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Saouka  ·  3780 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Understanding Snapchat: A Journey That Left Me Feeling Out of Touch

One of the main reasons Facebook 'won' was because it managed to beat MSN.

MySpace had a chat feature. Bebo had a chat feature. But MSN still reigned supreme as the way to talk to people online. MySpace and Bebo had bulky inboxes like an email client and MSN was quick and fun. MSN is still slightly better for the user than Facebook ever was; it did webcam chat without issue much earlier, you could appear offline to 'friends', you could add people you barely knew and satisfactorily block them forever.

So then Facebook comes onto the scene and has integrated chat. You've added all your friends, like on Myspace and Bebo, and suddenly you don't _need_ MSN up to talk to them. You still do for the few friends you have that don't have Facebook, but slowly it becomes easier to just open Facebook and open MSN when you want to talk to those friends. Eventually MSN just remains closed. And as it was suffering from the iTunes style of updating anyway, that wasn't the worst of things. Even if it was slightly better, the extra effort isn't worth it.

Facebook damn well knows this. They've got you talking on their website, now they've got you on their apps. They are an important part of life because they've also beaten texting in how we communicate.

So Snapchat comes along, and Facebook don't like it. There's another way to communicate, and this one is even more low effort than before. It's seamless, it's easy to do and to understand. They know that one of the reasons they're so dominant is that the price to communicate is being on Facebook.

So why is Snapchat so dominant, aside from ease of use and tumblr-esque simplicity in communication? You're right that it captures attention and demands you look at every pixel for those 3-10 seconds. You've probably also heard that it's used for porn, but it's a method of communication so that's a given.

Taking a DP on Facebook, for me, may take up to 2 hours. I'm not actually kidding. I'm not an expert photographer, and I'm damn well not that ugly or attractive to merit it, but I like taking pictures of myself for Facebook that make me look okay. I feel compared to everyone else I know and people I don't know. Snapchat, if you trust it, takes your photo and then removes it forever. Okay fine it's not foolproof, but the idea is that you send it to your friends and assume they probably aren't horrible people. People share things with someone because they can, and in this system they can't. You get a sense of impermanence that means you don't worry as much.

If I upload a random photo of my day on Facebook, maybe 1-3 of my friends will give a shit, so I wouldn't put it on FB, but I also can't be bothered uploading it to send to them in a message. So Facebook photos are now where you put the highlights of yourself to show off. Snapchat is where you can fuck around with friends.

Saouka  ·  3815 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Should you go to jail for posting video of a real murder?

When The Human Centipede 2 was set to be released in the UK, it was originally banned by the British Board of Film Classification because whilst the first film had a premise; a grotesque science experiment, the sequel was more of the same with extra gore thrown in. Whilst The Guardian were quick to note the BBFC's complaints were mostly due to the sexual nature of the sadism, I felt what the BBFC added was a good summary of what shouldn't be shown in film.

They added:

    "There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience."

This summary is not far from what anyone visiting Gore sites is looking for. So I think if this video were fictional and released, it would be banned. I don't think that's a contention, I think there's nothing more in expression in this film than bleak death and a sort of enjoyment in being grossed out.

For his expression of this video as a sense of free speech though. I mostly agree with free speech. I believe there are limits to what is free speech and what should not be allowed. That isn't particularly contentious in the UK, I understand free speech is defended quite passionately in the US. Elements of banned speech in the UK are hate speech, libel and slander.

I think libel and slander laws are found to be there for good reason rather than being decried as censorship. There isn't exactly a case to be found for allowing people to discredit others. Hate speech effectively defends itself; there isn't really a game in town that would protect hate speech. So I think the argument of "Free speech means he can post anything" falls apart; we already have many cases where free speech isn't unlimited, so this too should justify itself.

The reality of the act is interesting. Publishing a video of someone's death can have merit; historical importance in the hanging of Saddam Hussein, Peter Smedley's suicide in the BBC's Euthanasia documentary, tragedy in the 7/7 bombings, political scandal in Wikileaks' collateral murder. All these cases are recorded on video, capture the reality of death, in startling vividity, yet we do not debate that they should be viewable. So the issue is not in the reality of death.

I think the actual problem I have is what the expression of the video is and the expression of the community towards it and I do think this is relevant to the law. The law isn't merely to punish people for doing bad things to stop them doing them, it's to express how we feel about things.

    One may lose more money on the stock market than in a courtroom; a prisoner of war camp may well provide a harsher environment than a state prison; death on the field of battle has the same physical characteristics as death by sentence of law. It is the expression of the community's hatred, fear, or contempt for the convict which alone categorises physical hardship as punishment. (The Expressive Function of Punishment pp99)

I'd write it out in my own words but it's a little late and it's written on my wall anyway. That's how the law is, it's why a speeding ticket matters more than your TV breaking. I don't know if he should be locked away for publishing the video and encouraging entertainment in watching this, but I feel that the law should express disdain for his actions in a suitable manner. I don't think there's an argument for tolerance or for free speech here. I think he's expressing little more than entertainment in someone dying, or being eaten or being raped and I don't want that in society. I feel like the law should reflect that, regardless of what they find.

I actually feel a lot more strongly about this than I thought I did when I started typing. Hopefully it's not too unclear to see how I feel.

Saouka  ·  3825 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sexual metaphors used to market gendered technology

    Or, said differently, she is penetrable, easy to display, easy to manipulate, easy to use, and cheap to own.

Is this where everyone stopped reading, or was it just me? I forgot that USB sticks were now metaphorical detachable penises. The whole "Do you think I'm still pretty?" is a good thing to complain about, but when were we told the RT is female? I don't think that came out in the advert. Unless that can be shown, the entire 'deconstruction' falls apart.

    Do you still think I'm pretty?
Well this wasn't said 'pathetically', it had the same monotone the rest did. Is it pathetic to say? I'm not sure. It's arguable that the female voice was chosen because Siri is female and that voice is what we associate with Siri. The jump to Microsoft also being sexist seems a little contrived. However, the language use might get me. Pretty isn't a masculine word, it's a feminine one. Even if I might choose my technology based on how it looks (I'll go for nicer looking mediocre headphones over ugly good headphones any day), I don't gender them as female. I think that point can be accepted; the final phrase could be see as a problem. It's not surprising that Apple products are designed for looks as well as functionality, something that Microsoft doesn't usually pay the same amount of attention to, so I don't think the punchline hinges on _women_ being only useful for their looks, but instead that Apple should spend a bit more time on function like Windows did.

