The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: DanSC on November 10, 2006, 09:31:51 am
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http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11102006
It just makes a ton of sense.
This is an instant classic.
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Doc Andretti seems *concerned*. He knows chances are he'll have to touch that sack after that stunt is done.
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And Philippe is scarred for life. Again.
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The hell with Philippe. What about me?
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owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
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I have to admit, that would be a life changing experience.
Just not in a good way.
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The hell with Philippe. What about me?
+1 :'(
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This is definitely the year of cat homoeroticism.
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T/F: "Junk" is a collective noun and refers to the combination of meat & potatoes (or schlong and bozack, if you're nasty).
I SAY TRUE.
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Philippe seems to have dressed up for the occasion. And I don't think the little shaver has any room left for scars in his psyche.
And Ray being picked up reminded me of Richard Harris on A Man Called hoss. Only nastier.
edit: I didn't know the filter replaced the common name for an equine quadruped for "hoss". Very funny, filter.
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I guess no-one else found this arousing.
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BE CAREFULL ON::CAT CACK FRIDAY
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T/F: "Junk" is a collective noun and refers to the combination of meat & potatoes (or schlong and bozack, if you're nasty).
I SAY TRUE.
True - I guess the female equivalent would be "box" (specific, collective, and not overtly offensive unlike, say, pussy)
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My personal favourite term for the genitals has always been "area".
Gender-inspecific and all-parts-inclusive, completely inoffensive and yet... unnervingly vague.
"Dude! You kicked me in my area!"
"Dude! Put some clothes on, I almost saw your area!"
"Dude! She was totally hot for me, we were all grinding on the couch, all area to area!"
Etc.
My favourite male-specific term? "Package".
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ew, dude, stop talking about your area. gross.
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If there was ever a strip to pull me from lurker-dom into the bright light of the board, It would be this one. Which it has. But not by my junk. No sir.
Always good to see Doc Andretti, Ray may be one for foolish risks, but he at least gets medical backup.
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Ray's facial expression is so... surprised. Seriously, what did he expect to happen?
If we're talking about slightly unnerving synonyms for the general genital region, I've always been partial to "bathing-suit area."
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ew, dude, stop talking about your area. gross.
He's got wart. In his area. Area Warts.
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just as long as he doesn't start talking about Area Wipes.
also: I, at first, thought that this concept of being carried by your area would be a certain way. Now I am kind of thinking, shit, that would not be a good feeling to feel at all.
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Why does the area muscle dude need to be so scantily clad? Is it to emphasize the cat-junk-yanking eroticism?
NOT REALLY NECESSARY THANKS
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The writer authored a strip in which a cat was lifted off of the ground by his c*ck and testicles.
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T/F: "Junk" is a collective noun and refers to the combination of meat & potatoes (or schlong and bozack, if you're nasty).
I SAY TRUE.
I think it has to be true, or else the stress of the full weight of Ray's body on either just the meat or just the potatoes might cause them to, er, rupture.
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Factoring in centres of gravity there's only one way for Ray to have adopted that horizontal aspect while suspended.
One word: Tumescence.
The point is that with the application of basic physics and Properties of the Gentlemanly Region, this strip becomes even more troubling than it might first appear.
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Ray has been a little... lackin' in the mackin' department lately, right? If Onstad develops this strip, I'd bet on this incredibly painful ritual restoring his natural mojo, and before you know it he's getting his bone on at an hourly rate.
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Be kinda cool to see the cat-in-the-crown again. Ray's been all money no honey for a good long time now.
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Ray has been a little... lackin' in the mackin' department lately, right? If Onstad develops this strip, I'd bet on this incredibly painful ritual restoring his natural mojo, and before you know it he's getting his bone on at an hourly rate.
He'll be like: bone...bone...bone...
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Enough, already!
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Just remembered, with respect to the meat+potatoes or just meat argument, we are forgetting one pretty important point:
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=01212002
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we talked about this...
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It's barbed, you know... cat junk, that is.
Also, giraffe placenta: kosher or not?
