The Soros Thread (Retitled)

[DrEvil]

So until a post or two ago, Soros was a really, really important, nefarious, evil mastermind, singularly responsible for the terrible course of recent world history.

But to an argument showing his actual placement within a particular class of identifiable individuals, some of them clearly more powerful and influential than he, the answer so far is this: Never mind that class! None of them matter, because: the queen and the pope! (First evidence, a story about a BBC reprisal against an editor's story placement, which may not even be due to a royal intervention, but the royalist attitudes among BBC executives. Okay.)

You happened to start a Soros thread. I guess it's no longer interesting. Well, you should start the queen and pope thread -- I hope you do that, on another board, without ever staining this one with your presence again.

Jack your first sentence is an out and out ad hominem lie ( no surprise there)

Your second sentence is bollocks.

And your third sentence indicates is more ad hominem BS.

How is it that some people see you as a smart guy around here?

Anyone not suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome can tell that Jack isn't an idiot.
He knows the difference between a sentence and a paragraph. He probably even knows what ad hominem is, and most importantly - he can write coherent sentences with arguments and stuff.

[slimmouse]

So until a post or two ago, Soros was a really, really important, nefarious, evil mastermind, singularly responsible for the terrible course of recent world history.

But to an argument showing his actual placement within a particular class of identifiable individuals, some of them clearly more powerful and influential than he, the answer so far is this: Never mind that class! None of them matter, because: the queen and the pope! (First evidence, a story about a BBC reprisal against an editor's story placement, which may not even be due to a royal intervention, but the royalist attitudes among BBC executives. Okay.)

You happened to start a Soros thread. I guess it's no longer interesting. Well, you should start the queen and pope thread -- I hope you do that, on another board, without ever staining this one with your presence again.

Jack your first sentence is an out and out ad hominem lie ( no surprise there)

Your second sentence is bollocks.

And your third sentence indicates is more ad hominem BS.

How is it that some people see you as a smart guy around here?

Anyone not suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome can tell that Jack isn't an idiot.
He knows the difference between a sentence and a paragraph. He probably even knows what ad hominem is, and most importantly - he can write coherent sentences with arguments and stuff.

ok doc. you got me,

Let us not care that the earth is ruled by pyscopathic idiots.

Let us focus instead on grammatical semantics

[JackRiddler]

Thanks, Dr E.

I also can't help reaching for Dunning-Kruger, I've done it a few times recently. But it's a kind of fallacy in itself, isn't it? Because then you're arguing with those whom you have labeled by it, so what does that make you?

And I have to say, as irrelevant as it is, this is a cool page for the pictures of 13th century siege machines and other stuff:

http://www.cathar.info/cathar_wars.htm#crusade

[DrEvil]

^^Yeah, I've been overdoing the whole Dunning-Kruger thing lately, but on the other hand, if the shoe fits and all that jazz.

There is of course the distinct possibility that I'm at the wrong end of the effect and suffering the consequences, blissfully unaware, but I'm willing to live with that.

slimmouse: We're ruled by psychopaths?!?!?! Why didn't you say so before?

[coffin_dodger]

Dr evil:

There is of course the distinct possibility that I'm at the wrong end of the effect and suffering the consequences, blissfully unaware, but I'm willing to live with that.

Willing?
As if you have a choice!

[DrEvil]

Says the guy who thinks the speed of light is different in different solar systems, quantum physics are bogus (to be replaced with his own personal made up woo that makes no sense whatsoever, to the point where he can't even explain it himself. Yes, he's obviously smarter than a century's worth of geniuses) and that scientific papers are made up because the titles sound like science fiction to him.

Dunning-Kruger indeed.

[dada]

dada: wow! just read your last post properly. You are cooking with fire, man. Let's drink.

Thanks, Jack. I'm finding that the less I drink, the more I cook. That being said, though; We will drink.

Gates though, he's committed to realizing the technocratic vision. Make eighty percent of the world empty-minded and just barely fed? He's on it.

See, I was under the impression that this thread was about an individual. Comparing individual actors to the catholic church, or Saudi monarchy is an apples to oranges thing.

Gates is selflessly dedicated to a higher calling. He's the ultimate toady for the establishment. This makes him the best candidate for President of the Legion of Doom. You can't run 'religion' or 'royalty' against Soros. They aren't individuals.

And anyway, if we are allowing organizations on the ballot, I'd vote for the media over religion or monarchy. It has wider influence and broader appeal.

Did you write the song?! Play it!

It's tempting, but I think I'll save it for a special occasion. Music is a contextual weapon, its maximum effectiveness hangs on its deployment at the proper time. Sort of like a pie in the face. ha

[coffin_dodger]

Drevil said:

Says the guy who thinks the speed of light is different in different solar systems, quantum physics are bogus (to be replaced with his own personal made up woo that makes no sense whatsoever, to the point where he can't even explain it himself. Yes, he's obviously smarter than a century's worth of geniuses) and that scientific papers are made up because the titles sound like science fiction to him

You haven't even scratched the surface, but fuck yeah.

I'll continue to occasionally tickle your Intellectual Superiority Complex - I know it gets you off. Happy to give a helping hand.

[DrEvil]

Drevil said:

Says the guy who thinks the speed of light is different in different solar systems, quantum physics are bogus (to be replaced with his own personal made up woo that makes no sense whatsoever, to the point where he can't even explain it himself. Yes, he's obviously smarter than a century's worth of geniuses) and that scientific papers are made up because the titles sound like science fiction to him

You haven't even scratched the surface, but fuck yeah.

