Lemurmania

A few important points about Mace: - Has a wallet that says "Bad Mother#$@*&" - Slapped around Jackie Brown - After killing people, says "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I break your concentration?" - Can freeze water to defeat giant robots - Managed to make the third Die Hard suck less than the second one I think when you add this up and factor in his pimp purple lightsaber, it's all quite clear. Baldy is the baddest of the good guys, not to mention the most sylish. You can talk up that whiny little surfer boy 'till you're blue in the face, but it won't make a difference. And yeah, the little green wrinkly guy with Grover's voice is probably more powerful. But who cares? Who would you want to party with? That's right, baby, Mace. Think about it -- you're stranded on a weekend on Coruscant. Who's gonna show you the sights? Who's gonna hook you up with the parties that will leave you broke, sore and happy? Mace, baby. Only Mace.

"Sorry, I really thought it wasn't loaded ..." We shouldn't forget famous last words. Personal favorite: Civil War General John Sedgwick, who uttered what I think are the best last words ever spoken by a human being: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ..." His last words were in response to his officers telling him to take cover against Confederate riflemen, and the sentence was never finished because Sedgwick was struck and killed by a Confederate bullet.

From what I hear, Revan had a really good singing voice as a boy. Well, you know what that means -- snip snip! Castrati time! It doesn't pay to have a good singing voice! I know Obsidian and LucasArts have tried to repress this information, but it's true: Revan is an aging castrati.

Sorry, SW Fan, did we get a little deep? Too much of that dang book larnin'?

This looks incredibly promising. Everyone connected to this project should get free cookies.

That's just cruel.

DarthWeevil, thanks for a deep and interesting post. Withteeth, the parascience site looks interesting -- I'll have to give it a read today. Or they don't. That's the danger of fundamentalism. At some point it's very tempting to say, "Look, it's written in my holy book, therefore it's literally true, and nothing else is." It makes a sort of perverse sense. Faith is irrational by definition (meaning that if you could logically arrive at it, you wouldn't require faith). The paradox of using an irrational model to understand an increasingly scientific and secular world must give folks a bit of a headache. Deciding that all that intellectial, rational, science-based stuff is just heresy and unbelief, and that everything is explaind in Holy Book of Your Choice must be a great relief. Much easier than attempting to reconcile science and faith. For what it's worth, this is how Islam got side-tracked from cultural dominance. Up until the 14th century, everything enlightened and progressive was happening in the Caliphate, not Christendom. Algebra, geometry, literature, poetry, music, art, perservation of the classics, it was all happening in Baghdad, not Britain. And then the fundamentalists took over. Out goes art. Out goes optics. Out goes mathematics. Out goes everything but the Holy Book. Everything you need is in scripture. In this Lemur's humble opionion, there's nothing more poisonous to a civilization than religious fundamentalism. Countries can recover from genocide and fascism in a generation. Some countries can recover from communism in less than half a century. But fundmentalism? Man, when the holy rollers take over, you're doomed for centuries. Nothing kills off an enlightenment more permanently. This is why I'm moderately freaked-out by the rise of fundamentalism in the USA. The alliance between the Republican party and the fundamentalists looks a lot like the alliance between the House of Saud and the Wahhabbis on some days. Most scientists also believe in God, so clearly the two don't need to be toxic to one another. Science and religion can coexist just fine. It's science and fundamentalism that can't be roommates. But therein lies the problem. For someone who is religious, there's no contradiction at all. But for a fundamentalist, either the Big Book explains everything or nothing. There can be no middle ground. Either Thor is banging his anvil in the sky or an electrostatic discharge has created lightning. Either the bones in the ground are demons who couldn't escape Noah's flood or they're dinosaurs. To a fundamentalist it can't be both ways, since a fundamentalist rejects the notion that the stories in their Holy Book might be metaphorical. Loved the story about Newton. Classic stuff.

