My stomach rumbles in some foreign language, my heart is being snapped at my something I can't see and my dreams are being eaten by power-hungry glorymongers.

RoosterSheep · 1 year

I think you removed compassion from your infinity equation.

jewche_bag · 1 year

As a potential schizophrenic I feel as if I may have insight that's valuable to somebody - not intended to attack or demean anyone, but I suppose another side of the story can help lead to resolution.

The problem is that any persons reality, outside of what's physically observable, could be described as a collection of biases which happen to emerge from and are subsequently validated and communicated by social structure - an incomplete internal model of the external - and many of the techniques aimed at combating mental illness could be used to invalidate ANY persons beliefs, not just ones which appear on the surface to be irrational.

People stop talking - why waste energy on a road that'll only lead to frustration and conflict? They start looking elsewhere. Drink away their problems. Abuse substances. Attempt to forget themselves. Destroy themselves because they don't find a place where they can be happy anywhere else.

PowerPuffBubbles · 1 year

I guess I've learned today that strategic amalgamation of list items might save a relationship.

chemeleon · 1 year

I don't know. While your financial situation should always factor into the decision, I don't think it should be the deciding factor. If it were, the vast majority of people wouldn't be having kids. Basically just the rich.

I think what you (and most people here) really have a problem with is a lack of consideration in the decision to have children. Which I totally agree with. Historically, though, the majority of our ancestors have had children in what we might consider 'less than ideal' conditions. That doesn't make them wrong. To be honest, from a purely genetic context that makes them successful human beings, especially considering that we barely have a grasp of the complexity of consequence of genetic combination over eons of iteration - I'd wager that that's the ideal model, and the increased strength of influence of socio-economic factors in our current model is basically a fallback to something we have a better grasp of.

murf6464 · 1 year

Well, I'm beginning to feel the need to drown myself in a bathtub full of acid and children's tears.

chemeleon · 1 year

Careful. With only the outer-rings in synchrony, a poem like this, and you'll begin to get sucked down to the lower hub quanta of rational entanglement. The skyweb won't hold you without a core. YOU must BE the path. I smell like hemp clothing, scented candles and furious masturbation.

1NSTRUM3NT · 1 year

Turns out nobody does, they're all just using the comfort of social reinforcement to form a weighted rationalization of their their inability to comprehend and effectively deal with their lack of understanding of the complexity of human emotion.

But who cares?! We're all going to die. Live life to teh full, no regrets.

lundah · 1 year

The bar of success is raised by the competition (i.e. fellow human beings) undervaluing or being forced to undervalue their efforts. I don't see any pressing reason - an actual threat to survival of the species or civilization as a whole, for example - that this should be the case. The system in place is perfectly capable of surviving with more relaxed demands on its constituent organisms, but it's undermined by corporate greed and other members of economic hierarchy (who actually define, though their own opportunist requisites, the minimum effort required from an individual for human survival).

I feel like I should clarify that I don't have any superficial issue with hard work, just the idea that a life of servitude in exchange for survival (regardless of the ethics of what is, at it's core, a system configured and controlled by human beings) by extension places all emphasis on the implied value of life and very little on the analysis or experience of it.

rawbamatic · 1 year

Easy mistake to make. When I was born the nurses confused me with my imbecile cord, but that's primarily because nurse's eyes can only detect angles on a two dimensional plane.

chemeleon · 1 year

TIL LSD can turn models into dogs.

Budgs · 1 year

It's true. All mindless automatons must wash their filthy hands. Rejection of our contextually entangled will is simply reckless disregard for the truth.

ExplosiveSperm · 1 year

That's pretty cool. One time I built a catapult. I was drunk though so it's an achievement of relative magnitude.

The blueprint looked something like this : (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

pandy55 · 1 year

I am entirely serious. ಠ_ಠ

Docfeelbad · 1 year

... the device is needing double powerings to photon-diffusal the spectracorns.

Docfeelbad · 1 year

Of course, sir. All of Shiva's arms are currently occupied by the unsheathing of the tome at this time, please waiting while we do the needful.

