LunarEcho Posts

People always complain about this stuff. It's not that nothing happens, because things do happen. We got Obamacare. The issue seems to me to be that the electorate is too uninformed and/or apathetic to hold politicians accountable for their actions. Sure, if you get involved in a major scandal, you will get voted out, but how many people even know what legislation their reps work on/support? Maybe they hear about a couple bills during the campaign season from the rep or a political opponent, but that's usually it. And how many people really know what these bills mean? Everyone has a plan that is going to create jobs and stimulate our economy while lowering taxes, doubling the funding of our schools, and keeping all our entitlements intact.

Conversely, anyone who has a real strategy to fix problems(which of course involved scenarios that aren't pure fantasy and giving some things up or accepting taxes) gets skewered by opponents for being for taxes/hating our schools/trying to kill everyone over 50 with death panels/other shock stories. It's not so much a partisan thing as an opportunistic thing. It happens in both general elections and primaries. There are plenty of people who want to get into politics, and they'll use any opening they get. Voters aren't informed enough to have a nuanced view of issues, so politicians who are bold, simplistic and vague in their statements, and aggressive in attacking opposition win races. And then when they fail to follow their fantastical and impossible strategies once elected, the public usually doesn't understand why they failed, or sometimes if they failed. We just wait for the next candidate to come along and tell us the last guy secretly hates America.



By the way, this isn't even close to being correct. Well, the part about taxes being as high as ever. Whether or not you think they are too high is another matter altogether.



This is the problem. How do you do both and lower taxes? Well, the politicians will tell you they will cut waste and corruption. Good luck. While the amount of waste and corruption are appalling in one sense($10 million is a lot to most of us, especially if it's being used to build a bridge to nowhere or something), even if we got rid of all of it, it wouldn't come anywhere close to fixing the deficit. In general, you can have a balanced budget, or stimulus spending, or lower taxes, but not all of them. Well we could get rid of entitlement programs, but they are called the 3rd rail of politics for a reason.

I guess my point is that this doesn't necessarily make the list any more valid unless you believe that the voters should come from within the canon, which makes them likely to perpetuate the canon with only minor changes. Also, you can go back to the question: how were the voters chosen and who chose the voters? The methodology and people involved in choosing the voters is also very influential.

Anyways, really the list is just for fun. I just think it would be fascinating to see one constructed in a wildly different way.

I'm firmly in the "gameplay" camp. The whole point of video games is that I interact with them. If I just want a good plot, there are quite a few very excellent films I could choose from. Furthermore, even the best video game plots aren't all that good(excepting something like a VN where the whole thing is a story and the plot is the gameplay). I can count the number of video game plots that I would rank equal to or better than the plot of an average movie on my fingers. So it's going to be the gameplay that makes the game worth playing, otherwise I would just watch movies. Not to mention, even if the story is amazing, if I have to slog through 3 hours of boring repetitive button mashing to make it to the next part of the story, I might give up, even knowing that the story is likely to be good.

Obviously, it's nice to have a good story and good gameplay. However, a game with an awful plot and excellent gameplay can be a good game, a game with an amazing plot and terrible gameplay is usually unplayable.

Then why isn't La Monte Young on the list? He was a huge influence on music, both popular and classical. Brian Eno and John Cale of The Velvet Underground(on the list) are quoted in Young's Wikipedia article as saying he was an important influence on them directly. Not to mention minimalism was an important development which was incorporated into electronic music, rap, pop music, and other styles. My guess is that half the voters don't even know who he is.

It comes back to which artists you decide to give votes to, those being the types of artists likely to be one such a list if it was compiled by the public or rock critics for Rolling Stone magazine. These groups have created a musical canon, and by selecting voters who are either part of musical canon or voters who helped shape and defend the canon, you are likely to perpetuate it.

If you want to see an interesting list that has significantly different ideas from the usual VH1/Rolling Stone/MTV ones, you would need to include some different types of people in the decision process. Perhaps something that also included music philosophers, musicologists, music theorists, classical composers, writers, and poets(all experts on music and/or words/lyrics in some way) in additional to popular artists, popular music critics, record producers, Rolling Stone editors, and the like. I certainly think it would be interesting to see how that turned out.

Reid is saying Kolb will be the starter if he is healthy. Vick had a good game, but he has lost the confidence of most what with playing terribly, going to jail, getting out of jail and playing terribly again. One good game won't erase that, though if Kolb continues to suck(quite possible), they might start him. He's historically not been a good passer though.

Here is an interesting article about it, not sure if it's the one mentioned. I haven't tried any of this stuff so I can't speak for its validity, but it is interesting.

http://www.slate.com/id/2222931/

The eagles are screwed. Their new QB sucks and get a concussion. Maybe Philly fans will get what they deserve for failing to appreciate McNabb and running him out of town.

And go Redskins with that ridiculously lucky win against Dallas.

This kind of thing tends to be an exercise in futility. Of course, people like it because it gives us something to rant about. But that aside, how do you compare the Bee Gees to OutKast to the Dylan? They all had very different musical goals and created very different music. I suppose one could measure something empirical like album sales, but that tends to be unsatisfying as well. We want some justification that our ideas and tastes are "correct." I say we just get over it.

