I've been sitting here for some time now thinking of how to type out a rant about all the things I encountered at university(I started a month ago) and the surrounding the city that I flat out hate, and there's quite a lot of things about the modern world that I just can't stand.


The past month has been a twofold experience, on one hand it's a confirmation of my suspicions about the problems with Western Democracy, and on the other it's been a shock at just how little I've grown as a person, at how there can be so much variety and depth to every person around me that I've never noticed and been too incompetent to even ask about. A good analogy for my experience is Simpson's paradox, it's been a month of seeing a world that I despise on a grand scale, yet love on an individual level.


Because despite all the mistakes that I've already made this year and despite how at ends I am with the people around me (for reference I've been trying to go cold turkey on the election and news and politics in general but everyone I know ends up chiming in on it and forcing me to hide what I really think) and despite how isolated and despondent I've felt about everything (I really started to doubt my love of maths as well), I just can't bring myself to hate all these people.


I can't hate my feminist friend despite how horrible feminist policies have been for the world; I can't hate my friends and family who voted for changing the flag despite it being a giant fuck you to the small amount of history we have as a country; I can't hate all the nonwhites I now live with despite them being the cause for my impending minority status and dim housing prospects. I can't hate my gay relative despite them never shutting up about their bullshit.


There's so much history and subtlety to every person that leads them to act the way they do, it's damn near impossible to make a face value judgement of who they are, let alone why they chose the views the hold. But while I'm on this point, I can hate the media; I can hate them for twisting the truth and misleading the public, for pitting the country against itself. for reference I've already pointed out that there are serious issues with accepting refugees - The media loves to portray the situation as innocent women and children fleeing from the horrors created by evil white intervention in their homeland, and that their biggest danger is evil white racists not letting them into their countries; when really the reality is that the refugees ARE FUCKING RAPISTS.

If the media actually told the truth about the refugees, if they ran those stories 24/7 instead of the current "blame whitey" shit then the public opinion would be unanimously opposed to open borders, but instead Europe is still letting them in. In summary, the media is directly responsible for every single rape that has taken place. And that's just the most obvious case, when I still watched the news I'd pick up on some deception every single day, sometimes it was simple miswording or film editing, overtimes it was flat out lies (the most notable being dismissing the fact that my country's housing problem is caused by immigrants and Chinese businesses as casual racism)And to go a step further, this entire political climate is a result of leftism/liberalism/democratic thinking.


A cornerstone of feminism/Marxism is the destruction of the patriarchy/bourgeoisie, the liberation of the oppressed/proletariat, and finally the new age of utopia now that the evil archaic world is gone. Well congratulations, you fucking got it, your ideas are taught at every level of education and in almost every field (even my calculus book is vaguely political, how very convenient that your climate data only goes back 200 years despite the earth's age); the media exclusively reports from your point of view even if (in the case of Europe) it completely contradicts reality; government policy in the Western world is in favor of your policies (lax border control, endless free trade, anything LGBT related); All the music, movies, books and even video games pander to your sensibilities.


And of course, voicing opposition gets you ostracized. All these terror attacks now stem from your fetishizing the concept of a moderate muslim and innocent refugee - If you wanted to help someone you culd always help the people already living in your own country, there's always been plenty of them, yet instead you import troubled people and you import their troubles with them.
—
See I'm stuck in a position where I don't really believe in anything anymore, I've tried being apathetic, tried being optimistic, tried being right wing and left wing and anything in between, or outside of it all; tried being religious, tried being atheist, tried ignoring the world, tried learning everything about the world (The further I get into maths, the less real everything feels despite how much more I know about everything)  - And I know I'm young , that a lot of this is just angsty venting and that despite moving out of my home and living on the other-side of the country I'm still not really grown up, that I've still got a stupidly long way to go before I can say I'm not just a dumb kid anymore, that there's still lots of things that I'm not even aware of their existence - But I also know that I've learned enough from experience and theory to make a good approximate guess about things.