Docfeelbad · 1 year

If you have a number of spectracores you might want to try hyper-compression to entangle your packet of arbitrary size with the phase-aligned edges of a carrier element. Problem is that most nodes are essentially repeaters and they have an annoying habit of going out of phase, diminishing the contextual scope of packets and creating closed-loops in the space-time continuum. This is a widespread problem, basically the whole internet is a DDOS attack on the edge of itself and barely anything gets beyond the central servers. It's a clusterfuck. I'd wait until somebody fixes it.

pandy55 · 1 year

The messy room is analogous to the irresponsible manner in which you promote your distaste. That said, the backing of a network of nodes which share similar perspectives can help justify your projections of context - there is a high probability that this strategy will encourage the formation of an impenetrable blanket of background aggression which may impede your ability to compassionately assess the situation, however. I suggest sleeping with her.

dan_blather · 1 year

Not much to add, but there's a distinct possibility that advertising could also have an effect on the attitudes of the parents. In fact it's pretty much a certainty that their idea of what's right for their child can be influenced by external phenomenon, advertising one of many potential vectors. A parent may have more direct influence over a child than other sources, but in turn, that responsibility is going to be greatly in favor of the biases of her immediate environment. Accounting for that, you might say that the aspect of good parenting you're pertaining to here is analogous to dismantling your own indoctrination - in a perfect society, in perfect circumstances, the idea of eating McDonald's having negative connotations would be foolish in itself. In that case, parent-child influence is really just a transmission vector of the real source of the problem.

martiiin · 1 year

Giving them (a small amount of) money has the added benefit of preventing a child and his/her mother from starving / freezing to death. Provided the chav doesn't spend it all on White Lightning and creme eggs.

roses-are-free · 1 year

Celebrities are like templates for imaginary friends everybody can play with.

chemeleon · 1 year

This neglects to mention the part where you, a champion of the multiverse, surrounded by cheering fans, are tasked with chewing your way out of the abdomen of a giant spider.

truxs · 1 year

Given this information I speculate that in 40 years time men will have access to their own vaginas.

I speculate that in 40,000 years men will be able to contain the past within the present, eliminating the need for time travel and giving them genetic access to their sexy grandmothers.

In 800,000 years we will wear headphones that play the sound of an 18th century church bell when they detect that it's time to go pee, and meet an inconceivable pooping giant after a freak scientific accident turns the element potassium into trillions of tiny airborne mirrors.

dbyway · 1 year

It really depends on what you define as success. If you're talking about adaption by choice as opposed to forced adaption, then motivation for adaption is partially dependent on how much credence you give to the power you're adapting to. I'd say that adaption of the self is giving up control to that power. I'd rather not change myself to exist harmoniously within an order formed by a bunch of power hungry maggots with overpowered weaponry, if that adaption meant I became one myself. Conversely, I'd probably choose to wear itchy fluffy socks if the floor was covered with really cute worms.

iameoghan · 1 year

Upvoted for TIL.

RobinPerris · 1 year

This post is an innovate mix of rage comic and tabloid newspaper. The second half is an easy to follow, step-by-step guide on how to emotionally react to an event and use the backing and comfort of a group you're strongly attached to to justify some negative action toward the perceived perpetrator.

While I don't agree with some of the business practices of EA, this kind of underhanded technique of influencing bias and shaping reactions to it has the potential to turn what could be a rational process into a circlejerk. Be a responsible citizen and an honourable leader and avoid this kind of thing.

thatnakka · 1 year

I think you'll find not only is it actually bacon that he loves, but that bacon is the real threat. The things he dreams about doing to bacon would probably fuel a breakdown of a magnitude which could only be recovered from with weeks of shoe oriented retail therapy.

chemeleon · 1 year

The operative factor is their place within the order they subscribe to. There's nothing intrinsically objective about the perspective that it stems from. They may believe it and use it to justify their actions, but the context is not at fault. It's the individual and communal lack of ability to accurately verify that context that's at fault.

chemeleon · 1 year

The underlying phenomenon of communal identity (and, to an extent, the weaknesses of communal verification of context and perspective) is the cause of conflict.