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I think that someone could make a decent living lifting guys up guys like this. Not for Ray's reason though.
ew, dude, stop talking about your area. gross.
It's fortunate people from Milton Keynes aren't verbose in that respect...
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Ray looks like he's having a totally life-affirming experience right there.
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Also, giraffe placenta: kosher or not?
Like a fuckin pickle. A day goes by i don't hear about giraffe placenta and i'm surprised.
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Also, giraffe placenta: kosher or not?
Well - is cow placenta? Assuming the slaughtering was done by a schochet etc..
Giraffes are split-hoofed ruminants, so I'd guess they could be kosher.
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I missed out on the giraffe placenta joke, but anything that has a split hoof and chews the cud is permissible. However, placenta is RIGHT OUT (i.e., not kosher) because of all the blood. Leviticus 2:13 prohibits consumption of blood. Even if you could salt out all the blood from a placenta, it's still probably non-kosher.
Two things make meat non-kosher: 1) if it comes from a non-kosher animal (such as a hoss), or 2) if it comes from a kosher animal, but was not slaughtered and/or prepared according to Jewish law. Certain parts of animals are not kosher to eat (sciatic nerves, certain types of fat, blood, etc.). I mean, YUCK. Animals might eat the afterbirth, but then again they dont' have prenatal/postnatal vitamins like we do.
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Two things make meat non-kosher: 1) if it comes from a non-kosher animal (such as a hoss), or 2) if it comes from a kosher animal, but was not slaughtered and/or prepared according to Jewish law. Certain parts of animals are not kosher to eat (sciatic nerves, certain types of fat, blood, etc.). I mean, YUCK. Animals might eat the afterbirth, but then again they dont' have prenatal/postnatal vitamins like we do.
3) If it comes in contact, after slaughter and koshering, with treyf materials or dairy
4) if the animal is not, in life, fully healthy
5) For the orthodox, if it is prepared for eating by a non-Jew
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um, also that it came from an animal which is still alive. or does it not count because it came out naturally, as opposed to being cut off?
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3) If it comes in contact, after slaughter and koshering, with treyf materials or dairy
4) if the animal is not, in life, fully healthy
5) For the orthodox, if it is prepared for eating by a non-Jew
What do orthodox jews do in prison then? Does the prison system have to hire jewish cooks?
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What do orthodox jews do in prison then? Does the prison system have to hire jewish cooks?
I do not know how prisons resolve this. Airlines purchase the meals whole and frozen from kosher distributors, which are designed to be heated up without breaking the seal from the distributor. Since the seal is not broken, a goy is not considered to have prepared the food, only to have carried it (which is apparently acceptable).
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Well, pretty much all the Orthodox food laws go back to... taking a few thousand years of knowledge about how not to die from food poisoning despite basically just chilling around in stone huts and stuff... and couching them in God to make people actually follow them.
The whole thing with the "only prepared by the orthodox" and the "only carried by the goy" thing completely makes sense because... the whole tradition is about who you can trust to actually follow the rules.
If the seal isn't broken, you know that some dude who doesn't know (or doesn't believe or is too cheap to care) that ill-prepared pig is fulla worms, that badly-prepared meat and badly-prepared milk can come together for stomachal bad news etc isn't fuck*ng around with the product.
But... to phrase it that way both (a) sounds kinda racist against everyone else and (b) admits to the tradition coming from good culinary sense as opposed to a Dude jumping out of a cloud and laying down some science so... semantics must be applied for the sake of sensitivity and tradition.
If you just say "Well, if we know the dude is just heating the thing, we aren't getting accidentally poisoned by idiots or purposefully poisoned by anti-semites"... well.... you sound bad saying that. So you dig around in some old texts until you find something more polite.
To be honest, it's a lot better than the religion I'm ethnically attached to... Catholicism... where they just have a dude who looks like the Emperor in STAR WARS and sounds like Hitler say "Uh, look, it's a sin and if you do it, a magical redman will poke you with sticks after you die and... LOOK OVER THERE, TOTALLY BRAD PITT!" and then Emperor Hitlorium just runs off in the other direction.
Orthodox Jews receive style points for at least thinking it through.
