Enkrod

Russia, over Ukraine, hand on their throat, continually punching a country that desperately tries to defend itself, red faced with rage shouting at the people standing around the fight and trying to help Ukraine from the sidelines:

“YOU DAMN WARMONGERS!” punch “ALL YOU WANT IS TO THREATEN ME!!” punch, punch crack “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?!!1!” punch

I was very very lucky.

I turned 26 when I heard myself coughing like a 66 year old chainsmoker with cancerous lungs, found I was unable to run up stairs and out of breath after carrying groceries inside. I had to have a cig every morning so I would be able to have a shit at all, but if I did… that first drag sent me rushing to the bathroom, it got so bad, I had to light the first one while sitting on the loo, or i’d shit my pants.

That’s when I found myself disgusted with myself. I stopped, I simply stopped. From 38 cigarettes per day to 0. I am so happy it worked, because I am a very easily tempted personality and tend towards addiction in anything that gives my brain pleasure.

It took a year before I completely stopped coughing and two years before I could run up those stairs again, but one day I simply realized “Oh my! I’m not out of breath. What… what happened? Oh, yeah I quit smoking! Damn this feels nice!”

Bullshit, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are EU countries, people bought HD2 and now can’t legally play anymore. Steam has already issued refunds to some.

And for so many people there isn’t even a choice. They bought the game, and now they can’t play it, because no PSN in their country.

And even for some countries with access to PSN, creating an account requires photo-id and a face scan. That’s complete bullshit.

With face scans! What the hell Sony?!

The difference is everyone CAN install a bad anti-cheat, or decide to not do it.

But if people who bought the game suddenly CAN’T legally play it anymore, because PSN doesn’t allow accounts in their country, they don’t even have a choice.

Selling the game in those regions in the first place was deeply wrong, but then taking away the ability to play AFTER they sold it to people, that’s a bridge too far.

And we’re not just talking about most of Africa (not that that would be less bad), we’re also talking about countries like Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, those are EU members, how is there no PSN available there?

There’s five million ants for every human, should they decide to fuck us up, they will.

How is horizontal gene transfer between microbes in any way relevant to a discussion about the ancestry of chickens that only reaches back to the dinosauria clade? Chickens are invariably a sub-group of the bigger group dinosaurs.

Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.

T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.

T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.

Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists

But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can’t evolve your way out of a clade.

This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons

But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can’t evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can’t evolve out of your ancestry.

It’s three fedoras, looked at from the top!

Thank you for making me look, but fuck you for not telling me, it took ages of staring at my screen before I got what was actually depicted.

Theistic Satanism, otherwise referred to as religious Satanism, spiritual Satanism, or traditional Satanism,[2] is an umbrella term for religious groups that consider Satan, the Devil, to objectively exist as a deity, supernatural entity, or spiritual being worthy of worship or reverence, whom individuals may contact and convene with, in contrast to the atheistic archetype, metaphor, or symbol found in LaVeyan Satanism.

The Satanic Bible is LaVeyan Satanism and as a product of the 20th century very much more modern than the “traditional Satanism” of de Sade and Huysman in the 19th century.

LaVeyan Satanism is still much more on the “spiritual” side of things than, for example the explicitly atheistic, sceptic and rational Satanic Temple, but both fall under the umbrella of the more modern, non-theistic understanding of Satanism. While a more historical form definetly existed, even if it wasn’t widely practiced.

In Christian Satanism the Devil exists and is being worshipped. This is “classical” or “theist” Satanism where there is a belief in the existence of Satan.

Contrast that with modern atheist Satanism, where the Devil is merely a psychological symbol of rebellion, independence and freedom that serves to trigger theists while also being a representation of revolting against christan authoritarianism and, through the exploitation of rules stemming from theist-political decisionmaking, as a counter to the blatantly unconstitutional abuse of religious freedom laws for the benefit of a single religion.

That is extremely cool and I don’t doubt your expertise in the slightest. Was only commenting about that anoxic conditions alone wouldn’t necessarily preserve the bog mummies, but that the acidic conditions and tannins are likely more important.

Well the human gut is anoxic too, so that shouldn’t be a problem for the gut-bacteria in that log and in the bog mummies. I think it way more likely that the sphagnan and the other tannins in peat-bog-water conserved this as well as the bog bodies.

Meh, our esoterics are basically religious anarchists or spiritual hippies. They still fall into all the trapping of religion without the “organized” part of “organized religion”.

It’s her reversal of the Serenity Prayer, changing it into a call to action instead of acceptance of the (seemingly) inevitable.

Basically every great and complex work ant colonies are capable of is an emergent property of simple rules that are simple instinct in simple creatures, yet the interplay of lots of individuals following these simple rules begets complex behavior. This is the easiest to grasp example imho.

Flocking birds, schooling fish, hell we can write computer programs where complex behavior emerges from simple rules, Conway’s Game of Life is the best example for how simple the rules can be and how complex the emergent systems.

But emergence is everywhere, the cells of your lungs don’t breathe, but they arrange themselves in a way and are embedded in a system that can exist because lung-cells do arrange the way they do.

Life itself is an emergent property, the atoms that constitute us themselves aren’t alive, they don’t run, breathe or think, all of those are emergent properties from the right collection and arrangement of atoms into molecules into cells into a multicellular organism.

Thinking is no different than running, it is something that happens through the complex interplay of matter but transcends the single building blocks.

A single ant can’t be a colony, a single cell can’t breathe or run and a single neuron can’t think, but if you bring them together in the right amount and arrangement, new properties emerge.

And most importantly, if you disturb that arrangement, if you destroy some of that constituting matter or rearrange it, the emergent properties change or vanish. That it can simply stop to emerge is imho the best prove that it is an emergent property.

“An emergent phenomenon of the way our biological hardware works” is one possible, entirely rational and most importantly sufficient answer. And even if we did not have an answer, that doesn’t mean that there is not an entirely materialistic explanation for the phenomenon, even if we didn’t find the answer yet.

Because we have hundreds of thousands of examples of previously unexplained phenomena being sufficiently and completely explained by purely naturalistic, materialistic causes.

On the other hand we have exactly zero previous examples of a phenomenon being sufficiently explained by anything supernatural.

Since we observe consciousness solely bound to the existence of, reliant on the configuration of and changeable through the change of physical properties of physical matter, we can conclude that it is an emergent property that has arisen like other properties emergent from biological matter through the well known, well defined and observable process of evolution.

Could there be an alternative explanation? Yes!

Is the god-hypothesis in any way an explanation for consciousness? No! In fact it would raise more questions. It is neither sufficient, nor rational. What it is, is a god-of-the-gaps argument, another turtle on the way down.

Margerine under Nutella!

:.|:;