    “Don’t leave me,” she implicitly begs, “you can still use me, too.”

Oh wait, the final phrase is now implying that the iPad wants to get fucked. Christ.

And it's petty for me to call this out, but

    eveyrday
should probably be spelled correctly.
Saouka  ·  3831 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's a government shutdown?

Being from England, I had no idea what the hell this was and so I'm answering assuming you knew as little as me. So this summary is for people from the non-US who didn't know this was possible.

A budget plan has to be drawn up before the start of the Fiscal year, which was October 1st, otherwise we don't know how much is to be allocated to each sector. Congress debates how much money goes into each sector before the start of the year.

This is normally fine, but because you've got Republicans in the House of Representatives and a Democrat in the White House, you get a lot more fighting.

This year they missed the deadline because they were arguing about Obamacare. The lack of resolution over this bill means throwing the entire baby out with the bathwater and no one gets paid because the budget wasn't allocated. As your Government assumed this would happen from time to time, they set up some rules that dictates who gets paid and who gets told to go home whilst the country sorts out who gets paid what. Taking from bfv's document, these are the people exempt and still getting paid. Everyone else gets 'furloughed' : legal temporary unpaid leave.

1.Employees who are necessary to address emergency situations where the failure to perform those functions would result in an imminent threat to the safety of human life or the protection of property.

2. Employees who perform functions that are funded through fees or under multi-year (as opposed to annual) appropriations.

3. Employees who perform functions that are related to express authorizations to contract or borrow without an appropriation.

4. Employees necessary to meet the obligations necessary to the discharge of the President’s constitutional duties and powers. This is understood to be employees necessary to interpret statutes, such as the Antideficiency Act, to avoid significant constitutional issues.

5. Employees who are required for the orderly termination of agency functions.

So non-essentials are trimmed whilst Congress sorts it out. Longest was 21 days in 1995, The Independent works out about $10BN in cost per week to the US economy.

Saouka  ·  3691 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Geeky Problem: Queer Terminology for a Constructed Language

Gender female, sex male, bisexual. I was assigned male sex at birth because they saw a penis and that's the identification criteria. I realised that the chemicals in my brain were not happy with testosterone because it resulted in depression from the onset of puberty and the depression stopped after I removed the testosterone and put in estrogen. I'm sexually interested in both genders and only romantically interested in women at the moment.

Gender and sex are confusing as hell in modern languages, I don't think German differentiates the two concepts by noun at all, and English common usage doesn't really differentiate too much. Sex is frequently called biological sex, although this doesn't really capture it either, and Germany/Australia using 'Third Sex' options show that really sex isn't as determinate as one might want. Preferably there would be Gender(Assigned), Gender(Identifying), Gender(Presenting/Expression) but the first use only makes sense in a medical context, the second to oneself, and the third to others.

English uses sexuality from a relative standpoint instead of an independent standpoint, and that makes life confusing if you're trans. So if I liked women only, I'd start out as heterosexual and end up homosexual? At what point was the change? Androsexual & Gynesexual seem to be more intelligible. But that doesn't take into account people who straight up don't identify with one gender more than the other, or people who are attracted to those who don't seem very masculine or feminine. Gender(Expression) Sexual? Then you have people who are asexual but still form relationships that aren't based on sexual attraction, I'm sure they have a type too. I know a few girls who are straight but are sexually bisexual, and a few guys who are romantically only into one gender but would have sex with either if they were attracted to them. Would it be beneficial to divide attraction into the Greek forms? So Lojban has "mi prami do", where "prami" communicates an idea of love and "cinmo" could communicate feeling, but neither really hit the spot for sexual interest.

Huh, making up language words is fun, I see why you do it.

You’re right, they are bad at this. “woman-become-man for male to female transsexuals(or past-man-woman) reverse the genders for the other direction. monadic? or places for former and present names pc: This leaves out a lot of possibilities: transgendered (i.e., living as other gender without body alteration), transvestite, and, of course, homosexual and heterosexual. And this does not even get into the mass of biologically defined variant sexes: xx males (hypersensitive to testosterone), xy females (lack testosterone receptors), xyy males and overt hermaphrodites of various degrees “ They have no idea. Transgendered isn’t a word, because ‘to transgender’ doesn’t make sense. It’s like watching someone stumble at scratching the surface, to mix metaphors. Woman-become-man doesn’t make sense either; it’s conflating assigned gender and gender identity until it makes transition sound like either a choice or a cosmetic decision, like people change gender because the other one looks more fun. Variant sexes is going way too far until you can express the basics well enough. Can I guess 95%+ of Lojban speakers are male? Orgasm/Climax is JUST sexual release?

Saouka  ·  3816 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I know none of my passwords.

    In the case that my Yubikey were to be broken or lost, I have physically printed my password and stored it in a secure location.
Saouka  ·  3831 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Gender stereotypes! Most common Facebook status words for girls and guys

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ngi8c/most.../

I'd wager this was the thread and image flagamuffin intended.

Saouka  ·  4049 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Change using Theseus's Ship

"Wherein does personal identity consist, then? [...] My overall conclusion then, is that persons in all probability to comprise in what I would call a basic sort, for which no adequate criterion of identity can be formulated" PP. 135-6 EG Lowe - Kinds of Being, A Study in Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sortal Terms

Personally I adore this question; it's what draws me into Philosophy at the moment. How do we identify anything that changes over time?

What technique we usually use for identity is Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles, which says that if A is identical to B then any property of A must** also be a property of B, and vice-versa. It makes a lot of sense; if Object A is orange, then we'd expect that if Object B was identical, Object B would also be orange.