You're to be commended with how well you wield the language then, if not for what you do with it. You seem to have a barracks-lawyer notion that you can evade anything through careful choice of verbiage. A real lawyer would tell you what a dangerous notion that is. If I stand in a court and say, "You honor, I said that the world would be a better place if he were out of it. I never said I wanted him dead," I'd get just as convicted. In fact, there are very few countries that would honor your notion of careful wording even in contract law. Correct wording makes a contract more likely to stand up in court, but it doesn't guarantee it nearly so much as evidence of a clear understanding bewteen parties. Trust me, I've negotiated some contracts, and I know more than a little about this. On an informal message board, your insistence on "proving," "law" and "careful wording" just seems odd and misguided. Take your insistence that your name was chosen at random. Nobody in their right mind would believe you -- and if you were in court, for some insane reason, defending yourself, declaring, "Your honor, I never knew that was a common transposition of numbers for an obnoxious kiddie title," well, you'd get yourself nicely convicted. Like I said, it's an odd sort of barracks-lawyer thing you have going here. You're obviously not a lawyer, and yet you use and abuse some amateur lawyerly notions. Strange. You keep flattering me, I'm going to have to send you red roses and some chocolates, you big silly hunk of man! I don't really think I need your permission, lad. Everything on these boards is property of Obsidian, or haven't you read the terms of service, careful-wording-boy? Here you go with the "proving" thing again. Where did you get this notion? It isn't necessary in a court of law, and it certainly isn't necessary here. SOmething that is obvious or self-evident requires no proof. Hm, perhaps you're taking the notion from math, where formal proofs are required for theories. Don't know. Or maybe something's lost in translation? Again, everything hinges on this idea you have that you can deny the obvious by selecting your words carefully. So long as you never admit that "1337" means "leet," you win, right? Sorry, lad, it doesn't work that way in any real-life situation, much less on a silly little forum for a videogame maker. And without that thin fig-leaf of protection, your whole argument crumbles into tasty goodness ... Enjoyed the milk. Honey was a good idea -- thanks! As for your ramble about attention-whoring, nope, still doesn't make any sense. I'm sure you thought it was clever and well-phrased, but something's just not happening there. Something like logic and continuous thought. That's entirely your problem. I'm having a hoot, and if I didn't have to leave the 'puter, I'd keep it up just to see which would happen first: (a) thread gets locked, or (b) you get tired. If you're not having fun, what on earth are you doing responding to me? Yes, I'm blatantly troll-baiting. I said as much, every post. As for me, hey, I'm having the time of my night. You're tons of fun to debate. I can't imagine you'd put this much effort into responding if you're not having a good time. Now that is twisted.

Once more into the trollish breach (when will that silly Lemur ever learn?): Never mix up imply and infer. In general, the speaker implies, the listener infers. Oh, I suppose you could argue (and you will!) that you were referring to my act of inferring meaning within your argument, but it's a stretch. You'd still get a markdown in your school paper, 1337. I'm shocked and awed that you're admitting his underlying point stands. Surely that was a sentence-long type-o ... So if I'm understanding your disputation style correctly, someone with an easy argument is "stupid" or a "n00b," but someone with a subtle argument is "twisted" and "surreptitious." You seem to have a dismissal on hand for everyone. Bravo! That's sig material right there. I'm really enjoying this "twisted" thing. Makes me sound all kinky, like I'm some dude wearing a corset and black eyeliner. Elaborate! Silly too leet for me, your easy denial of the obvious leaves me breathless. More! More! And he gives me more! In response to the fact that his attack on another user was only lacking the word "need," he gives me a patronizing lecture about choosing my words carefully! Bravissimo! It's the truth. I don't know you in RL, so I'm hesitant to ascribe charactersitics to you. I can say plenty about your online persona, and I could even attempt to infer what sort of person you might be from it, but it's all just grabbing at the wind. I've known people who were quite pleasent in the flesh but flaming jerks online. One never knows. Here your reasoning plunges into the deep end. What's the source of your confusion? My silly little cheese dialogue was clearly aimed at your argument style -- I even said so. And then I said that the butt of a joke rarely finds it funny. Very clear. How did you get yourself tangled up in knots over that one? There's absolutely nothing to be confused about. Let me go over it again: Lemur makes fun of your arguing style using cheese. You state that cheese joke isn't funny. Lemur says that you shouldn't think it's funny, since you're the butt. 1337 responds with a convoluted argument about attention whores. Whatever.