An overarching attribute of religion is it's ability to closely knit the identity of the person(s) subscribing to it with the systems of representation it peddles - it's a system which, to the subscriber, appears relevant or applicable to the majority of connections they make. I suppose it could be likened to an algorithm that predicts and defines 'truth'. Its virtue becomes seemingly self-evident and that algorithm spreads to other areas of cognitive process, including the definition of self. The mind becomes attached to it.

The same could be said for nationalist identity, or any communally dictated identity for that matter. The same rules apply - a singular apparent self-evident truth attached to the self - the difference in action lying in the strength of attachment, the scope of it's application (most beliefs about the self are relatively inert in that regard) and the form of the organizational structure in which it resides - for example an industrialized nation, vigilante group, network of friends, etc.

The Zeitgeist seems to have made religion the scapegoat for this, which is somewhat frustrating. It's an obvious connection to make, but it has to be apparent on thought that the problem is far more complex than it appears, and that jumping with haste, like some do, on a bandwagon of animosity is tantamount to hypocrisy. What the cause really amounts to is a process that everyone subscribes to to some extent.

chemeleon · 1 year

The assertion that religion causes war.

Religion doesn't cause war. Communal aggression is an extension of communal identity. There are plenty of things besides religion that groups of people can become attached to and will become violent in order to defend.

To single out religion - that's a phenomenon in and of itself the product of the same irrational process: communal verification of an answer which is only applicable from a certain context, one easily challenged by more thorough and accurate systems of representation, but one which people will vehemently defend as they've attached a lot of themselves to their context, the logical extensions of it and their preferred resolution, and spent very little time trying to prove themselves wrong.

In other words - everybody has the potential to be incredibly stupid, it's unwise to pick on a subset of people you've (potentially erroneously) judged to be the big problem. Everyone is the problem. If you actually want to fix the world and have any hope of being effective, start with yourself, and make damn sure you're right before you even think about asserting your preferred order at others.

(If you want to hide behind an unverifiable opinion as some kind of defence mechanism or a means to position yourself above others in order to achieve social gratification, I guess that's a lesser evil).

sporaticallysane · 1 year

Kinda sounds like there's more to it than Bob simply trying to avoid paying back a little money. People who eschew social responsibility like that may have deeper psychological issues - problems interacting with others, low self esteem etc. I guess it'd be quite easy to confuse those symptoms with sociopathic social reasoning if he's hidden it well, or you've grown used to any quirks he has that might otherwise indicate problems. I don't know - I feel as if there's too many missing links between owing a little money and completely blanking your childhood friends to decide that the connecting factor is that he intentionally did it for the sake of shedding himself of a little responsibility. I doubt he doesn't care about his friends.

will7 · 1 year

I don't disagree, but I would like to elaborate that while the underlying order of the physical structure of the universe is self-affirming, human interpretation of arbitrary order - while appealing to our aesthetic senses - does not indicate the overall virtue of the subject of interpretation.

From a standpoint of perception, we build a number of loosely linked, generally contextually independent models of the environment internally which we project onto the external.

We validate these by the accuracy of their application in interaction with and prediction of the external (a ball rolling down a hill or social validation of some abstract structure).

Consider that we project order on to a number of phenomenon that are the result of some physical or chaotic process, such as astrological interpretation of the position of stars and planets or cloud formations. These are examples of ordered phenomenon which we don't instinctively attempt to fundamentally understand, instead opting to use best-fit internal models. These cases highlight the nature of the attraction to order - that attraction to external order is entirely dependant on our internal approximation of that order, which is often incomplete and possibly laden with inaccuracies beyond the context in which we choose to perceive. Arbitrary order, then, isn't inherently 'good', regardless of our attraction to it. Money, social status, self etc. are analogous with cloud formations or astrological symbols in the sense that they're only loosely connected with any universal order - it's our collective interpretation of them that gives them weight.

Attraction to external order validates our internal models all the time that the strategy is a success. Refinement of our internal models would appear at first glance to reap much less of a reward. However, the success of that strategy is measured by the environment in which we exist. By expanding our outlook by a few thousand years, or expanding our geometric interpretation to include another axis, for example, one might choose to project a different order onto the environment, which may influence vastly different decisions.

menschlich · 1 year

Seconded. I keep finding myself in awe at just how they managed to make such a good game.