So what happens when I do take away a plank of wood from Theseus' ship? Does the ship lose the property of having _that_ plank of wood and so stop being Theseus' ship he sailed in on? Loux's reply is my personal favourite. Loux claims that the moment the piece of wood was removed from the ship; it stopped being a property of that ship. If you took away all the bits of wood from the ship, there would no longer be** a ship to take objects off, but if you put a new piece of wood onto the ship, it would be adopted into the ship as a part of the ship. It solves the problem nicely, but like all problems in Philosophy, it doesn't matter if you have a solution, it matters if the solution can be applied to learn something.

The issue is time, or Diachronic[Dia=Through / Chronos=Time] Identity if you want the technical term. If time had stopped, a river could be compared to be identical to another river and we would have no issue. The problem has also been stated as Heraclitus' "You cannot step in the same river twice" Quine answers this question in From a Logical Point of View, he says that we should consider time in slices, like 2D parts of a 3D object. So when you take time slice A of a river, you can see all the water molecules that are in it at that time, and if you drive, faster than the river flows, down to a further part of the river and take time slice B, you could see all the same molecules of water in the river again. Would that be sufficient to step in the same river twice? Well that depends how we identify the river, so Quine looks at how we teach someone to identify a river. We point to many spots of say, the Tiber, and say “That’s the Tiber”, and we do it again later, at another point in the Tiber, until the person understands all the points in that river are the same river. We accept the flow of water, the process of water flowing, as what makes up that river, not what’s in the water or when we looked at it. Heraclitus’ example plays on the fact that river is a name for a temporal group of objects, not a concrete one, and so we become confused. We can** step in the same river twice, and should not worry ourselves over that. But how does this apply to humans? Let’s take Henry, an example from Loux. "Henry acquires a tan. We would say that a property of Henry is the fact that he is tanned. In winter, Henry loses his tan. Henry-in-summer does not have the same property, as Henry-in-winter does" [Loux Metaphysics] I'm gonna borrow heavily** from Loux's Metaphysics here, using the 2nd Edition if anyone desperately wants to check my sources. So what do we do? Obviously Leibniz's Law says they are NOT identical, but we find this very distasteful. I'd want to say I was identical to me before I went on holiday. The reason we find these views to conflicting is that we are usually acting under an Endurantist viewpoint; our parts are persisting three-dimensional individuals wholly present at every moment of their existence An Endurantist would reply that we should describe Henry according to him at certain times. This is Henry at 13:47 Friday 20th Feb 2012 when he had a tan, so he is still identical to Henry, but not by time-specific measurements. A Perdurantist would reply to this that this measure is too steep; we wouldn’t want to have to do that to describe identity, and so the answer is one we can accept, but only if there isn’t a better one. The Perdurantist thinks there definitely is a better example; we are time segments of a single identity. We should not worry about whether we lose something, or gain something in our spatial being, only that we are linked over time to our spatial being before that. So you would be a Perdurantist; you believe that we persist because of our change over time, not that we are one concrete entity. You might ask who could believe the opposite. Well, anyone who believes in a soul, or anything that’s non-physical could easily conjure up a few examples of a concrete entity that happens to exist within a physical manifestation. They would say that you are not your physical entity, because you can lose your arm and not seem to be a different person, and they’d be right in that regard. To answer your question of what actually is identity, I’d refer you to the quote at the beginning; there isn’t a way to define a person’s identity. I believe this is because our descriptive terms don’t play nicely with time, but that’s my own opinion. Some people would believe that if you have enough matching properties, or matching essential properties, then you’re identical, but I feel this is too weak and likely to falter. I swear I write all these things at 2 or 3am. I apologise for any mistakes, and I’ll clear this up tomorrow to make it more legible, but I hope that it might give you a better understanding of some of the viewpoints floating around at the moment.

Saouka  ·  4053 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?  ·  

    Since bats actually utilize a form of perception alien to a human, perhaps that explains why it is we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat.

It's a greater problem than just a difference in types of sensory input; it's how we perceive the sensory input once it's at our consciousness.

What is it like to be another human? Let us pretend that you are cloned at birth, your clone grows up separately to you, but at no point suffers any harm to their sensory organs that you do not. You meet one day, and go to a music concert. Your clone has been educated highly in musical knowledge, and is proficient in several instruments, whilst you, for this example, are not. The orchestra, when tuning up, play two very close notes. You, when listening, cannot distinguish between them, but your clone can.

You are both taking in the same sensory input. One of you however learns something different from hearing the two notes, whereas you do not. The key difference is how the brain responds to different sensory inputs; clearly there is something to be said for how the brain plays a part in interpretation sense data.

Okay, you say. Fine, there's something to be said how you listen to something, but that's only because he's been trained in it and I haven't. If I went away and was trained as well, I would hear the same thing, cannot I simply be trained in various ways and thereby experience what it's like to be someone else? This is where we come into identity topics again. If it is true that your brain does not contain elements of your identity or your soul (Dualism etc), then you are allowed to claim that you could experience what it is like to be in his brain without altering you. If it is not true, and your brain does contain who you are, it is seemingly impossible for you to remain you, whilst also experiencing what it is like to be him. When you wish to experience what it is like to be a bat, how may you have the intelligence of a bat whilst also still being yourself?

| This may be another reductive attempt to understand a subjective phenomenon, but it seems plausible to me that my red is the same (or similar) to most other humans perception of red simply because, give or take a few cone and rod cells, a human eye is a human eye.|

A completely reasonable interpretation, and entirely what most people will accept so that they can carry on with life. As with a lot of these problems, it's not just the answer that matters, but how we get to the answer. Colour is the same amongst all humans? Well that shows a clear sign that the world is physicalist; nothing that is not physical exists. If it isn't we suddenly have to explain what causes a difference in colour perceptions between humans. The explanatory gap is huge because of how particles of energy give rise to such vivid experiences in our minds; we can't really seem to grasp why a packet of light particles suddenly makes us overcome with the experience of "Red".

Also I know I've posted long criticisms on TheAdvancedApes twice now, but I do really like your work, that's why I'm happy to put the effort into providing another side!

Saouka  ·  3797 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Philosophical Health Check

Well that was fun!

I had three contentions, where one was serious and the others I believed were defensible.

