I wish I were drunk but sadly I’m sober.
[quote]
If had beer goggles on, you and me might could makea a go of it.
Can’t you even spell DEFENSE, you ignorant fucker? ESS! ESS! ESS!
What did he say?
Current “sings”? Do you mean “things”? Or “signs”?! Spell correctly, you oaf! Spell correctly!
It does sound like we both swing the same way, though, loverboy. 
Getting late, but yes I meant signs.
Nah, two happy girls I had at the same time, a while ago, (need to go back to the old country someday) say otherwise.
And I do like the fact that it did happen in this universe; someone up there does like me.
No, you’re an atheist, which means it didn’t happen.
And it’s so unbecoming of you to tell war stories in the Pit!
And BTW I’m not gay, or even bi. I’m moronosexual, which means I’m attracted to fucking idiots like you!
Gaudere really loves you.
Bolding added for emphasis.
Ahhh, this is so like usenet. Only the flames are so much weaker. A spell flame? What, are you 12? C’mon, wheres the bit about my mother and sister? The size of my anal cavity? Aeschines you’re pretty pathetic as a mswas fanboy.
I see clearly that it is a struggle for you to get any.
BTW I’m an agnostic, it is just that I don’t think there is a God moving stuff around in this universe, that is why I used protection. Since you love moronosexuals, you are out of luck with me.
No, I am ageless.
No, I cavort with both tarts and virgins!
As vast as the multiverse of my soul.
NO! I AM THE CHRIST OF THE BBQ PIT!
Everytime I get a piece of moronity, I am sexually fulfilled. You sated me greatly today, O lover.
Sisyphus Shrugged! - yeesh! You will never die for our sins (and I have many) so you are a fake, in all the universes.
Even on that you are a cheater, Sisyphus.
Aw hell, found out again. :o
What I think is being referred to is that MrErekWas has a knowledge of science that is no deeper than periodical knowledge – that tip-of-the-iceberg knowledge which is published by various mainstream and barely-off-mainstream authors in discover, popular science, etc.
MrErekWas… From all of this mess, my guess is that you haven’t ever been emersed in any real scientific study/endeavor and have never been forced to really come up with a consistent model based on a strictly trial-and-error approach dealing with inanimate objects.
That said, sometimes the arguments you have with people on the SDMB often seem familiar to me – Within the Physics community, a similar kind of disagreement (as in the referred thread) seems to arise between “theorists” and “experimentalists” constantly - each claiming intellectual superiority over the other.
I skipped over alot of the endless crap, but am I understanding that you are saying that people have been too stupid in the past to build wonders of the world? In my experience and explorations, technology/economy/culture rises and falls due to politics, war and corruption… and technology is never a one-way street because of those.
Back to the OP: Disagreement is going to happen between people, but good GOD! Alot of this (esp. on the ‘Great Debates’ board) might be averted with a slightly more humilified approach and softer debate diction. Healthy discussion is the goal there, not NUKE THE OTHER GUY – unless you intend to carry it to the pit.
No. You have reversed it. His position, (carefully constructed of the finest straw) is that the people with whom he is arguing on the SDMB believe that knowledge was invented in the approximate timeframe of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In order to build this argument, he asserts that (for example) the thoughts of Isaac Newton on the material universe, his attempts to pursue alchemy, and any thoughts he gave to the mystical realm must all be accepted as a single phenomenon. Now, some of his opponents occasionally set up some artificial barriers (playing in to mswas’s argument) by acting as though Newton, himself, divided his activities among the various fields and rigorously set up barriers separating them.
I suspect that mswas is closer to describing Newton’s daily activities, in that I doubt that Newton had separate rooms and bookcases where he pondered mathematics in one, alchemy in another, and the face of God in a third. However, Newton left us pretty good texts on his thoughts and we do not find him intermingling his ruminations of each discipline throughout each work. (There are occasional references to God or appeals to analogies from other disciplines, but he clearly did not simply mix them all together and happen to come up with good math and bad alchemy in the same text.)
