Bijou Drains
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I’ll be getting my flu jab, and if/when the Covid 19 vaccine is ready I’ll be first in the queue, litle old ladies, the disabled and the vulnerable will be lying in my wake as I get in first!
Am I now supposed to be supporting the Catholic Church because I pointed out some good things about the medieval Church?
—
You want to be careful matey, there was another bloke called Thomas More who was saying positive things about the Catholic Church, look what happened to him!
It’s interesting that Andrew Wakefield is supported by one of the colleges of chiropractors, another bunch of evidence free schisters.
L. Bird has not replied to my question of what he thinks of Carl Sagan, Richard Leakey, Brian Cox etc. Are they bourgeois scientists and hence not to be esteemed by socialists? The same question applies to Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Copernicus, etc.
—
Sadly this is L Bird’s pattern, comes in hijacks the topic, throws around all kinds of ridiculous statements, and then when the going gets sticky and there are a few questions he can’t answer (he has studiously ignored one of mine in this thread) he buggers off.
His next move will be to come back in a few week’s time, claiming to have trounced the arguments of everyone on here and then start spouting he same horse shit all over again.
But in our kindly, tolerant, demcratic way, we let him get on with it. It’s a bit like having a stray cat that comes and shits in your garden, you know it’s a pest, you get sick of clearing up the shit, but if you haven’t seen it for a while you get a bit worried about whether or not it’s ok.
Getting back to the original point of this post all of the anti science bullshit out there, as well as the general atmosphere of being anti expert, I also think that a lot of this stuff is out there for financial reasons. If you look at the case of the proven fraudulent research carried out by Andrew Wakefield on Autism and the MMR jab, his motivation was to profit from the legal claims that would come from it. He has now gone to the States and is coining it in from publishing the same rubbish, but there is a gullible audience that will buy it. A lot of the conspiracy websites have advertising and other associated income streams, get a lot of traffic and your in the money.
There is a similar thing going on with football at the moment, sites set up to report spurious football transfers (Messi to Hartlepool United, etc. If your reading this Harley, it’s not true, sadly he’s not on his way to the Victoria Ground) which then make money when the click bait is responded to.
From the point of view of those who get lured into this nonsense, I think a big part of it for them, is the idea of being in on the know, that you know something that others don’t and that when you tell them you can bathe in the kudos it brings. It’s a bit like an elaborate version of knowing a bit of juicy gossip.
Wez “Bijou – I may be mistaken but weren’t Einstein’s theories of relativity entirely the result of ‘thought experiments’?”
the point is that the thought experiments he used were attempts to expain observable evidence that he sought to explain, without the observable phenomena, there was nothing to explain or attempt to understand. I wouldn’t have a reason to find an explanation for the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, if I haven’t observed something that might be a weasel under the cocktail cabinet
L Bird
Touch is not the only sense, observation is through the sense of smell. So if you can list even ten “discoveries of science” that have not been based on things that have been sensed, including by observation I would be amazed. So off you go then, set yourself away.
“Almost everything to do with ‘science’ can’t be sensed in such a direct way.”
Actually, practically everything in science can be sensed in a direct way, Hook’s Law, Boyle’s Law, etc, all the way through are based on sensory perceptions of measurement. When you use a spectrometer to measure the width of a sodium atom you are using your senses, aided by machines, but dependent upon your senses.
L Bird, I will go with you as for as the difference between “The World” and “Our World”. Our world is a growing development of interaction with each other and with the world we live in.
Not that very far from Piaget’s concept of schema, mental representations of the world as we understand it which transform as we encounter new experiences and challenges to our pre exisiting schema. The process being an ongoing process which is never complete.
I could also see to some extent that due to the fact that many of the key experiences that form schema are social experiences and as we share a degree of social experiences they are likely to be commonalities at any point in time, in any society.
However, and it is a big however, “our World” derives from somewhere, we discover as children that things that are hot burn us. We develop a schema around hot things that protects us. Our schema is not “The World” it is “our world”, but it is based on our encounters with external forces, forces of nature and social forces. Whilst we can change our internal representation of these forces to gain a more accurate schema (never getting to a point of complete accuracy), we cannot simply ignore these external forces. We cannot change “hot things burn my skin” to “hot things do not burn my skin” by our own creation, any more than the schizoid man can become Napolean, just because he wants to.
ALB – “Otherwise you end up with the absurdity, expressed many times here, that in the past the reality was that the Earth went round the Sun.”
Hi Adam, have you heard of a guy called Galileo, youmight find his work interesting
The thing is with our feathered friend is that he tells us that we shouldn’t rely on the opinions of experts and that doing so is anti socialist and then cites Marx to back up his argument, not seeing the irony that he has just used Marx as an expert source (or rather his interpretation of Marx)
Over the years there has been some speculation as to the origin of his title, L Bird. Some have speculated that it is short for Liver Bird and that he has some connection with the city of Liverpool. My own take is that like a bird he comes in, flaps about, squarks a bit, shits all over everything and then fucks off. (Sorry L Bird, just pulling your leg mate)
As far as I can tell he is the only living person who interprets Marx in the way he does. That’s not to say he is not an affable at times interesting contributor, and he does have a sense of humour and irony, however he is not representative of our views.
Just to reiterate ALB’s point, L Bird is a non member who frequents these boards, due to the democratic and open nature of the party we do not close down those who we don’t agree with but attempt (sometimes very frustratingly) to engage them in debate.
I also take on board your viewpoint on Attenborough, to some extent. The anti science movement appears to be backed by those elements of the capitalist class who are most endangered by recent scientific findings. Perhaps the growing anti science debate might actually be a positive thing, in as much as if this kind of propaganda is being put out there it must be because those who are threatened by the scientific evidence are feeling the heat. If the antibodies of reaction are active, perhaps the virus of revolution is in the air?
Given your heritage Alan, I would have put you down as a Border Collie man, also widely regarded as the most intelligent breed of dog in the world (although I don’t know how they measure dog intelligence)
I remember hearing Vic Vanni in 1982 saying “there are two classes in society” in a booming rich Glaswegian brogue. Nothing I have heard since that time has convinced me that Vic wasn’t telling the truth.