It's interesting that the games are pretty much polar opposite in terms of design philosophy. It appears Bethesda RPGs are designed with the philosophy that freedom of movement and epic vistas = immersion, which is partially true, but it's implemented in their games at the expense of required player effort and rigid structure, with enemy levels and loot weighted by the level of the player. It seems that Dark Souls proves that rewarding player effort with freedom of movement and enhanced loot is equally if not more immersive. There's a sense of risk that connects you with your character, and a real sense of progression that is not just applicable to the game world but also to the skill of the player. I feel so much more connected with the world of Dark Souls when I enter a new area and have no idea what lies ahead and if I have a hope of surviving it.

It helps, of course, that nigh on every aspect of the game is so well designed and polished. It feels like an adventure that you're a part of. One of the few RPGs in recent years to actually achieve that.

867530Nine · 1 year

The solution is to wear a tie. Always wear a tie. It's the universal indicator of respectable social status.

Little known fact: a mound of west African slaves once fooled their owner into allowing them freedom by fashioning ties from the blood and fur of wild animals and convincing him they were visiting representatives from a successful business.

sickillness · 2 years

Point taken. Like I said, I am just projecting. I hear a lot of darwin award statements that are similar to these and it irks me each time I do. Still, I don't agree. To reduce a person to 'dumbass' that the earth would be better off rid of, that's a sign of overconfidence in ones own ability to accurately interpret the situation. It's contextually biased and conceptually fallible. It's a hollow conclusion. There are plenty of other ways of looking at the situation.

sickillness · 2 years

You know, I agree. I was just taking to task the darwinian superiority complex that has manifested of late. Probably just me projecting in this situation. From an evolutionary standpoint, 'intelligence' is rooted firmly in survival and adaption. The guy survived, and therefore is not a dumbass from an evolutionary standpoint. An arbitrary approximation of level of intelligence based on observable action with relatively little contextual information doesn't really factor in to our current understanding of the process of evolution, so to spur on his removal from the genepool based on his actions doesn't make much sense. It's working on the assumption that that stupidity - whatever that is - breeds stupidity. If that were the case, we would have never progressed to the point we are at now.

sickillness · 2 years

I thought I was saying the opposite... that a persons dumbass quotient should probably be based more on the results of their actions than the probabilities projected onto the situation by the observer. After all, he wouldn't have acted in the first place if he weren't confident in his prediction that he'd survive, and he did.

sickillness · 2 years

Sure, but being a dumbass isn't situationally implicit. He might have been testing his hypothesis that trains could become sentient when placed under stressful conditions.

sickillness · 2 years

Hey, he's not that dumb. He didn't die.

oldmanrain · 2 years

Don't they say the most beautiful art is the product of adversity?

anonlungent · 2 years

All you have to do is remove the first Y and you have a valid statement.

darkgatherer · 2 years

Haha. You said brainwash.

TBtheG · 2 years

First you give them clothes, next they'll be forming dog unions and demanding the vote.

blinkergoesleft · 2 years

I think the fact that this happens at all in our increasingly connected world indicates a lack of some fundamental understanding between human beings. At one end of the spectrum it's disconnection from the consequences of our actions, at the other it's the inability to vicariously experience through the eyes of others. It goes without saying that if the architects and perpetrators of violence were forced to experience the suffering they cause in order to bend the world to their desired order, they'd search for an alternate route - but that suffering is a reality of the situation they're not required to grasp. Their drive, the order they're attached to is not based on any legitimate reality - it's an impotently imagined self-centered future that requires suffering and death in order to exist - but the simple fact it can exist is enough for a group capable of forcibly silencing any opposition to it.

