#happily for me I don't care about religious debates so I don't have to know that part

[pilferingapples]

I feel like the real philosophical divide on that robot/clone poll is between the people having some sort of existential identity crisis about free will and Selfhood and so on, and those of us looking at our mortal shell and going 'who would build THIS on purpose'

[penroseparticle]

Nothing annoys me more lately than "Going to the gym isn't a personality" like yes??? it is???

People talk about the things they care about, that they spend time on, that they put effort into. That includes their bodies?

I work with a lot of athletes. Like more than your typical amount. And they will happily debate protein powders, tell you they're doing a new training regimen, talk about Lat Pulls like having opinions on them is something obviously I have as well. Going to the gym is exciting for them- they tell me they hit a new personal best bench press, or are trying to hit a specific weight class, or are working on knee strength after their surgery. They compare times they threw up or got too dizzy.

The same way when I talk to MTG players they tell me about their new EDH deck, or talk about that one wombo combo they pulled in Draft, or this asshole at FNM. It's all just nuts and bolts for a thing they care about. I don't know much of anything about Knitting but a lot of my friends do, and I would NEVER tell them that "Knitting isn't a personality" just because I personally find it boring or whatever. Because I would be an asshole.

Going to the gym is a ~personality~, it's just not one you want to talk about. You don't care about machine vs. free weights. You don't want to know how long they spent working out this morning. Frankly, you want them to do the work at the gym and not give you a peek behind the curtain. You want people to look good, look fit, look how you want to, but not talk about how much work and effort it takes to do so. Working out to you is a chore, and an unpleasant one at that, so you'd rather they not remind you of it.

But exercising your body shouldn't be a chore, it should be something you enjoy- your favorite rock climbing place, the dance class you and your friends take, etc. These people LIKE going to the gym. They would gladly tell you about it. And if for some reason you are talking to someone who works out religiously but hates every second of it- first of all, yikes, buddy you don't have to live that way- but second of all, that person will not talk to you about the gym. They will talk to you about what they are actually passionate about.

You don't have to enjoy their hobby! You can think the gym is boring, or exercise isn't interesting. But like. say that. The gym can be a personality. Anything can be a personality.

[vinnythedagowop]

My good friend Michael.

I really don't care if this sounds like sycophantic praise of brown nosing, Michael has always been someone who is worthy of praise, yet always turns it down. I've seen him debate the sexual revolution with a feminist, spirituality with various religious folks, the sanctity of Misanthropy against egalitarianism and each time he was very calm and diplomatic. Each time the verbal exchange ended in the opposing person conceding and thanking him. And he always denies his talents and attributes.

One day I was at his "lab" as he calls it, he was working on a set of matching coffins for his Polish friends. He brought out some mead (every winter he has amazing mead) and we sat in his garage sipping, listening to Beethoven, France Gall, DiJ and Nancy Sinatra+Lee Hazelwood. He sat in complete silence save for a small sigh when looking at his work, of an occasional humming when a song's Melody had struck his fancy. I, being an Italian, not used to silence asked him; is there anything you're not good at? His reply; "Hmm, nearly everything but questioning my existence on this mudball. Even then I most probably ask the wrong questions." He is always aloof, and then out of nowhere he says something that literally shakes you awake with it's poignancy.

He loves as hard as he hates. I mean this. I've only witnessed him in love once, and he seems to further dwell inside himself, but his eyes tell all. He will burst out and say something about the gal's attributes, but not their physical attraction so much as their demeanor or their intelligence. Then like that he bottles up and goes back into his inner sanctum. I guess my reason for talking about him is he is sorta M.I.A. and I miss him. He's happily with a woman, who nobody knows (not shocking, just aloof as usual) and has been skipping out on social engagements. Not really a big deal, he's not a social creature.

This brings me to another point. I've personally witnessed him at a social event, working the crowd and making folks smile and having the ability to speak with a vast knowledge on nearly any subject under the son. This wasn't a normal event, but a 150.00 per plate Art Museum fundraiser. He hobnobbed with Cincinnati's elite like he knew them. It really made me realize he isn't alienated, as that would require his wanting to be part of something, he chooses to be outside of societal constraints (his words) and can function with a tactile warmth, and then extoll the virtues of eugenics and Social Darwinism, or as he calls it, Nature's Eternal Fascism.

I've seen him make food for a neighbor who lost his wife, tend a bird with a broken wing, mow his widowed neighbors grass (like clockwork), teach children WWII History at the public library summer program, tend his garden and speak to his plants like they were his children. Every single time you think you have him figured out, he breaks any preconceived notions.

While in Uni, I did an interview with him for a journalist class. I'll make sure to post that sometime today, as it's very humorous and full of his sardonic wit.

I miss you Michael and I hope the person who has your time is worthy, but then again you probably think the opposite and worry of your worth. Please come back to us mortals (bahahaha) and regale us of your tales. But really I miss you buddy, the world is a better place with you in it.

*grammatical errors etc are not culled as this was something from my heart and I needed to get it out of my system.

