Technically, shouldn’t the fact that brain activity ultimately has a physical basis (various chemical and electrical signals moving around and such) imply that, if a person lying knows they’re lying, there should be some physical difference between that brain and the brain of an otherwise identical individual saying the same thing, but believing it to be true? Measuring that and interpreting the data might be an impractically difficult problem to solve, sure, but if there truly were no physical difference, that would have to imply that at some level, thinking is a supernatural process that at least partly occurs outside the physical universe, which is both something no evidence exists for, and would seem in contradiction to things we do observe, like how damage to the brain changes and impairs a person’s thinking

Drive through would require I get a car tho, I was more trying to defend the kiosks as, while I understand that they aren’t perfect for various reasons, like dark patterns and such that software ordering enables, I genuinely find that kiosk format the least stressful way to order food, in the rare instance that I’m at a place that has them. Dont have to install their app, doesn’t activate my social anxiety like asking an actual person for things, and I can walk in and use it rather than needing a vehicle.

In the rare instance that I go to mcdonalds, Id rather use their device than put their app on my device, or make an account to use such an app.

The trouble with that is, if youre going to go into a field that does need it regularly, theres a decent chance youre going to need it because you need math for which trig is like, foundational to the foundations of the thing you actually need. It would be a fair bit of a slowdown to go teach such basic things to all the engineers and scientists and whoever else may need such things before teaching them the math that builds on it, and you both do need those professions in a modern society and dont know in advance which kids will ultimately end up in them.

Also, abstract? It seems to me that, being generally related to and derived from geometry, trig is one of the less abstract bits of math, simply because you can draw out the circles and triangles and waveforms and relatively clearly see what the concepts represent and how they relate to eachother, rather than just writing out a sequence of symbols and remembering what to do with them all. If it takes hardcore drilling to stick around, thats in my view more a case of it being taught in an ineffective manner that prioritizes brute force memorization over actual learning.

Weirdly enough I think that the majority of my use of trig since college has been for video games. That being said, I feel its squarely one of those “you probably wont need it much, but theres a chance you will someday for some random thing or will go into a profession that needs math that requires knowing trig to learn, and you wont want to have to learn it the first time right then.” things. Its pretty foundational to other math and does have a lot of practical applications even if not for everyone, so might as well teach it to kids when theyre old enough to learn it.

Honestly, I don’t think he’d look that creepy without the context, same goes for most other famous but hated people that people dont like the appearance of, like Jeff Bezos or such. I think that that reputation comes from a combo of: people being more inclined to notice things they don’t like in people they already dislike or to consider neutral features in those people negative (the flipside of how one can find someone a bit bad looking, but then end up friends somehow and no longer think they look so bad), and media using photos of those people taken at unflattering angles, mid-speech where expressions look strange, etc, when talking about those people for an audience that already isn’t inclined to like them.

Never having actually been there, and therefore just going off vibes I get from portrayals on the internet: that city in Florida where they designed it around every property having boat access (I forget the name, looking up “Florida canal city” gives me one called “Cape Coral” so it may be that one, or there might be some other similar place ive seen pictures of before out there that im mistaking for it). Cool concept in theory but every picture Ive seen of the place it looks like someone took generic slightly rich car-filled suburbia and made it even more overpriced and dysfunctional

tbh I think Id be in no mood to actually eat anything, and trying to decide on anything in that circumstance sounds like itd just compound the anxiety , so given that itd be kind of a waste of food and wouldnt be of much comfort, Id probably just turn it down.

Ive kinda always liked things related to it (spent my childhood reading warrior cats and redwall, would always choose humanoid animal characters in games over humans when available, because I found humans kinda ugly somehow, etc) but never really considered myself one until after high school because it was considered “cringy” and I had to grow out of worrying about that. Actually was unfortunately rather judgmental towards furries myself at a certain age just out of denial.

Kinda warmed up to it in college after growing a bit and getting away from my old classmates, but it’s difficult to say what the initial draw was because, well, Ive had some sort of a liking for characters designed as humanoid animal people as far as I can remember (or, given that those are pretty common in kids media, I guess I didn’t really stop preferring them because they somehow felt easier to look at and imagine interacting with than more realistic human characters. I do have social anxiety and autism, which I suspect might have something to do with that feeling but I cant say for sure).

I would consider furry generally a subculture. I can see why some people would consider it a kink, given that furry culture seems to have a weaker taboo about sexual stuff than wider society does and that the community makes a lot of porn, but I don’t think it really qualifies as one for a given person unless one is just there for that and doesn’t have some interest in the wider community or furry characters in other contexts. For my part, I tend to imagine or prefer furry characters in any context that would generally involve human characters. Ie, if I draw or write or just fantasize about something, I’m very likely to work furries in regardless of the content, so them popping up in horny stuff is less a matter of finding those characters an inheritly sexual thing, and more a matter of sexual stuff being included in “everything that normally has humans”.

As far as my participation goes, that social anxiety I mentioned does limit me a bit, Ive not been to any conventions for example despite hoping to eventually. It’s mostly limited to art and internet communities for me at the moment, though most of my current friend group are also furries just cause those places are where I went looking for them.

Well yeah, that’s my point though, there’s nothing about the US’s size that means it cant have that stuff, the big country argument is functionally just an excuse to distract from what the car industry has done here.