I can only speak for myself, with the luxury of a myriad of perspectives pumped directly into my home and a comfortable disconnection from the atrocities and tragedies occurring at the present. From my perspective, the pattern emerging on part of the perpetrators is a weakness of human will: a fallback from the functions we all have potential access to as human beings to thoughtless automation, a survival mechanism designed to react to the small world exposed to us, or the inability or unwillingness to use imagination to construct a semblance of reality that encompasses experience outside of our own, instead placing value on our immediate survival and little else besides it. The terrible irony is that they're prepared to end lives for the world they're building as if behind it is some truth that carries more weight than life. That world is the product of an imagination incapable or unwilling to vicariously experience the very real suffering of others.

ProbablyHittingOnYou · 2 years

Haha... breaking up a relationship based on its false pretenses so that you can form another one based on false pretenses. Sounds like your collateral sleaze management strategy needs some tweaking, because I would say that's pretty close to maximum sleaze.

chemeleon · 2 years

This is interesting... the article has a rather negative tone, but I think that maybe this explains the disconnect between what you perceive and the bundle of instantly presented connotations and associations that have built up over the years that psychedelics are famed for.

chemeleon · 2 years

So many arguments could be avoided if people were just honest with themselves. People are guilty of rushing the argument at both ends of the spectrum. I'm not suggesting rationally emulating an opposing opinion and challenging your current understanding with it is easy, but most people opt for the route of becoming attached to an opinion based on the small amount of information they've been exposed to, blocking out the wall of possibilities that present themselves when faced with arguments that threaten the validity of that opinion. It's guess it's a kind of self defense. A weakness that has propagated throughout the self after having constructed the lions share of their understanding utilizing a methodology inept at encompassing all possible states. It's just easier to hold whatever's in your shadow at arms length and mark it as false.

moogle516 · 2 years

It's true, in a sense. They would be entitled to all those things provided the policies favored them. The truth is fortune is rarely showered upon those who work hard in their chosen field, but often on those in a position to exploit the weaknesses in the system. In this case, the weakness appears to be the misplaced trust of the electorate.

EruditeUK · 2 years

Like an animal can't see beyond a human as potential food.

It's simple. A group of people come together, united in a shared belief. Through their interaction with the group they become personally attached to this belief. This belief doesn't require empirical verification, its validity is enforced by the shared perspective of the group attached to it - a set of arguments from similar perspectives which further entrench them in the security of its validity.

A shared framework and understanding of the world emerge, woven around this belief - if X is this unquestionable origin, and Y is true, the group searches for paths from Y to X. Any concessions they have to make in order to reach X (about the building blocks of the universe for example) are solidified and thus become truths themselves.

This framework reaches critical mass and is heavily defended by the members of the group, who have by now become strongly attached to it. The members, in other words, have become the framework.

Now, there are two reasons this blob of semi self-aware connections might attack without mercy : the members of the group, in order to defend their framework (themselves) will actively attempt to destroy any external threat to its integrity - for example, that may be another group with a different set of values, corruption, or a piece of evidence that points to the origin being closer to N than X. The other depends on how their understanding of external objects is structured - essentially, they are all black boxes that emit a relatively small amount of information, the rest is filled with the internal logic of the framework.

allocater · 2 years

I think a big old ultradimensional spider eating us all from the inside out would help with the Multispeciesm.

chemeleon · 2 years

I like to think if we get enough pictures from enough angles we'll be able to create a working copy of them

wang-banger · 2 years

Right. Agreed on both points. But, for someone who doesn't fully understand the issue - aiding their understanding being the implied purpose of the metaphor - the irrelevant information cannot be discarded (in this case the notion of "family"), because the points of intersection between the two concepts are not clearly defined. Without understanding the actions taken to reduce deficit, how is the person in the dark expected to pinpoint and extract the relevant information from it?

The answer is - provided they don't consider the metaphor a purposeless ornate concept, and actually use it - that they'll use personal experience as a model for the issue, and more specifically that their understanding of the issue will be deeply rooted in their interactions with their family. That is, after all, what the metaphor is attempting to do: to explain the issue on terms closer to home. I'd imagine that for the average family that 'cutting back' entails notions of personal connection between all individuals, fair sacrifice based on those connections, and personal responsibility for all the members of the group. Which, if you think about it, is not an ideal way to color the perception of a process which is at it's heart far colder and unforgiving, especially when it could influence those peoples useless votes and opinions.

wang-banger · 2 years

It doesn't have to match entirely - but in this case it's misleading, because: a) there's little parallel in terms of the systems it's describing besides a group of individuals forced to reassess their decisions to redress some economic imbalance, and b) it entangles the sentiment of a family unit who all care for each other with the economic decisions of a cold and heartless military industrial complex. That kind of blind association probably doesn't lend itself well to unbiased analysis.

akuma87 · 2 years

The only sane explanation is that they're all in bed with the devil.

