• 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle


  • I can see how the cartoon is inappropriate. A Star of David references Judaism as a whole. It paints an entire religion as the perpetrators of bad acts that can only reasonably be laid at the feet of Netanyahu’s Israeli government. An Israeli flag might be more appropriate, but it would still be painting ordinary Israeli citizens with too broad of a brush.

    On the flip side, the military controlled by Nethanyahu’s government seems to be painting all Gaza citizens as targets, regardless of affiliation with Hamas or lack thereof. This stance sucks and is evil.

    Killing innocent people like Hamas and Israel have is a clear ethical failure. Fomenting culture-wide hatred of a group in a way that encourages future killing of innocent people like Hamas and Israel have is also an ethical failure.

    Harvard was right to condemn the cartoon, but there is no real good guy here.














  • At the time, I approached it from the perspective that consciousness in some capacity was possible after death while acknowledging that I had no evidence on the questions of how, why, how frequently, for what duration, etc. I hypothesized that ghosts were whorls of consciousness like the whirlpools in water after the passing of an oar.

    I was raised Lutheran, but had been approaching my understanding of existence from what I thought of as a logical perspective. For example, I reasoned that heaven, if it existed as a joyful reward state, must either be essentially finite in duration or must involve eternal dementia based on the notion that eventually you would run out of novel or interesting thoughts or experiences. To remain joyful, heaven would have to either have the individual be dissolved back into the universe/almighty or would require forgetting earlier novel experiences.

    These days I tend to just anthropomorphize the universe itself, as the wants of an omniscient and omnipotent being would be indistinguishable from the natural rules of the universe. To quote Roger Waters: “what God wants, God gets (God help us all)”. I figure God wants matter to be attracted to other matter and for electromagnetism to be a thing (amongst other rules of the universe).




  • I was in college, it was night, and several friends and acquaintances of mine had lugged a case of beer to a giant empty wire spool that sat next to our campus at the time. The spool on it’s side made for a good table.

    Having completed an entire class about world religions, we were set to debate whether Buddhism or Taoism was a more reasonable philosophy.

    The girl to my right was definitely engaged in the conversation, but she hadn’t said anything yet. I asked her “so what do you think about all of this?” She looked at me, crossed her arms, and fell backwards into the ground. I immediately said, “holy shit, did you guys just see that?” Nobody else saw the girl. As it happened, the wire spool was on the lawn between the campus and a graveyard.

    Maybe I’m nuts or maybe I saw that. Never saw anything like that again though.


  • There was a kid I knew in middle school who lived a block away from me named Nick.

    In May or so of 1994, during our last year of middle school, Nick insisted that Nirvana was “sooooo easy to make fun of.”

    He then played the song OP is referencing in it’s entirety while interjecting “but I lied” (and giggling) after every time Kurt sang his denial of gun ownership.