Newton recognized that his various subjects of interest were separate disciplines, a point that mswas prefers to obscure while pushing his own claims that knowledge must be holistic (as opposed to interdisciplinary).
Here’s my go at it… D-E-A-L W-I-T-H I-T P-I-N-K-B-O-Y!
Since everyone is wrangling over spelling and quotes, it should be noted (stricly in the interest of the Straight Dope®) that Zeno made no mention of rivers: the inability to step into the same river twice was pointed out by Heraclitus.
We need a special category of Gaudere’s law for people who point out spelling mistakes that are not, in fact, spelling mistakes.
Aeschines, rather than continue in this idiotic dung flinging competition, perhaps you could pose a coherent argument with references to back up your opinion, or should I wait until posters provide you with enough of a rebuttal that you leave the thread?
GIGObuster, I believe that the best way to read mswas is to consider that he uses the following technique in his arguments:
IMHO, he is attempting to get people to think outside the box. Of course, I disagree with his methodology because I think people should say what they mean (and mean what they say), not hide it in humor, and not redefine terminology, but that is my opinion.
As for Newton being a single man with multiple works, I think the real question is whether Newton would have made his contributions to math and science had he never worked in alchemy? It is certainly possible, imho, that the man Newton became and the accomplishments he made are attributed to his other non-scientific works - that we are a sum of our parts.
Except I wasn’t using that technique in that thread. Though I did point to a Discordian work as a cite, one that confused the hell of of GIGObuster when he tried to read it. A Discordian uses tactics like that.
I don’t think I am redefining terminology. For instance the term “Being put Behind Bars” would make us think of being in prison. But one does not necessarily need to be in prison to be behind bars. I am attempting with different levels of success to break words down to a fundamental meaning, one that is free of the perjorative context that most people have used for it for most of their lives. Such as ‘Mysticism’ or ‘Religion’.
That sums it up quite nicely, thank you.
tomndebb Your dart hit the board, but not the bullseye. My point is that something can be hoilstic, AND interdisciplinary simultaneously. As gooftroopbag pointed out, I am saying that the man can’t be seperated into the mystic and the scientist, that he was always Isaac Newton and those things were part of him, and he can give priority to one over the other at any given time, but that the other is still there running in the background always, because it is part of the whole man. So comments about Newton wasting his time on Alchemy, seem ignorant to me, because his work in alchemy was part of his overall body of work, and who knows when and how inspiration struck. That doesn’t mean I think that cooking a lasagna is the same as synthesizing gunpowder, even though the little subtleties of cooking and doing chemistry have some commonalities and the practice of each can aid the other.
CitizenBob While you missed the mark pretty widely in your assessment, your point about theorists and experimentalists was interesting.
Erek
Many geniuses, both scientists and artists, are real assholes in their personal life. Would you say that is a necessary part of their personality also? Perhaps Newton wouldn’t be able to do the physics without the alchemy side, or perhaps he would have had more time to do good physics. I don’t think we could know. It’s also possible that the physics that he would do would be useless, you could only ask for so much.
CitizenBob got it right on the money. I’m not surprised you disagree - some tone deaf people try to sing. I’d guess that two groups who need each other (like the theorists and experimentalists) tend to bicker. When I was a freshman an experimentalist did the big Physics lecture, and did experiments on stage. When he was away at a conference, a theorist subbed for him. He did an experiment, and got a negative value of gravity, 
which shows people should go with what they’re good at.
I’m just glad he didn’t sub during the Faraday Cage experiment.
I, honestly, can not read what you write without having to determine whether you’re being serious or not; or whether what you’re typing is what you really mean or if its some attempt to get people to think outside the box. IMHO, you are a Discordian, whether it’s the tactic you always employ or not; I go into a discussion with you assuming that is what you’re using until proved otherwise.
I would say yes; that doesn’t mean that you have to be an asshole to be successful, but that it is a vital part of their personally (of course they can overcome it; they don’t have to remain assholes).
The way I like to look at it is our lives represent an equation of who we become; where the choices we make, the things we do are inputs that define the function and what drives what we eventually think about and do.
“a negative value of gravity” – I love it!