    You agreed that: There are no objective truths about matters of fact; 'truth' is always relative to particular cultures and individuals And also that: The holocaust is an historical reality, taking place more or less as the history books report

I read this and immediately realised that this was a serious issue. I don't know if historical reality and truth are the same thing. I think I feel conflicted because I don't want to ever say "The Holocaust wasn't true" because of the sentiment expressed rather than because I believe historical events are objective truths, I wouldn't feel as concerned with "The birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a historical reality" or "The building of the Golden Gate bridge happened more or less how the history books report".

    You agreed that: Severe brain-damage can rob a person of all consciousness and selfhood And also that: On bodily death, a person continues to exist in a non-physical form
I believe in Procedural Identity; that a person can be expressed as a process in how they react to certain stimuli, rather than being bound to any physical or non-physical form. So their potential continues to exist, but upon severe brain-damage they no longer exist in the same process and stop having selfhood.

    You agreed that: So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends But disagreed that: The possession of drugs for personal use should be decriminalised
Personal drug use isn't necessarily without harm to others. If the drug trade were harmless then the statement would be a lot easier to agree with. I think I'd rather deny that people are allowed full liberty than allow personal drug use under Mill's idea that people should have some liberties taken away to grant them more liberty. The risk of addiction in some drugs is so high that it seems foolish to allow them to all citizens, but this leads to questions about lazy citizens or citizens who don't strive to do their best.
Saouka  ·  3825 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How can there be posts with negative shares?

I'd rather if mk weighed in here, but as far as I know these are because there used to be an ability to vote down on posts which could be used not as intended. If you hover over a share button it has a few fields. (I realised this could be interpreted as "As far as I'm aware a nefarious feature existed that I totally never knew about or used before I mentioned it". It was fun to find out about.)

<a id="down_106576" onclick="return vote(this)" href="http://hubski.com/vote?for=106576&amp;dir=down&amp;b... src="images/img_trans.png" class="2-s-point-h"> </a>

Where the part you're interested in the bit here: http://hubski.com/vote?for=106576&amp;dir=down&amp;b...

In Psuedocode this is vote?=for [Post Number]; dir=[Vote Direction, Up or Down]; by=[Username]; auth=[String that verifies you are who you claim to be];whence=[URL in hex]

Setting dir=down is for unsharing when you've shared it. When you submitted a content form in the past it wasn't checked if you had shared it first, so you could write out the link as dir=down and it would just keep letting you unshare.

For the record, even if you know the auth string it won't let you vote if you're not signed in. I did check, you just get a user mismatch error.

Saouka  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Crypto-Patriarchy: The problem of Bitcoin's male domination

Aight, I'll bite.

What does Privilege mean to you? I've seen the word thrown around on this site and Reddit a fair few times, and for the most part it's just used as a way of making an argument seem less legitimate by association.

Saouka  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Crypto-Patriarchy: The problem of Bitcoin's male domination

I'm not going to question the term has been thrown around poorly in arguments; it has and it shouldn't. It doesn't stop it being a useful tool that people discard far too frequently.

Privilege as a term is designed to make people aware of where their benefits might make them unlikely to notice problems. It doesn't mean they're better than everyone, and one privilege isn't the be all and end all of comparison. As so frequently pointed out, some starving African children are able bodied, but they're really not doing great. White, middle class males don't get literally everything either, but they have advantages and disadvantages in ways they're not aware of.

I can walk around and I have no issues with getting around London, and as such I don't really notice when a place doesn't have disabled access. I'm privileged because I don't need to notice this kind of thing and I don't know what it's like when someone refuses to make somewhere accessible because it's too expensive, or not structurally possible, and I don't know what it's like to have that life. This doesn't mean my opinion is invalid if I said "Hey, that building doesn't have access, but it totally should. What gives?" and it doesn't mean it's invalid when I say "It seems pointless to have disabled access there; it's unnecessary and far too expensive. Why not this instead?"

It is unlikely though that I'll ever be in a position where I can explain what's difficult about life in a wheelchair though, 'cos I don't live like that. There's gonna be a load of minor things that I never thought about, and to say "Well I know what it's like, and I think if this happened it would solve your problems" IS patronising. Sure, I might have done the research, studied it for years, and I might _genuinely_ know what would help. It's just straight out unlikely, and when people say certain things, the fact that they were privileged in this way shows.

I'm not privileged in the fact I'm transgender and that's pretty difficult some of the time. My life isn't shite because of it, actually being white and middle class has made some of it a breeze in ways that other people aren't so lucky to have. One of the key issues is that going to the bathroom is a big deal - most places have one gender or the other and going in the boys results in bad things and going in the girls also results in bad things. To me, most people are privileged in the fact that's never a thought to them. Don't make 'em better or worse people, just means that it's a bit easier for them for that particular bit of life. There's a lot of little things there that you won't think about, so when someone speaks up for me and says "The issue that Transgender people need solving is X", without asking someone living that, it's a bit weird. Yes, the NHS queues are terrible and that'd be nice to have solved, but in reality what I would prefer at the moment is a standardised manual for transgender patients so that I know if my rights are being violated when a doctor insists I have to strip down. Again, your views aren't invalid, it's just difficult for you to speak about and frustrating when my views are shouted down when it's something so personal.

Returning to gender, there are a lot of things you won't notice because you're male. That's not your fault, privilege was never meant to be about blaming people for things. It's just that it is easier for men to get onto these STEM courses, as you say, but not that it's the easiest thing ever. Rich White Men don't go out of their way to prevent women getting on the courses - no one is suggesting that for a minute. The article, and I've only glanced over it, seems to suggest that men select men for these jobs without considering that they're being sexist, it's just inherent. There's a few articles on the internet about Academic sexism where they submit two fake students for the same course, same credentials exactly, just different gender. The women are less likely to be accepted. On the streets, black men get random stop and search more than white men. We're not going out of our way to blame white men here - all we're saying is that there's a problem, and it's not obvious to you if you don't live it.

Saouka  ·  3780 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Transgender, Dead, and Forgotten

Whole community's in mourning today.

Spent a few hours with my LGBT+ group talking to people on campus today about it. Main goal was raising awareness, I didn't really realise quite how little awareness there was. The few people who really listened thought of it as a terrible event, some thought the 'small' numbers meant that it wasn't that important, especially so close to Remembrance Sunday.

