Dudevid

Not sure if anyone's posted this yet, but here's the link to the broadcast:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21039062

I hope this works for international duders. BBC don't usually block that kind of thing.

3,513. 78 platinums. 98.41% avg. completion. (needs to go up 1.59% before I'll be happy about that. I have a disease. :¬().

I have no religion. I feel that residing at the core of every religion is a disposition destructive to the coexistence of the human species – namely:

1. One should believe an idea without evidence.
2. One should take pride in and feel sensitive about ideas one has procured by way of point one.
3. One should take ideas procured by point one off of the table of rational discourse, and feel personally offended, given one's pride and sensitivity, by logical challenges to said ideas.

What's particularly perilous about this disposition, and about the notion of religious tolerance, is that ideas believed without evidence have no standard by which to determine their relative merit. This standard can never be morality, for these ideas are compatible with a morality preached by the religions out of which they are borne, and religious tolerance necessitates moral relativism. This means that all ideas believed without evidence, regardless of how incompatible, should be granted equal consideration and tolerated to the same degree.

But you'll notice a particularly intolerant class of people are the religious, for their ideas believed without evidence are inconsistent with other ideas, such as those of science and, importantly, those of adherents of other religions also believed without evidence. This inconsistency, intensified by a pride and sensitivity in one's ideas believed without evidence and an offense taken by efforts to criticise or undermine them, is what causes wars, genocide, crusades, inquisitions, and all manners of religiously motivated barbarism, and it's all sanctioned by God.

If you regard yourself as a tolerant, liberal religious person, then know that by subscribing to a religion and committing even one relatively benign instance of belief in an idea without evidence, such as "Jesus was reincarnated two days after his death", you are guilty of precisely the same infraction as those committing malign instances, such as "Homosexuals should be stoned to death". You are both merely believing an idea without evidence, and these are both ideas your gods have allegedly imparted to you. If you then proceed to be proud of and sensitive about your idea believed without evidence, if you demand it be respected and tolerated, if you are offended if it is subjected to rational discourse and criticism, then you are demanding the same rights for people who harbour ideas far more destructive to humanity, and you make these destructive ideas far more difficult to openly discuss and criticise.

The only way to be fair, and to tolerate every idea believed without evidence to precisely the same degree, is to reject all of them and to tolerate not one of them. Evidence is universal, and ideas substantiated by evidence can be shared by every human being without inconsistency and conflict. That is why I have no religion.

I'm so with you all on wasted potential. I figured the only way the consumer can influence Ubisoft and force their hand on this is by voting with their wallets; I didn't and won't buy Revelations – despite the fact I'd probably quite enjoy it – in hope that tailing off sales will bring the franchise in new directions. I guess we can only be blamed for buying up Brotherhood in such quantities.

Well, say what you will about Ubisoft, but at least this will almost assuredly result in RedLynx games being multi-platform.

Alex Navarro's snarky cynicism can get a bit tiresome at times. Navarro's effectively saying Fondaumiere is being a hypocrite by bemoaning how expensive games are and then going on to demand more people buy his game despite that. Clearly Navarro's got it backwards; Fondaumiere's saying there's a bunch of people who didn't buy the game, and in an attempt to answer why, he's proffering that games are too expensive. The guy really doesn't deserve this kind of snickering sardonicism. It's not good journalism, and I don't expect it from Giant Bomb. At least Patrick Klepek wouldn't put out trite like this.

I adore the art style and sound design. A game that feels like this should never be called "Black Knight Sword". They need something akin to what the name "LittleBigPlanet" achieved. What is it with Grasshopper and names as of late? Though, I'll give them "Lollipop Chainsaw".

As many have affirmed, mentions of "under God" and "In God We Trust" were adopted during Eisenhower's reign in the 1950s. I would add that the propagation of religion and its coalescing into American national identity was an enterprise of the Republican Party to keep the populace spellbound and docile in the face of the "threat" of Communism, and the embellishment of such a threat supported that purpose. It served as a means of union for the people, instilled greater piety and patriotism, and also deflected attention from the illicit affairs of the privileged elite to the external menace of the Soviet ideal.
 
America is the only country on Earth with secular ideals ingrained deeply into its constitution. Your founding fathers inaugurated your great nation on paradigms such as the separation of church and state. Yet, decades on, the staple American citizen decries desecration of their cultural identity if not bequeathed the federally-allocated allowance of admission of religious dogmatism. I'm not attacking religion as a whole; under your right to the freedom of speech and expression one can assuredly practise and preach whatever supernatural ideology they subscribe to. My point is that there's nothing at all fundamentally American about pronouncements of adherence to Judeo-Christian doctrine; it's merely a political tool crowbarred into your national consciousness which has sadly stuck.

Opinions can be persuasive in infinitely varying degrees, but only the assertions upon which they are based and the process of logical reasoning by which they are established can be said to be true or false, correct or incorrect. If one begins with the premise "the Jews killed Jesus" – which itself can be argued to be correct or incorrect – one can exercise their rational faculties and establish the opinion that as a consequence all Jews should be exterminated. This opinion is not correct nor incorrect; it follows logical reasoning with an appropriate inference devoid of fallacy. By all means, the opinion is morally reprehensible and, bluntly, fucking disgusting, but not incorrect, nor can any opinion be said to be.

Straight vodka. The good stuff, though: Jean Marc XO, U'Luvka or Kauffman. Smirnoff is vile, and anyone saying Grey Goose is the best vodka around is ignorant.