Apositive

I just saw a compilation of commeercials from around the world that won various prizes at the Cannes film festival in 2016. The best one won only a bronze. I think it's from Germany, but could be Austria. Some people are standing in line at night. A woman walks up to them and asks them how long they...

...trust anyone who publicly wraps themselves in the flag of altruism? I no longer do. It's nearly universal that someone who makes a big virtuous public noise about their motivations, is secretly motivated by personal self-interest, and is merely concealing that personal self-interest behind a fals...

There's no doubt that asexuality is real. We all know that it damned well exists, based on our personal experience and our observation of others. But the only definition of asexuality available to us has a political foundation, not a scientific one. Politically-based definitions are irrelevant to th...

Yeah, happy birtday, ciri. Good to see you back on your feet.

Wishing everyone happy holidays.

It's widely called "The My Lai Massacre" and was one of the foci of the antiwar movement. Colburn himself later lectured officer cadets in military academies and told them that something "primal" can take over when you are in a kill-or-be-killed situation with your buddies dying ...

In 1963, while with the US Army in Vietnam, Lawrence Colburn interrupted the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops and saved some civilian lives. In order to accomplish this, he was obliged to order his helicopter gunner to aim the weapon at American infantry, including a lieutenant wh...

...is that we have an excessive social focus. It's not entirely a joke that a Canadian is defined as someone who believes that she can find a cure for cancer solely by being a hit at cocktail parties. It's even partly true, as, in Canada, securing funding for scientific research depends much, MUCH m...

I can understand the attraction (pun intended) of having a single, pithy word you can use to cement your own view of yourself, but it can be a trap. People are too complex to be summarized in one word, and we never completely know ourselves anyway. Back on AVEN I came to be a proponent of abolishing...

I agree with you both.

Well, elections might be the least bad way we've come up with to choose people for responsible positions, but elections have also been discredited as a way to make meaningful choices. The candidate who wins an election is the one who's best at winning elections, not at doing the job that they're ele...

There's a lot of sound science in what you say. Science is kind of a faddish thing, with yesterday's cutting edge displaced by today's cutting edge displaced by tomorrow's cutting edge in a kind of fashion-runway manner; but, sticking to what I've read of recent views in psychology, a lot of our men...

I was just re-reading that (and not catching all of the typos) when I thought of another possibility: sports officials. The vast majority are volunteers, but there are some who are still in their teens. (I personally knew a woman who played hockey on a high school team, from which nearly every playe...

The "G" stands for "Good," as we can all agree that AVEN is now a shithole. The major factor in its having become a shithole is the amateurism, lack of qualifications, and total absence of aptitude among its administrators and moderators. Having a bunch of college students and ca...

"Critter" is slang for "creature," and creatures are created; which could launch an extremely tiresome and irresolvable debate that it's wise not to touch with a twelve-foot Hungarian, let alone a ten-foot pole. So I'm not going to. But you're probably aware that my home city, To...

Let's turn the topic around to wearing clothes. Clothes are good not only for keeping you warm or cool (yes, cool, which is why traditional Sahara Desert clothing is white), but also for comfort. My desk chair is metal, and when I sit on it without pants on, it literally bugs my ass. But in a warm s...

In this post-ethical century, when honesty and forthrightness are seen as quaint memories of a naive past, it's hard not to be aware of the irresolvable problem of collective living. All human success, and even survival, depends on strategy. Without strategizing, no one succeeds, or even survives. Y...

I am a rationalist, atheist, skeptic, and an egalitarian. Holy smokes, I've been cloned! haha Not really. Not unless you, like me, also have borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, features of Asperger Syndrome, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, and features ...

My heart goes out to Ciri, because I've done the psych-ward thing (just once, but once is one time too many). I hope all will go well. While I did some credible writing on AVEN, which is now inaccessible to me and possibly purged (I have no way to check for my old posts without an account), I don't ...

I randomly divebombed to have a look on here. Yeah, it's pretty dead. The only posts I've seen on here are from people banned on AVEN. You've always been a cut above the usual asexuality management amateur. You know that the very definition of asexuality has suffered from having a political activism...

I don't do a single blessed thing of consequence on my computer, yet I sit at the computer in every waking moment. Overall, I live like a prison inmate without ever having been even charged with a crime. It's at times like this that I wish I'd never been forced to become alive. Life is drab and poin...

Can we please have a biologist, rather than psychologist, studying asexuality for a change? It would bring some sanity to the demented and psychotic world of "self-identification." No. Because that would still be Biological Psychology. Psychology is the study of human behaviour including ...

He has several handymen, cleaners, etc. on staff and I wonder what it's like for them to have him as their boss. It is to weep for pity.

The "studies" into how safe ECT is are funded by the manufacturers of ECT equipment and conducted by medical people who depend on the goodwill of treatment manufacturers in general in order to continue receiving research funding. I don't buy for a second that running an electrick shock thr...

My building's superintendent has an extreme case of what I call "pre-retirement constipation." He is six months away from retirement, so he doesn't give a crap to such an extreme extent that he could explode like a tick at any moment. This does not, however, prevent him from behaving like ...

Ciri wrote:Cashiers don't have friends outside work: Fact.

Are there any other job titles that this fact applies to?

What is the most irremediably evil type of person who ever lived? I've got a little list. 1. This person is unable to form a concept of anything except what they want, and unable to form an intention except to get what they want. They have zero ability to evaluate their own desires and therefore usu...

ECT is just medieval as the rest of 20th-century psychiatry. It no better than treating bleeding with leeches. But, in general, I find all the pretentious and self-important talk of dopamine and serotonin is buffoonish and self-lobotomized.

I'll be there in spirit, as a poltergeist.

What makes you guys think that was a coworker? I never said it was.