[fapangel]

Isn't Kushner and Bannon fighting or is this some WWE button pushing acting/hyped up by the media thing? I don't know all the details. BTW, since you seem to have a lot of support for trump has there been anything you wish he can improve on or anything that he did that you didn't quite approve of but either don't care/par for the course?

I honestly haven’t paid muchattention to the Kushner/Bannon thing; this kind of internal cabinetpower-play personality clash is the kind of super in-depthpsychoanalysis bullshit I’ve never been good at - and, I havealways found prone to being twisted by the biases of those doing theanalysis, and that was before the current mediapersonalities that do it went totally apeshit. 

However, this: 

>has there been anything you wish he can improve on or anythingthat he did that you didn't quite approve of but either don'tcare/par for the course?

YEAH I GOT SOME SHIT TO SAY ABOUT THIS. 

For starters, I feel a deep, deep, deep ambivalencetowards the Trump administration’s “war on global warming.”I can see their reasons for it, but Ireally, really don’t think their approach is going to accomplishanything. Furthermore, I’m deeply suspicious of the motives behindit - it might be entirely due to The Decent Reason,but I doubt it, because there’s a very powerful, widespreadsentiment of “global warming denial” in the right wing thatis nothing but knee-jerk reactionary bullshit; where they reject theentire idea just because THE OTHER SIDE is pushing it. This is theexact kind of shit conservatives detest and loathe when used by theleft wing, and yet they happily employ it themselves. At bestthey���re indulging in the same kind of hypocritical blind tribalismthat defines the left, and at worst they’re actively lettingthe opposition frame the debate in stark terms of opposition; a falsedichotomy that only serves their goals. In short, conservativesreally need to unfuck themselves on this issue.

Trufax: Once Upon A Time, I was aglobal warming skeptic - and contrarianism was a significantmotivator for me. I had learned by that time never to give an inch onanything ~THE LEFT~ supported; to challenge every precept they putforth, because so often even the very foundations of their arguments- and thus the frame defining the entire scope of the debate - wereartificial and false. Under this paradigm of “challengeeverything,” my objections were three-fold:

A. I doubted that Global Warming washappening.

B. IF it was happening, I doubted thatit was anthropogenic (caused by human activity.)

C. If it was both happening andanthropogenic, I doubted that any left-wing policies would dojack shit to address the dire consequences they predicted.

Atthe time - ten years ago, or so - there were Science Reasons to fuelthis doubt.The data was questionable, the models, imperfect, and the question ofpoliticized bias up in the air. There were two main camps ofscientists who openly questioned global warming. The first weregeologists and geophysicists who contested the validity of citingvarious physical phenomena as proof of anthropogenic global warming,(such as melting ice sheet, etc.) when it happened to involve theirgeographic area of study. The second were physicists/geophysicistswho questioned the math behind it, especially the energy balanceequations - most famous of them,IvarGiaever,winnerof a Nobel prize for physics, who famously said“Iam a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.”Saidquote comes out of the U.S. Senate Environment And Public WorksCommittee's minority report, which had over 650 actual honest-to-godscientists on record expressing actual, serious doubts vis a visglobal warming. Thenthere was some theories being kicked around that held global warmingto be happening, but not from anthropogenic sources - the mostconvincing (to me) at the time was the possibility of stellar cycles.A lot of levelheaded scientists wondered if we were coming out of aMaunderMinimum,a 60-70 odd year “super-cycle” in solar activity that might beconnected to the “LittleIce Age.”This struck me as the most likely alternate explanation simplybecause of the limited amount of historical data available; it wasquite likely our current observations on global warming just didn'thave a big enough sample size,so we were over-emphasizing the significance of the data bump. Inshort, I had plenty of reason to scoff at the idea of “scientificconsensus” the left constantly invoked.

Thenthe scientists went and didmore scienceto answerthese objections. You know, like they're supposed to. They diddue diligence, they replicated results, they refined models, and inthe end presented a convincing argument - global warming ishappening,and it iscausedby human activity.

However,that still leaves point C: namely, left-wing policies aren't going todo shit to stop it. Justconsider this graph:

Guesswhich nations didn't even have emissions targets set for them?Developing ones, including China, India, Brazil, South Africa, etc.Yes, China. Slowclap. Andyet, the Kyoto protocol - which set an average target of about 5% CO2emissions for most Western nations - was talked up as the greatmoral crusade of our time, asif a measly 5% reduction was going to do jack shit with China pumpingout enough pollution to create a semi-permanent browncloud visible from fucking space.

Thenecessity of these pissweak efforts are justified with the mostoverblown Chicken-Little sky-is-falling bullshit you can conceive of.From Al Gore's theatrically released power-point presentation thatwept for “drowning polar bears” and predicted global catastrophein ten years (complete with a doomsday clock) to media reports ofManhattandrowning by 2015, the constant flow of emotional fearmongeringbullshithasbeen constant, hysterical, and loud.They'vebeen promising us that the end is nigh for twenty-fivefucking years andyet the apocalypse keeps taking a rain-check. The ObamaAdministration's EPA published atypical example:

If climate change goes unaddressed, the report predicts morethan 2,000 storm-mangled bridges, 57,000 deaths from poor air qualityand 12,000 fatalities from extreme temperature between now and theyear 2100... the report argues that the U.S. will save 7.9 millionacres from wildfire, and prevent more than $10 billion in damage toMidwestern farming counties and coastal communities alike.