So my leaping to Nur's defense is bad form? Impolite? Inappropriate? Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

I know, and I'm violating the Prime Directive -- don't argue with anonymous trolls on the internet. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I know I'll never get in the last word with a full-time troll, but this is as good a way to pass a rainy afternoon as any other. To wit: You've stated many times that you don't care what anybody here thinks of you. You've recommended that people /ignore you. You've admitted that your style is blunt and aggressive, and that you "don't give a d@mn." And yet, despite this, your argument hinges on the fact that the poster who suggested you are an unpopular troll is not in fact the entire forum. I mean, really, you're just arguing for argument's sake at that point. His underlying point stands, i.e., you are an abrasive poster, and nobody in their right mind would want to have a drink with your online 1337 persona. Your point, that he is not an embodyment of the entire forum, is simplistic, misses the point, and is legalistic to boot. Nonsense! You underrate your own ability to pack a sentence with red herrings! In the first part you were decrying his lack of being everyone on the forum; in the latter half of your sentence you declare that his "law" will not be yours. (A weird way of thinking, but there you have it.) I felt your law obsession deserved its own rebuttal. You seem to have a thing for rules. His take on your popularity was "obviously false"? How would you know? You've already stated, repeatedly, that you don't care about public opinion, and that concepts such as "friends" mean nothing to you in the forum context. If I assert that you have no lovers in this forum, wouldn't it be equally true, since such relationships, by your reasoning, don't exist here? As for calling youself leet, check your user name, 21337. You declare your ub3r 1337ness with every flaming post. Pardon me for crediting you with more subtlety than was warranted. Leet, meet Leet: In a narrow, legalistic way you're correct. You didn't use the word "need." In every other sense you're contradicting yourself. And here we are, back at the tiresome "friends vs. friendless" bit of semantic wrangling that lies at the heart of your wriggling. You declare that there can be no such thing as friends on the boards, and even if there were, you don't really care. Therefore his statement that you have no friends is just specious, and shows how immature and silly the poster was. But isn't that just the sort of reasoning a person with no friends would use? I'm not saying that's you, of course, but doesn't it smack a bit of the person who can't play dodgeball walking away, muttering about how the game is stupid and he doesn't want to play? As for how funny something is or isn't, it's traditional for the butt of a joke to not find it at all humorous. Like Mel Brooks said, "Tragedy is you get a hangnail; funny is I fall in a sewer and die."

I'm in the mood to feed the trolls. Here goes: He asserted that the whole forum thinks you're nasty, not that he was the whole forum. You extrapolated his assertion to absurdity, a well-established and cheap rhetorical trick. He never said it was. Again, you're setting up straw-man arguments. Speaking as a father of a small infant who really does believe that the universe begins and ends in his wants and needs, I can see with some clarity who's fitting into that mold and who is not. I have no doubt my boy would declare himself "leet" if he had speech. Attempt to disarm the criticism by acknowledging it. Of the various assertions and specious arguments made here, this is the most sophisticated. Well, obviously he never stated that he needs this forum to find friends, and the assertion that he does is pure silliness, meant to troll for more reaction. Using extrapolations of statements to make further extrapolations into absurdity is commonly known as reductio ad absurdum. Your rhetoric goes like this: Person A: Everybody likes cheese. 2Leet: You aren't everybody, and there's no way everybody could fit into you, so your "cheese liking" isn't my law. Furthermore, I find it pathetic that you seek cheese on the Internet, where one can't even taste cheese. You and your cheese needs are pathetic and stupid. I pity you. I pity your cheese even more. You'll probably never find cheese, since you're so obviously cheese-challenged. Okay, that's enough troll-feeding for the moment.

