Enkrod

I was very very lucky.

I turned 26 when I heard myself coughing like a 66 year old chainsmoker with cancerous lungs, found I was unable to run up stairs and out of breath after carrying groceries inside. I had to have a cig every morning so I would be able to have a shit at all, but if I did… that first drag sent me rushing to the bathroom, it got so bad, I had to light the first one while sitting on the loo, or i’d shit my pants.

That’s when I found myself disgusted with myself. I stopped, I simply stopped. From 38 cigarettes per day to 0. I am so happy it worked, because I am a very easily tempted personality and tend towards addiction in anything that gives my brain pleasure.

It took a year before I completely stopped coughing and two years before I could run up those stairs again, but one day I simply realized “Oh my! I’m not out of breath. What… what happened? Oh, yeah I quit smoking! Damn this feels nice!”

Odds of a sexual abuser need not be high for the man, they’re simply 0% for the bear.

It’s three fedoras, looked at from the top!

Thank you for making me look, but fuck you for not telling me, it took ages of staring at my screen before I got what was actually depicted.

Theistic Satanism, otherwise referred to as religious Satanism, spiritual Satanism, or traditional Satanism,[2] is an umbrella term for religious groups that consider Satan, the Devil, to objectively exist as a deity, supernatural entity, or spiritual being worthy of worship or reverence, whom individuals may contact and convene with, in contrast to the atheistic archetype, metaphor, or symbol found in LaVeyan Satanism.

The Satanic Bible is LaVeyan Satanism and as a product of the 20th century very much more modern than the “traditional Satanism” of de Sade and Huysman in the 19th century.

LaVeyan Satanism is still much more on the “spiritual” side of things than, for example the explicitly atheistic, sceptic and rational Satanic Temple, but both fall under the umbrella of the more modern, non-theistic understanding of Satanism. While a more historical form definetly existed, even if it wasn’t widely practiced.

In Christian Satanism the Devil exists and is being worshipped. This is “classical” or “theist” Satanism where there is a belief in the existence of Satan.

Contrast that with modern atheist Satanism, where the Devil is merely a psychological symbol of rebellion, independence and freedom that serves to trigger theists while also being a representation of revolting against christan authoritarianism and, through the exploitation of rules stemming from theist-political decisionmaking, as a counter to the blatantly unconstitutional abuse of religious freedom laws for the benefit of a single religion.

Meh, our esoterics are basically religious anarchists or spiritual hippies. They still fall into all the trapping of religion without the “organized” part of “organized religion”.

Not necessarily. And I don’t think you meant it like this could be read.

You can absolutely be pro something but recognize the downsides of it. You can be pro vaxxination, but be critical of how the government handles rollout, you can be pro EV but still remain convinced that the resources needed for batteries are (at the moment) produced using child labor and causing environmental destruction. Constructive critique is valid and necessary.

People don’t need to be fanboys, sitting on the fence is completely okay in regards to many topics.

What I think you meant to criticise (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that lots of invalid critique and unreasonable opposition hides behind a thin veneer of “I’m actually in favor of {x}” and yes, we’re all sick of it.

Roche et pierre, mon frère!

LTS males for the win!

EOL, they’re stuck, no updates, nothing fresh, their flaws are open, known and won’t be fixed and if you get them, they’re a seriously risk to your safety.

That’s a squeegee, they said they use it after every shower but doesn’t help.

It’s her reversal of the Serenity Prayer, changing it into a call to action instead of acceptance of the (seemingly) inevitable.

Basically every great and complex work ant colonies are capable of is an emergent property of simple rules that are simple instinct in simple creatures, yet the interplay of lots of individuals following these simple rules begets complex behavior. This is the easiest to grasp example imho.

Flocking birds, schooling fish, hell we can write computer programs where complex behavior emerges from simple rules, Conway’s Game of Life is the best example for how simple the rules can be and how complex the emergent systems.

But emergence is everywhere, the cells of your lungs don’t breathe, but they arrange themselves in a way and are embedded in a system that can exist because lung-cells do arrange the way they do.

Life itself is an emergent property, the atoms that constitute us themselves aren’t alive, they don’t run, breathe or think, all of those are emergent properties from the right collection and arrangement of atoms into molecules into cells into a multicellular organism.

Thinking is no different than running, it is something that happens through the complex interplay of matter but transcends the single building blocks.

A single ant can’t be a colony, a single cell can’t breathe or run and a single neuron can’t think, but if you bring them together in the right amount and arrangement, new properties emerge.

And most importantly, if you disturb that arrangement, if you destroy some of that constituting matter or rearrange it, the emergent properties change or vanish. That it can simply stop to emerge is imho the best prove that it is an emergent property.

“An emergent phenomenon of the way our biological hardware works” is one possible, entirely rational and most importantly sufficient answer. And even if we did not have an answer, that doesn’t mean that there is not an entirely materialistic explanation for the phenomenon, even if we didn’t find the answer yet.

Because we have hundreds of thousands of examples of previously unexplained phenomena being sufficiently and completely explained by purely naturalistic, materialistic causes.

On the other hand we have exactly zero previous examples of a phenomenon being sufficiently explained by anything supernatural.

Since we observe consciousness solely bound to the existence of, reliant on the configuration of and changeable through the change of physical properties of physical matter, we can conclude that it is an emergent property that has arisen like other properties emergent from biological matter through the well known, well defined and observable process of evolution.

Could there be an alternative explanation? Yes!

Is the god-hypothesis in any way an explanation for consciousness? No! In fact it would raise more questions. It is neither sufficient, nor rational. What it is, is a god-of-the-gaps argument, another turtle on the way down.

Margerine under Nutella!

:.|:;

Mhhhmmm Pasta

380 million, if you’re talking about the US.

Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.

Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.

Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.

So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.

Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.

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