts a pretty decent breakdown of alot of problems in our country, which was genuinely surprisingly decent

kthx immediately shitposts, Jessup posts which triggers kthx. Thread turns to shit until qan brings up racism/genes, there's almost a decent convo despite repeated kthx shitposting

i discover the thread and qan's post gets me thinking so i crank out a pretty big post in like 5 minutes because thinking comes easy to me, i guess (kthx would consider something that long an 'effort post')

my post shuts even kthx up for like 36hrs, in the meantime OP says something about Americans not being American (you cant just ignore the ppl you dont like, sry buddy Henry Ford didn't do what he did alone, the government was complicit and the people were too)

at this point the thread just sort of dissolves into shitposting from all angles, so in the meantime i've just been trying to figure out how I have done more brain-ruining drugs than kthx/eph combined, plus between them they have been alive on this earth for something like ~230 years, and yet have the historical knowledge of someone who got a B- in 10th grade u.s. history

also toying with the idea that kthx doesnt actually post in political threads. he just loads up a homebrew version of AOL's SmarterChild, except it culls phrases and slogans from every fox news article written since 2008

so now here we are

i guess zeebu posted something and raizin, mentally broken from years of posting in holocaust denial threads on halfchan, just topkeks and >greentexts as usual

[Jerome Scuggs]

anyways i think about why kthx just cant get over jessup and i'm reminded of this post, which i screencapped because it's so beautiful and applicable



how can someone be both red-pilled and red-scared, i love 2017

[Jerome Scuggs]

oh and since the third post is the charm, let me tell you more about my grandfather

i've always been a skinny fuck and i get it from my grandpa. when he tried to join the army they didn't allow him because he literally weighed 120lbs at age 18 (i'm almost 30 and just hit 150lbs and thats only because throwing weight benches at fedex for 4 years got me some muscleweight)

so my grandpa went on a binge diet and fattened himself up enough to meet the minimum requirements. unlike some currently serving presidents who used their health as an excuse to dodge a war, my grandfather could have sat at home but he worked his ass off, got up to weight, and went off to fight. still, he was so small that they gave him a paratrooper's carbine instead of a straight up garand rifle, lol

it's too late to go to my parent's house to dig up photos so i found an approximate representation of my grandfather pre- and post-diet:

[Jerome Scuggs]

I'm officially drunk enough to understand this post now, you seem like someone who waited in line at mcd's for szechuan sauce

There are so many reasons why America isn't go great. Or maybe there's just a few. Actually I was just reading something yesterday by Christopher Langan, the person with the one of if not the highest known IQs. He invented something called 'meta-language' - basically there are problems in math where a statement is undecidable, or unprovable. Here's what he has to say:

""This formula is unprovable". If the given formula is in fact unprovable, then it is true and therefore a theorem. Unfortunately, the axiomatic method cannot recognize it as such without a proof. On the other hand, suppose it is provable. Then it is self-apparently false (because its provability belies what it says of itself) and yet true (because provable without respect to content)! It seems that we still have the makings of a paradox…a statement that is "unprovably provable" and therefore absurd.

But what if we now introduce a distinction between levels of proof? For example, what if we define a metalanguage as a language used to talk about, analyze or prove things regarding statements in a lower-level object language, and call the base level of Gödel’s formula the "object" level and the higher (proof) level the "metalanguage" level? Now we have one of two things: a statement that can be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, and thus recognized as a theorem conveying valuable information about the limitations of the object language, or a statement that cannot be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, which, though uninformative, is at least no paradox. Voilà: self-reference without paradox! It turns out that "this formula is unprovable" can be translated into a generic example of an undecidable mathematical truth."