It's prompted me to go and do more awareness campaigns this year, so that next year hopefully there'll be less reason to reach out for support and more people in the community to turn to. Today of all days I'd rather just be close to my friends.

Saouka  ·  3790 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Case against the existence of Free Will

The issue faced here is that free will is being defined in a certain way that guarantees the conclusion of free will either being random or an illusion. To summarise; you’ve defined free will as having higher complexity in predicting what will happen; that a truly free agent applies decision-maker X in their brain randomly and comes out with a decision and then, as we cannot find this, concluded that decision-maker X couldn’t exist and so neither can free will.

When we define free will in terms of moral responsibility we can come to other conclusions.

    My second assumption, closely related to the first, is that nature is fundamentally causal.

So I can assume we’re dealing with compatibilist free will; deterministic universe and free will. So I’m going to defend Dennett’s idea of free will against this to lend another side to this argument.

    More significant than the missile’s brute obedience to physics is the fact that its behavior calls into question what it is that constitutes a “choice”. If there are at least two heat sources in front of it on which it might potentially home, then, in at least some sense, the missile’s behavior is the result of a “choice” between alternative imaginable paths.

Obviously the missile cannot do anything other than it does; it does not select a heat source based on anything other than whether the heat source matches a signature. Do I think the missile has free will? Absolutely not. Do I think it is any closer to free will than a ball rolling down a hill? Again, no, I believe it is identical on free will decisions. What is different in your choices of examples is the complexity and unpredictability of the action - you’re implying that free will is simply an awfully complex illusion we can perform.

    What we call freedom is nothing more or less than the general belief that each of our predictions really could represent some future state of affairs.1 It is a byproduct of the impressively complex, evolutionarily advantageous, but ultimately deterministic, way our nervous systems respond to a varied but not wholly unpredictable environment.

I think that falls in line with what I’m claiming your argument set up. With the definitions you’ve given us you really couldn’t conclude any other way.

Consider Sphexishness:

    Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the inspection, an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral "program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed sequence of behaviors. Dennett's argument quotes an account of Sphex behavior from Dean Wooldridge's Machinery of the Brain (1963). Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will (or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness).
Wikipedia: Digger Wasp

Pretty cool little example of impressively complex behaviour that looks like free will.

What about a bird?

    the bird’s behavior differs from the ball’s in at least two ways, one from our point of view and one from its own. From our perspective, the bird is unpredictable; the ball is not. The bird appears to have free will, not because it is unconstrained by physics, but because we can imagine it taking any of any number of plausible paths.

I dislike relying on quantum argument because my understanding is limited. As an aside, by this definition all photons have free will as we can imagine it taking any of any number of plausible paths. So, according to your definition of free will given, I would deny that the bird has free will because it requires me to accept that many things which do not have free will do.

Concerning ourselves with non-quantum objections, you have to deal with why free will is important to us rather than whether it fits with your definitions of not being constrained and agents being the source of their actions. Not-constrained I’m taking as if I feel hungry and someone stops me from eating, my free will is threatened. Also that I have free will because of a source-based theory; I am the originator of my actions and that is why they are significant.

An agent being the source of their own actions is only significant because it implies a responsibility onto them. Free will is important to us because it is tied to moral responsibility. If I act of my own free will then I am responsible for what I have done and any definition that avoids this does not tell us anything useful. To paraphrase Strawson - we already know what free will means to us because of how we react morally to actions done freely by agents. That cannot be taken away by whether or not a philosopher denies it exists.

    In place of an unknown (and perhaps even unknowable) physical solution to the problem of behavioral unpredictability, we are postulating an explanation which is little better than magic.

If you believe that choices are merely being unpredictable, as a bird's actions are to us, then free will choices must necessarily be magic. If you believe that free will is a form of assigning blame and praise for actions then you needn't.

Free Will is not saying that we have a RNG in our heads that computes actions; if so our actions are arbitrary and meaningless, we could decide anything and moral responsibility would be meaningless. If it’s an illusion then we aren’t morally responsible either.

When you avoid the moral implications of free will, something people deal with and are prepared to talk about on a regular basis, you are avoiding a key aspect of the argument. Asking people to define free will is difficult; no person on the street could do that. If you ask someone if they were responsible for something they can tell you immediately if that is so.

What matters when we talk about free will is that the action is a suitable indicator of our morality. When I say that they had free will what I’m saying is that “Well I think someone could have done other than what they did, so I think morally they’re praiseworthy/blameable for what happened”. If someone does something immoral, but was forced into it, then I don’t feel that was morally significant of them as a person. If I feel that they were able to choose anything and decided to do something morally reprehensible, then I feel it is significant. When someone trips and kicks a puppy I don’t think they’re acting immorally; they couldn’t have done anything different and it doesn’t communicate their morality.

Consider free will as our control over our own actions in respect to our morality. When I act or don’t act in a certain way I cannot do differently than I do, but when it goes well or badly I can adjust my morality so that in the future I act differently. I can place myself in situations where I could not act differently than I did and so act morally.

I used this intuitive argument that free will is morality when talking to mk about it, so see what you make of it.

    If I agree to meet you at the bus stop and oversleep, you might feel that I've wronged you because I am responsible for me getting up on time and being there. If I told you that I wasn't there on time because I was mugged on the way to meet you, you (hopefully!) wouldn't think I'd wronged you because it was outside of my control. This encompasses the first definition, that it is my action independent of others. What about if I agree to meet you at the door of my house and I wake up on time, but because of my severe OCD I am late to meeting you. You may feel wronged that I took so long, but upon realisation that I have to check all the light switches are off before I can come to meet you, you may feel that this was outside of my realm of control. In this example I didn't have any other choice to checking all my light switches, it feels intuitively that if someone is to be held morally responsible they ought to have had an option to refrain from the action.

In the first case I lacked free will because of outside interference and so I was not held to be acting under free will. In the second I lacked free will because of neurological interference and so was not acting under free will.

