A friend of mine keeps talking about becoming "sovereign." It apparently has a lot of benefits, but sounds too good to be true. What the hell is he talking about?

Darkness12 · 1 year

The difference here is that a lot of people (libertarians, mostly, for obvious reasons) DO know about the idea of microsovereignty, and none have succeeded in seceding from the US.

ana-sisyl · 1 year

I wouldn't call it a quip, just naivety. I was aware of the federal aid distribution, but didn't connect that to economic prosperity. I guess it would make sense to do that, since state governments ought to be collecting more tax dollars if local businesses are thriving, right?

solomonar · 1 year

Why are you being downvoted? It IS stupid. This STILL isn't cognitive dissonance.

ana-sisyl · 1 year

That's not very serious. We'd obviously still trade with each other just like we do with other nations. :/

ana-sisyl · 1 year

Yeah, I'm sure the US hasn't grown economically or socially in the last 140 years...

Wait, has it really not? Is the south still so industrially backwards? I figured maybe all the Texan oil wealth would mean something.

noworryhatebombstill · 1 year

cacophonic: terrible sounding; caco is greek for shit; a cacophony is often used to describe what it sounds like in hell. I'm sure you can figure out what -phone means.

amalgamation: This just means combination, but comes from a metallurgical term, so it's kind of stronger: you can imagine mixing molten metals together to get an alloy that seems homogenous; it's a much stronger form of combination than just mixing things together.

brmpbrmp · 1 year

Exactly. Anyone who thinks the Tea Party is anything but the GOP's mouthpiece is deluded.

desquibnt · 1 year

No, she's just a dirty, filthy, lying, whore. She is not that stupid. She knows exactly what she is doing, exactly the image she presents, exactly the sort of character she's playing for the idiot right, and she's milking it for all it's worth. She's a whore in every sense of the word.

oniram · 1 year

You never know. People can't stay at their computers for every single hour of the day having an argument with someone else.

Sorry, I was busy for the last three months having an argument on a different website. Where were we?

ana-sisyl · 1 year

Little kids all doped up with ritalin and other amphetamines have superhuman reflexes. Not joking; that level of skill cannot be acquired by adults. Plus, they also learn to compensate for the lag between the server and the client.

Ash09 · 1 year

I'm not saying it's the cause, nor are you actually arguing against my position: I argue that the sort of Islam that provides the justification for terrorism can only thrive in cultures that are already incredibly violent. It's the idea of culture as divine truth which allows it to spread; it is this that makes religion dangerous. Philosophy does not spread passively; rational thinkers do not take new positions and alter their thinking without lots of critical thought. But when you throw religion into the mix, you can easily brainwash the unwashed masses into "believing" (although not necessarily understanding) complex philosophical arguments which justify any sort of behavior. They "believe"

Ash09 · 1 year

Who's "we", and why does it matter?

I prefer to operate on the assumption that the universe exists in some objective sense, whether it be as I perceive it or something entirely different which generates those perceptions. It really doesn't matter either way, because as I perceive it, the universe is consistent and everyone else who I assume is a person and not a p-zombie acts as if they experience the universe in the same way I do, unless their physical brain is being affected by some malady or chemical (I see this as evidence that the mind arises from the physical space-time structure of the brain).

When it comes down it, no matter what the true underlying nature of the processes that generate my conscious experience, they are not dependent on the part of the universe that is "me": My consciousness exists, I need no justification for that aside from the fact that I'm thinking about it right now, and something which is not my conscious mind is generating sensory data which my mind interprets as our (assumed to be) objective universe.

Even if the universe is nothing more than the calculations of the brainstates of my mind over the period of its existence, or if it's even just the data that describes that according to some scheme, there must be something exterior to me. It is not nothing, for I exist. It is not necessarily spacial; as I have explained, it could be some abstract representation of a space-time universe. Whatever it is, there must be some sense in which it is not homogeneous, for if it were homogeneous in all possible ways, it would not be possible for it to give rise to my experience on complex chaotic systems. Whatever this thing is, each part of it can't be dependent on the whole, for then the entirety is defined by that part, and we regress down to homogeneity, which is impossible. Some part of it, some process or rule of transition or substructure which exists by some definition of structure, which, while playing a role in describing all that is me, is not dependent on me. It is of a higher (lower, as I prefer to imagine that there is some lowest layer of reality) order than my mind, and this is all Kuthiyea describes as a "higher power".

All of this is much simpler if we agree to start with the assumption that we exist in an objective, physical universe. The universe persists beyond our deaths, and so it is "higher" than each of us. Gravity still works when we die; we're not special. The laws of physics are a "higher power" than anything constructed by man. Anything we could possibly engineer is just a manipulation of matter which continues to follow some set of rules. Even if we discover how to "change" the laws of physics, we've really just discovered how to manipulate it more finely.

Ash09 · 1 year

Religion is regional. Culture is regional. Islam is a religion that provides a moral justification for the absurd and violent culture of the region, and the culture of the region provides a reason to adhere to Islam.

Ash09 · 1 year

Have you had properly cooked bacon? Bacon with the proper ratio of fat to meat? Crispy and delicious? Seasoned with maple and smoked with hickory? It is more than a food, it is end of a life lived blind.

Ash09 · 1 year

Why?

Ash09 · 1 year

Is this close?

Ash09 · 1 year

I think all he's saying is that the universe is higher up (or lower down, to be scientific about it) in the layers of reality. Human beings run on the hardware of the universe; all our petty squabbles are emergent from the laws of physics. Thus the universe itself is "higher" than we mere mortal minds.

nudebeach · 1 year

He ditched her for a bunch of mexicans, which I thought was pretty weird.

Seriously, though, would it be so hard to give the girl maybe a quarter or even a tenth of the winnings?

sarahfrancesca · 1 year

He lost it a bit at the end with a subtle smile.

ana-sisyl · 1 year

Says who? And what's being claimed as significant?

Synthesyzer · 1 year

Better yet, get his permission to film him while he does it (set up a stationary "hidden" cam), then post it on metacafe or one of those other sites that actually shares ad revenue with its normal users and earn yourself a few thousand dollars. Naturally, you'll split it with him.

Seriously; this is a goldmine. Metacafe used to pay $5 for every 1000 views your original videos got (they stopped doing this) and Revver still has a program that gives 20% of ad revenue to video promoters, and splits the remaining ad revenue 50/50 with the content producer. So if you host your video with Revver, submit a link to Reddit, get a few hundred upvotes (which translates to a few ten thousand views or so, and more as it spreads across the rest of the internet), you could make a decent chunk of cash.

ana-sisyl · 1 year

No, a lot of help as in he barely did anything technical on his own. He wrote none of the code for 4chan, he wrote none of the translations, he wrote barely any of the changes or modifications, etc. All he did was buy hosting, put up a website based on a free japanese image BBS that his friends helped him translate and modify, and then post about it on SomethingAwful.com. His role was simply being the kid with the credit card and the first English-speaking anime fan to create an english-language imageboard for Americans. It's like saying the kid with the engineer father deserves to have his robot be given first place when he made it with a kit ordered out of a catalogue and the father read the instructions to him and even does most of the trickier assembly because the kid has no idea what to do. Then the father realizes that the robot kit includes a type of motor not patented in the US, so he files a patent under his son's name and suddenly the kid is famous and being hailed as a genius and given all sorts of awards and admiration.

ana-sisyl

TROPHY CASE

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