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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Hard disagree. Randomly murdering fascists does not a revolution make, to say nothing of the odds of winning that fight.

    Go to the gym. Be able to do cardio without dying. Work on your fitness and health. Then buy a gun. Train with it. A lot. Organize with like-minded people. Invest in community defense, look out for LGBT / immigrant / marginalized friends and family. Be prepared for violence, but keep it a last resort. When / if bullets start flying, lives with be ruined on both sides of the gun.




  • Hi. I failed out of college, in no small part due to undiagnosed ADHD. I wanna offer a little pushback.

    I can’t tell if you want to change society to be less punishing to neurodivergent people, or if your whole thesis is “People with ADHD have little to no trouble in society today”.

    If it’s the former: not treating people who are struggling is not the way to change society. Accepting for the sake of argument that ADHD people “pay attention to different things”; paying attention to some things is critical to my ability to thrive. I would love to live in a world where I could just do what I thought was important and still have my needs taken care of, but unfortunately I’m stuck needing to pay attention to stupid bullshit I don’t care about in order to make a living, and that’s a tremendous struggle without medication.

    If it’s the latter: Jesus Christ, talk to someone with ADHD.

    And finally: I take issue with your metaphor at the end. What do you think is present in an unmedicated person with ADHD that is somehow missing in a medicated person?



  • The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

    I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

    I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

    Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.


  • Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

    If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

    Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

    So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.


  • I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

    The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

    And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

    Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.


    1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

    2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

    3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.








  • Maybe “impulses” for short term, immediate gratification & “ambitions” for long-term, fulfillment-type goals?

    You bring up something I hadn’t thought about before with “want” kinda meaning a couple different things. I like the idea of separating the different types out in your head.



  • I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

    Earth’s diameter is 41.804 million feet. I’m not sure if you meant that or Earth’s circumference when you said “Earth’s surface”, but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

    The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

    Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

    127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

    So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you’d only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

    EDIT:

    Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.