The reportitself (which you can download in its entirety) has some realgiggles, such as solemnly including damage to coastal properties -you know, those houses that rich morons build on literalfucking sandbars - I'm sorry, I meant “barrier islands” - andact surprised when thishappens. Oh, and the US taxpayer picks up the tab, too. And of course the seas willswallow the land, the rivers will flood, a plague of kekking frogswill go around slaying first-born trust fund inheritors, etc. But thereally notable thing is the more prosaic things in the report; thesimpler predictions of general economic impacts caused by highertemperatures and the resulting long-term weather patterns andecosystem shifts. These are the things that'd actually change life aswe know it in the long term... but MSNBC's story went straight todemolished bridges and body counts. If it bleeds, it leads.

It'snot just the media filter pushing the hype, though it helps - it's adeliberate debate strategy. In formal policy debate, the“affirmative” team argues for a plan of action, and vindicates itby establishing 1. there's a problem, and that 2. Bad Things happenif the problem's not addressed by their plan. The “negative” teamargues that the plan is bad, because implementing the plan will alsolead to Bad Things.Ergo, victory often goes to whomever's predicted Bad Things are theworst. Thisis known as “impacts outweigh,” i.e. my impacts are worse,therefore avoiding them is more important- hundreds dead in aheat wave is preferable to thousands dead in a war, for instance. Theinevitable heaver-impacts arms-race naturally means that almost every“disadvantage” (negative consequence) in policy debate is GlobalThermonuclear War. Everysingle one.

Thisis precisely why greenies wholeheartedly parrot these lurid doomsdayscenarios with the fervor of religious nuts promising that Armageddonis nigh: the impacts outweigh. The warming mitigation policies theychampion come at real and serious costs to the economy, standards ofliving and ultimately people's lives - so theirimpactsmust outweigh that to hold any water. Thetheocratic tones don't end there, as Megan McArdle of Bloombergpoints out in her excellentarticle on how alarmism poisons the global-warming debate:

The arguments about global warming too often sound more liketheology than science. Oh, the word “science” getsthrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, nota fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly towardthe truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. Icannot count the number of times someone has told me that theybelieve in “the science,” as if that were the name of someomniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone.For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate:believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.

In short, the politics of global warming have fuck-all to dowith the actual science most of the time. Scientistsaren't infallible, andthere is some complicity but for the most part thisisn't even the scientists fault. They'renowhere near“controllingthe narrative.” Becausethe politicians and the greenies are speaking for them, theconservative knee-jerk reaction is to throw the baby out with thebathwater and ignore allthescience and everypossibleconclusion as politically tainted; the result of collusion,conspiracy and cherry-picking to serve an agenda. This is theattitude Trump's administration is taking towards it, and whilethey're not wrong to assume that the existing science data on allthose government websites - and the still-serving employees that madethem - definitely have an agenda, justblanking the pages is the wrong approach. Globalwarming isactually happening, andit is actuallycausing problems, andwe will haveto find solutions for it - and since any conservative will agree thatthe left wing's solutions will cripple the economy and do fuck-all toactually stop warming, those solutions had damn well better be ours.

Theglobal warming debate is not about empirical proofs and causes, butabout consequences and mitigation policies. Asthis briefsearch on Slashdot shows, people are finallystarting to really talkabout geoengineering - active mitigation approaches - on a regularbasis, and many are starting to re-think the benefits of nuclearpower, which conservatives have historically championed as reliable,CO2-free baseline load generation. Climate science data will be vitalin pushing these initiatives, both in the horrifically complex andhigh-stakes considerations we must work through thoroughly beforeattempting geoengineering, and in making the economic case fornuclear power. Theadministration's current approach to “The Science” treats it asinnately hostile; already a permanent possession of the Enemy Camp,when it's anything but.More than playing intothe left wing's hands, it's actively ceding them ground without afight, which is ludicrous. Even if the intent is to “nuke andpave,” blanking all the climate data pending a full review andre-write by a new, more conservative bureaucratic science staff, it'sstill a poor way to do it. The resistance seen from the EPA and othergovernment climate-science related agencies has notbeen the blatantinsubordination and borderline treasonous defiance of lawfulauthority displayed by Swamp Thing bureaucrats in other agencies.It's stuff like tweeting about unclassified, non-security relatedclimate science data and appealing to public opinion - rather tamestuff.

Trumpisn't a very conservative conservative on most any of theconservative “social issues,” which means he's either entirelysidestepped or paid mere lip service to a lotof the Usual Suspectswhen it comes to the usual tribal-savage litmus tests (abortion,etc.) Unfortunately climate change isn't one of them, as far as hisadministration goes. The left wing's been allowed to defile climatescience by using it as a shield for their politics. The naturalreaction is to punt that political football back, but that's stillletting the left wing define the terms of the debate. It's badstrategy, ineffective politics and it all leads to ineffectualpolicy.