Having said that, this list is an outrage! Queen and Lennon are ranked way to high and Yes is nowhere to be found. I am appalled.

Most everyone considers many very different things to be beautiful in some way or to some degree. Perhaps all these different beautiful things have and share some quality that causes them to be beautiful. Following loosely the ideas of Plato, then absolute beauty is an infinitely pure and extreme instance of the quality that allows things to be beautiful. Beautiful things are then beautiful because they possess to some lesser degree and purity the aspect of absolute beauty. Of course, beautiful objects possess other aspects, which is why many different things can be beautiful, and possess the aspect of absolute beauty to varying degrees of extremity and purity, which is why some beautiful things are more beautiful than other beautiful things.

This isn't so much a simple definition for absolute beauty but rather a way to conceive of it. Additionally, this is a philosophical idea that is actively used today. For example, in Judeo-Christian ideology, God would be absolute beauty, among other things, and humans are beautiful because they are created in the image of God.

Of course, as is always true with philosophy, there are countless other possible ways to answer the question, and it is unlikely than any one answer will put the debate to rest. Personally, I'm a bit more postmodern in my beliefs, but I posted the above possibility because it doesn't seem that others in the thread have mentioned it yet.

Because for many people, extramusical factors have more influence over whether a band is considered to be "good" or "authentic" than the content of the music. For many people, the music they listen to is an important part of their identity. They may belong to a related subculture. If a band that these people identify with then garners more mainstream appeal, as A7X did(for example, being on GH2), people from outside the subculture begin to listen to the band. Following the idea of one's musical taste as part of one's identity, the people from the original subculture are now sharing part of their identity with people who listen to mainstream music. The members of the subculture may not like this and see it as something that weakens the distinctness of their subcultural identity. Thus, they choose to eject the portion of music that has been embraced by the mainstream from the subculture. This leads to statements like "A7X used to be good back when they started but now they suck" or "Green Day totally sold out with American Idiot, I liked them back when they did Dukie" which serve to expel that music which has been embraced by the mainstream from one's musical taste and thus from one's identity.

This also applies to Green Day pre and post-American Idiot.

In theory sure, but most of the people who invent of change martial arts are already experts in other martial arts. I would highly recommend getting lessons as it is possible to injure yourself if you perform moves or train incorrectly. Kung Fu is also very much steeped in tradition. Practitioners care about Kung Fu lineages, i.e. which grandmaster(s) can you trace your training back to? You'll miss out on that part.

Penetrating Sword from Demon's Souls.

Not only is it not particularly good, but you're using a weapon called the "Penetrating Sword." Also says in the description it was used by the hero "The Penetrator" and has especially powerful thrusts. Getting the picture here?

Apparently it didn't become valid enough not to get deleted.

I've been seeing it simply posted by itself, in some cases in a created topic specifically for that purpose in a section where corn is irrelevant.

See Space Cowboy's post in this thread for an example. https://www.fakku.net/viewtopic.php?t=40997&start=30

Wrong, it's definitely spam. The intent is not to discuss the merits of corn, but simply to copy and paste from an article about corn as part of a meme, especially when the posters place their excerpts in threads to which they have no relevancy or create threads in sections in which the topic is inappropriate.

People who wish to know more about corn will have no trouble finding the maize article on wikipedia, not to mention posters are copying verbatim from this article and contributing zero original content with their posts.

I do report threads. However, these "walk the dinosaur" and "corn" meme threads are not by new members who are confused, they are by people who should know better who are spamming/trolling.

Posting to make this thread reappear from the vanishing thread bug.

I heard this from a Jewish guy:

Q: Why do Jewish people wear yarmulkes?

A: Because they don't want to pay for the little propellers.

I feel there has been an increasing lack of understanding/respect(more so the latter) concerning what kind of posts are appropriate for which subforums. The way I understand it is

Serious Discussion - for serious discuss of topics
Random - for more lighthearted yet still coherent discussion of topics
IB - anything goes

I think this is a good model. There are subforums for all kinds of posts.

However, I do think it is a problem when incoherent memes involving the wikipedia article on corn or lyrics to a certain Yes song appear in Random or SD, either derailing legitimate attempts at discussion or polluting the thread list with threads that would likely be of little interest to users browsing those subforums.

Furthermore, these posts are often by longtime users of Fakku who are aware of the rules and should know better. If these users want to post memes or troll, there is the entire subforum of IB that they can utilize.

Negative reputation is not going to be a deterrent against this kind of spamming/trolling, so I am going to suggest that some other type of deterrent be considered.

Edit: someone else posted a similar thread to this concurrently.

https://www.fakku.net/viewtopic.php?t=46937

Every generation complains about the corruption of the youth, etc etc etc. Individual people are always going to present examples of squandered opportunity, and yes, times change, but I think in general people just buy into the hype and overreact when they declare that morality is dying and such. Each generation tends to be different than the last, but that doesn't mean society is collapsing.

The user formerly known as gibbous contributed a quote to one of these threads about how the youths are being corrupted and society will be ruined that is attributed to Socrates. Several thousand years later, society has yet to implode.