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Well, pretty much all the Orthodox food laws go back to... taking a few thousand years of knowledge about how not to die from food poisoning despite basically just chilling around in stone huts and stuff... and couching them in God to make people actually follow them.
I don't think the causation there is quite what you're describing.
Let's say you're an ancient Jew. You see some fool eating pork, and then a week later he's crapping green and purple. You don't think "hey, there must be parasites in that pork! I'd better tell people God doesn't like pork so that they won't eat parasites". You think "wow, God smote that sonofabitch but good. He must really hate people who eat pork or he wouldn't make them crap green and purple."
It works out either way, though. The point is that you're observing and connecting cause and effect.
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Hm. A fair point.
Though, if I'm misconstruing, I don't think it's a lack of logic and more... my bias against thinking that people really actually believe religion literally.
I generally tend to believe that... there is nothing fundamentally "smarter" about human beings today more than five thousand years ago and... that no rational person then now or in another five thousand years would "actually" believe that there was a demon in a pig that made you sick or something.
I have to believe that if a couple of well-educated people (rabbi, after all, were teachers and the most learned men of their time) put their heads together, they'd probably figure out that it was like a cold or a flu or some other non-fatal disease which was understood to be passed on an air-to-air vector or a sexual vector or whatnot. Educated people knew that insects spread disease and that insects could be too small to see with the naked eye, at times.
People knew about sickness and that... it was something in the air or... something you spread with your weiner. People who had the time to think about things and not just toil fourteen hours a day, anyway.
The educated class in that society explained it to people in a way that people without the time to think could understand. These days, the middle classes mediate that interplay, having enough time to think some or most things through and... calling the ruling class on their bullshit so that the most oppressed underclasses can access the truth underneath the simplifications and manipulations.
The more people have to work, the less time they have to reason and learn. Religion exists, in my mindscape, not because it exists on reflex in the human mind, but to fill in the gaps, to force people without the time to know things to... do reasonable things.
The problem is that such great power corrupts any power structure in two generations at the most but probably even quicker.
This is why religion asks us to be fruitful and multiply... the more kids we have, the harder we have to work, the less we can learn and reason and the more power religion has. This is why government allied with religion functions to economically destroy the middle class, as the middle class functions to mediate truth and force reality on all others and, indeed, themselves.
The harder we have to work, the easier we are to rule because we become embroiled in just... feeding our kids, working our jobs, scrimping for health care. As individuals, we can only function in our own immediate self interest... dynastic families and bureaucracies of tradition can affect agendas that transcend generations and even centuries.
Yikes, I've rambled off-point.
Essentially what I'm saying is... my bias is not logical fallacy, my bias is the belief that... I don't know that adult humans with the time to learn could've been that fundamentally ignorant with all the knowledge that was already on the books, so to speak.
By the time the idea of "kosher" was codified, the knowledge base was there, if crudely, to know that these effects were not demons or spooky ghosts with only one or two jumps of common sense.
Distrust of organized religion is probably my defining ideological tenet, if I have to choose one. I tend to believe that all of the other problems of the world could not be so very out of control if so many of the rules of society weren't based on blind faiths that are either just silly or constructed specifically to control a given society's underclass.
While I believe that there's parts of our society where partial socialisms are necessary (education, infrastructure, military, health care, etc) I'm not a communist because... small scale capitalism is healthy and can work if essential religious assumptions about who "deserves" money and success and so on don't conspire to create larger structures of inequity.
There's an old Russian saying, "the second you think you're hanging the last capitalist, someone comes along to sell you the noose" and... as disgusting and weird as the whole killing part of that thing is, the other part of it... that people are always going to look for gain where they can... is useful and true.
Unfair as it can be, economy is why we have stuff. Functioning under the watchful eye of a government making sure that business doesn't get so big or so hidden that it can cheat, it can be a force of change and... if not capital G good... at least a necessary-evil mechanism to keep things moving.
Capitalism will sell what it can sell when it's allowed to sell it. It's religion that messes the whole thing up, looking to keep people ignorant through its direct interactions with people, through indirect interactions with commerce with the government/military... because the less ignorant people are, the less religion means anything to them.