What I see is that the political system doesn't currently exist to improve people's lives, any benefits to humanity comes about in spite of democracy and in spite of egalitarianism, not because of it. Immigration hasn't improved my country due to some innate superiority of removing white people, but because the people who came over were simply good people. My country is peaceful and functioning not because democracy is capable of producing an effective government (it's laughable just how bad our current one has been), but because all the individual people involved work their hardest in spite of bureaucratic bullshit.
—
To summarize this mess of a post, I get the undeniable feeling that the world has turned against me; sometimes it's a subtle change of words and sometimes it's an overt attack on my existence. It makes me mad as hell that I've ended up in this position and I'm even more mad that everyone before me and around me let the world end up like this. But at the same time I don't want to end up hating everything. Even in the mess of a city that I now live in there's plenty of good things and good people, even among the groups of people that i dislike the most there's still significant amounts of common ground between us; hell, on this site I agree with people more often than not despite being an abrasive dick to everyone.

I'm terrible at communicating my thoughts in any medium, but I needed to get this off my chest, bottling things up turns me into a horrible person and I want to change that but right now I haven't a clue what to do. All I really know is that I'm opposed to the modern world and I'm opposed to being a horrible person, beyond that I've only got a vague idea of improving myself  that's had mixed results so far.

Thanks to anyone that bothered to read that.
Kudos to Sandtrap for formatting, notepad killed the formatting and my enthusiasm for fixing it.

Are now free:

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

"Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them," Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. "Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal."

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that's because it kinda is. But in this story, it's not just the poor who don't have access to scientific papers - journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand - with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

Don't get us wrong, journal publishers have also done a whole lot of good - they've encouraged better research thanks to peer review, and before the Internet, they were crucial to the dissemination of knowledge.

But in recent years, more and more people are beginning to question whether they're still helping the progress of science. In fact, in some cases, the 'publish or perish' mentality is creating more problems than solutions, with a growing number of predatory publishers now charging researchers to have their work published - often without any proper peer review process or even editing.

"They feel pressured to do this," Elbakyan wrote in an open letter to the New York judge last year. "If a researcher wants to be recognised, make a career - he or she needs to have publications in such journals."

That's where Sci-Hub comes into the picture. The site works in two stages. First of all when you search for a paper, Sci-Hub tries to immediately download it from fellow pirate database LibGen. If that doesn't work, Sci-Hub is able to bypass journal paywalls thanks to a range of access keys that have been donated by anonymous academics (thank you, science spies).

This means that Sci-Hub can instantly access any paper published by the big guys, including JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier, and deliver it to you for free within seconds. The site then automatically sends a copy of that paper to LibGen, to help share the love. 

It's an ingenious system, as Simon Oxenham explains for Big Think:

    "In one fell swoop, a network has been created that likely has a greater level of access to science than any individual university, or even government for that matter, anywhere in the world. Sci-Hub represents the sum of countless different universities' institutional access - literally a world of knowledge."

That's all well and good for us users, but understandably, the big publishers are pissed off. Last year, a New York court delivered an injunction against Sci-Hub, making its domain unavailable (something Elbakyan dodged by switching to a new location), and the site is also being sued by Elsevier for "irreparable harm" - a case that experts are predicting will win Elsevier around $750 to $150,000 for each pirated article. Even at the lowest estimations, that would quickly add up to millions in damages.

But Elbakyan is not only standing her ground, she's come out swinging, claiming that it's Elsevier that have the illegal business model.

"I think Elsevier’s business model is itself illegal," she told Torrent Freak, referring to article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits".

She also explains that the academic publishing situation is different to the music or film industry, where pirating is ripping off creators. "All papers on their website are written by researchers, and researchers do not receive money from what Elsevier collects. That is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold," she said.

Elbakyan hopes that the lawsuit will set a precedent, and make it very clear to the scientific world either way who owns their ideas.

"If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge," she said. "We have to win over Elsevier and other publishers and show that what these commercial companies are doing is fundamentally wrong."

To be fair, Elbakyan is somewhat protected by the fact that she's in Russia and doesn't have any US assets, so even if Elsevier wins their lawsuit, it's going to be pretty hard for them to get the money.

Still, it's a bold move, and we're pretty interested to see how this fight turns out - because if there's one thing the world needs more of, it's scientific knowledge. In the meantime, Sci-Hub is still up and accessible for anyone who wants to use it, and Elbakyan has no plans to change that anytime soon.