This reminds me of a book by Douglas Hofstadter called "Godel, Escher, Bach" (he dumbed it down into a companion piece called "i am a strange loop" which clarifies and brings up alot of interesting points) except he doesn't try to dress it up in funny semantics. I read these books almost a decade ago and should probably revisit them and apply what I've learned since then, it would be interesting to see what happens

I think something similar happens when you try to define problems in a complex society. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely chaotic but it is a lot like trying to un-mix paint. What you need is a meta-language that turns the lower level political debates, steeped in unknowns, multiple causes and effects, and the inconsistent definitions that everyone brings along for the ride. It seems clear to me that approaching political debate without a higher level language will result in a toxic sludge that slows down all progress. Everyone is familiar with pub chat: people calling each other demonic, sociopaths, nobody ever sticks to a subject long enough for it to be settled, and if they do stick on the topic little progress is made and certainly no one approaches the argument with the possibility that they could be wrong. Political debate is no different. I think that is one principle that will never let you down: always accept the possibility that you are wrong.

As someone who debated in middle and high school I understand your point about debates more than anyone here. Case in point: I was a rabid libertarian, voted for Ron Paul in 2008 (he was on the ballot in Louisiana, running for 'the Constitution Party' - I considered the possibility that I was wrong, alot, and the 2008 financial crisis really challenged alot of my attitudes and beliefs. I was ranting about my doubts at my local bar one night and this guy is like "dude, have you ever even READ karl marx?" I hadn't, I did, holy shit. I spent years of my life defending capitalism and hadn't even read the books written by the dude who coined the fuckin term 'capitalism'.

But even more important here is your point about "higher level language". It's something I think about alot, when I look at politics. Traditionally, politicians do all this complex and high-level political shit, and then the media has to dumb it all down and translate these decisions, actions and events into a narrative which is easily consumable by the masses. My theory about why politics is so fucked now? It's because anti-elitist attitudes led to these "high-level" politicians being replaced with people who watch fox news and CNN and think that's how politics works. And so now politics in this country has become simplistic and dumb, and people seem to care way too much about "looking at both sides" or whatever, and as you mention, not all ideas or sides are equal.

I didn't even cover one of the worst problems in America: the education system. I'm not even talking about all-day kindergarten or teacher involvement/pay or the poor funding of American schools. All of these are important but they are smaller pieces. The education system is fundamentally flawed. I went to a "multicultural" high school in Canada where many of my friends and fellow students were Indian or Chinese. Some of my teachers were Romanian/Eastern European. In all of these places the emphasis on education is so much greater that they think Canadian schools are a cake walk. They could do the math I struggled with in their sleep. That's only one aspect of education, and I admit that simply making kids do 3 hours of math a day won't make them smarter per se, but if that's the situation in Canada I can't imagine what it's like in the American public schools.

Me neither, I was in gifted programs by third grade and went to magnet schools for the rest of my public education. In particular my high school, caddo magnet, has produced some of the most awarded and influential debaters in the country, and I'm lucky to know these folks

The approach towards education shouldn't be focused on memorization or even specific subjects. What good will knowledge do you without the ability to apply it in the correct way? What will knowing the base that was bombed in Pearl Harbor prove? There has to be an emphasis on higher understanding and critical thinking that can be applied to all subjects and walks of life. Presently they give you the materials to make a boat but don't give you the instructions. And what good is that? Here you have an education system that simply hopes you will be able to figure it out - which is a far smaller set of people than could have built the boat if only they were given the proper instructions. We teach people geography and history and music but don't teach kids how to think, how to understand things properly, how to synthesize all the knowledge they've accumulated through school into something meaningful for their lives and society as a whole. What ever happened to philosophy and classics? What ever happened to the idea that not every idea is equal, for if it doesn't withstand the fury of sound logic it is to be discarded or improved upon? The cynic in me says that these processes or institutions were dismantled solely for the power they posses, and that it's easier to rule people in a poor form than in a proper one. Does anyone disagree with the statement, "correct reasoning is available to everyone, and there is no law that states for every reasonable person there must be 5 unreasonable. Reason is not a resource - a bar of gold or pail of water which, if I possess it you cannot, if I have drank it or I have spent it, you cannot?"

