Soap and dirt

I’m all for mandatory military training. Deployment is a separate issue.

Ask my wife to take the month off, or quit her job, then spend 25 days doing whatever she wants. The last week we can spend with my family.

Art

Yeah if I had an isolated hyperbolic time chamber that I couldn’t use to do anything “productive”, it would be mostly reading. I have like 200 books and I’m in the middle of at least 10% of them.

one thing he said was that he didn’t consider belief a binary as in that you either believe something or don’t. He viewed all beliefs as a continuum. You can believe one thing 10% and another thing 90%, but he wouldn’t let me pin him down as to whether he “believed” any particular thing or not.

That seems pretty reasonable. The only thing I believe 100% is that my consciousness exists in some way. I’m about 99.9% certain that reality is roughly as I experience it (I have a physical body, the things I witness correlate to an external world, I’m not a brain in a box or in some kind of simulation, etc.). Every other belief carries some higher degree of uncertainty.

I think of how much evidence I’d need to believe something. If someone told me their dad was childhood friends with Bill Clinton, I probably wouldn’t believe them, but all it would take to convince me would be a yearbook and a couple old photos. If someone told me they had a tea party with Sasquatch, they could show me a video and I’d still assume it was faked.

This seems like a healthy perspective, to me. The problem pops up when you start assigning high confidence levels to unlikely claims, or spend too long obsessing over low confidence claims. I suppose aliens could run the government, but even 10% confidence is way too high.

Well, not nobody

I think that really depends on how you define “religious” and “Marxist”.

When you say “religious”, do you just mean belief in a higher power, or dogmatic adherence to a specific church, or something in between?

When you say “Marxist”, do you mean someone who thinks his hypothesis of class struggle inevitably leading to a classless, stateless society is accurate, or someone who totally agrees with everything he ever said, or something in between?

My personal belief is, roughly, that every consciousness is a manifestation, or reflection, of a universe-spanning cosmic consciousness that you may as well call “God”. Not only does that not conflict with the end-state of Marxism, but I’d argue that it’s particularly synergetic. If we’re all aspects of the same “thing”, it only makes sense that we should aspire to cooperate freely. Even the teachings of Jesus center around mutual aid and cooperation, and there are claims that the early Christians operated under borderline communism.

On the other hand, the institutions that arise nominally under the pretense of divine mandate tend to be extremely hierarchical and exploitative. Those institutions pretty clearly prioritize adherence to church dogma over individual connection with the divine. There’s your opiate: people blindly following orders because some guy in an impressive hat told them God would punish them if they didn’t.

So yeah, you need to clearly define your terms, and confirm that the people claiming to be “religious” “Marxists” are using those terms the same way you are.

Additionally, every neuron fires as your brain gives out, so during that personal eternity your life is “flashing before your eyes”. If this reflection on your life fills you with contentment, that is heaven. If it fills you with shame and regret, that is hell.

I’ve never done opiates, but that sounds kinda like just the right amount of alcohol and weed. It’s a tough needle to thread, but I have fond memories of nights drifting off to sleep perfectly content, perfectly warm and comfortable. The brain is tingly and fuzzy, the body almost feels like it’s on the edge of vertigo, in a cozy falling-twisting sort of way; like sinking into an impossibly soft mattress that just keeps going. Warm but not sweaty, calm but not numb, everything exactly as it should be.

"what would the universe look like if the word ‘fish’ started with ‘p’?”

More tie dye, for one.

Altoid sours

They actually feel better, economic crashes are a great time to acquire assets at a discount.

Really depends on how you define “magical”. It was also very much legitimate proto-chemistry.

70% of Canadians live south of the 49th Parallel, the northern border of the US.

As to the latter, I’m roughly satisfied in the department of things that kids would preclude.

As to the former, that’s part of the reason I want kids. I care about the people who will live in the future. I want a better life for them.

I can do what I can to improve the world in my life, but someone needs to carry the torch. Kids are an opportunity to teach some subset of the future population my values. I want to learn from my parents’ mistakes and my own life to make better kids that become better parents, who make better kids who become better parents, so on and so forth ad infinitum.

The intro to Idiocracy can be generalized: the world will be populated by the children of those who have children. If only the worst people reproduce, the future will be worse. Unless the ethical people reproduce and pass on their values, those values will die out. If we want the future to be better, we have to have kids, teach them to be better, and teach them to teach their kids to be better.

It irrationally bothers me that his eye isn’t lined up with the viewfinder of the camera

I made this mistake too once. Skinhead ≠ Nazi. Skinheads were originally just working class kids with a particular aesthetic, generally ska fans.

Nazi skinheads are a subsect that were/are disavowed, and actively fought, by the larger skinhead community. Far left, actively anti-fascist skinheads were/are definitely a thing.

A bygone era of a simpler Internet. Time marches on, so it goes.

Takes me back