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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 06/16/2009 : 13:34:38
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Link
"When a nagging child is overheard arguing his case for mom or dad to buy him a new video game, one particularly desperate talking point comes up again and again: this will totally improve my hand-eye coordination. If you're a parent who feels like enrolling your gifted child into some kind of chess club because it seems like a rewarding alternative to video games, consider the observations of Reuben Fine, psychoanalyst and author of The Psychology of the Chess Player originally published in 1956:
"The profuse phallic symbolism of chess provides some fantasy gratification of the homosexual wish, particularly the desire for mutual masturbation."
Chess is a hopelessly trivial human enterprise, which can't help your child think "several moves in advance" about difficult scenarios in the real world. It certainly won't get him off the Internet long enough to get laid. Playing chess for hours at a time only helps you play better chess for hours at a time -- and that's all it will ever do. Most people genuinely believe that chess is a perfect, flawless game incapable of creating controversy -- a hobbyist pursuit so ultimately pure and clean that no evil thoughts could ever rise from the board. In truth, most of us are in it for the money."
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 06/16/2009 : 15:01:34 [Permalink]
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| Every so often, Hollywood happily shits out another movie featuring chess as one of its lesser themes. Chess boards are commonly invoked when hacky scriptwriters can't architect more visually appealing metaphors for two opposing forces of good and evil led by individuals with colliding intellects. Snippets of dialog between characters engaged in a "battle of wills" are often as trite as they are terse, with characters delivering stinging quips followed by the word "check". Examples include Independence Day, Se7en, CopyCat, Hackers, Mr. Holland's Opus, Phenomenon, The Interpreter, Dawn of the Dead, Pearl Harbor, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Seventh Seal, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and the scatterbrained last season of Twin Peaks, to name but a few. |
The Seventh Seal is probably the most iconic. Interesting article.
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 06/16/2009 : 15:12:05 [Permalink]
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Oh, that's a thoroughly enjoyable article. I've watched the chess sharks playing on San Francisco's Market Street.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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Scattershots: Chess
