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"Donning a mask"

These attempts are pretty weak, for the record. I can't even riff off them, they aren't clever enough.

One of the secrets to my lack of assailability is that I don't make up stuff, so, I can never get caught in lies about my life, etc.

Now that you've ventured into the creepy area of imagining how I must live (for lack of anything better to use as a retort), I'm sad to say that I can now confirm that Shadowtanuki is also smarter than you. I guess "dawning a mask" and "bro" helped, as well,

You should learn that, when people aren't being paid to pretend they care about your approval or opinion, they actually don't really.

Oh no.... the dunce says I'm a dunce....
I am wounded so deeply.... 
How can I ever regain your approval...

Hey wait, if I'm lumped in with Optimised I don't mind - we both understand the difference between chemical and biological evolution, unlike someone else I know!

Btw - isn't that harassment you're engaging in now? 
Of course I never took your standards seriously, but you sure seemed to earlier!

Carry onward!

I didn't say you were a dunce. The statement was relative, not absolute. Be more precise in your thinking and you'll do better in life.

Your over-usage of dunce as an insult is also telling. You may not realize you've done it 4-5 times now over the past few months.

Maybe a moratorium on "dunce", "keep trying", and "carry onward" is in order. You're going to burn permanent pathways in your corpus callosum or something...

comment: I didn't say you were a dunce. The statement was relative, not absolute. Be more precise in your thinking and you'll do better in life. 
translation: prioritize pretenses over meaning, entertain these little games with managers, act like an LMNOP and you'll do better in life. 
response: Seems true, actually. At first glance... but then again.... we both wound up here on chess.com debating one another, didn't we? Seems we actually wound up in the exact same place!

We're not in the same place. That's not how the internet works. I can be in a completely different location/environment, with a completely different background, amount of character, sense of integrity, etc. Now this freedom of interaction is a great boon to mankind...but it comes with downsides. You would be one of them.

But your entire mind is absorbed in this conversation - you've left your body behind, you're just refreshing the page. You're in the same mental space as I am right now. And if you had any integrity.... you wouldn't be sucked into these internet debates with me, would you? You'd have the mental discipline to go to sleep right now... you'd have a woman in your life that actually wanted you to come to bed. But obviously you don't have that... 
If the HR department was truly the source of ethics for mankind you'd have a strong argument - you surely have very strong character by that standard. However, when it comes to religion... you were actually taking an antagonistic stance toward that earlier. Which means you don't behold yourself to religious values. At least not for any coherent reason - maybe because you've inherited them. 
This is one of the ironies of atheists / agnostics - because they don't have any serious ethical standard to measure themselves against, since they've rejected it... they often wind up completely convinced of their own outstanding moral virtue. That's just a function of your ignorance, it means absolutely nothing... how do you even define your ethics? Can you give a coherent standard that's more than self-interest or conformity ?
Just imagine having your own head that far up your own a$$ you are absolutely convinced you're a beacon of moral virtue for the world. That's how power tripping manager types think though, folks - it's the way it works. It's like Neitzsche said - the atheist / agnostic is beyond good and evil, infact it is through his own ascendance and supremacy he overcomes the concept of good and evil.

Sure can. Not to you, though. That would be a significant waste of time.

I'm no beacon. But again, relativity. You're in the gutter somewhere with your avatar, so to you, yes, I guess I would appear something like a beacon. It's a bitter feeling, I suppose.

In terms of women, I don't really discuss it because they aren't objects/trophies, but rest assured I do just fine.

In terms of management, I kept getting promoted because when layoffs and mergers would happen and other teams would average 20%-30% turnover on the people left behind, my teams had a 90%-95% retention rate. I did this a few ways...by inspiring loyalty among good people, and by making sure the universally negative people were not around to mess everything up for everybody else. So, I'm well acquainted with the likes of you.

Mental space...I'm replying to you during load times while I am warping around the Euclid Galaxy . So no, we're not in the same "mindlessly refreshing the page gnashing my teeth" space.

So that means I might get muted for writing the author’s name who wrote A Christmas Carol?? (Just google the author’s name, I’m too afraid of getting muted)

I want to make a comment upon this whole situation, and I totally agree with at minimum one person in this thread. However, I'm not gonna risk getting downvoted into absolute oblivion. Never know when the green pawn's gonna try and en passant you into muteland.