The difference in whether I had free will was whether I would be found morally responsible for an action. Whether I was morally responsible is something almost anyone can form a decision on. Free will is not to be defined by philosophers, but explained. So, you might reasonably say that I am defending that free will is whether the agent could have done other than they did, or whether they could have attempted to do other than they did. That implies that decisions are made purely in the moment, that there is a second of which before that moment the agent could have gone either way and after that the agent could not stop their action. I think free actions are decided by our thoughts prior to that event. If we are to believe that MLK did really say “Here I stand. I can do no other” when he refused to recant his writings, I don’t think he was saying “I am not acting of free will” or that he was speaking nonsense when he said “I can do no other”, nor do I think he was saying “I am not responsible for this”. He was saying that his morality was that he could only do that and it would be impossible to do otherwise, fully accepting responsibility. So I think free will is making decisions based on our based actions and our thoughts now and using those decisions to decide what we do next. It is control over our life in a way that is congruent with how we use free will in society and does not confine us to any of the classical fears about not being ‘truly’ free.

Saouka  ·  3796 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski's Thoughts on Free Will

I think you asked the right question.

Free will historically has been defined as either a sort of free action, that we can act upon our desires without someone else stopping us, or a free choice between two actions. If you are ever in question of whether something is down to free will or not then consider the act of a person morally. Do you think they're responsible for their action, if not, why not?

If I agree to meet you at the bus stop and oversleep, you might feel that I've wronged you because I am responsible for me getting up on time and being there. If I told you that I wasn't there on time because I was mugged on the way to meet you, you (hopefully!) wouldn't think I'd wronged you because it was outside of my control. This encompasses the first definition, that it is my action independent of others.

What about if I agree to meet you at the door of my house and I wake up on time, but because of my severe OCD I am late to meeting you. You may feel wronged that I took so long, but upon realisation that I have to check all the light switches are off before I can come to meet you, you may feel that this was outside of my realm of control. In this example I didn't have any other choice to checking all my light switches, it feels intuitively that if someone is to be held morally responsible they ought to have had an option to refrain from the action.

So you might hold that free will is the ability to do as we want and the ability to have a choice in what we do. That's a standard compatibilist view. Compatibilists believed that we might be in a deterministic universe; one where the facts of the past and the laws of physics entail what will happen in the future. It's easier to imagine it like a billiards' table where if one ball is hit with that knowledge and the knowledge of physics you can predict where everything will go. The compatibilists said that if we were in a deterministic universe, although current scientific findings predict that we aren't, we might still have free will in the sense already given.

Okay, I should back up to why Science says we aren't. Billiards and conventional rules work absolutely fine for Newtonian physics, but the second you even edge in quantum physics all our rules hit the wall. I'm a hundred percent sure I could be rightfully called out on this one, but quantum effectively shows us that there are some things we can't predict through laws of physics, we just have to measure them and see what they are. We don't know how nuclear particles decay, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle kinda screws us over in humans ever knowing what these minute details of the universe are; the closer we measure the velocity of an atom the less we can know about the location of it and vice-versa. If there were a Laplacian demon in existence that could know all these things, it couldn't exist in our universe as any physical entity for fear of adjusting something about the universe and having a recurring issue of predicting. Heisenberg's UP doesn't show it can't be deterministic, but it does show that we could never be the determiners and it does show it's really unlikely that the universe is deterministic.

The compatibilist stance is just one of the many stances on the issue. If you're really interested in a light book on the topic, Dennett writes quite well on modern Compatibilism (I personally really enjoyed Elbow Room) and argues our free will is controlling our future so that we may not do otherwise than what we would want to do. So a drug addict may lock himself away so that he cannot fall into temptation, or Martin Luther King may claim that he can do no other than he does and both could claim to have greater free will for it.

There are a buttload of issues for any form of compatibilism, but this debate was pretty dry and I didn't really get here on time. Hopefully this summary is slightly helpful. If anyone's particularly interested I could probably write a load on what it means to be able to have the ability to do otherwise and suggest topic reading, but it's just because this is what I'm writing an essay on this week.

Saouka  ·  3801 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Social Media Is Redefining 'Depression'

lil posted a really great video about this a while ago http://hubski.com/pub?id=56999 - it talks about anhedonia - literally the inability to feel pleasure, as a type of depression.

I laughed at the "Only stem degrees matter" mini-tirade. It's like Reddit birthed a person. The anti-women rant is laughable, especially the awful strawmen; it's basically a how to on arguing poorly.

Saouka  ·  4074 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Dualist Program, Part 1: A Historical Primer  ·  

A very strong summary of dualism, I wouldn't have necessarily considered Greek thinkers as a forefront of dualism but instead started at Descartes, so it's an interesting perspective. Aristotle's Psuche was considered to have separate levels for humans and plants depending on their purposes, such as breathing, conscious thought and movement. Anyone reading Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul) should remember that Psuche and Soul are pretty much analogous to some translators, even if our modern conception of the soul (Which is fairly bastardized), is very different. You can even have Psuche for objects that aren't alive; the psuche of an axe for example would be 'to cut', or the psuche of the eye would be 'to see'. Aristotle comes to the same kind of conclusions than Descartes does in the separability of the soul from the animal though;

    So just as pupil and sight are the eye, so, in our case, soul and body are the animal. It is quite clear then that the soul is not separable from the body, or that some parts of it are not
(413a Aristotle's De Anima II.I) He carries on to ask whether the soul is the sailor of the boat, and so parts are very much separable, or the actuality of the boat, and not separable in any way.

    Developing this concept further, he hypothesized that each of us has a life force running through our blood vessels (pneuma) that allows us everything from muscle contraction to sensory perception.
It's useful to link this to Vitalism, as the theory of a life force of some form didn't stop in Greek times but carried on in relative force until the early 1900's.

    With his view that mind and body are separate as well as separable
Note this is a contentious point of Descartes' philosophy. Sartre's Being and Nothingness claims this is the foundation of Descartes' downfall; he should have instead considered them as a singular and looked at where their union was effected; the imagination, not by attempting to rejoin them. (pp. 27 B&N) Descartes' reason for separating them was that it was conceivable to separate them, and so it must be possible, at least by God. If you're interested in a more modern conception of Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism that doesn’t separate them, check out EJ Lowe's Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and the Problem of Mental Causation: Erkenntnis (1975-) , Vol. 65, No. 1, Prospects for Dualism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2006), pp. 5-23 I found Erkenntnis a bit of a bastard to find, although it's on JSTOR if you have access to that.

