Cerebralicious
Entrepreneur, polygnostic, professional dilettante, systems wrangler, agorist libertarian, ardent bibliophile, unrepentant elitist, technarchist, polymath, gamer, worldbuilder, epicure, occasional saponifier, rationalist, practicing hesperophile, US immigrant, provocateur, philosophunculist without portfolio, transhumanist, aspiring post-Singularity superintelligence - indeed, veritable demiurge upon this Earth.... What more need be said?
(Well, except that "humble" seems to be a word missing from my vocabulary.)
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I posted a video where I play with myself…AS TALLIS :) In Dragon Age. :)
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“More than one person I know is spending this holiday week unplugging from the internet. Which is awesome. I mean, seriously, I really admire these...”
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What is greed?
Me wanting to keep what is mine or you wanting to take what isn’t yours?
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Not only am I greatly surprised,...
So, um, I’m closing down this Tumblr, and indeed my personal blogging in general, and moving on.
It’s not that I haven’t had a jolly old time here, because I have, or that I have any kind of beef with most of you guys. (Which actually is the problem: y’all’re, if anything, too damn interesting; and I’m going to miss a few of y’all quite a lot in my daily argument-stream. You know who you are.) It’s just that between making a living at my day job(s) and spending all this time arguing matters political and matters ethical and generally setting the world to rights, I’m both spending a great deal of time, and consuming most of that ineffable quantizable willpower I need in order to get stuff done, and that’s impinging badly on the thing I really want to do, which is my writing.
And since I can’t stop earning a living, alas, and a chap’s got to pursue his dreams, the blogging’s got to go.
For those of you who have enjoyed my writing/worldbuilding/conlang posts and would like to keep following them, they’re moving to a new blog here (RSS feed here), with a Google+ page here. Please do feel free to follow me there; your comments will continue to be welcomed, as ever.
I’m also over there personally here, where I’ll no doubt continue to post some random stuff of vague interest to some, although I don’t plan on returning to habits argumentative; must focus on the writing, dammit.
So, with that, farewell, and to all the chaps and chapesses with whom I’ve had heated arguments - or heated agreements - over the last year, keep it up! You guys are awesome.
Landfill Beyond The Stars: No, just no. It’s hard to imagine the economics that would make it possible to haul junk across space for dumping. And that would make it worthwhile to waste an entire planet to store the stuff. But…
…there are a couple of locations that specialize in recycling of exotic materials in, ah, ways that you wouldn’t want to live next door to, or even on the same planet as, or disposal of really awkward components that can’t just be dumped - like, say, singularities - and which occasionally store piles of things waiting to be recycled. So, “junkyard beyond the stars”, that we can do you.
wolfkazumaru replied to your post: wolfkazumaru reblogged your post: wolfkazumaru…
Fair enough, glad I’m interesting. I’ll respond to the rest when I get home, most likely. Gotta go to work.
Just to save time by clarifying one point: insofar as democracies in the modern West have those safeguards, I should mention that I consider them confirming instances of this point. They work better by being, in those areas, actually antidemocratic.
eclaircissement replied to your post: wolfkazumaru reblogged your post: wolfkazumaru…
You may not know it’s Brussels that makes the most laws in the UK and human rights cases are sent to European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. As is becoming increasing clear national parliaments and courts aren’t sovereign in the EU.
Yeah, I’m familiar with it (ex-Brit, here), although possibly not with the latest updates. But last I heard, the UK government was still trying to split the difference and argue that it was (a) in the EU and (b) maintaining parliamentary sovereignty at the same time.
It’d be interesting to see what would happen if they came into serious conflict, particularly since the EU is looking increasingly unable to exert its will on anything, these days, what with the imminent euro collapse.
Massive Art Nouveau Mural by a’shop
Made with 50 different colors and over 500 cans of graffiti, these artists recently produced this stunning Goddess on the side of a 5-story high apartment building. Your graffiti is inferior.
(via: My Modern Met)
Since I am on the record as being generally opposed to graffiti in the past, I must redefine this is not-graffiti for the purpose of my personal prejudices. Because damn, that’s awesome.
(via hawkw)
but if a presidential candidate doesn’t personally believe in evolution then *gasp* I can’t bring myself to vote for them. That’s un-scientific
…I submit that there’s a strong positive correlation between our bomb-happiest - and most otherwise grossly flawed, be it social engineering hubris, economic voodoo, or whatever else - governments and the number of people in them willing to ignore the coquetries of objective reality.