Buddy, if you think learning history and music doesn't teach one how to think, the problem's not history or music, it's you. Case in point: me. But then again I -did- have rhetoric and philosophy classes in high school so maybe you're right, but still, this comes off as some STEM-major superiority complex bullshit. In particular I majored in history in college, and half my classes weren't about memorizing facts. They were classes devoted to analyzing sources, classes literally about the history of history, et cetera. What's the point of history if one doesn't study it, learn things, and use reason to reach conclusions?

Reason is nothing without facts, and I guess vice versa. If you start from an ill-informed premise, an incorrect fact, no matter how rigidly you apply reason, you're going to reach wrong conclusions.

Of course every problem in a society is interrelated, like the mix of paint I mentioned above. Remove one colour and you just have a slightly different shade of dooky. You need funding for public schools, you need to solve the problem of wealth inequality because Jimmy White Trash isn't going to learn that well if he grew up without the resources or proper parenting. You don't need a lot of money to provide a blank slate and much of it comes down the parent's own poor education and just the facts of life such as crime and drugs. By the way if anyone thinks that they're going to solve drugs & crime by putting more people in prison they are sorely mistaken - but that's exactly what for-profit prisons are all about. That aside, many of the problems in society start to unravel and even fix themselves once you educate and provide for people. The mix of paint turns out to be two colours mostly, to your surprise, and the rest of paint is easily dealt with. There is no magic spell to automatically fix the problems in the world - you have to take the proper actions that are dictated by sound reasoning! America is not the only country that has failed to do this, but it is essentially why America is such a backwards country: the steps you guys are taking aren't towards progress, they don't fix anything - do you think Donald Trump is somehow brilliant? I think he's just shitting all over your country and making a mockery of something that was already quite the joke to begin with. But hey, why even try to fix the issues in your society when you can debate on a fucking spaceship forum about who's more of a nazi and who's more patriotic and what gender people are. Faggots.

As an active member of DSA as well as a citizen of the great state and Prison Capital Of The World, Louisiana, there's not much I can disagree with here. About the only thing I disagree with is the notion that you think this is some brilliant insight. Welcome to years ago, have you done any political organizing lately?

Also Eph your website owns these tards harder than anything. It's free and idiots like myself who spend all day on a 2d spaceship can learn a lot. Thank you for providing such an interesting (for stamp collectors and enthusiasts) and sharp resource. Seriously that website is better than most I've seen so kudos to whoever made that and I especially like the section on Online Buying seems like a lot of great info there.

my god, kthx was right, this is political Tone

[Jerome Scuggs]

as an example of the sort of debating I was doing in high school, I recently judged a tournament and shit's so futuristic now that all the kids debating had laptops instead of rubbermaid containers packed to the brim with expando files filled with evidence.... they were literally emailing me their constructive speeches before they would give them. Imagine being 16 and arguing shit like this. I figure you might enjoy it in particular, as the topic this year is increasing access to education, and the Affirmative was a very critical and very awesome case which proposed adding the right to education as a constitutional amendment.

https://keybase.pub/jeromescuggs/cas...n%20922%20ACX/

[kthx]

Actually I didn't post because I was out getting drunk and doing cocaine all wednesday night. But today was more mocking you for being proud of your soldier lineage while being a traitor yourself. I figured I wasn't even being that subtle .

[kthx]

Also Jessup posting isn't a trigger, I use it as a way to bait you into the conversation by posting anti socialism shit that goes over his head because he is dumb.

[kthx]

Just saying I also had family members in the military and I actually chose not to end up a socialist faggots bragging about my knowledge of history on a forums that tens of people browse still. I think that much like socialism that it is a waste of time and pointless activity to continue doing in 2017.

[kthx]

Also I am always right Jerome you know that. Like I said I didn't need to read more than a paragraph into his diatribe to see that. Grandiose words from a mediocre mind, he definitely enjoys rick and morty.