Capitalism will sell what it sells, government will protect its own petty bureaucracies, the military will generally be very happy being unused if everyone is getting paid... religion is the wedge in the works, functioning to leverage everyone against everyone else for its own gain.
...fuck, have I rambled.
I would erase the whole thing but for the fact that I took so long to type it.
But this whole thing explains my bias, anyway. Before government, culture and economic forces developed enough... with spare time to think and learn for more people... religion had to fill in all of those roles and had to do it simply.
The Big Questions are The Big Questions, there's nothing wrong with having a slant to it for your own personal edification. But... organizations to deliever those answers to us on a platter, man, we have less harmful paths to the smaller answers now.
Kosher law is one of the most benign surviving versions of this manipulation and, even there, they have to dance an intellectual dervish to explain it in today's context without either coming off racist against everyone else or admitting that it comes from common sense and that the whole "God" thing was sort of made-up.
I dunno.
That's my bias. For whatever it's worth, "comparative religion" was the field I took more classes on that anything in college but... the underclass prerequisites were different for the Communications and Liberal Arts departments and so my diploma says "TV/Radio/Film".
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good lord, no.
this is what is known in psychology as "hindsight bias." It is a pretty basic concept.
Once you know how something works, it seems to be the only logical way. How is "your c*ck fell off because of tinytiny bugs!" any more logical an explanation than "God did it! Remember him, the guy that made the universe? He sure is pissed."
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Yeah, with all due respect, this is pretty blatant hindsight bias. The weird thing about science is that most of the concepts we take for granted today are actually mad nonintuitive to an observer who can't see them -- for example, the idea that you get sick because of invisible mystery bugs. People thousands of years ago were certainly bright enough to observe functional facts about the universe (for example, the correlation between sickness and various foods and their preparations), but their assuming sickness to be the wrath of God and not tiny invisible mystery bugs isn't a product of stupidity, just the fact that the tiny-invisible-mystery-bug meme had yet to exist. Today we take bacteria for granted because we have remarkable and widespread microscopic equipment that allow pretty much any layman to see microorganisms during elementary-school science class; without any evidence for this, and with a full belief that there is a god who influences the world (a belief that is not intrinsically stupid, to say the least), it makes more sense to assume that God did it than that something else did. You go with what you know.
Anyway, this is rambling quite a bit. I guess what I am trying to say is that bacteria are not actually that commonsensical an idea?
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No, no, I understand the idea of "hindsight bias".
But... I don't fully understand how my teevee works or my computer works but I still understand that it's not magic. I understand my car even less, other than the vague idea of internal combustion as a theory, I'm completely lost but... I don't believe there are actually goblins at work.
I can no more see a flu germ than a human could ten thousand years ago and while I like to think of myself as smarter-than-average perhaps, I'm hardly some genius running around inventing new forms of commerical energy and new forms of pyramid scheme.
My science education ended with an eleventh-grade chemistry course in a poor rural high school and yet I am able to accept the idea that the things I cannot see aren't magic.
I don't think that people back then were that intellectually "different" than I am other than the level of access I've had to basic knowledge.
Moreover, I tend to believe that more knowledge was lost to the Western and Near-Eastern world in the dark ages than we really know or care to admit. I tend to believe that knowledge and civilization stretches back farther than we care to admit and... there were points in history where knowledge we "believe" was discovered hundreds of years ago was actually known by religious, intellectual and governmental "elites"... perserved after the catyclismic collapses of civilizations in tiny semi-secret pockets.
I think ancient man... or at least those pockets of ancient man with access to continuous knowledge traditions... was much smarter than we care to believe, for reasons of arrogance or ignorance, these days.
I'll totally accept if you say that my basic distrust of religion is why I could be wrong. I'll totally culpa to thata.
But religion is a fundamentally constructed device of social control, it doesn't just "happen" or "appear". It's all intentional. I do believe that those rules and ideas were created specifically with the idea of explaining a complex idea to people without the time to process complex ideas.