"I'm no beacon. But again, relativity. You're in the gutter somewhere with your avatar, so to you, yes, I guess I would appear something like a beacon.""I did this a few ways...by inspiring loyalty among good people, and by making sure the universally negative people were not around to mess everything up for everybody else. So, I'm well acquainted with the likes of you."

But you do believe you're a beacon. Of course you deny that because it's an unpopular thing to admit, but every other post is full of self-aggrandizement, you have managed to compliment yourself in almost every post, often multiple times. I could just go back through your posts and quote all the times - when you're not describing your own virtue you're implying it by proxy - any random post. This is how you think. It doesn't matter if you deny it, I can see it.

And it makes sense - it's just like Neitzsche said, you dispensed with God and in the process threw out the very foundation of ethics, and so now... what standard do you assess yourself by? The HR departments standard? No, on a deeper level... it's your own personal ascension - Neitzsche called this the ubermensche - and through this self-aggrandizement you strive to go beyond good and evil. This is essentially why you support the authorities - you simply aim to be the authority, for authorities sake. I can see you do it verbally in your posts. Not surprisingly, you couldn't be bothered to make a case for a secular ethics - you're willing to debate all the other irrelevant points, why not that one? It seems relevant given how you drone on about the good people and the bad people - well what does that even mean when you have no foundation of ethics? You just take good and evil for granted - but they do not actually matter, you're beyond them... so I'm not surprised by your lack of an argument - you don't care enough about the matter to make one! But your secular ethics is gonna be, just as you say, a completely relative concept, and one that's ultimately meaningless. You aren't going to appeal to some transcendent and unifying standard, you can't, there isn't one. Infact, most of your ethics you actually inherited from Christian civilization. But it's going to be alot of subjectivity, alot of consensus and norms, alot of self-aggrandizement... and that's why every other post you make are full of both. You actually need that aggrandizement to justify your arguments. In a way your "grandeur" is the point of the entire argument. But when I drill in and look... this idea of your grandeur falls apart, it's nothing.

I really do not envy the way you think about yourself. It is so foolish and so pathologically self absorbed.

"Mental space...I'm replying to you during load times while I am warping around the Euclid Galaxy wink. So no, we're not in the same "mindlessly refreshing the page gnashing my teeth" space."

I don't know what this poetry is supposed to argue, but I can just observe your actions - here you are, with me, debating back and fourth for pages, as you've done before... And infact, here you've been for the last 10 years or so on this forum, according to Optimized... and this is the sort of debate you find yourself in often, that's what he said earlier... So how little significance does this place really have when you've spent that long here arguing with people? How above it are you, actually...?

Keep trying!

What a complete load of crap. Optimissed told you I am prone to self-aggrandizing? Lol. That's rich.

Self-aggrandizing would call for me to be spouting off stuff all the time. Except that I don't mention details about my life or accomplishments unless somebody is being a jerk and makes ridiculous assumptions I need to set straight. The way you did with your "power tripping manager" chip on your shoulder, for example.

Are you really going to tell me that you can't figure out what my "poetry" was talking about? Let me spell it out...while you were "in the space" in your head that you claimed we were both in, I was playing a video game, and only reading your garbage while the game was loading data between star systems, and pausing to reply if you posted something new.

You imagine that this back and forth is a struggle on both ends. It is not. But if you want to keep posting blather for me to pick apart, be my guest. I make a habit of mirroring people's malice back at them (minus the "dunces" and harassment you prefer, that will eventually get you muted). As you said, I've been doing it for a decade here, and for 4 decades in total. I don't care about how I am perceived here, and I may make pointed commentary, but I don't cross any lines. I have an ethical framework, as it turns out, one that does not come from anything but my own conscience (and no, I am not beholden to anyone or any organized religion for it).

So, I'm not going anywhere...it's draw or lose for you. Those are your two outcomes. If you want to be another poster to trash your own reputation here for a decade, again, be my guest. I will call you out every single time you get into it with anyone on the forums, and I will hold up your behavior for everyone to take a gander until you are just sick of it and either change your behavior, or leave.

