5481

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: A Commentary on Religion and its Societal Implications

« on: April 09, 2015, 12:49:03 PM »

what abt the other 'thread' in this sub-Forum?

"jews corrupt the young"

Good catch, thanks!

5482

Flat Earth Community / Which space missions do you consider to be legitimate?

« on: April 07, 2015, 06:30:20 PM »

We've received the following question via Facebook. I (and presumably the author of the question) would be interested to see what our individual members have to say.

Of all the space missions, be it Man on the Moon or simply spacecrafts like Curiosity, Voyage, Rosetta or others, which do you consider to be legitimate?

5483

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Anti-Semitism of the Moderators.

« on: April 07, 2015, 02:28:04 PM »

Guys, please take it elsewhere. This is not a discussion for S&C.

5484

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Cazazza Dan

« on: April 06, 2015, 05:34:51 PM »

Brand new album Bit Player is here, and it's a doozy! Or is it?!

My feng shui has been messed with. I hope you're proud of yourself.

5485

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Ask a Jew anything.

« on: April 06, 2015, 01:33:40 PM »

WAP2 is a WiFi encryption.

I think you're thinking of WPA2.

The WAP2 interface is what SMF displays for older phones. You can see it here: http://forum.tfes.org/index.php?action=forum;wap2

EDIT: *shakes fist at Parsifal*

5486

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Improving our home page

« on: April 05, 2015, 11:11:45 AM »

If, in the event of a merger, will all this wonderful work be for naught?

As far as I'm concerned, tfes.org will continue to operate as normal until reunification, should it ever happen. If things start moving forward, we might want to renegotiate or at least discuss some of the previously agreed points, given that the state of both sites changed considerably since last December. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

5487

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Improving our home page

« on: April 04, 2015, 11:05:34 PM »

Right! We've gone and done and implemented my first two suggestions, with a little bit extra. Here's how things work now:

The 5 most recent threads in Announcements will appear on the home page. Members interested in writing stories there should get in touch with one of the admins to get new-thread-posting privileges. Maintenance notices and outage debriefs will now appear in a sub-board of Announcements called Status Notices. Those will also appear at the bottom of the sidebar. In addition to that, the sidebar now features links the five most recently updated threads in FEG, FED and FEQ&A.

I hope everyone enjoys the changes. Let us know if we screwed something up, or if you have any suggestions, or questions... or anything. Really, just talk to us. We're lonely.

5488

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Improving our home page

« on: April 04, 2015, 09:21:53 PM »

While on the subject of tying the homepage together with the forum, this could also open another avenue. Currently, we rely on a blogging CMS that only Parsifal and I have direct access to. Obviously, this is not ideal since it needlessly stops our members from directly contributing (see: the fact that we only published one of Pongo's two proposed posts, for no real good reason). We could, for example, have a News board here which would allow some pre-approved members to post directly to the home page.

That was actually quite easy to implement. My test page now displays threads from Announcements.

5489

Suggestions & Concerns / Improving our home page

« on: April 04, 2015, 08:31:14 PM »

It's no secret that our homepage currently leaves much to be desired. We don't have all that much content there, which appears to lead to a high bounce rate (i.e. people finding us, visiting the site, and leaving shortly after). We've neglected it, and I think it's high time we work on it.

I've been playing around with SMF's website integration functionality, and so far I came up with the idea of listing the most recently updated threads in the sidebar (which is currently cluttered by largely unhelpful blog stuff). Mind you, this is just a quick draft, but instead of this:



we could have this:


(Currently, I have this set to display only threads from Announcements, FEG, FEQ&A and FED of my dev forum, but this can obviously be changed)

While on the subject of tying the homepage together with the forum, this could also open another avenue. Currently, we rely on a blogging CMS that only Parsifal and I have direct access to. Obviously, this is not ideal since it needlessly stops our members from directly contributing (see: the fact that we only published one of Pongo's two proposed posts, for no real good reason). We could, for example, have a News board here which would allow some pre-approved members to post directly to the home page.