"No, it'll be loud and nasty, my kind of kill. I'll stare the bastard in the face and laugh as he screams to God and I'll laugh harder when he whimpers like a baby. And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will seem like Heaven after what I've done to him." Oh, wait, that was Sin City, not Star Wars. My bad.

Is this what you're referring to? Looks kinda ... uh ... well ... erm ... pathetic.

Let me get this straight -- you maintain that you have a forum-given right to post in as combative and aggressive a style as you like, and then you turn around and say "why's this thread about me"? Like I said earlier, you might want to examine why the threads you post in become flame wars. By being so needlessly full of aggro, you make yourself the subject. It's quite a selfish way of behaving, actually.

Being constantly available for a flame war seems like a dubious boast. Telling people they should just /ignore also seems a bit facile. You're dodging any personal responsibility you might have for being civil. You're also avoiding any responsibility you might have, as an adult, to bring light rather than heat to a discussion. Here's a random sampling of your posts from the last 48 hours or so: And your defense of this is that (a) you only attack when provoked, and (b) we should just ignore you if we don't like it? Seems a little thin.

I believe you, millions wouldn't. I took the liberty of looking at your posts using the handy forum feature. I read back about two months. Lost count of the number of times you described people as "stupid," or just launched into ad hominem attacks. You're bringing a lot of aggro to the boards. Go back and read your posts if you think I'm making this up, or singling you out spuriously; the pattern is plain to see for anyone who wants to take a look. There are plenty of ways to disagree with people without attacking them or belittling their ideas. And I'm not trying to judge you personally -- you might be a great person to hang out with; I've no way to know. The internet is funny that way. But the tone you're bringing to the threads is so heated that it's going to be hard for people to get past how you sound and take in what you mean. You have some good and interesting ideas. It's a shame to see them get lost when you take such a needlessly combative stance.

Just curious, 2Leet, did you ever wonder why so many threads you're involved in become flame wars? There does seem to be a bit of a pattern.

The line is translated variously, but the most common version goes: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." N. was very concerned with what happens when you yank away the moral perogative of religion. He believed that the Judeo-Christian notion of God had functioned as a cement binding society together, and that losing the cement might bring the whole building down. A particularly poignant quote: In other words, if we're going to abandon all conventions, what's left? Aren't we lost? Aren't we like little kids who've been abandoned by their parents? We're living this out in my home country right now. Science and rationalism make religion more and more of an option, a lifestyle choice, if you will. We don't need it to explain why it rains, why the sky is blue, why thunder sounds like a big boom. We now know that the thunder doesn't come from Thor striking his giant anvil in the sky. But this advance of rationalism and empiricism is coming with a price. People of faith feel like they're under constant assault, and they're striking back, trying to regain control of a society that feels increasingly hostile to them. How can they not feel under assault? Unless they can reconcile science and religion, they're going to be angry, angry, angry. For those who can accept nothing but a literal reading of their scripture, these must be very trying times. It's all a bit like the Taliban, trying to enforce a "pure" version of Islam on a country that doesn't much give a d@mn. Every day I see evidence of the Talibanization of my country. Films that mention evolution can't be shown in Red states because of a fear of fundamentalist backlash. Link. Some states are requiring that faith-based science be taught alongside real biology. Link. National leaders declare that "the jury is out" on evolution, which must be a hell of a surprise to virologists and drug companies. Link. None of this would be happening if science and rationalism hadn't taken such a strong hold in our society. Nietzsche saw this coming, saw that losing God would leave a God-shaped hole in peoples' lives. His answer was that we would evolve past the need for a supernatural daddy-figure, and so become "supermen." I suspect the reality will be much more complicated. (Yes, I know, it's obvious I've read way too much on this subject.)

