Donated! God, if he won the nomination, it'd be the most significant political event of my lifetime. Bernie 2016!

If I don’t follow a particular tag, I am exercising my disinterest in a topic or category of topics. If, on the other hand, I choose to “ignore” an individual I am effectively deciding that I don’t want to hear what that person has to say on any topic whatsoever.

Recently b_b mentioned to the rest of the Hubski team that he thought the term "ignore" wasn't appropriate because of the negative connotation. I tend to agree, it should be called something else, because it isn't a negative thing at all. I would be SHOCKED if I wasn't ignored by at least several people given the amount of music (original and otherwise) that I post to Hubski. I take absolutely no offense to this.

All this said, I am pretty frugal in my ignoring ways. I tend to keep the ignoring for tags/domains and obvious spammers. I have muted maybe 2 people that weren't obvious spammer, they were just obvious assholes.

FWIW, I really enjoyed your observations, thank you for taking the time to write this.

The danger of letting people build protective walls around themselves is that they will be tempted to do just that. Every time I hear the phrase “Hubski community” I mentally shake my head. To me, a community is a group of people with tangible interdependencies. Whether they like each other or not, they have to get along. I have seen a certain level of emotional support offered up on Hubski from time to time, but if my car dies on the interstate I will probably not be logging in and begging members for immediate help.

I don't expect that everyone that visits/uses Hubski will develop the same types of relationships, but many will. I also think that with time and expansion of our user base, we will see a number of different communities. There will definitely be bubbles of different communities throughout Hubski, just as there are IRL.

We have some interesting ideas in the works right now. I'm excited for the future and I'm glad that you are a part of our "community" emcadwaladr! -We are better for it imo.

so, in reply to both of your comments:

i'm an athiest and not a spiritual person, so i don't think of tripping as spiritual, though i understand that's a common framework in which to approach the experience. it was always clearly a drug-based experience to me, not spiritual in any way. i see psychedelics as chemical tools to create cathartic/epiphanic mental situations that enable me to resolve certain kinds of problems. psilocin in particular has been the most useful one in the toolbox.

for me, the core of the experience is the disruption of self that comes at peak, the dismantling of concepts as i approach the peak, and the clarity afterwards. everything outside of that is just flavoring. maybe someone who enjoys these things more recreationally would disagree.

no trip is "bad", it's either more or less intense, and you can appreciate it or not. it will be colored by your thoughts and emotional state. you will dismantle yourself. the things that weigh on your mind most heavily will be the focus of attention. you can either find value in examining your contradictions, or hate the revelation of your hypocrisy. but there's always something to learn, and the most stressful trips have the most important lessons to teach.

this might just be my weird perspective. i'm pretty masochistic, overanalytical, have tendency toward detachment and dissociation, and i'm capable of looking back on some straight hellish experiences with an eye for the benefits. maybe most people can't do that.

actions inspired wholly or in part by my trips: seeking help for medical problems i'd been ignoring, coming out to my family, ending a relationship that had gone on too long, entering the most important relationship of my life, ending my drug addiction, and some more important things that i won't write here.

ending my drug addiction required abstinence from all drugs, including psychedelics, so i've sort of moved past all this. it was a useful tool for a while but eventually i reached a point where i had to leave it behind.

"Do you believe in evolution" is not a yes/no question, despite the fact that it's presented as such.

"I do not believe we descended from monkeys" and "I do believe that MRSA evolved because of our use of antibiotics" are positions that are easily held by lots of Americans. On the face of it, the former is a creationist viewpoint while the latter is an evolutionist viewpoint. But keep in mind - "Intelligent Design" allows you to say "I believe that evolution is all part of God's plan" and, by definition, you're a creationist.

That's where "evolution" and "America" comes off the rails - most Americans are perfectly fine believing that there's science involved in their lives, but they get itchy when you say "there's nothing but science in your lives." A wholehearted acceptance of the factuality of evolution means a wholehearted acceptance that Big Sky Father has less power than we were taught at Sunday School so most Americans prevaricate.

And if you prevaricate on the survey, you're a creationist.

You're missing out, personally I love them and find them so inspirational. Perhaps you've already seen some of the stuff I'm going to ramble about below, but maybe others will find it interesting. :)

Some of the final shuttle launches almost brought me to tears, even though I think it was right to retire it and move onto something else, and long over due. It was just kind of sad, because the space shuttle was such a huge focus of my whole life, and is what got me into space/astronomy as a hobby.

Last Shuttle Launch: STS-135

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

Did you watch the Curiosity rover landing? While not a launch, it was pretty amazing, and they broadcasted it live in the middle of the night. The night of the Curiosity rover landing, no joke, I teared up a bit and had to choke back some tears. When they finally announced the landing was successful and said "Wheels down on Mars", and everyone in the control room lost it, I couldn't help but feel happy for them and humans in general.

