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@onesteptwostep I think you gotta consider a more complex reality than viewing consumerism as the only alternative to religion. Appreciating physical reality of life, for example, is not the same as consumerism nor materialism. It was actually one of the big points in Nietzsche's work: people...

@onesteptwostep don't you think the main reason religion exists is to give people a psychological benefit?

I see obsession with spiritual stuff (especially of the new-age category) as a knee-jerk reaction to consumerism. I don't see the infatuation with an arbitrary system of metaphysical belief as any more profound or aesthetically elevated above infatuation with consumer goods. It's just something...

Serotonin deficit

the problem of those so-called incels is that when you isolate yourself from the reality for too long, and think about it too much, it becomes something grandiose, mystical and unreachable. Sort of like if you stay inside your house for too long and start making up all kinds of wild ideas about...

"erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation." wow.. this stuff is so progressive it makes my head spin

when I learned about mbti, it was only one out of a million of different sources from which I learned about stuff like behavior, personality, psychology, self-improvement etc. Probably because of that, I never really got obsessed with it. E.g. I never bought into the static view of personality...

very good. saved this one. 9.1/10

QT / 10

encouraging certain values in the society. If e.g. murder is within the scope of an individual's capacities, it's a matter of probability whether that person ends up murdering someone regardless of which laws are in place. But if you change the way that person was brought up and what values and...

what about those who watch manga porn and don't tell anyone about it

A note on the crude death rate: places like middle east will typically have much lower crude death rates than developed western countries due to demographical aspects of the population. E.g. if a population is comprised of more young people, there will be a lower crude death rate. So in that...

Fine, I was wrong about Syria

probably anything with brain on earth considers beauty as anything complex yet orderly, like the peacock's tail. In that sense, the bigger the range of colors you see, the more complexity you're able to see and hence can assess beauty on a higher level. E.g. if you see things in grayscale only...

@higs that's correct, that Detroit number is from all causes, whereas the 0.5/1000 in Aleppo is the additional mortality rate you get from the war. Nevertheless, would you say that an additional 0.5/1000 is a huge number? That's 5% of the Detroit rate. edit: according to stats from the CIA...

congrats, I agree it's a bad source of stats on the issue nevertheless, it remains my point that news articles on individual incidents cannot really give a good representation of what it's like there. Obviously, since armed conflict is the only reason we ever hear about Syria, most of the news...

@higs you're giving examples of suicide bombings etc, which obviously exist. You're giving examples of bombed buildings, which we also know exist. But you have to look the extent to which these occurrences are localized. Kabul, for example, is a very large city. I'm not too impressed with...

From watching interviews with migrants living on the streets in Paris, a lot of them seem very disappointed with the conditions they ended up in. It seems many of them had expectations of wellbeing which were not really met. I think a lot of the migration from Syria is well-founded, because the...

@Happy I would say those goals are a bit too vague. I've been working on an independent project of sorts over the last 2 years, and it's now almost done. At the outset I had a pretty specific vision in mind, and then broke it down to very concrete steps. But like you say, after its being broken...

I'm so bored nowadays that I'm considering becoming either a christian or an alcoholic. Thoughts?

boring, hazy, mediocre

I think Sweden is a good example. Here, multiculturalism is literally an official policy enforced by the state. During the 70s, they "explicitly rejected the ideal ethnic homogeneity and the policy of assimilation (source)". The last part is the most troubling: when you don't care about...

That's exactly the definition I've had in mind all along, which is why I wrote "Geographically emplacing a foreign culture into another one". I've used muslim migration as an example because that's the most prominent case were I live currently. If the migration was a bunch of old-school...

yeah, I guess hubris, and the consequent laziness resulting from hubris. So while all the other kids learn how to make an effort, you learn how to tell a cool story about why you don't need school. That works reasonably well for a while, before the learning curve gets too steep. But then you get...

Duration of life has nothing to do with meaning. The desire to prolong one's life is just a basic instinct.

my parents had some sort of bird in a cage as a pet. One of those small parrot things. One day they generously put the cage on the terrace to give it some sunlight. But as fate would have it, while no one was watching, a crow came down and fuckin ripped that thing out of the cage and ate it...

liked the sinister part in the middle there. but.. I think that 3-note melody got a little repetitive. 6/10

It makes me wanna hurt myself. 0/10.

try this experiment: search for "was the moonlanding fake" on google and then duckduckgo. google provides a bunch of articles saying it wasn't fake, whereas duckduckgo doesn't "answer" your question but rather gives closest results. Sounds good at first – considering you know it wasn't fake...

my ears don't understand this music 2/10

a bacteria culture, probably one which has rapid cell division so it will have an ever evolving personality. I could play around with antibiotics and train the bacteria to become antibiotic-resistant.

Yes, let's take some examples Take, for example the hindu-arabic numeral system, which we use today. Great example of the benefits of multicultiralism, no? Well, not really. It's not like the reason we adopted it was that we opened our borders and imported a large number of hindus and arabs...

me? I don't see where I have favored personal anecdotes over the scientific method

I've never claimed it's categorically garbage I don't know. I don't have expertise in the field, so probably no. I'm not a climate-change skeptic. Like I said, I have little opinion on climate-change research, as I have not studied it. yes the reason one would have to review science is...

Some research: Bozarth, M. A., & Wise, R. A. (1984). Anatomically distinct opiate receptor fields mediate reward and physical dependence. Science, 224(4648), 516-517. In order to assess the effect of physical dependence, they injected rats with morphine into two separate regions of the brain...

even in a "rigorous" field like computer science, about 50% of publications is more or less garbage. In economics – maybe 80%. I don't know what it is in social sciences, but it's quite naive to treat academic research as religion, and "trust" "scientists". Sample size + academic paper doesn't...

uhm.. I'm confused. If you claim that no one is doing that, are you saying that you and everyone else agree with his statement that withdrawal symptoms from opioids are not really unbearable? no one has claimed that medication to ease withdrawal symptoms is not in existence. But very few...

fish is the only acceptable pet animal

I was looking through that whole article to find out what that graph is based on, or what the scale on the y-axis is, without any luck.

I didn't understand a single thing from this paragraph. It seems to me that one of the problems here is that you badly want to discredit the guy wholesale, treating the world as a binary place: if you agree with someone's politics, you buy all their opinions wholesale. If you don't, they are...

@redbaron don't you see the absurdity of what you're saying? it's obvious that a regular flu is not lethal to any significant extent. I've had it myself multiple times. But you're saying "it depends on the strain". is your interpretation that the quote in OP was talking about the H5N1 virus or...

wow, "requiring modern medicine", that sounds very dramatic :storks: flu has a mortality rate of about 0.5/100000 (i.e. you have a 99.9999% chance of survival), with predominately the elderly (65+) being most exposed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374803/

well, there's no doubt that drug addition is tough to combat. but you gotta separate two things: 1) the psychological challenge of overcoming addiction, 2) the barrier which is represented by physical withdrawals. I don't know what his opinion on the first one is – I would have to read the book...

I think it's quite clear that in that statement, no one is disputing the realities of opiate addiction. what he is referring to is the common excuse used by opioid addicts that they wouldn't be able to quit even they wanted to – due to the physical withdrawal effects. and it is true that the...

what do you discuss there?

please show me where in this thread I sought out conflict. Or where I have complained about conflict for that matter. as usual I have to tolerate your buddy redbaron's idiotic and aggressive garbage posts, yet you target me as the one at fault. what else is new

lol, redbaron, please don't feel I directed any of that judgement of post quality towards you – you're a lost case

a light and nice tune. liked the chorus. 7/10