    The problem was that if it truly isn’t your eyes that are seeing (but rather that the image that is reconstituted on your pineal gland so that your soul can perceive the image presented to it) then this automatically begs the question of who is seeing for your soul? Doesn’t your soul then need its own eyes and pineal gland inside of it?
What you’ve raised is known as the ‘homuncular fallacy’. Descartes replies to this directly; “Now, when this picture [originating in the eyes] thus passes to the inside of our head, it still bears some resemblance to the objects from which it proceeds. As I have amply shown already, however, we must not think that it is by means of this resemblance that the picture causes our sensory perception of these objects—*as if there were yet other eyes within our brain with which we could perceive it*. Instead we must hold that it is the movements composing this picture which, acting directly upon our soul in so far as it is united to our body, are ordained by nature to make it have such sensations” (AT VI:130, CSM I:167). So Descartes would probably disagree with you on the soul requiring eyes in order to see this composed object, unless this is what you meant in Descartes appears to make the soul entirely supernatural. Assuming the homuncular argument does disprove Descartes’ argument, of which is one of the smaller problems of Descartes’ Mind-Body solution, it now must be shown that it is also applicable to modern neuroscience, which you appear to say it does by assuming it is analogous with Dualism. If it is not analogous with dualism, then the homuncular argument has no grounding what so ever, for there is no regress.
    An activity is carried out in a person’s brain
Does not seem to immediately follow that a brain thinks for a distinct person, because ironically this IS begging the question, whilst mistakenly using the phrase ‘begging the question’ (See section below), that a brain and a person are separable entities; you’re using “for” to imply a separation. I feel that simply having an action carried out in my brain doesn’t necessitate that my brain also must have a brain thinking inside it; the brain appears to be the instrument by which the person thinks. | Cognition and cogitation are functions of man, not of our brains| This isn’t necessarily shown. Cognition is indeed a function of man, but I would argue that part of a man is his brain. Otherwise can I equally argue that picking up a rock is a function of man, not of our arms? You need stronger evidence to show a dualism between mind and man, I’m still very much convinced they are one and the same.

I do have a small problem in your argument with the following phrase, although this is not damaging to your argument, just a complaint to do with terminology:

    This begs the same question that if a brain thinks for the person, who thinks for the brain?
I apologise, but unless I'm mistaken, do you not mean "invites the question"? Begging the question is a very specific form of circular reasoning which isn't present here. The other use in this article appears to be incorrect also. I am writing this out at 3AM, so I’m a little cautious about challenging it, but I figure I might as well.

Back to your argument. Regrettably I can't read any more of your Source 1 than the summary because I don't have PubMed access, I'll see if I can fish around for a copy later, but this is just from the summary.

    The Edinburgh survey revealed a predominance of dualistic attitudes emphasizing the separateness of mind and brain. In the Liège survey, younger participants, women, and those with religious beliefs were more likely to agree that the mind and brain are separate, that some spiritual part of us survives death, that each of us has a soul that is separate from the body, and to deny the physicality of mind.
Really, genuinely interesting. I wouldn't have thought dualism was that pervasive in medical attitudes, but I'm more convinced by the spiritual leanings of the summary than that people genuinely believe in the philosophical implications. This links back to my earlier concern over you jumping between the use of 'mind' and 'soul' with ease; whether someone would agree that a person has an immortal soul and whether they have a mind separable from their brain is not the same thing. You're welcome to, and I'd delight, in you challenging this. I’m really curious to see how you develop this in neodualism in neuroscience, so thank you very much for writing these articles!
Saouka  ·  3784 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who aren't you, Hubski?

Gender security is way overrated.

Saouka  ·  3802 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rape Is Caused by Rapists, Not by Underage Drinking

Is diminished responsibility close enough to excuse?

    Academic studies have shown that if the female complainant is portrayed as drunk, she is perceived as less credible and the defendant is seen as less likely to be criminally culpable compared with a sober victim (Stormo et al., 1997; Wenger and Bornstein, 2006)

    Stormo KJ, Lang AR, Stritze WGK. (1997) Attributions about acquaintance rape—the role of alcohol and individual differences. J Appl Soc Psychol 27:279–305.

    Wenger AA, Bornstein BH. (2006) The effects of victim substance use and relationship closeness on mock jurors judgments in an acquaintance rape case. Sex Roles 54:547–55.

    In mock jury trials [...] some tended to believe that so long as a person was conscious they were capable of expressing resistance to unwanted sexual contact and that a non-consenting person would struggle even when intoxicated (see Finch and Munro 2005).

http://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/documents/publications/Joe_St...

    However, inebriated females were assigned more responsibility when they consumed alcohol than sober females. In addition, sober males were assigned more responsibility for the rape than inebriated males.
https://www.iusb.edu/ugr-journal/static/2000/pdf/fogle.pdf

So if a woman has been drinking she's held to be more responsible for the rape than if she were sober and if a man has been drinking he is less responsible for the rape than if he were sober. Furthermore it has a recorded effect on mock juries. Is drunkenness an excuse for rape? It does change the burden of responsibility greatly and affects culpability.

Saouka  ·  3802 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Gall-Peters Projection Map

    Some of the oldest projections are equal-area (the sinusoidal projection is also known as the "Mercator equal-area projection"), and hundreds have been described, refuting any implication that Peters's map is special in that regard. In any case, Mercator was not the pervasive projection Peters made it out to be: a wide variety of projections has always been used in world maps.[26] Peters's chosen projection suffers extreme distortion in the polar regions, as any cylindrical projection must, and its distortion along the equator is considerable. Several scholars have remarked on the irony of the projection's undistorted presentation of the mid latitudes, including Peters's native Germany, at the expense of the low latitudes, which host more of the technologically underdeveloped nations.[27][28] The claim of distance fidelity is particularly problematic: Peters's map lacks distance fidelity everywhere except along the 45th parallels north and south, and then only in the direction of those parallels. No world projection is good at preserving distances everywhere; Peters's and all other cylindric projections are especially bad in that regard because east-west distances inevitably balloon toward the poles.[25][29] The cartographic community met Peters's 1973 press conference with amusement and mild exasperation

Gall-Peters is an improvement over the standard Mercator in terms of equal area - because that's not what it's for. If anyone was actually suggesting the Mercator was good for it Gall-Peters might be useful. They're not, it isn't.