I mean, realistically if you gave a fox a ball, I could see it playing around with it. Like sure, they don’t exactly know or care about the rules to soccer but it’s not hard to find some way to play with a ball and foxes are active creatures that seem like they’d need a lot of enrichment to keep healthy.

There are many such areas, what I was trying to say was more that that is a solvable problem, if the government of the area was sufficiently motivated to solve it, rather than something like “we’re too big for anything but cars”, which is more of an excuse to not do any of that change to the infrastructure because it implies that nothing can reasonably be done and that cars are simply the natural way of things.

You could similarly say that Europe is huge, or that China is huge, or that the whole planet is huge, and therefore the people living there must need a vehicle. Except, most people dont leave their local area all that often, and when they do, theres nothing that inherently requires that the vehicle used to do so much be individually owned. This isnt to say that nobody needs a car, obviously if you live way out in the middle of nowhere, running transit might not be so viable- but that does not describe how and where most people live, even in the US, and for the majority that do live in urban areas, the size of the whole country is irrelevant to if they would need cars if we just built the proper infrastructure.

Nihilism carries plenty of hope; it carries the hope that the values we make for ourselves, our subjective experiences, are the highest basis we have to judge ourselves on, that we are not a cog in somebody elses cosmic machine, or at least that if we are, that someone ultimately has no more valid a claim to us than we do. A universal meaning, if one exists, has a potentially infinite number of things that it could be, so if one exists, we almost certainly will fail to live up to it, despite any effort we make, and that notion I find horrifying. But you cannot fail if there is no goal, you can do what you want, and as humans are a social species, what we want, on average, is to live well, to be kind and experience kindness. Absent some other mission, this is what people try to do, without really needing to think too much about it.

I do not get this “nihilism means you feel everything is hopeless” notion, despite it being commonly repeated, because if nothing matters, nothing requires you to give up. There is no reason not to keep going, and since humans are ultimately wired to want and need and care about things, hope for the future is the default state. The people that tell you to not vote, or not be kind, or similar, on the grounds that things are all pointless, are not actually following nihilism, because they act as if that implies there is a universal mandate for inaction, not simply no mandate.

Beyond that, theres the matter that, well, I simply dont see a mechanism from which a universal meaning and purpose could arise (short of an actually omnipotent entity existing and using its power to decree such a purpose, but since I also believe such entities are self-contradicting and impossible, I cant accept that one). Purpose to my use of the term implies artificial creation to fulfill some role, an ultimate purpose then would somehow have to mean that the sum total of all things was created by some intelligent entity, except that entity would also be a thing that therefore would have to have retroactively created itself, which is paradoxical. Even if, for the sake of argument, I did think that the idea of a meaningless universe was mentally unhealthy, I cannot simply decide that idea is factually wrong simply because I didnt want it to be true, my brain just does not let me consciously change my beliefs without being convinced to the contrary like that. There are a great many things that I wish werent true, and yet think are regardless. This isnt one of them, but that isnt the reason I think it.

I fail to see how, true or false, that would be relevant.

Ah, then I see my point of confusion: I do not see “nothing matters” as a fundamentally undesirable position (actually kind of the reverse), so to me Donald’s statement does not read as despare at all, it just reads as a neutral explanation of his stance on it. As such, Mickey’s statement doesn’t read to me as absurdist reassurance, rather, Donald’s reads more as something an absurdist might say and Mickey’s response reads more as “how dare you believe that, that idea must be somehow made false even if it is true and I wish to use violence to bring that about”

What does that even entail though, you cant exactly force things to objectively matter if they don’t already, there’s no mechanism by which we could influence that. If you just assert values that you hold personally, you’ve merely created subjective meaning and done nothing relevant to nihilism’s truth value. Meanwhile If nihilism turns out to be objectively false, then you can’t fight it because it wouldnt even exist to fight. You can fight nihilists I guess, but then you’re in the generally disliked position of fighting people based on a belief of theirs that does not require them cause any harm to you or anyone else, because it doesn’t require anything at all.

Its about as bizarre a call to action as declaring that you dislike some branch of math and want people to help you fight it.

transhumanism isnt transcendent of material reality though, its literally just the idea of using technology, which runs on the rules of nature to modify humans into some more desired state, its not that it does impossible things so much as that the limits of what the material universe allows are actually much grander than our current abilities are up to.

That hypothetical doesnt really change what I said though. It would make the materialist position incorrect, but it still wouldnt be hypocritical because it would still be consistent with itself, and it still wouldnt give you any course of action with which to “fight” the nature of the universe.

Always hated this meme because Mickey’s dialogue is set up to give the confident and condescending “vibe” of correctness but actually makes no sense if you stop and think about it. "Trusting the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals " when declaring emotions to have material basis isnt hypocrisy, it’s self consistency, essentially the reverse of hypocrisy. And if the universe is just a material thing with no basis for intrinsic value, what even is there to “fight” about that? You cannot exactly punch the nature of reality into submission, or change the behavior of the universe through sheer force of will. And if you could, there isn’t even a reason given for why you would even want to do so, it’s just implied that human values and emotions being a result of material reality is undesirable because what? “chemicals bad” I guess?