"Atheism has a Richard Dawkins problem"

sideshowbob said:
Most of those words appear to be English but strung together they don't convey anything at all.
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Tiassa said:
It's a certain point about the nature of influence, mixed in with an obvious joke. In either case, you need to know the history involved; I didn't really think it was so obscure.

(The trick is trying to understand how it wasn't "Under Pressure". It was either a direct cop or cryptomnesia, and if we pretend to not understand the latter, then we can also argue those queers never influenced him. Talk to artists about who influenced their work; you might find it a surprisingly deep conversation compared to not being influenced by common elements in the culture around you. More directly, it would seem we need to invent a new valence of non-influence, just for atheists. Or maybe just for you? It's always a challenge to figure out side questions in the face of paradox; like the bit where any number of atheists want to behave similarly, but nobody should draw any conclusions from that fact. It's an unfunny aping of Christianists. Meanwhile, most of the atheists here have been influenced by Athanasius. Pretty much anyone discussing in a Christian, pseudo-Christian, or post-Christian context was. Somewhere between faint echoes of sixteen hundred plus years ago, and Rob Van Winkle telling people to not believe what they were hearing over and over again, we can find the approximate distinction by which years of common rhetoric and behavior displayed by diverse people who happen to be atheists have nothing to do with each other or any other common element between these individuals, but that rule only applies to atheists and can't be applied to anybody else. There is a part of me that says, yeah, I get what these people want me to believe, and how it works; then there is the part of me that recalls living experience, and it reminds this idea of non-influence appears pretty unique compared to human social behavior.)
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Beat that Sideshowbob.
 
Tiassa said:
It's a certain point about the nature of influence, mixed in with an obvious joke. In either case, you need to know the history involved;
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And that's the bind.
Is it possible to discuss influence with the willfully historically ignorant?


I recall the frustrations of a fine art lecturer who was saying at the beginning of every first year batch of students, there are always at least a handful who begin the semester with the attitude that they will be on the cusp of developing some new art movement before their final year of study is up. So the facillitators have to tolerantly sift through their hackneyed efforts that are derivative of the past 100 years of fine art history, and patiently bring them up to speed with what has already manifested and taken root in their ideas. Baby steps ... baby steps ...
 
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Seattle said:
The convention to create a paragraph, every now and then, is pretty common and yet it, apparently doesn't unduly influence you. Why should Dawkins have such influence on the rest of us?
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What does the history of the paragraph tell us? Not much, I imagine .... so there's a hint on its scope for influence.
 
Musika said:
I recall the frustrations of a fine art lecturer who was saying at the beginning of every first year batch of students, there are always at least a handful who begin the semester with the attitude that they will be on the cusp of developing some new art movement before their final year of study is up. So the facillitators have to tolerantly sift through their hackneyed efforts that are derivative of the past 100 years of fine art history, and patiently bring them up to speed with what has already manifested and taken root in their ideas. Baby steps ... baby steps ...
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That's the idea! Squash their hopes and dreams early, before they threaten the art establishment. I never had a teacher do that, and I would have walked out of her class immediately.
 
sideshowbob said:
One of the reasons Dawkins may have had more influence than you and Tiassa is because people could tell what the hell he was talking about.
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And besides it doesn't matter. Dawkins isn't an authority on anything but evolutionary science.
 
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spidergoat said:
That's the idea! Squash their hopes and dreams early, before they threaten the art establishment. I never had a teacher do that, and I would have walked out of her class immediately.
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If its your desire to pass your work off as "revolutionary" when the same schtick occured a few decades ago, its more a case of having illusions rather than dreams.
(Actually you see that tendency here on sciforums a bit ... someone will come along and present something they claim to be a new finding they have discovered in science and the regulars will point out its been done and trialled 70 years ago, and that they're a crank and should go get an education)

If you want to create something "new", it probably would behoove you to understand what is already in existence.
It's not so much a foundation of the art industry (which, sure, you can argue is a world unto itself) but a foundation of any sort of knowledge.
I guess as far as art goes, if you learn the ropes, at least you can tag a "post" or "retro" to it if you are hell bent on whatever you are rehashing.
 
Musika said:
So tell us about it.
I can't even find a wiki page on it.
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Grammar books, books on effective writing and writing style are a good first start. We could be writing from right to left or from bottom to top but due to the pervasive influence though the years of grammar most of us don't write that way but some like to continue writing without end, without punctuation, without paragraphs in a manner that makes it hard to read or to want to read their comments but I'm sure you know of what I speak as even Richard Dawkins was influenced by this manner of writing and dare I say the writers of the Bible even seem to have been influenced in this way and yet you claim to not be influenced or perhaps you don't claim that it's hard to tell but I feel sure that you must have been influenced to some extent by grammar as much as you have been influenced by Richard Dawkins. The word salad approach to writing takes many forms including using words self-defined in a unique way so as to confuse the reader, sometimes it takes the approach of capitalizing Words in a Rather random way and sometimes the approach seems to be to just use any old word and claim that it is the reader who is dim rather than the enfeebled writer but there are many approaches to the word salad style of writing. Sometimes it is just monosyllabic gibberish, sometimes it's a misuse of terms as in a misunderstanding of singularity as a synonym for singular and oftentimes it is just the language of a crank but in all cases it is hard to read and the intent seems to be to obfuscate rather than to deal with the subject at hand.
 