Violent_broccoli · 2 years

As a fan of Darwin, I think that's pretty idiotic reasoning.

CommodoreJacob · 2 years

Give the man a break. He's working with what he's got.

Jimmy · 2 years

Well, I'll use the case of the moon as an example - for the moon to have purpose, that requires that there's some goal which the moon plays a part in reaching. Who or what defines that goal?

In the case of science, the goal is defined by the underlying model of the universe, that - simply put - imbalanced forces are continually striving to reach a state of equilibrium. Within the confines of that model, the reason for the moons formation is analogous with how it is formed, the same way an islands formation can be explained by the physical forces that act upon land.

When mainstream religion or Bill O'Riley talk about the purpose of the moon, they are alluding to an alternate understanding of the universe, which may or may not be fully formed, and generally mirrors the environment they themselves exist within - that is: one of choice, purpose within a social system, will and motive.

Within that system of understanding, the idea that there is some force or consciousness like ours, that can comprehend an attractive state that it desires to attain and will it into existence through the manipulation of the universe - that is a potential explanation for why things are as they are. In that case, the goal of the moon, the idea of "why" the moon exists is already partially formed - it is willed for some deeper purpose we may or may not comprehend - and the "how" becomes detached from that will, as how doesn't sufficiently explain the moons role in attaining the desired state.

Personally, I think it's interesting that that from the standpoint of conception (which is where the majority of the conflicts between belief systems lie) both models are strikingly similar, the difference being that one assumes that life and the universe arose from simplicity while the other assumes that it arose from a complexity that mirrors or is greater than our own. I understand this doesn't really help after a few beers though.

Jimmy · 2 years

"Why" ultimately depends on your frame of reference - if you believe that observable phenomenon in the universe emerge from a set of laws then "why" and "how" in the explanation of a phenomenon are interchangeable. If you believe they're the product of something akin to human will, the how does not account for the "why" it was chosen to be.

chemeleon · 2 years

Well sir... if astrological symbols aren't true, then why did the boobies in the sky give me a boner?

willgt09 · 2 years

I have a feeling it's a scare tactic, most likely to mute some of the public support for wikileaks. Twitter as a target makes sense - of all the social networks, this is the one where movements are started. If users are aware that they could be being watched by the parties they criticise, that's at the very least going to blunt some of the rhetoric - especially from the well connected, outspoken users, who'll feel a little more exposed than the average retweeter.

chemeleon · 2 years

http://i.imgur.com/dGIeK.jpg

maxwellhill · 2 years

Regardless of the scale of the effect on large organizations, it's a step in the right direction. There's little chance the public will be content with what is being revealed by the leaks - and while, in general, the path of least resistance prevails (ie sitting back and hoping the exposure of information alone will lead to their positive restructure), there is a threshold of inaction and apathy on the part of the organizations beyond which people will react, provided there is a steady stream of information that sustains the awareness of their corrupt actions in our minds - a strategy that wikileaks appears to be following.

Change will likely be a slow process - the nature of self preservation suggests that the organization will resist internal restructure all the while eliminating external threats is a more profitable strategy. It'll modify it's external appearance in an attempt to hide whatever profitable corruption has surfaced from (lack of enforcement of) the rules of the system from which it emerged. The truth of the matter is that it's in the interest of that system to enforce those rules, or else an unsustainable parasitic relationship could develop - the corrupt structure feeding off its resources for no net gain. Although it can sometimes seem as if the system's self destruction could arguably be the lesser of the two evils. At any rate, being made aware of the shadowy processes which influence the development of our civilisation can only strengthen our position and incite a collective will for positive change. I think in that respect, wikileaks has done a great deal for us. Even if it is as simple an act as gently shaking us from our apathetic slumber.