An Overview of the landing, so that the second video make sense, and you can get an understanding of how complicated a landing this was. Atmospheric breaking, parachute deploy, powered flight, sky crane dropping it onto the surface... just so many things that could have failed but didn't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I8AoB1xgU

The Landing: A little dry at first, but keep in mind every thing they are seeing is 14 minutes behind. So the probe had already landed and was safe before they even got confirmation it was entering the atmosphere. It goes through cruise stage separation, atmospheric breaking, parachute deploy, powered flight, and then the sky crane landing, and then they even got pictures right away, which they weren't expecting because they weren't sure if the other probe in orbit would still be in line of site to transmit (they use it like a relay). I linked to a point in the video that starts at the atmosphere entry phase.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

Depending on how old you are, you'll get to see NASA/SpaceX or SOMEONE land people on Mars. The things these people do, from launches, to landings, it just amazes and inspires me. Just imagine what it's going to take to put people, supplies, and vehicles onto Mars. Personally, I'm going to completely lose my shit.

I <3 space exploration.

I feel like I'm the only one on the internet who doesn't care lately. I can still watch youtube videos, and I've never commented there nor intend to. It hasn't really changed my experience at all. I have never touched my G+ account and don't really care about it, it could be telling the world I eat poop for all I care right now, and I couldn't be bothered to login and stop it. I only use youtube for clips that get linked, looking up a song here and there, and watching project related instructional videos for around the house type stuff. That's it.

Again, I'm not saying I'm FOR it, because like all of you I really don't see the benefit to them doing this. It's just a grab to try and force more people into using G+ and hopefully adopting it more so they can pull some of those revenue streams (people) away from Facebook. But it certainly doesn't seem to make the experience better for anyone who uses youtube. So I get why people are upset, but I also get why Google is doing it. Meanwhile I just really haven't been personally affected by it or had my internet experience altered in anyway whatsoever, so I simply "don't care".

I am really surprised how the internet mob has mobilized against Google all of a sudden. I personally enjoy a lot of Google products, and some of their projects are pretty cool, and it seemed that was kind of the common opinion. But now this happens and the torches and pitchforks are in hand, and Google is now "one of them", one of those evil companies out to quash the proles. I've been more in awe of that, than the actual youtube/G+ fiasco itself.

I feel like this will all be forgotten by next week, and I'd bet G+ actually picks up a bunch of users, not because of the force, but actual users who develop their profiles and check it out. No matter how much hate they get, I feel it's just temporary. I just don't see the "forced down my throat" sensational crap. I can still watch Youtube videos, and I still don't use G+. What's the big deal!?

Finally, for the heterosexual marriage to ever overcome its historic reputation as a relationship based on power and control -- a reality which continues in many parts of the world -- we must model equality.

This is one reason that I reject marriage out of hand. It is historically about transfer of ownership from the father to the husband, and I, for one, don't want the responsibility of owning another human. Slavery has ended, but marriage survives. In the US, spousal rape wasn't even a crime until, what, the mid-70s in a lot of states? Its stupid and outdated. Marriage should be abolished in the eyes of the law. Leave it as a religious practice. We can already co-own a house with whomever we want. We can designate power of attorney to whomever we want. These are civil functions that fall under contract law, and man, woman, gay, strait, are all the same. Why should you get a tax break for being married? So throw that out the window. In the end, the two benefits that marriage affords that are not open to the rest of us sinners are a) being able to designate a singular person who can inherit your estate tax free (but let's be honest, in the US the estate has to be worth way more money than most of us have to even make that an issue), and b) we can't impart legal residency to an alien of our choosing. If those few things were rectified though legislation, then all of the arguments about marriage become null and void. Princess fantasies and dreams of the big, fancy wedding keep women as willing conspirators in their own enslavement. I see no place for it in modern society.

Fox News, mainly, just exploits a mind-set which existed long before Fox News was around. It certainly does do propaganda effectively, but its effects are limited to those who are predisposed to see things their way in the first place.

I think that some of us don't understand that when they say things like "liberal" or "left-wing," they aren't using those terms to mean the same thing that we mean. For them, these terms mean "the Others" or "the Dangerous" not "liberating" or "progressive." So they can say that Westboro Baptist Church is left-wing and really understand that to be the case. There's no sense of irony or double-talk.

I know this is the case because I belong to a public-speaking club that had several Tea Partiers in it. I heard them (mis)using terms like "liberal" so often that one day, when I was in charge of the impromptu-speaking portion of our meeting, I showed them the dictionary definition of the word "liberal" and then asked them to speak about the concept using the term that way. Not only could the Tea Partiers not do so, try as they might, they also disbelieved that the term was defined that way in the dictionary.

It's one of the things that's so strange about public discourse in America. We're speaking past each other, in part, because we aren't even using the same language as each other, even though it may sound like it.