Zompist Bboard Again

Saying ‘everyone is guilty’ without qualification is as unhelpful as saying ‘privilege doesn’t exist’. But at the same time… what does it mean to ‘choose to passively let our privilege benefit us’? To suggest a concrete example: as an Australian, I live on land which was dispossessed from the indig...

Yeah, that's why I added the " if he goes 'see? us evens are just better' " bit. in no scenario did the runner pull the trigger, but premeditated, fully informed cooperation is not the only type of complicity. Like, being aware of privilege and advocating for the runners who got shot... sa...

late to this, I know, but I just wanna say: what Linguo is here saying is not that complex, it's just hard to swallow. Like the arguments for veganism we feel it's too onerous, too demanding, and thus we want to reject it, but it doesn't mean he's *wrong*: if you're runing a race, and other runners ...

Xenophanes said that If cattle and horses had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle. the ancient levantine god is "the good sheperd" and so on, so yeah, there's nothing weird i...

Yeah, turkey makes so many soaps that some of ours are co-produced with turks, turkish companies, and even whole plots: 'mi mamá ve la turca' in chile is easily understood to mean 'that subgenre of turkish soaps'. This makes me wonder, in parallel... do all countries produce soaps? i know many latin...

hell, think of us! modern politics, with its web of lobby, PACs, the CIA, secret shit we all know goes on, or even just the out-in-the-open, legal, public record stuff, public opinion, the media setting the agenda, it's all unthinkably complicated. we also don't understand our rulers, and medieval p...

I'll take your word for it, I have read neither the oracle bones nor the omens of the last king of assyria. that's pretty interesting, tbh. to my discredit i hadn't considered a cast first approach to mythogenesis. How do you get gods? Because we're humans, we anthropomorphize. Cats and dogs, our co...

myths come after the gods? like... actual gods come, and then people tell stories about it ? Well, if you're looking for a universal cure, the odds of a river providing it, are low, yes...but if you posit that it cured the ailments of that time and place, or of the person recording it, then it becom...

Aaaah... right. I get it. shit, the anti-israel movement is plagued by the cancer of nazis. regrettable, but probably unavoidable.

I knew, say, antidisestablishmentarianism but not aubergine, since I learned eng from videogames and not, I dunno, cooking shows. ‘Aubergine’ is itself regional, though. Here we call them ‘eggplants’. yeah, iirc the exchange somewhat like this - i ate some eggplant - ... your plants lay eggs? - non...

Nursery rhymes, kids' games, and so on -- completely unfamiliar. Oh, yeah, totally. the whole of children's culture gets exported much less than, say, TV, I would think. children's culture is very local: here we have this one ritual singsong, "arturo prat chacón dispara por este cañón" wi...

But why is there no burden of proof for that claim? there certainly is! but it's one that can easily be met: of all the mythology that makes actually falsifiable claims (we can't say a lot about the claims that are not falsifiable, but prima facie they shouldn't be more or less true) those claims a...

german laws never cease to amaze me. please don't respond if this would remotely endanger you, but is it really illegal to say, you know, beggining by a stream and up until the big amount of water?

the butter of us culture is unevenly spread even within the bread that is each country. for example, I always thought watching the wizard of oz was like a yanqui thing (as opposed to a world thing originating in the SU like, say, pizza) until, adulthood, where I learned that, instead, almost all chi...

no, I know, but I don't think it is an argument against them. I think neither you or I would give, after all, any more credence to mystical experiences if drugs couldn't cause them, would we?

na, while I share your conclusion I don't think the reasoning here is sound: it could be the case that there exist some aspects of reality that the undrugged mind has more trouble perceiving, processing, remembering or comprehending as compared to the drugged mind. drugged minds, after all, work dif...

Oh, absolutely. I'm partial to a radical approach to preventing those pitfalls of science *within the social sciences*, which is to try and build concepts de novo as opposed to taking up the concepts that common sense offers, but yeah, often the experiences of your subjects *is* your data, after all...

Honestly why not ? it doesn't seem like his grasp on power has been diminished, the level of NATO support for ukraine has been dropping, and though Kiev looks totally outside of his reach the russians haven't lost much ground since the initial offensive. the ukranian war looks to be in a stalemate, ...

true on the rationalist-empiricist synthesis. 'the thought closest to nature' is a great sentiment, until one stops to think 'what do we mean for a thought to be close to nature' ? modern philosophers express this as the correspondence theory of truth, i.e. truth is when something said corresponds t...