New Testingstan

Dooey Jo wrote:no it is just a bunch of flowers now clearly they are on the path towards friendliness

That is one obnoxiously huge picture.

Man, isn't that quote at the top of SDN misattributed to Voltaire and actually from some Neo-Nazi?

It definitely has that veiled whining about how bad it is that it's not socially acceptable to openly shit on minorities anymore like in the good old days feel.

Pretty darkly comical if true.

I walk home. It’s cold. The bite of winter was in the air. The cold winter of the south, the winter that gave the Red Hands the color of their uniform. White of snow, white of bone. The Red Hands are on the wall, in their red and white uniforms, looking down into the Pale behind their mirrored masks...

Not working from a prompt this time, rather inspired by the idea of an expedition sent by humans living on a tidally locked world exploring the forbidding perpetually dark lands for the first time. ----- We walked under the stars. We thought we must have been the first human beings to walk under the...

Speaking of SDN : [quote=""Building A Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle, as quoted by Atomic Rockets "]If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, then there could be no Empire even with the Field. There'd be no Emp...

I don't watch the show so I wouldn't mind.

BTW you can read a PDF of that book I talked about here.

I read it all since yesterday; even if it's probably wrong it's an interesting read.

So, anyway, this is kind of interesting (I randomly stumbled into the hypothesis from Peter Watts's blog): Jaynes published only one book, in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , which tells the story of how mankind learned to think. ... Jaynes began inspecting ...

Idk lots of people who believe in an afterlife lose loved ones and get hit hard by it and don't kill themselves to join them, seems to me there might have been deeper issues at play here; take away the religion and we might have just gotten a different stated reason for the suicide. Anyway, I'm less...

It's also funny when these kind of people talk about "religion" as if it's all like Christianity. "How is religion not child abuse? You're telling kids that they'll suffer for all eternity if they don't worship your imaginary friend." Cause, you know, all religion does that. Gues...

Ugh I just checked out a thread randomly on SDN and got reminded why I left that place.

12 year old commits suicide to be with her father in heaven.

PERMIT ME TO CRASSLY EXPLOIT THIS TRAGEDY TO PUSH MY PET ISSUES WITH RELIGION

I'm not like a linguist or anything, but a friend of mine will sometimes say 'if L'Académie française is at odds with French speakers, L'Académie française is wrong'. I expect most elites throughout history would disagree with that and say that obv the way quality people talk is the proper language...

Doesn't the fact that something like two thirds of English ended up being French/Latin-through-French derived indicate that a lot of the language is in fact affected by the privileged in particular, even if they're a minority (let alone half the population)? Probably. See also: Romance languages, S...

I don't think the idea is women have no effect on language. It's that (especially before now) our contributions were not seen as acceptable or valid and didn't enter lasting mainstream discourse (ie the discourse of men). I think this is problematic when you apply it to a highly stratified mostly i...

well it was certainly codified by men I'm sure there are women working on dictionaries now (in fact I'm sure I've heard one from the OED on the radio before), but they were all established and their first few editions compiled by men plus nearly all the great producers of influential, defining artw...

Charlotte, minor nitpick: It is an interesting sidelight that our language - created and codified by men - does not have one unflattering term to describe men who vent their anger at women. even such epithets as ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’ do not condemn the man but place the blame on a woman - h...

Isn't original lovecraft about how black people are scary and evil or have I been mislead from not having read the source material myself :L I'm not familiar with Lovecraft's IRL views aside from vague internet people mentions of him being a massive racist shitlord, but I find that pretty believabl...

So I've been reading a bunch of the stuff on this site . It's interesting to compare what Lovecraft actually wrote to the internet telephone game version of what he was about. Like actually reading his stuff it seems to me that what he was about was something along the lines of that speech Q gives P...

How exactly is Male Identity Politics supposed to deal with the issues of the patriarchy? I mean, either in theory OR in practice (where it inevitably ends up, well, look at every single MRA argument out there)? I suppose it depends on exactly what you mean by "identity politics"; approac...

I'm not sure if you missed the part of the article that made me post it or if you disagreed and are ignoring that part in the post, but that essay touches upon something that is the answer to a lot of your points: how identity politics honestly has no real (non-negative) meaning for privileged iden...

One thing I disagree with in the article is how it says that things like straight as an identity (and by proxy things like white) should be discarded and leaves it at that, whereas I think that yes they should be discarded as identities but still useful as descriptive labels so as to remove the imp...

But seriously mainstream culture treats me like garbage and literally puts my wellbeing and even life in danger constantly. Is there a specific reason I shouldn't advocate for its overhaul when people like myself and people significantly worse off than myself are in this situation? Well, I don't th...

My big issue with SJ self-critique culture is sometimes it reminds me quite a bit of hermetic and fundamentalist Christianity: The world is evil and living in it is corrupting. A normal life is inherently morally compromised. Becoming good means rejecting the mainstream culture: its ideas, its vocab...

Jung just get a tumblr account already so you can message me in there too :L I've been considering getting a tumblr so I can post my sci fi things and random inane thoughts. I thought that thing on pornography you posted was rather interesting, particularly the recurring theme in pornographer comme...

When men say that they “love to see the woman underneath the makeup,” they’re not saying they want to see your leg stubble and greasy bangs—they’re saying they want you to be better at hiding your maintenance routine. Because the maintenance spoils the fantasy. I think the reason you get what I ass...