AtPhantom

@comicsrulebutdbzdoes2 said:

Far less than straight people then...

Oh, that. I thought there was some new development.

What happened to Helena?

It's funny because Books of Doom got Doom's character completely wrong. ;)

This whole thread is silly. There are plenty of people who are more evil and who have created more evil than the Joker. That's not what makes him a good villain.

I don't think the Joker is overrated. I do, however, think he is badly overused. I wouldn't mind seeing him stuck in limbo for the next half a decade or so.

@doomdoomdoom: Perhaps I expressed myself incorrectly. I shouldn't have said the ideas are hard to restrain, the ideas themselves are fine and good. It's just that they tend to be driven into the extreme because America seems to lack the counterbalance to swing the pendulum back. Any idea driven to its logical conclusion becomes toxic, and these are no exception.

There are a lot of factors in the American anti-science thread. Biblical fundamentalism and the perceived clash between religion and science is a big part of it. Another big factor is that America has a very prevalent myth of The Common Man. Your average down-to-Earth working class Joe who gets by by the sweat of his brow and the hard work of his own two hands and is concerned with practical maters is very much an ideal in the American culture (I mean look at Superman and his parents.), which consequently sneers at the perceived Ivory Tower intellectuals who spent their days debating how many angels can dance on the top of a pinhead instead of doing useful things, like building railroads or ships or growing crops. This leads into the democratization of truth and opinion. "We're all equal in this society, therefore my opinion is equally valid just as the other guy's opinion, regardless of how many years that guy has spent studying the subject and how much of an authority on it he is, so I'm free to believe what I want." You can see this in internet debates very often.

All of these ideas draw from the counter-cultural European Renaissance ideas. Protestantism, Calvinism, later Capitalism and generally the rejection of the Church and the old European system of nobility. They're present in other countries as well, but they're so woven into the American national myth that they can be hard to restrain sometimes. I think the past few decades have the rise of the anti-intellectualism due to various socio-economic factors, and it is now reaching a turning point. In other words, we have nowhere to go but up. :)

Like, there's an entire chapter in the book dedicated to the Rohirrim outmaneuvering a Mordor army sent specifically to prevent them from reinforcing Minas Tirith. Likewise the book takes great length to show exactly how the main Mordor army will conquer an impenetrable city, with various siege weapons, different artillery barrages for various effects, probing of defenses and psych warfare. Mordor knows how to wage war.

Also, that's not strategy, that's tactics. Strategy wise, Sauron will run rings around them.

Or not, because wildfire is damn unstable that it's just as likely to blow you up as it is your enemy. In fact, my memory may be faulty, but Tyrion does in fact blow up his own fleet along with Stannis' during the battle. Which was okay in that case because defense of King's Landing was paramount, but a rather terrible idea in general. Also, the amount of Wildfire they had was due to them discovering a huge stash of the thing leftover from King Aerys. They didn't actually make so much of it in a month. Plus, you know, ships are flammable. It doesn't take much to destroy ten of them in narrow confines.

Horses will charge pike walls into their doom if trained properly. Medieval horses were bred to be completely freaking psychotic.

None of that's actually an OOC problem for Mordor. Magical fire is nothing new in LOTR. Numenorean forts like Orthanc and Minas Tirith all have impenetrable magical walls. Magical swords are completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things and also very prevalent in LOTR. Also, superior strategists? Based on what? Like, Sauron doesn't make a single strategic blunder throughout the entire book. The only mistake he actually makes is thinking that his enemies would rather use the ring against him than destroy it. And he wasn't that wrong about that either.

EDIT: Also, the naval chain thing is hardly cutting edge tech. Rome had a chain deployed to guard the Tiber two thousand years ago.

@doomdoomdoom said:

That seems perfectly normal to me. Most of those were probably smokers with the "Well I didn't get cancer, so what do those doctors know anyway?" kind of attitude. It's stupid, but it's the kind of stupid humans are perfectly capable of.

You can't deny that there is a rather vocal anti-science current in America though. There are anti-science loonies everywhere, but very few countries make them senators.