879 karma · joined November 21, 2016
Something like 59 micro-seconds per 10 million frequent flier miles.
A version of this is what I took to be laid out by the 3rd question.
On this basis, the continuation of the soul is irrelevant with regards to the self. The death of the soul would be as immaterial to the self as the soul's continuation to "heaven" would be to consciousness.
This isn't happening.
Intersex children being force-ably sexually re-assigned, that was a thing we did for a long time and which has only barely slowed in recent times. The only sexual modification of children going on is the regularization of the body.
Born and raised on a farm. Worked logging from the age of eighteen. Worked in housing construction and also as a plumber's assistant and as an electrical assistant. And I, too, call bullshit.
Liability laws diminished (This was already the case with most state agriculture laws, so you have a lot of farm kids with injuries from tractors and the like.)
Kids working in bars serving alcohol and not old enough to drink, yet I've seen these exact people scream about a family-friendly drag show held in a bar venue when the bar part is shut down (so no alcohol served), yet they want minors around possibly inebriated adults.
People need a baseline education to participate in modern democracy. They should not be forced out of school by economic circumstances in order to work low-paying jobs for multi-million or billion-dollar companies.
...
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?"
A king is only a social construct. One can still order your head cut off.
Beware, O Sinner, for Who Promises You a Tomorrow?
--St. Alphonsus of Ligouri
Just as we pretend the heat death of the universe shall never arrive and that time (billions upon billions of years is inconceivable to the human mind) we pretended it an infinity, never truly paying heed that there would be a last generation or that we might be among them.
Well, if that's the case, you really shouldn't care. It should be as easy for you to be one as the other, yet those who invoke 'both sides' really only ever seem to be favoring one side.
Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-o...
When your parents are your teachers, the disappointment quotient to your failure isn't double but a power of 2 because, whether they know it or not, their ego is on the line twice over as both teacher and parent.
They tend to start telling you or others that 'you're so mature for your age', where you are expected to be adult in mentality but without the actual ability to act upon that mentality (that is, they want to reference how 'adult' you are --- because of their parenting/education style --- and by definition of being underage, you have no autonomy. So have all the expectations of being or interacting like an adult without any of the autonomy, so you end up in your 20s feeling closer to 40 --- most especially if there is a lack of socialization with children your own age, and you the vast majority of the first two decades of your life around people your parents' or grandparents' age. So when you're in college, you feel alien from everyone who is your own age.)
All of this goes double if the reasons for homeschooling are religious fundamentalism, or add a disbelief in autism or ADHD into the mix.
My experience is that the vast majority of people who homeschool their kids don't do so because the education system is 'failing' but because of control --- my kid isn't going to be infected by evolution, etc (and transness nowadays).
This is, of course, not all homeschools, but it remains by far the majority of what I have seen in person and online.
Also there is a sense of illegitimacy. When your high-school diploma is just a sheet signed by your father stuck in a folder that you have to send out when official transcripts are required, it's a constant worry of if these records are going to be accepted or not, or that this school has no XYZ ID number because there was never any such thing back then, etc. All of the educational records that would you would normally request to be transferred between institutions, you have to manage.
--Thomas Jefferson
My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers.
My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming.
Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Now human language, limited as it already is, is to be is to be humbled before machines that humans have also invented. In our inability to create a machine capable of doing cognitively what humans do, we prefer that humans function as if they had been lobotomized, in deference to our crude machines.
We have built god, and god is stupid, and we bow before him because god has been created, once again, in the image of man.
This is a fundamental problem with the nature of science and the nation state in that modern science is constituted by the nation state, not merely imposing into or upon it.
I am speaking solely of the social situation, the psychology of the times, which in part can be summed up in one word 'conformity' (oh, and not to forget segregation, anti-gay and anti-communist hysteria, etc).
Technologically speaking, if I had the New York Library (or equiv) and a typewriter, I wouldn't take it as too much of a step down.
There is an interview series on youtube, can't remember where, of people who grew up in the 50s. It sounds like a miserable place. There is a reason that housewives were prescribed quaaludes in record numbers and consumed so much alcohol. In most places, women wouldn't be allowed to open bank accounts or get a credit card alone for another two to three decades.
If people want to live one place or another, wear this or that clothing, engage in various aesthetic enactments, etc, that is one thing, but when we whitewash the underlying conditions that were the milieu in which the adopted proto-aesthetic formed, we have to be careful that this does no rehabilitate those underlying conditions.
BDSM is at little risk of this due to the nature of consent that is welded into the community, the attempt to maintain a firm division between fantasy and reality. Palingenetic fantasies of bygone eras, however, seem to have much less of a check in place against their actualization; in fact, their actualization, I would say, is exactly the goal of a certain minority who holds such views. It is the difference between a safe practitioner of BDSM and someone who uses BDSM language as a cover for abuse.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210413173809/https://www.arist...
from one of the authors, which you might or might not find useful.
What Is a Minor Literature? by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.
That is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's something that human consciousness seemingly has to do.
To quote from Mike Alder's Newton's Flaming Laser Sword
> It must also be said that, although one might much admire a genuine Newtonian philosopher if such could found, it would be unwise to invite one to a dinner party. Unwilling to discuss anything unless he understood it to a depth that most people never attain on anything, he would be a notably poor conversationalist. We can safely say that he would have no opinions on religion or politics, and his views on sex would tend either to the very theoretical or to the decidedly empirical, thus more or less ruling out discussion on anything of general interest. Not even Newton was a complete Newtonian, and it may be doubted if life generally offers the luxury of not having an opinion on anything that cannot be reduced to predicate calculus plus certified observation statements. While the Newtonian insistence on ensuring that any statement is testable by observation (or has logical consequences which are so testable) undoubtedly cuts out the crap, it also seems to cut out almost everything else as well.
And as for revolution, context is king. To the Southern slave holders, emancipationists were radicals intent on overthrowing the very foundations of civilization itself. The birth myth of the United States is revolution (though I admit we may have been better off eventually going the route that Canada took).
Of course it's serious stuff, people who try to figure out the world generally do take themselves seriously. A bunch of people sit around and try to figure out what the structures that we create are, how they actually operate, and if that is helpful or harmful to the human beings within those structures, serious stuff indeed. Their conclusions may be right or wrong or a mixture of both. Criticism, however, does not properly take the form of 'this idea is produced by an academic leftist, therefore it is bad and wrong'. Where's the marketplace of ideas in that?
Self-avowed conservative intellectuals have been wrong in the past as well. They have no less wanted to produce 'revolutions'. They have no less produced disastrous and failed revolutions.
And if we want to say that things shouldn't change from what they are now, at all, then that might be the most radical proposition of all, because it has never before happened in history, though many have tried it because they too thought their place in history perfect.