chemeleon · 2 years

A single person sifting through a mass of data like that is impossible. What other option do you have when faced with an opportunity to expose the potentially corrupt inner workings of extremely powerful entities? The fact that there exists an impartial organization able to sift through, find and expose the truly relevant information about that corruption makes inaction the irresponsible choice. The risk of releasing information that could potentially endanger lives is minimized if not removed altogether, and those who have the power to make decisions which shape our futures are held to account if the luxury of the closed environment in which they operate has propagated a mindset of detachment or selfish motive.

CalebTheWinner · 2 years

I'm prepared to accept the deliberate infliction of horrible things on a fellow human being if it's justified within some arbitrary framework.

chemeleon · 2 years

It's a good example of just how arbitrary humanly devised social order is, and the lengths gone to preserve it show how desperate we are to cling to that which contextually defines us as individuals.

pookiemon · 2 years

I agree, though I think that's the symptom of a larger phenomenon.

Generally a label of insanity is awarded for dissonant behaviour in social situations that implies some cognitive process which makes no sense according to the Zeitgeist of shared interpretation. That could stem from an alternate view or an undiagnosed tumour. I have to concur though that the label itself does not stem from some undisputed truth, rather a lack of information coupled with faith in the ability of an ultimately flawed social understanding to rectify uncertainty.

pyth · 2 years

Innocence in this case is a quantifiable state resulting from the application of well defined laws to a system that is open-ended in interpretation. It's faith in that state and the human being it implies that enables us to create blanket mechanisms to deal with them. It's the reduction of a person to an entity residing in the environment your law implies that diminishes the value of any justice based upon it, and when they inevitably prove themselves as ineffective, leads to torture, harassment, abuse.

When dealing with this level of depravity, guilt and innocence cease to become factors beyond allowing an 'administrator of justice' to sidestep their own natural sense of compassion. It's telling that many laws dealing with the inter-personal are designed to bring to justice those who have sidestepped theirs.

chemeleon · 2 years

It has it's benefits and drawbacks. If you really wanted a balanced view you'd go study its effects under controlled conditions and try and get some real data to draw conclusions from. Hastily formed opinions based on the heavily weighted nodes you're presented with can fuck with the freedom of others for no good reason. As it stands they're pushing an economically fruitful dream that'll bury its malformed roots under a temporary wave of confidence in the notion that anonymity is inherently bad. It can almost be imagined that the corporation behind this is some parasitic process that lays down junctions in unpoliced areas in order to feed off of the time and effort people spend on figuring out the landscape of hopeless possibility the junctions imply.

chemeleon · 2 years

Relevant

NonAmerican · 2 years

education benefits not just the individual and should NOT just be about getting a big pay packet - it's about preserving and furthering human knowledge!

Staying on top economically is a core survival technique for people and nations alike, but when it's woven into the foundation of our education system it totally skews our idea of the purpose of knowledge and the reasons for it's pursual. When I went back to college I was constantly reminded that the route I took in education should revolve around my ideal career, that universities wouldn't look favourably upon me if I wasn't focused on that aim (of course it's no secret that they receive funding from future employers of their students/customers) - the subtext being that in essence, the system as a whole revolves around pushing knowledge as a means to an end rather than as a valuable commodity in and of itself. Capitalism is supposed to incentivize progress but in this case the way it's implemented stifles it, driving it toward its own goals, holding it down so it can milk the most out of the process - it rewards ultra-personal specialization as opposed to holistic and interconnected networks of understanding that can be absorbed by the average individual.

Which is a shame because human knowledge has been and I wager will be around a lot longer than capitalist society.

tf2fan · 2 years

Don't do drugs in college. You don't need them yet.

gaffekinsley · 2 years

Depends how you define it. Personally I think a different perspective constitutes a deeper understanding. Imagine an interesting idea (evolution for example) and then experiencing it vicariously, through the eyes of the process itself. That's what I tend to experience after taking psychoactive substances.

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Time Capsule

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