It’s a different kind of reality-faking, sure, but I’m willing to make an inductive stretch and generalize the principle.
deadline-showdown Asks:
cerebralicious Said:
It’s not so much the fact of it per se, but rather its implications. Evolution’s both a very well established theory (in the scientific, not the common, sense), and one that forms part of what I, at least, would consider “common knowledge” to be expected of any educated person - and one, moreover, that touches at the edges on politically significant issues. (While they’re ones he would, Constitutionally appropriately, leave to the state level, nonetheless they are political issues.)
And looking at your proffered suggestions - well, with the first (trivial), it’s suggesting that he’s in the habit of having definite opinions on things that are too trivial to be worth thinking about enough to validate said opinions; and with the second (uncontested), that he’s in the habit of having definite opinions on things that are so eo ipso definite to him that they don’t need to be checked against objective reality. Neither of these, to me, are the hallmarks of the kind of careful, logical, rational thinking that I want from anyone I’m going to endorse handing political, which is to say, coercive power to.
Now, in fairness and to expand on the parenthetical with which I ended that post, in the context of the rest of the candidates of both parties and, indeed, politicians generally, he’s well ahead of the average in terms of intellectual integrity, and I’d probably be pretty happy if he won the election on those terms alone.
But to actually endorse someone, my standards are kind of strict.
(Edited: It’s not the theism, just to say. I have no particular issue with theists, per se, because it’s not like I can disprove their deity - for the most part - any more than they can prove It. It’s only those strands of it that go directly against my ethics or observable objective reality that I have trouble with.)
wolfkazumaru reblogged your post: wolfkazumaru reblogged your photo: Democracy. …
Whoa hey, you unfollowed me. Interesting. I question your method of extrapolation, since all modern democratic nations have mechanisms in place to prevent exactly the kind of scenario you propose.
Some months ago, actually. I still read you on occasion directly, as spare time permits; it’s just that I’m trying with irregular success to waste less time arguing unproductively on-line. Things to do, and all.
Anyway. I question your questioning, since at least many modern democratic nations have methods in practice to bypass those mechanisms if the demos really want to.
(And, incidentally, not all. The UK, for example, under the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, can always override past law with present law, so any mechanisms it may have instituted mean nothing as soon as it passes something that contradicts them. The British Human Rights Act was effectively a dead letter as soon as it was passed, in this respect; the only thing that stops the UK government from passing the Kill Those Bastards Whose Faces We Do Not Like Act is its estimate of the likelihood of losing the next election.)
wolfkazumaru reblogged your photo: Democracy.
Yeah, you show all those nations run by direct democracy. All zero of them.
To avoid multiplying panels pointlessly, the burden of extrapolation is on the reader.
As is the responsibility of extrapolation.
I was in the middle of a Stargate SG-1 marathon when I decided I needed a particle for Síntári that makes an imperative more urgent.
It would work in the same way that English, Latin, and Greek all use go!, ite!, or ἴθι! plus another command.
The particle is kri. This is perhaps unsurprising if you’re familiar with the show XD.
So while lainttiskuas means “(You [sg]) write it!,” lainttiskuas kri! would be more along the lines of “Go write it (now)!”
I’m also thinking of deriving it from a verb krije, but I still have to figure out what that verb means. Probably something like “to pay attention to.”
You too, huh? :)
Back in the older versions of Eldraeic, a terminal krí (long-vowel marker on the I to make that sound right) in a sentence was how you converted a requestive into an imperative. Of course, ever since I caught delusions ambitions of publication, that’s had to be kicked out of canon for fairly obvious reasons, but it used to be there…
(via fyeahconlangs)
Democracy.
The word which is commonly translated as “Imperials”, referring to any of the Empire’s citizen-shareholders, is valmiríän in the original Eldraeic; curiously, it is not cognate at all to that nation’s formal name. From its roots, it could have the meaning either of “ordered self” or of “self that sets in order”.
When asked if one translation or the other comes closer to the intended meaning, the valmiríän, infuriatingly, always answer “Yes.”
Klingons Love Shakespeare: While cultures also are very different (see: Culture Clash), there’s enough commonality among near-median species that this sort of thing happens all the time, between any pair of species you might care to name. Even if it’s only about one small, weirdly idiosyncratic cultural element - given the way these things go, Earth is as likely to become famous for popsicles - spot the reference - as for, say, Confucianism or the eponymous Shakespeare.