Think of me like the guy that comes to the park to calmly oppose the crazy anti-government guy with the bullhorn on a soapbox, ever single day, week, month, and year until the guy finally leaves the park because he can't get his message out unopposed and he's just tired of the hassle. There's no rancor. See, I just don't like malicious behavior in people, and I'm a retired systems design and analysis guy who loves to dissect things that are wrong/dysfunctional and try to fix them.

I've got all the time in the world. It will be calm, measured, and incessant, for as long as it takes for you to change...and you will change. Even if it is just to be stressed out before posting something you know I am going to call you out on. Ask your new friend about posting about his IQ or his "paranormal abilities". He is constantly aware that I am going to take him to task when he puts people down by claiming to be smarter than everybody else, or when he claims to be some kind of chosen one with powers that naturally place him above other human beings.

I don't do this via harassment, and it's not personal, I don't use /follow, I will never PM you. There's no stalking. I won't seek you out at all, but I will run into you anyway because you like to post diatribes full of invective when you are on the attack, like most trolls do. At any point, you can drop the malice and start being a better human being, and I will have no bad behavior to point out anymore. I don't really attack people, I just point out their bad behavior, over and over and over until they stop. The people I call out are not special. I don't have a nemesis. I don't hold a grudge, or rage about it, or get stressed out, so I can do this pretty much forever. Ragequitting is not in my nature.

That is what you are signing on for. It's 2025 now, how many years are you planning to post here? Average life expectancy says I will probably be around til 2050, 2060 if you are unlucky.

How/why are y'all writing so much... it's a forum question, not a required 10-page-essay on the mysteries of life (not saying writing a lot is bad).

Dio, I'm sure the whole community would appreciate it if you stopped being here just to "mirror people's malice back at them". Although you seem to be unaware of it, what you are describing sounds a lot like premeditated harassment.

What you call "invective" and a diatribe might just be someone else here stating an opinion, and promising to always be there to shame it and call it out is kind of a threat.

I think what Dio is trying to say is that you have 5 threads complaining about the site. Do you have anything nice to say?

Yeah, I have nice things to say about people who are actually here to play chess and have a good time, not people who plan to camp out on the forums and harass people until 2050. I'm saying that the website should allow freer speech if they are going to offer forums. Dio has been here for going on 12 years, and all he does is talk. He should agree with me.

He's ex military, maybe you should leave him alone.

Point taken

I actually feel satisfied now knowing that, in your response to my elaborate explanation as to why you have this need for self-aggrandizement, you deny it but then couldn't even help but go on for paragraphs with yet more self aggrandizement... And that's because, again, your notion of morality is entirely contingent on the self. Which you even admitted in your post. You've ceded everything I just said, it's hilarious. But you're in a catch 22, since it's hard for you to make a moral argument without doing this. But without any morality... it's hard to make an argument at all.

"Self-aggrandizing would call for me to be spouting off stuff all the time. "

No, only when you need to make a moral argument. Spouting off all the time doesn't benefit you. And otherwise you can just pursue your self interest in your life, in the choices you make.

re conscience: How is the reasoning of your conscience formed, exactly...? Was its reason inherited, or were you born with your conscience as it is? Does the consensus view of the crowd inform your conscience? Is your conscience influenced by your personal desires? You don't know. But it's ok, I've been explaining it for you. It's conscience which leads you to comform with authorities to violate / disregard peoples natural rights in pursuit of your own ascension. Conscience alone is mere subjectivity, and it can be derailed just as human reason can go astray... and infact, you can hardly define conscience.

You're not beholden to organized religion, but you're also not beholden to transcendental philosophy, or the higher level reasoning you mischaracterize as dogma, or to mystery religions or Jungian psychoanalysis, or to the divine source and destiny of all things. Hence when I ask you how did the universe originate you have nothing to say, you just ignore it... Likewise you fail to distinguish between biological and chemical evolution, because you ignore the divine reasoning. These things were necessary for you to justify your statements, but you don't pursue them, you're content with ignorance. With organized religion you just threw the baby out and claimed it was bathwater.

"Are you really going to tell me that you can't figure out what my "poetry" was talking about? Let me spell it out...while you were "in the space" in your head that you claimed we were both in, I was playing a video game, and only reading your garbage while the game was loading data between star systems, and pausing to reply if you posted something new."

