there are also timelines where george w bush was president for two terms!
how i feel for those poor people. multiple tax breaks for the rich, economic depression, two wars, indefinite detentions and torture of prisoners, the establishment of domestic surveillance programs, ā¦
oh.
wait.
thatās our timeline isnāt it? 
Is there a quick way to ālikeā every post on a page?
Or, failing that, an auto-like from every page visitor for every poster for any post about Sarah Palin. It would save so much click energy.
I thought the value of the ālikeā system was in the userās selective useā¦ Isnāt ālikingā everything essentially indistinguishable (information-wise) from not ālikingā anything, from a thread-level pov?
I agree. Youād think, wouldnāt you?
But I know of no other subject matter more likely to attract universal exhibitions of deserved contemptuous wit. Sarah Palin may be the Ur-sink of derogation.
No. Sarah Palin is advocating that anybody who wants to drink water pay their semi-privatized water companies to build desalination plants that may be very expensive up front but make up for it by also being very expensive to operate.
That will leave the cheap water delivered by socialist-built infrastructure for subsidizing agribusiness, while we buy lots of oil from Alaska to run the desalination plants and no longer have salmon competing with theirs.
Iāve held on to a speculation that what we understand as consciousness only originated at dawn of recorded history ā that itās an historic development, that itās in a sense learned, and that this implies that it could vary or be lost. So, yes, I think what youāre saying here may be basically accurate.
If youāre being serious, Iāll definitely get on the boat that consciousness generally is highly variable, and the āstandardā changes between eras and societies. For instance, we moderns may possibly be considered less conscious than our pre-agricultural ancestors. We had to spend a lot of time thinking about how we appear to our tribe-mates, and had to think about all the people in our tribes and who we appeared to be to them. These days (this is highly tinted by me having living hours between 4pm and 4am) itās possible to survive with no friends, a dozen work-relationships, maybe 3 merchants (and even then you donāt ever have to interact with actual humans in the supermarket these days), and knowing a few people you live with or possibly no roommates if youāre life swings that way, instead of the 5-100 people living in constant intimate contact in your tribe with whom you naturally share everything.
Living oneself can literally mean living by yourself, if I spent the effort, I could get my human contact down to only coming into any realtime contact with 1 person face-to-face, and phone calls at work from users who are on a whole other plane of existence from myself, since they deal with the real world. The only other people I interact with, I choose and expend effort to do so, in order to maintain my sanity and humanity. It is emotional and mental exercise for me. And I know that if I donāt do it, Iāll end up dead via depression.
Anyway, Iāve been ramblingā¦ What I mean to say is, as modern humans, we can choose a lifestyle (depending on a lot of prerequisite factors which are heavily favored towards privileged people) where we use our brains for minor tasks, nearly all of which are those that our brains evolved to do. And none of which require us to think about ourselves or any metacognition. We end up doing robotic things and being robots. That isnāt very conscious, or at least not very; self-aware. Iām too comfortable right now to break out and do better things with my life.
Also, I think that consciousness has at least been around as long as art has been around. And I mean by that, artistic intent. If all you want to do is record for yourself an accurate depiction of an object, thatās not really art but engineering. Art happens when you want to apply a lens to the depiction of something, or to just create something without worrying about āis it possibleā. Or just an externalization of raw emotion. Also complex messages can be embedded in art. Or simple ones. Or no message.
Basically, I think intentional art is a good indication of complexity of thought, and that it might make a good approximation for a measure of consciousness.
I really hope I didnāt sound like Deepak Chopra here. I meant to make things concrete and testable, and not-a-word-salad.
Go ahead, make me explain myself. Iād rather that than get away with bullshitting.
I wonāt visit places in where grass is grown/people refuse to live in the desert they are in. Iām sure Las Vegas & places like it are nice & full of nice people, but fuck that.
Yeah sorry bud. I am working on a time machine to try and change that.
Iāve always maintained that stupid people need representation too, and they can recognize one of their own when they see one.
She told her supporters we should boycott Copenahgen, and half of them switched to Skoal.
The short version is, yes, Iām serious. I was influenced by a book I read when I was 19, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which seemed like a crank theory in many ways, yet it seemed somehow to make a lot of sense. (Everyone Iāve ever talked to whoās read the book has said nearly exactly the same thing.)
The crux of the idea was that, before we learned to create an internal narrative in which we reflected on our internal states all the time, weād basically carry out long term tasks by hallucinating voices that would tell us what to do; this was the origin of religious ideas. Main evidence the author used was how in very old extant texts, there was almost never any reflection on internal mental states. Among the examples, he pointed out how in the Iliad, every time youād expect someone to reflect or make a difficult decision, a god shows up out of nowhere and tells them what to do.
There are a couple of examples that lend credibility to this idea for me, which involve carrying out complex tasks without being fully conscious of it. For one, thereās a common experience people describe, of realizing that theyāve been driving for a long time, on a familiar route, but are unable to remember the last period of time when they were doing it. Iāve had a couple of experiences when, under particular stress or, oddly, extreme boredom, Iād feel ādepersonalizedā for a moment.
And, a few times ā and this is the scariest in a way ā Iād get into a political argument with someone physically in front of me, whoād just expressed an idea that I found particularly egregious, and Iād realize, after the fact, that Iād made a coherent argument, one I thought was basically correct, and that Iād handled properly ā yet somehow without really being fully conscious of what the person had said, or how I was responding. For instance, I remember getting into an argument with an overt white supremacist, concluding with my denouncing her and turning and leaving, all without somehow actually being conscious of what she meant. It was like Iād just watched a television show about someone who acted just as Iād want to act.
You should warn that you will lose IQ points listening to that bint.
Iām assuming youāre talking about bottled water. If so, youāve latched on to a bad talking point, and repeating it shows a lack of deeper thought.
First off, if all bottled water Americans used came from California, then itās still not enough to make a major dent compared to agriculture and residential usage (I did the math). Think about it for a second ā of all the water you use, how much comes from bottled? Remember, a single 1/3rd pound hamburger raised in california is 150 gallons of water.
Second, so what if the water is bottled? It will be consumed by a human ā how is this bad? Itās not going to yards. I would wager to say that people are much more conservative when they pay 300x the price for anything.
Third, whatās the alternative? That drinking water be trucked in from east of the continental divide? As bad as bottled water is environmentally, this is even worse.
Mind you, this isnāt a rant on bottled water. Itās a rant on shallow thinking.
Kill me now.
I do not wish to live in a world where Sarah Palin in on autoplay in a BB thread.
They would have to go out into it, for it to have value to them. People only value what they have experienced.
Seriously thereās nothing more condescending than that tone from someone whoās barely literate.