Seattle said:
Grammar books, books on effective writing and writing style are a good first start. We could be writing from right to left or from bottom to top but due to the pervasive influence though the years of grammar most of us don't write that way but some like to continue writing without end, without punctuation, without paragraphs in a manner that makes it hard to read or to want to read their comments but I'm sure you know of what I speak as even Richard Dawkins was influenced by this manner of writing and dare I say the writers of the Bible even seem to have been influenced in this way and yet you claim to not be influenced or perhaps you don't claim that it's hard to tell but I feel sure that you must have been influenced to some extent by grammar as much as you have been influenced by Richard Dawkins. The word salad approach to writing takes many forms including using words self-defined in a unique way so as to confuse the reader, sometimes it takes the approach of capitalizing Words in a Rather random way and sometimes the approach seems to be to just use any old word and claim that it is the reader who is dim rather than the enfeebled writer but there are many approaches to the word salad style of writing. Sometimes it is just monosyllabic gibberish, sometimes it's a misuse of terms as in a misunderstanding of singularity as a synonym for singular and oftentimes it is just the language of a crank but in all cases it is hard to read and the intent seems to be to obfuscate rather than to deal with the subject at hand.
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This is all fine, but I don't see any richness in your presentation of this historical tapestry. No substantial conflict in the landscape of culture, ideation, economy, politics, etc. IOW it is completely lacking of any meaningful social commentary. This would also explain why there are no wiki pages forthcoming.
 
Schizophasia

Other speech disturbance
Classification and external resources
ICD-10R47.8
ICD-9-CM784.5

In the mental health field, schizophasia or word salad is language that is confused and often repetitious, symptomatic of various mental illnesses.
It is usually associated with a manic presentation of bipolar affective disorder and other symptoms of serious mental illnesses, such as psychosis, including schizophrenia. It is characterized by an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them. In this context, it is considered to be a symptom of a formal thought disorder. In some cases schizophasia can be a sign of asymptomatic schizophrenia; e.g. the question "Why do people believe in God?" could elicit a response consisting of a series of words commonly associated with religion or prayer but strung together with no regard to language rules.
Schizophasia should be contrasted with another symptom of cognitive disruption and cognitive slippage involving certain idiosyncratic arrangements of words. With this symptom, the language may or may not be grammatically correct depending on the severity of the disease and the particular mechanisms which have been impacted by the disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophasia

<>
 
Musika said:
This is all fine, but I don't see any richness in your presentation of this historical tapestry. No substantial conflict in the landscape of culture, ideation, economy, politics, etc. IOW it is completely lacking of any meaningful social commentary. This would also explain why there are no wiki pages forthcoming.
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Because Wiki is known for its rich historical tapestry.
 
Seattle said:
Because Wiki is known for its rich historical tapestry.
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Yes.
Actually it is.

You can go on about the veracity of the content, but the fact there is a page dedicated to the world's smallest skyscraper and not a page dedicated to the historical influences of the paragraph should be a fair clue of the red herrings you are relying on.
 
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Musika said:
Yes.
Actually it is.

You can go on about the veracity of the content, but the fact there is a page dedicated to the world's smallest skyscraper and not a page dedicated to the historical influences the paragraph should be a fair clue of the red herrings you are relying on.
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God told me to mention the paragraph travesty and he expects Man to do better (this was a divine revelation). He also mentioned that he doesn't know you and suspects that you might be a poser. I thought that was rather harsh but who am I to argue?
 
Seattle said:
God told me to mention the paragraph travesty and he expects Man to do better (this was a divine revelation). He also mentioned that he doesn't know you and suspects that you might be a poser. I thought that was rather harsh but who am I to argue?
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What can I say?
The world is your oyster and wiki is waiting to grant you the wealth and fame you so rightly deserve.
 
Musika said:
And that's the bind.
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Well, yeah, it's an infamous bit of pop culture history; like I said, I didn't really think it was so obscure.

Rob was always fun for dumb-assed lines about his work. Like the time he said rap was the hardest music form to write, because the words had to rhyme.

To the other, I also happen to know Marshall is something of a Donkey Kong guru. Not that I ever needed to know, but if you catch it on the right day, the Bloodhound Gang joke↱ can be downright vicious.

Is it possible to discuss influence with the willfully historically ignorant?
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Accidents happen.

Another thing is that outside the subject of insistent ignorance, people tend to be far more understanding of basic influences.

And I would have to actually look up and see if it really was Wilford Brimley who makes the Bloodhound joke that much funnier.
 
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