The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

Power stancing

Zweihander parries

Small white soapstone

Covenant of Champions

Bonfire Ascetics

Dark Souls 2 had a lot of cool things that didn’t get enough credit.

As a heads up: I went looking for Black Hole on fdroid after seeing this comment, and couldn’t find it. Looks both the fdroid and github were nuked.

Yeah! Kropotkin argues a couple points:

• People are generally pretty good at self-organizing to solve problems, and have done so effectively in small communities for thousands of years.

• We have the technology* and productive power to ensure everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.

• Much of the scarcity we face today* is artificially created and entirely avoidable if we produce to meet needs instead of maximize profits.

• Things like laziness, corruption, and greed can largely be addressed by ensuring that all of a person’s needs are guaranteed to be met. Many people we currently* call “lazy” are either stuck in a hyper-specialized job that they can’t leave because they need to sell their labor to survive, or unmotivated because much of the wealth they produce is absorbed by someone else. And people tend to take more than they need more often than not because they are stuck competing with their fellow man for resources instead of cooperating for the common good.

He also does some back-of-the-napkin math to show that it takes less than a year’s worth of labor to produce everything a household needs for a year, and that the remaining labor time of that year should be open for people to cultivate different skills and pursue their passions. He argues that the distinction between what we today call blue-collar and white-collar work is unhealthy, and that everyone should do a bit of both.

His central thesis IMO seems to be that in the event of a socialist revolution, people shouldn’t be afraid to immediately start doing socialism. Take inventory of the food & start giving it to the hungry, figure out how many empty houses the community has & start housing the homeless, stop growing cash crops / producing niche luxury goods and start growing food / manufacturing necessities until everyone’s needs are met. He sternly warns against half-measures: maintaining the state’s use of violence or keeping track of some kind of currency or propping up political leaders are all things he claims will spell the end of a revolution before it gets off the ground.

I really loved the book. I feel like it provided a great example of what communism could (and IMO should) look like without all the baggage of so-called communist states like China and the USSR.

*= The book was written in the late 1800s. I think a lot of it holds up really well and some points seemed like they really called events that would happen in the next hundred years. That being said, it’s probably not as airtight today as it may have been in 1894.

The Conquest of Bread was a breath of fresh air! I cannot believe I read a book about politics / economics that was actually optimistic and left me feeling good about fundamental human nature.

Motherfucker takes all your surplus value and doesn’t even enjoy it! It’s like someone robbing your house and taking your shit straight to the dump.

True. They just visit to play poker.

Least thorough leftist video essayist:

Or just laser death ray at least two transphobes before you get caught.

Stellaris! Very cool sci-fi strategy game.

Here is a head on view:

The drawing has a little bit of his halo behind his head.

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth’s diameter is 41.804 million feet. I’m not sure if you meant that or Earth’s circumference when you said “Earth’s surface”, but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you’d only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.

Tuscan looks like the bottom of a chess piece.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.