We could also explore areas for integrating the home page with our Wiki, e.g. "Flat Earth image of the week" (this could be randomly picked from a selection of images we mark as good), a link to a random article, or something along those lines.

All in all, I'm looking for opinions on the ideas I've had so far, as well as any other ideas you might have for improving our homepage. Do you think the links to recent posts in the sidebar might be useful to a newcomer? Would people be interested in writing an occasional paragraph for the homepage were it not for the current administrative difficulties of getting this done? What else can we do?

5490

Flat Earth Community / Re: Eric Dubay shot us down

« on: April 04, 2015, 12:02:06 PM »

You're beating him with money and not with content.

You know what? I disagree. Eric is a beggar. He tries so hard to sell his books (most of which only have 1 review - I wonder who that might be from), beg for donations and profiteer from advertisement. He's also the one who decided that he's so cheap that he's going to host his forum on a free boards site (which in turn allowed me to advertise there) instead of spending some pocket money on a proper host. If he knew what he's doing, he'd be the one with money. He's trying to make money on his escapades, but he has no idea how to do so.

We, on the other hand, quite literally do not offer any avenues for ourselves to profit from. You can't donate to us (even though people wanted to!), and our CafePress store is set to not have any markup (i.e. the prices there are the prices CafePress demands - we have no cut from it at all).

The ad on Eric's site, which I'm paying for out of my own pocket, is setting me back just a couple dollars per day. I'm far from rich, either. I would argue that if you can't afford to occasionally invest $30 into something you care about, you simply don't care enough.

As for content, I guess it depends on what you mean by "content". We're the organisation to actually produce an electronic copy of the first edition of Zetetic Astronomy (available from our library). We got it because we cared and were willing to put in some effort. It wasn't even that difficult.

5491

Flat Earth Community / Re: Eric Dubay shot us down

« on: April 02, 2015, 03:02:14 PM »

I don't want to oust Thork or anything.  That exchange irritated me a little, but aside from that, he's doing a good job.

Fair enough.

5492

Flat Earth Community / Re: Eric Dubay shot us down

« on: April 02, 2015, 02:55:47 PM »

Why should we care about disassociating ourselves from someone's racist views?  Thork has already done an excellent job of implying we're racist on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/FlatEarthOrg/status/568056850463109120

As I previously suggested on IRC, if you'd like to make a complaint about Thork's work on Twitter, please do so in S&C. Personally, I see no reason to investigate unless someone makes a case for it and gathers some, at least anecdotal, support.

5493

Science & Alternative Science / Re: Ancient Aliens

« on: March 31, 2015, 12:53:33 PM »

Aliens are about as likely as leprechauns.

Incorrect. Given that there are no leprechauns on Earth, any leprechauns that exist (if they do), would have to be aliens. However, it is significantly more likely that any aliens out there, should they exist, would not be leprechauns. In other words, non-leprechaun aliens are more likely than leprechauns.

5494

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: PhD student shows students X-rated footage of herself; viewers unimpressed.

« on: March 30, 2015, 06:41:12 PM »

There is no way you seriously interpreted that sentence as me complaining about the sound of his voice. You know very well that I was talking about what he was saying. I think the narrator is a bit of a prick, based on how he described the video.

Your original complaint sounds like neither. It seems that you weren't focusing on what he was saying, but rather how he's saying it, and based on your clarification I'm still convinced that that was the case.

On another note, how did that woman get accepted to grad school in the first place.

She's a "feminist" in the UK. This stuff is all the rage now in some parts of Europe.

Pizaa, I feel like you're getting seriously personally offended by my disagreeing with you. I don't really understand why you are, but I apologize if that's the case.

Oh, not at all. I've noticed that people who disagree with me on these kind of subjects seem to think I'm angry or offended. I'm not, I'm just a prick.

