Zompist Bboard Again

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...

Traditional religions ("fundamentalisms") offer sets of rituals that claim to make you certain of whatever it is that you want to be certain about. c'est mauvaise foi, la foi I like how a discussion of religion ends up being about what is science. for my part, I don't think there's a lot ...

I'm an atheist, and I think I have good reasons to think I'm right about this: I suppose this puts me in the minoritarian gnostic theist camp? it's so weird how culturally we've accepted this religious framing that you can't claim knowledge about there not being gods unless you can prove it apodicti...

piñera, the only right-wing guy (if you don't consider the centrist-neoliberal coalition right wing) to be elected to the presidency since before pinochet, died a few days ago after an accident befell a helicopter he was piloting. the entire media has been sucking his you know what ever since. rathe...

I always get that feeling when reading scalzi (i mostly have it read for me by some dude who works for audible). do consider reading the interdependency series, for I much enjoyed it.

do consume carrot!

this message brought to you by your local chapter of the Associated farmers of Daucus, of AfD.

Oh, I'm not saying that crypto has good uses. My point is more like, if something has enough bad uses, the fact that it doesn't have any good uses by no means guarantees that it'll go away. well yeah. Alas uses don't care about our feelings, and useful stuff sticks around. I wonder if the recent &q...