I'll continue to occasionally tickle your Intellectual Superiority Complex - I know it gets you off. Happy to give a helping hand.

I'm assuming you're joking since you just said that, yes, you are smarter than every theoretical physicist of the last century.

In case you weren't joking, you're a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, which basically states that incompetent people are too incompetent to judge their own competence, and therefore tend to overestimate their own competence.
(The crude version: Idiots are too stupid to understand that they're idiots.)

I'm not sure it's an intellectual superiority complex, more of a strong dislike for stupid shit.

[Novem5er]

Since Dunning-Kruger has come up here recently, but also in other social media, I thought I would look it up. I'd never heard the term before, so it's new to me. I went to Wikipedia (the ultimate academic source, obviously!) and I found this part interesting, especially the part I bolded below:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of those of low ability to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

That bolded part is interesting to me because it's the opposite of Dunning-Kruger, and something I've experienced. I grew up as a Gifted child, but in a family that preached egalitarianism and modesty. My intelligence was less important than my effort and how I reacted to challenge I think this was good for me in many ways (I had more social skills than many of my Gifted friends), but I think it also hurt me in other ways. There is something called the "imposter syndrome" with Gifted people where they may be very competent, but they internally feel like they are "faking" their way through something and, at any moment, they will be called out for the imposter they are.

* Gifted is defined as scoring two standard deviations above the norm on a Stanford-Binet IQ test (or acceptable variant); which means an IQ of 130+ based on a norm of 100.

But that bolded part in the wikipedia article hit home. I never think of myself as a smart person. I always consider myself as the base-line for "average". I actually feel like an idiot much of the time because I don't have a technical skill. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a mathematician. I'm a talented painter, writer, and communicator (many of you are now laughing), but I don't actually "know" shit.

Hell, half the time I post things here I get yelled at by someone for basically being an idiot.

[dada]

Well there's a difference between 'smart' and 'smart.'

For example, I'm 'stupid' because I've chosen to fight a battle I'm guaranteed to lose, against all forms of authority, inside and out. My 'intelligence' has nothing to do with that.

[JackRiddler]

Let's help slimmouse out of the D-K ghetto. We could start with the important distinction between ad hominem and strawman. Ad hominem, attacking the speaker, is what I for example do when I call you an idiot. Of course, it may actually be true. But with me it's a side thing, I'll usually have some main argument and then here and there stick in the personal insults, such as that you are an idiot. What you think you are complaining about, when you use the words ad hominem (which must seem magic in their effect, since they are after all Latin) is probably strawman. That would be exaggeration or false characterization of the argument being attacked. That's also not really what I did, but it's true I combined three posters' nonsense (two of them a touch more coherent than sm's) into one more easily characterized and dismissed version of "Soros Obsession 101." I say it was a fair rendering, but you might differ.

Total subject change!

I think Zuckerberg just made a hell of a play in the billionaire's self-importance sweepstakes. Last week he announced he would dedicate "three billion dollars" (say it in your best Dr. Evil voice) to the conquest of, are you ready for this: ALL disease! (It's not being given away, as the media predictably covers it, but it's a plan to transfer a sum to some foundation structure to be specified later.)

So simple, so obvious, that none of these guys ever dared to see it until now. Fuck Crohn's, cancer, Lou Gehrig and leukemia, Parkinson's and the gout: all small potatoes for small thinkers. The Zuck, he's going to cure it ALL! Or at least horn in on the credit for every new treatment henceforth.

Now they're all scratching their heads, his compatriots in the Nation of Trillion, thinking: How do you raise on that?! The next and final step is obvious enough, however. Kurzweil's prefigured it. Thiel could go for it, although he seems too stingy on principle even to play around with pretending that some of his money has been "given away" to his own foundation, or in appearing to fix the problems of anyone not named Peter Thiel. Soros is surely too Old-World and fatalistic. But someone, possibly Gates, though I'd bet on someone from the later generation of Silicon Valley types, maybe one of the Google twins, is going to devote several billion -- several, I tell you! -- to ending DEATH in our time. You fucking ingrates, now you will live forever. Hooray!

.

[slimmouse]

OK Jack.

I have previously been described on here as someone who distills things into the lowest possible common demoninator., based on the best info at my and surely your own disposal.

So let me ask this question first. (DK BS and all that kind of insulting nonsense aside.)

Is George Soros , and his multi million dollar foundations that have clearly spread chaos in Wall St targetted countries, which currently appear to be includiing youre very own, a force for good, where humanity is concerned, in your own honest opinion?

You see to me, it all sounds like a very sick man, who constantly spends his time pitting Black against white ( for profit) , whether that be in the US of A, the middle East or wherever.

You know, Color revolutions and all that BS.

[JackRiddler]

Is George Soros , and his multi million dollar foundations that have clearly spread chaos in Wall St targetted countries, which currently appear to be includiing youre very own, a force for good in your own honest opinion?

This question contains a premise I would not phrase in this way, which furthermore turns it into a leading question, and is therefore doubly unworthy of an answer.

If we simplify it to either, "Is George Soros, businessman..." or "Are the Soros foundations..." a "force for good?", then only someone who had not read my posts here would be unable to say what my general opinion is, and also which caveats I have stated. You are at least 3 pages behind. I don't feel like quoting myself. You can go back and read me instead. But I find that your inability, laziness, malice or intentional obtuseness has been dragging down this discussion, as well as the RI board for many years. So my own preference would be that you act as a force for good in the world by voluntarily deleting your account and never coming back. Thank you.

.

[JackRiddler]

How about that Zuckerberg - going to cure ALL diseases. Period! ALL OF THEM.