5495

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: PhD student shows students X-rated footage of herself; viewers unimpressed.

« on: March 30, 2015, 04:14:23 AM »

Nah, I agree with Saddam. The narrator sounds like a complete m'lady.

If you judge a man by how he sounds and not by what he says, we're going to have to agree to disagree and never touch that subject again. I can predict no productive outcome, and if we try discussing it it's gonna end up the same as your contributions to the Ferguson thread.

5496

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: PhD student shows students X-rated footage of herself; viewers unimpressed.

« on: March 30, 2015, 02:05:01 AM »

He does seem to have some historical videos, upon a closer look.  His channel is simply mostly devoted to dumb MRA/redpiller/Gamergate/I'm-still-complaining-about-Anita-Sarkeesian-for-some-reason/wah-wah-won't-someone-think-of-the-menz stuff.  It comes down to the same thing in the end - a loser in a fedora raging about women who won't have sex with him.

Give it up for Saddam, everyone. The man who managed to admit he was wrong, and then immediately followed it by being wrong again!

Just watch the video already. Don't be so terrified of someone you think you might disagree based on 5 seconds of listening.

5497

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Why is the sun round?

« on: March 30, 2015, 01:31:13 AM »

Could you explicitly state what pieces of RE knowledge you believe are contradicting each other?  All I see is a link to a Wikipedia page on gravity. I assume you are probably referring to the Galaxy spin curve, but would like to be sure.

I directly linked to a section which outlines discrepancies between observation and the currently-dominant theory. The only way I could make it more explicit is by copy-pasting it here.

5498

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: PhD student shows students X-rated footage of herself; viewers unimpressed.

« on: March 30, 2015, 01:23:53 AM »

I stopped watching the video five seconds in, when I realized I had been linked to a whining MRA screed.  I'm sure the performance itself is very stupid, but not quite as stupid as the sexually-frustrated loser who creates a YouTube channel devoted to ranting about how bitches won't have sex with him.

Ladies and gentlemen, Saddam reminding us why this kind of shit needs to continue to be called out as it happens.

No, Saddam, the channel is anything but mono-thematic, and the person you've ignored is not an MRA, unless you use that term to refer to everyone who has said anything bad about feminism ever. Which, come to think of it, you probably do.

5499

Philosophy, Religion & Society / PhD student shows students X-rated footage of herself; viewers unimpressed.

« on: March 29, 2015, 10:41:03 PM »

Lauren Barri-Holstein, actress and PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, decided to show a recording of her "feminist performance art concerned with the female body" as part of an introduction to a theatre class. Many students seemed displeased:

"It was surreal. I honestly didn't know how to react. I don't think I'll ever be able to look her in the eye in person, it's just weird."
"It's not even the fact we saw her lady parts, it's the fact I literally have no idea how the clip was in any way related to this module."
"It was just so extreme and I don't understand why it was in any way necessary."

While some were okay with it:

"I understand her aim is to actively gross out the audience and challenge us, which does actually make sense."
"She's really passionate about exposing our socially ingrained expectations, so I'm going to suspend my judgement and wait until I get to know her better as a teacher."

Here's a Telegraph article providing some more detail about the story. Now, without further ado, I present to you Splat!, helpfully censored and narrated by Youtube's very own Sargon of Akkad:



Sometimes I really have doubts about my thoughts of going into academia.

5500

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Why is the sun round?

« on: March 29, 2015, 10:28:20 PM »

Is there really a difference between "unknown" and "untrue"? Because RE'ers sure like to conflate the two when it comes to their own theory.

There's a huge difference.
Again, 'untrue' would be if two pieces of knowledge contradicted one another.

Did you deliberately ignore the latter half of my post where I show an example of two pieces of RET "knowledge" contradicting one another and yet being dismissed as an unknown or an "incomplete theory", or was that an honest mistake on your part? You seem to have done a lot of restating and repeating yourself (a trend for you, I see), but didn't actually address the issue.