And I do believe that the power structures that created... or in the very least, codified and approved... those texts and rules and laws and ideas definitely knew that there were real and solid forces behind the things they couched in gods and monsters and commandments and such.
A religious idea means nothing and becomes nothing without either a force of authority enforcing it or a force of authority forming around it to enforce it.
Religious ideas at least survive and, more usually, are created to reinforce the power structure that promoted and wielded them. There's no point in defending a vague superstition unless you understand something of the partial truth behind it and know how to use it to your advantage.
Kosher law, again, is a fairly benign version of this... simply about finding a way to keep its power base alive and healthy without confusing them or educating them too much.
But I don't believe I'm dealing in a "hindsight bias". I just think that the educated elite throughout history have known a good deal more than it generally seemed and... they've had to apportion out that knowledge in indirect ways to use it to their advantage without giving the underclass the actual education necessary to fully use an education in general.
I'm not saying that bacteria is a full-on common sense idea...
What I'm saying is that there was an unbroken history of medical (and all kinds of) knowledge that has waxed and waned in and out of Dark Ages but has been preserved in manners only accessable to various elites (priest classes, royalty, scribe classes, etc) and...
Has been selectively and fractionally given to underclasses when it has suited the elite classes.
While bacteria is not common sense, exactly, the idea is probably older than our history as we know it exists and, further, if you lay the idea out before a child with any kind of educational base... they quickly get the idea and run with it.
Bacteria is totally covered in elementary school and I don't think people ten thousand years ago were "dumber" than us in any way other than how much time they had to think and learn. Nothing... biological, our brains haven't "evolved" in a few thousand years.
...of course, I'm rambling twice as much as anyone here so... I'll try to stop.
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I just think that the educated elite throughout history have known a good deal more than it generally seemed and...
You're welcome to believe in whatever, but factually, the educated elite in both Oxford and (Parisian Acadamia I don't care to recall) as recently as the 14th century black plague waves were beating the most educated minds available against since proven entirely wrong logical dead ends, as evidenced in their published works as well as in their private correspondance, in explaining what is now viewed as simple as fleas with a mid-gut bacterial infection (with possible anthrax [murrain at the time] complications in some areas). Man has not ever been 'stupid', he has however been limited mightly in his ability to reason by the limitations of his ability to observe.
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Certainly the rabbis were not stupid. However, plenty of educated and intelligent people now believe in God. Why wouldn't they have then, if as you say humans are not intellectually different now?
And if you believe God exists and have no way of observing microorganisms, the simplest and most logical cause and effect for "drinking water you pooped in makes you sick" is "God is punishing you for drinking water you pooped in, you sick fuck". It bears up under all standards of testability within the parameters of observation possible with the technology of the time.
If you engage in incest, God visibly punishes your lineage with deformities and sickness. If you eat raw meat, God punishes you with sickness. The cause and effect are observed and without knowledge of recessive genes and microorganisms any explanation is going to be equivalently magical.
It's all well and good if you believe vast amounts of scientific were lost in the Dark Ages that we have no evidence of, but it's an awfully hard road to try to argue as anything other than a Golden Age bias.
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I would also point out that religion can be a highly effective method of social control, whether or not the religious elite actually believe that direct deistic interference is involved.
Thus the rabbis could notice the correlation between eating certain foods and subsequent gastro-intestinal distress and create the prohibition solely as a means of promoting the health of the population. This would indicate that the rabbis have a relgious understanding more sophisticated than "God hates people who eat pork," even if promotion of such an idea to the masses is necessary to acheive their dietary aims.
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I would also point out that religion can be a highly effective method of social control, whether or not the religious elite actually believe that direct deistic interference is involved.
Thus the rabbis could notice the correlation between eating certain foods and subsequent gastro-intestinal distress and create the prohibition solely as a means of promoting the health of the population. This would indicate that the rabbis have a relgious understanding more sophisticated than "God hates people who eat pork," even if promotion of such an idea to the masses is necessary to acheive their dietary aims.