I think equating Nietzsche's writing with the Nazi philosophy is questionable. Remember, Nietzsche hated his sister's husband, who happened to be an Aryan supremacist. Also remember that N. went mad at the end of his life, and his sister got total control over him and his writing. Note that the book the Nazis went around thumping, "Will to Power," was produced by his sister after he was institutionalized, and didn't resemble any of his other books. Also note that Nietzsche went out of his way to praise Judaism several times. If you want a writer whose work really influneced the Nazis, look no further than Wagner. He was much more hard-core about racial supremacy. Nietzsche's thing, in brief, was all about abandoning conventional morality so that (here's the really important bit) you could construct a more strict, more demanding code of conduct for yourself. That's why he talked about his theoretical followers as supermen (ubermenschen). They would be so morally pure that they could consruct, codify, embrace and enforce their own morality. He has some line about "you shall be your own judge, jury and pale executioner." But all anybody remembers about him is the "God is dead" line and the fact that Hitler loved his sister. Oh well. I don't think Nietzsche is a good match for the Sith. Still way too much emphasis on morality. I nominate Social Darwinism as the closest fit. Remember, IBM and the US Government began eugenics experiements in the USA based on those theories. Admittedly, they ended them in the 1920s, but it's a neat little fact that the USA had its own flirtation with "kill the weak before they can consume valuable resources." Creepy.

Two weeks from when you read this. Whenever that happens to be. If you check, and I'm wrong, read this again and the clock will re-start. Back so soon? Two weeks.

That's pretty close. There's a philosophy called Social Darwinism that's bang on the money, though. And there were some people who practised it. Very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ran along the lines of "I'm rich because I'm more effective, and you're poor because you're being weeded out." One of many philosophies that helped the well-off justify their position. See also Ayn Rand, another favorite for the wealthy and well-connected. Who knew you needed to much philosophical support for being a rich person?

A few minor points -- Lucas's Jedi system resembles Taoism pretty closely, what with the light/dark business and the focus on letting things flow without impediment, instead of trying to use your will on a situation. Taoism and Buddhism are pretty closely related, so there's a strong similarity with Buddhism as well. Luke's exercise with the blind helmet, blocking the little remote thingy is straight out of Zen Buddhism. In Star Wars it's a magic thing called the force; in Zen Buddhism it's a subtle thing called ki. The force bears no resemblence in any way to Christianity, except that you're supposed to be nice to people. There's no God mentioned, no heaven, no hell, no resurrection, no judgement day and no Christ. Given these absences, I'm amazed that so many people answered that Jedi was similar to Christianity. Scientology has no relationship to Taoism, Buddhism or Christianity. It's entierely its own thing. If you believe reports that have leaked, Scientology is based on an elaborate mythology involving aliens invading earth and polluting it with their anger. Scientology gets rid of this alien heritage of anger for you. Doesn't sounds like Jedi or much of anything else to this Lemur. The quote about being wise if you know nothing sounds like a corruption of Socrates's line about being the wisest man because he knew he knew nothing. Very different meaning. I forget the name of the gent who uses that as a quote, but the philosophy you're using is called sophism. You belive that nothing is provable, and everything is debatable. That's sophism. Someone else was asking about Zen Buddshim. That's what happened to Buddhism when it hit Japan. It's philosophically the same as general Buddhism, but with a much heavier emphasis on experiential comprehension. In other words, you learn by doing. There is no such thing as Zen study without some sort of activity, whether it's painting, archery, poetry, martial arts or flower arranging. The code of the Samurai is called bushido. Boiled to its essence, it's all about serving a master without question, and being constantly prepared for death. Sorry this post is so long -- there were so many questions.

Not trying to be picky, but you can't emasculate a woman -- not unless she's had some heavy-duty surgery.