The Waterman Butterfly makes me quite happy; you take a physical globe made up of spheres and unfold it onto a 2d surface. It's like the Goode Homolosine but less ugly. The Goode Homolosine looks like a snake drawn by a child. Actually thinking of that makes it quite charming.

Saouka  ·  3809 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Seeing which posts/comments you've badged? And seeing how many badges you've given out?

http://hubski.com/badged?id=Kafke

It's on your profile if you click on the "Badges Given: 1 of 3".

Saouka  ·  3810 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: So these appeared in my physical inbox today

I've got some from mk that I'm quite grateful for, I've got the smaller orange one on my laptop but I'm debating what to do with the big blue one! (:

When I was younger I never really felt guilty about pirating music because I didn't have the ability to buy anything over the internet, lacking a debit card, and having little income to buy albums from HMV etc.

So when I started growing up and had some money hanging around, I started buying a few albums. In my head it's around £11-16 for an album and I could afford a few, but my current music collection is a few hundred artists and their works. When I talk to my friends about music there's a constant "Have you heard X? I stopped listening to Y a while back, now I listen to Z who are kinda like if A and B had a child who grew up with C" - I feel expected to be aware of a great deal of music as if what I listened to and what I enjoyed reflected on me as a person.

No offence to artists, but I can't exactly afford that at any point. I'm expected to be aware of several hundred artists and buying one album of each artists means I need to spend several thousand pounds which keeps growing year on year. The fight was always going to be black and white; you pay for everything with minor exceptions or you pay for nothing with minor exceptions and I can't afford the first category.

In my room at the moment I have two physical albums which I bought because I love the artist and can't go see them. One of my favourite rappers; Scroobius Pip, I go see every year he comes to my city and I've considered going to his other shows in London. It's becoming difficult however to decide who I support and where. Do I buy the album of the indie band because they have less income and does that mean I don't morally have to buy the album of the megaband because they earn so much already?

Music purchase doesn't seem to be a trade that way; it's charity. Google Play/Spotify aren't selling music, they're selling convenience. That's why they don't care how much they pay the artist.

Saouka  ·  3825 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thirty-Ninth Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

Right, I've been waiting for this thread.

Hymie's Basement - 21st Century Pop Song

Why? - Bitter Thoughts

These are both the bands of Yoni Wolf, the lead singer. He described it as "a thinking man’s melodic hip hop record.", but I prefer to think of it as a set of albums based on confessions in a church. It's definitely pleasing to listen to, but it's also a little disquieting, and I like that in a record.

Scrimshire - Convergent

I went to see Zoe Keating in concert in London and Scrimshire were supporting. Their tracks are free on their website and their female vocalist (Who I confess I can't remember the name of) had such a stunning voice that she didn't really need the microphone to be heard throughout the entire building.

Eyedea & Abilities - Smile

Eyedea is simply an amazing rapper. His freestyles are solid and don't feel prepared, his written music is witty and technically proficient.

Saouka  ·  3825 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thirty-Ninth Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

You mean "Sucking dick for drink tickets/ at the free bar at your cousin's bat mitzvah/" or a song about stalking a girl on your fixie isn't what everyone listens to on the way home?

I agree. I would feel slightly odd trying to get some of my friends into his music, but I like the realism. It's like the weird kid who masturbated at the back of science class grew up, became more verbose, and wrote an album about his life. I don't know if I'd want to hang out with him but I don't think I can stop listening.

I don't buy the

    “If condoms were so wonderful and a part of human nature, we wouldn’t have a problem with rising infections,”

argument at all. Condom use goes back centuries. The issue with infection was brought up much earlier; people don't like using them or forget them. So this is a wonderful drug that what, raises risks of other STDs but lowers HIV risks so that's totally cool? It's not going to tackle forgetting to take it, but it'll mean you don't have to lose sensitivity.

    There is also validity to fears about “barebacking.” Even if PrEP protects against HIV, condomless sex still invites other STDs. Some, like syphilis, gonorrhea, and herpes, are fairly easily treatable. But in recent years, there have been outbreaks among HIV-positive men of sexually transmitted hepatitis C, for which treatment is improving but still difficult, expensive, and imperfect. In certain parts of the world, such as Japan and India, a new antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea has rung alarm bells of a new STD epidemic. Simply put, nobody knows what new infections lie in wait down the road.

Why isn't this addressed further? Hep-C is no more a laughing matter than HIV. The argument against this 'valid point' is "Well no one we asked seems to care". Well they're idiots then. You can't be against the spread of infections and also not really give a shit that you're spreading all but one.

    “I don’t think the world of straight men would settle for using a condom their whole lives.”

Really. The world of straight men that I'm not a part of seems to be aware that when you have unprotected sex with anyone you have health risks. You get into a relationship, it's about to turn sexual and you both go get tested and then start having sex. Is this a foreign magical concept? If you're having lots of sex with strangers you wear a condom, this isn't a homosexual only thing. Hell, I've handed out dental dams under the same concept.

    "I always just figured that if I became HIV-positive, I’d deal with it.”

I've tried to come up with arguments against this, but what the bloody hell is going on. Why does an article try and take itself seriously and then come along with a quote like that? HIV is a serious virus.

Saouka  ·  3826 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Any suggestions for similar music to Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Definitely Mogwai, that's precisely what I thought of coming into this thread.

Explosions In The Sky is absolutely phenomenal, I personally love Your Hand in Mine although that entire Album The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is really good. The first track First Breath After Coma is so emotional and I adore it.

Also there's a version of Your Hand in Mine with strings which I really love too. I've had a few conversations with friends about what we felt when we listened to that track. I really feel with the original version that it's more of a war march.

Does And So I Watch You From Afar count? I feel like they do.

Just had a thought. God Is An Astronaut Try them as well!