An issue with scientistic types is that they think that scientific truths are the ONLY truths, and that other kinds of truths that do not overlap with scientific truths, like subjective personal truths, literary/mythological truths, and spiritual truths, either do not exist or are not really truths.

With the later two there is reluctance in our modern secular society to see myth and spiritual experiences as "truths" because of the modern cultural struggle against religious fundamentalists who wrongly treat them as scientific truths.

Ziggy Wilf essentially blackmailed the Minnesota Legislature into paying for part of the new Vikings stadium by threatening to move the team and thus take away a huge driver of the Twin Cities economy. It's disgusting

My first experience to geopolitical stuff was seeing news stories about the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda when I was 8. I think they are the reason why I'm a bit of a knee-jerk liberal interventionist.

It kinda reminds me of a round chocolate candy.

I'm guessing the dark areas left and right of the "heart" are the bare surface and the lighter areas above the "heart" are where nitrogen has frozen onto the surface as a frost.

The "heart" itself looks like some kind of very young ice feature based on how smooth and bright it is.

I refuse to read the book, the Atticus Finch of TKAM is one of my literary heroes and I don't want that ruined.

Psych guy, here! There was a very popular book back in the 60s called *Games People Play" which is based on this.

I'm also a teetotaler, in my case for religious reasons (I'm a Buddhist).

I think the negative associations towards teetotalers comes from traditionally most teetotalers being rather stuck-up preachy evangelical Protestant Christians who mixed up their hate for booze with their hate for beer-guzzling German and Irish Catholic immigrants.

I don't have any links any the moment, but look up stuff by Gregory S. Paul. Paul is both an active Paleontologist and an excellent artist.

It's a shame that people get accused of being a white knight so much when they express sympathy for a woman's situation. Most of the supposed white knight behaviors seem like showing some basic empathy, solidarity, and respect. If anything, the world could use more of these supposed white knight stereotypes, but some people online ostracize that behavior as if it's as shameful as pedophilia. I can understand it being off-putting if a guy has a history of showing fake or exaggerated sympathy to woo women, but there should be nothing wrong with guys showing a bit of compassion now and then. Of all the slurs that get directed at men, I think white knight is probably the best of the lot. What many consider a white knight falls under what I would consider well adjusted. I'm sorry your friend got raped, but thanks for sticking up for victims. I'll respect folks like you way more than I'd ever respect a juvenile minded person who thinks insulting a person's sympathy and their partner's faithfulness is better than having a respectful dialogue.

I think a lot of these people have a macho mentality reinforced by shitty pop-sci nonsense that "White Knights" are pathetic, submissive, effeminate "beta" liberal weenies and that women are really instinctively attracted to "macho alpha males". It's the same BS behind the Red Pill crap, basically.

The folks in /r/KotakuInAction, /r/TheRedPill, and /r/Coontown can all stay where they are.

The later is what has turned me off of Reddit. It is infested with racists and misogynists.

A few years ago I remember running into a snarky comment that went something like "The EU is the German Empire without the Kaiser".

Not that Greece itself is innocent in all this, but the Eurozone "powers that be" are using this to impose what Naomi Klein calls "the shock doctrine" on Greece.

That is a very edgy and simplistic dismissal of almost 2000 years of theology and philosophy, there.

I have always preferred typing because the motor issues stemming from my Asperger's makes my handwriting atrocious.

Oh thank God, I thought thought doing that was just me being weird and a Luddite! I have Nystagmus and trying to read on backlit screens seems to make that worse, too.

The little rover that could!

And of course if you tried scolding them they call you an evil Fascist SJW and make juvinile jokes about being triggered.

I have a friend who was raped several years ago and when I mentioned it as why these jokers piss me off so much I got called a "White Knight cuck".

My earliest exposure to internet discussion boards was as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s posting on message boards for games like Civilization, the Final Fantasy series, and the Legend of Zelda series. the user base of all those sites were fairly young, but the discussion in all of them was far more mature and polite than Reddit because the moderation was generally strict.

IMO any message boards that are not moderated enough inevitably degenerate into cesspits. The founders of Reddit were too ideologically wedded to "Free Speech" as an ideal that they put the ideal ahead of the proper functioning of the site.

IMO the worst part of Reddit is the vote-brigading and comment-history stalking. Tiny groups of extremists mass-downvote opinions they don't like into oblivion and the most recent AMA from the new CEO shows that they don't give a damn shit about it. I've been getting stalked by a couple of Redditors who downvote my new posts down to 0 or -1 because I made fun of Gamergate for well over a month. I messaged the admins and I never got a response.

I really like paleo-art, paintings and drawings of prehistoric landscapes and extinct creatures.

This place is so much better than Reddit.

I wanted to go into psych research but stuff like this really turned me off of it and I decided to go into clinical psych, instead. "Publish or Die" is terrible for science.

100 years ago "race science" was accepted as fact by a lot of educated people and many scientists despite being complete bullshit because it aligned with people's prejudices. We should not fool ourselves and think we are above such prejudices, today. Research data must be interpreted to make sense, and how we interpret said data can be biased by many things. Or we can unconsciously set up experiments that "prove" what we already believe.

What it really comes down to though, I think, is a loss of curiosity and wonder. Children are great at this: "why is the sky blue?," but something seems to get lost as people grow older. If people kept this curiosity and coupled it with critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate evidence and accept the fitting conclusions then we'd be much better off.

I think that it gets (metaphorically) beaten out of them.

"Mommy, why is the sky blue?"

"Mommy doesn't know, quit asking such stupid, useless questions!"

American society is anti-intellectual to an extreme, almost pathological, degree and acts very negatively towards anything without an immediate, concrete, practical, and most especially PROFITABLE, use.

I think the big issue is that the amount of factual and theoretical knowledge we have has exploded exponentially over the past 400 years. As late as the 1500s a sufficiently intelligent person could know everything known in their own society at least on a basic level. Today there is just so much stuff out there that no one can even know a tiny fraction of the sum of human knowledge.

That is really depressing. :-(

You can see a bit of this in people's angry reaction to the "demotion" of Pluto. The reaction was not for scientific reasons, but because of the simplistic, rote way they were taught what a planet is. To most people "planets" are just a list of things.

I think stuff like this should give those who consciously or unconsciously believe in "Scientism", the notion that the only real truths and facts are empirical scientific ones, some pause. We don't really see the world as it is, only as it is presented to the conscious mind. We can't really know if the order we think we see in the universe is really "out there", as most people usually assume, or, as Kant believed, is simply the result of out our minds/brains order order our sensory perceptions.

We BELIEVE that certain statistical methods are a valid way to determine "fact" from subjective anecdote and bias, but is that really true?