Sure, they could. But I question whether this is the obvious chain of events to assume. It seems to be predicated on the assumption that "the smarter you are, the less likely you are to believe God exists", which is somewhat tenuous, particularly in a situation where education is the province of the religious rather than the secular elite.
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It seems to be predicated on the assumption that "the smarter you are, the less likely you are to believe God exists",
I would say rather that it's predicated on the assumption that "the smarter you are, the more sophisticated your understanding of God is."
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I would say rather that it's predicated on the assumption that "the smarter you are, the more sophisticated your understanding of God is."
Hence my reference between the Big Questions and the small questions.
And, at any rate, I am one of those namby-pamby sorts who rejects organized religion without rejecting the notion of some Higher or Hidden Power. I am prepared for the idea... and even lean toward the idea... of something beyond my small reckoning guiding this whole extended show of horror and beauty.
While I definitely see any use of spirituality in the creation of a social order or power structure as intellectually null and void, a personal one-to-one relationship with/search for a Hidden or Higher Power may well be fruitful or even necessary within the human experience.
But the moment you look to anyone outside yourself to speak for that HoH, well, my distrust of anyone claiming to speak for the HoH upon myself or any mass of people knows no bounds. They either want something out of you or are mad. Or both. Probably both.
If not larger social control then money, if not money then sex, if not sex then to die for them in war, if nothing else the idea that their god will reward them for the handing over of your allegience.
I'm certainly not attempting to paint Searchers as ignorant.
I search, myself, for that magic, for that thermodynamic miracle Dr. Manhattan was looking for.
For that thing Mulder wanted to believe in.
One of my greatest desires is to see something that I know couldn't happen without there being some kind of force behind this all which would suggest a life immortal. I... certainly haven't seen it, is all, and I can't believe in second-hand accounts.
I'm getting off-path, of course, I'm just saying... I never meant to impugn anyone's larger spiritual beliefs.
My cynicism toward organized religion as inherent mental-slavery has nothing to do with the former.
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I'm one of those "mamby pamby sorts who rejects organized religion without rejecting the notion of some Higher or Hidden Power." I think hardcore athiest are just as wrong as Christian absolutist.
"Something unknown is doing we know not what is the extent of our knowledge."
~Paul
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I'm one of those "mamby pamby sorts who rejects organized religion without rejecting the notion of some Higher or Hidden Power."
Me too.
It's funny. I pretty fundamentally scorn religion (where religion = a socio-cultural construct for the shared experience of spirtuality.) On the other hand, I feel a very deep sense of spirituality and connection to the infinite. I guess I don't see the need for some other chucklehead to intervene between me and God. In fact, I don't think it's possible for anyone to come between me and God.
On the other hand, organized religion is by definition a social experience. It provides social support in numerous areas, including at least ostensibly on one's spiritual journey. It would be awfully nice to have a local support network...
Oddly enough I spent much of last night bouncing around Wikipedia looking at articles on different Christian sects and demoninations. I wasn't really looking for a home as much as wondering about how people define their spiritual beliefs. What makes someone a General Baptists versus a Primitive Baptist? What spiritual questions do people feel strong enough about to sever lifelong friendships and family ties in support of doctrinal schisms? To what extent are so-called doctrinal disputes truly theological in nature as opposed to social or cultural?
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I would say rather that it's predicated on the assumption that "the smarter you are, the more sophisticated your understanding of God is."
What's unsophisticated about the idea that God engages in direct action?
I mean, this seems to be the crux of the argument here: this assumption that an intelligent person, faced with the cause and effect of certain behaviors causing disease and the knowledge available at the time, would somehow automatically conclude, with no evidence or information to this effect, that the reason this cause and effect were connected were by means of non-divine agency simply because he is intelligent and therefore must for some reason follow the thought processes of a modern man backed by thousands of extra years of scientific discovery.
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What's unsophisticated about the idea that God engages in direct action?
Nothing. What I would suggest is unsophisticated is the idea that God only engages in direct action.
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Is it possible for God to give Himself junk so huge that even He Himself could not pick himself up by it using one hand?
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....and the whole thread is tied together nicely now! Haha...
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Turbo Ninja wins the thread. 1 can, 1 closure.