Apparently it's beyond comprehension that a person online would have no idea about the video game you're playing at the moment. Self-absorbed much?
You sure paused a while though, didn't you? Throughout these pages you've written a chapter worth of material, you must have spent an hour at least typing all these pages. It seems to me your video game took the back seat to this debate. Not as casual and ambivalent as you'd like to seem, I'm afraid. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

"Ask your new friend about posting about his IQ or his "paranormal abilities". He is constantly aware that I am going to take him to task when he puts people down by claiming to be smarter than everybody else"

This is actually the most interesting thing you've ever said, though the idea didn't come from your mind, not surprisingly. @Optimissed is correct as far as the paranormal goes, I've witnessed such things myself many times. Actually, this is far more common and known than you realize... there is an entire subculture of people aware of this sort of thing, who do this. Now, most of them are confused imbeciles dabbling in things they do not remotely understand, so you run into all kinds of superstitions and perversions of what's happening, but even so. It's actually a rapidly growing subculture due to the spread of esoteric knowledge online. And infact, in other countries such as india... it's part of their traditions and quite a large constituent. In the West you're much more insulated from a subculture like that.

Just to make an even more radical claim - this is actually an empirically observable phenomenon, I've tested it many times. It's completely reproducible... I don't refer to it as paranormal, if you want a secular explanation... macro scale quantum retrocausation combined with Penrose's theory on microtubules comes close. It's incomplete, but if you want someone who talks about this at length - Deepak Choprah is probably the most well known person. Though probably the most serious physical explanation is with the cognitive theoretic model of the universe by Chris Langan. And Langan is actually off record stating he's witnessed many paranormal phenomenon himself, and developed his theory of physics as a way to explain that experience. Unfortunately you will run into alot of confused babble on this topic, simply because people are lacking an explanation, lacking the language and the coherent mental framework to describe such events.. and there's alot of tradition and dogma carrying forward, inherited from cults, that pollutes peoples understanding. But actually... MIT has proven the occurrence of macro scale quantum events in experiments, the science is actually slowly converging on an explanation. Go watch the first quantum physics video in the course from MIT available on youtube, the professor will describe to you in the introductory video the experiment he conducted where he proved the occurrence of a macro scale quantum event (in the past some people argued this was impossible). What secular ignoramuses such as yourself get wrong about Deepak is they assume he's perverting science to his philosophy.... and many are also pseudo-skeptics. No, Deepak is looking to science to explain his lived experience. He's just unable to actually convey to you the full depths of his experience, because you are so shut down mentally you've completely pushed the possibility of such things out of your mind. But probably if you were to actually witness and comprehend some paranormal event... well one of 2 things would happen, a) you'd simply refuse to believe it and put it out of your mind again, literally just forget it happened, b) your whole mindset and worldview would be shattered. Especially once you realize the effect is reproducible, and you can invoke such events at will.

I'm more of the opinion every human being is in principle able to mentally invoke and experience such things, however due to the rigid dogmas people hold, including the conventional understanding of causation and models of physics which do not model things like will or cognition, many people actually preclude themselves from the possibility of ever doing so. And you would fall into that category. You could say that intelligence is useful insofar as it enables people to see past dogmas and maintain their own independent understanding, clearing the way for such an experience, but I really think it's a mostly natural phenomenon that hasn't been documented hardly (though in the quantum field equations there does need to be a transcendental function to coordinate things on a macro scale for this to be possible). And again, there are cults who have been doing divination in various form for thousands of years.

I could tell Optimized was much more intelligent than you simply because he recognizes key distinctions, like the difference between chemical and biological evolution you overlooked earlier. And this conversation is probably already multiple levels above where your head is capable of going...

Keep trying though!

Thanks for exposing yourself as the crackpot you are. It's amazing how people like you hide yourselves, and then the crazy just all pours out when you happen to hit the right button. Enjoy your future drubbings, and not just from me after posting such load of pseudo-scientific garbage.

Intelligence is useful insofar as it precludes sane people from falling for the same stuff that mankind used to naively believe centuries and millennia ago. The newest way that crackpots do this is by weaving science into their narratives. It's a form of willful ignorance and avoidance of reality.

I don't have to read the MIT paper to guarantee you that it does not make the leap you have taken with it. That's all you, connecting things that are real into your dream world via crazy dots.