Blacks make up roughly 13% of the US population, so the actors who won Oscars should reflect that if no discrimination is involved, going chronologically from 1995 we have:

1997: Cuba Gooding Jr.
2002: Denzel Washington
2002: Halle Berry
2005: Jamie Foxx
2005: Morgan Freeman
2007: Forest Whitaker
2007: Jennifer Hudson
2010: Mo'Nique
2012: Octavia Spencer
2014: Lupita Nyong'o

That is, (10/80) * 100% = 12.5% of actors who won Oscars are Black, funny how 12.5% ~ 13%

As for directors
1999: Steven Spielberg
2000: Sam Mendes
2003: Roman Polanski
2008: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
2012: Michel Hazanavicius

(5/20) * 100% = 25% Jewish, despite Jews only being 2.2% of the population.

#OscarsSoJewish

Sometime ago I stumbled across the blog of the creator of the Dilbert comics Scott Adams, and reading through his series on Trump has been very interesting and more importantly useful. The idea of taking specific view points of realty as filters to explain why events happen is very similar to the axiomatic method of constructing maths, you take a few given things as truth and build the rest of the picture on top of those truths. The Master Persuader filter for instance has to make me rethink my support for Trump, on the one hand I've been trying to pin down my beliefs for over a year now and Trump just happens to align with them, but on the other hand I've gone from thinking he was a bad joke to being caught up in the excitement of his campaign.

And what's more interesting is coming up with your own filters:
With the "Humans don't have that much of an impact" filter, suddenly fracking, global warming, and ocean pollution become non-issues.
With the "Humans DO have that much of an impact" filter, they become problems.
With the "all people are equal filter" I can quickly recreate liberal, multicultural, and feminist talking points with ease despite being fundamentally opposed to them.
With the "Hitler dindu nuffin wrong" filter, everything becomes in some way touched by God's chosen people.
With the "I can create my own sense of morality from logic and reason" filter, I become an atheist.
With the "I'm getting pretty arrogant there" filter, I become a Christian.

I feel like this is an important mental tool that I've been working towards but wouldn't have gotten to otherwise, does this concept sound like common sense to any of you?
—
Now speaking as a trump supporter, if the Master Persuader filter really is the correct one, and moreover if Trump really does become the president, then I would take that as definitive proof of how much of a joke democracy is; The entire democratic process becomes a reality tv show.

Explain this shit to me:

It's 2016 now!

I hope you've made your new year's resolution.

~Enjoy~

I've never seen one before in my life; Fruit look up near the sun and tell us if you can see one.

A scrawny 63kg guy like me was able to lift 64kg after only a year's training and a buzz cut. I hope all of you are training in some way.

It pissed on everything and by the end I felt like an old man, is that meant to happen?

I was quite enjoying fighting monsters in my dream and then that little adorable piece of shit climbs in through my window, just to wake me up so that I can open the bedroom door, just so it can go out again through the front door.

Discuss cats.

The problem I've always seen with any kind of serious discussion both irl and online, is that  people don't go into a discussion with the intention of learning whether or not they're wrong, to most people a discussions is just a method of preaching and confirmation bias.

Now over the past year I've learned to see the world from a rigorous, mathematically logical perspective; that is, I try to break every idea down to it's most fundamental axioms, and only use logically valid arguments to draw further implications from those axioms. Because of this is I am always willing to admit that any concept, any implications, any idea on which I base my views, can be proven wrong in a systematic way, and that those ideas should be discarded in favor of ones that can be proven correct. I am not quite at the level where I could convey all the subtleties of this method, so I can only ask that you pick up a book on mathematical logic and see where it takes you.

What I'm getting at is that the only way you could stand to gain unique and useful insights from discussions, is if you either used this method or one that is logically equivalent to it, because anything else just leads to soapboxing and straw-manning and just nothing productive. And before you say it this isn't me trying to claim that I'm smarter than anyone here, the only agenda I push is that mathematics is not boring, and that the world is far more interesting once you understand it.

I mean just looking over this board I already see people talking at eachother, not with eachother. There's no goddamn point to being here if we're not going to try and understand where eachother's ideas come from, and there's no point in preaching your own ideas if you yourself can't reconstruct them all from starting axioms.

So what exactly are you trying to get out your discussions?