I must live a certain way

Call me a cosmic NIMBY, but the notion of a colonized near side of the moon, permanently robbing us of the dark phases and the lunar crescent, is one of the few prospects that makes me understand the mind-space of your Kaczynski type. A horrifying idea.

Light pollution is one of the most radicalizing phenomena to me, in how it has robbed the majority of the world's population of one of the most beautiful parts of our planet's patrimony.

RT @SerpenIllus: Please welcome the AMAZING Mirasaura grauvogeli, a NEW MARVELOUS Drepanosaur published in NATURE today! This astonishing r….

Incidentally, I have nothing inherently against wanting to LARP as Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is cool, cool things/aesthetics tend to be what attract ppl to most things, including archaeology. But if you aren't intelligent enough to find the real world fascinating, don't bother

The real, psychological driving force behind these people is the desperate need for dastardly ancient conspiracies to exist so that they can LARP as Indiana Jones.

Online pseud archaeological arguments basically reduce to this

Ppl will call it "Reddit" to raise the appeal to incredulity fallacy, but this really is a textbook example. Who cares about your gut feeling lol - who are you? Touch some grass.

Yeah that's. yeah. Palaeolithic was likely quite a bit more interesting than just "eat berries & hunt deer," but the basic point that sustained civilizational development didn't take off until the Holocene is just straight up true. Doesn't matter if that sits weird with you lol.

Inside you are two creationists: One denies the evidence of feathered dinosaurs because it doesn't fit into his binary of created kinds, the other accepts evidence of feathered dinosaurs because they vaguely resemble Medieval heraldic beasts if you stylize them and squint.

RT @JoschuaKnuppe: I was looking very much forward to this but the Hammerschmiede clay pit turned out much more difficult than I anticipate….

A lot of this stems from a genuine theory of mind issue, ppl not realizing that your upbringing places a modifier on your later worldview that no degree of late-life shifts can fully bridge.

Christian who undergoes a crisis of faith, considers himself an atheist for a while and then re-converts may find, in retrospect, that he never really lost his core conviction in God's existence, and so falsely extrapolate from this that "real atheists" don't actually exist.

Conversely, somebody who grew up religious will have an "duh, of course" relationship to religious belief that a person who genuinely knows what it feels like not to have it, but then gains it will not have. Ppl conflate these differing experiences and then accuse others of lying.

An atheist who was formerly a Christian has an emotional connection to the faith that an atheist who was raised secular simply won't have, and therefore the "You are just mad at God!" accusation is fairly plausible for the former group, but totally off-base for the latter.

As I have noted before, lots of confusion is caused by a failure to recognize that being an atheist as a formerly religious is very different to being raised secular from birth, and ditto being religious after having grown up atheist is different to being cradle.

I should get one of those room night sky projectors. They seem cozy.

"lol" and a number of other sentence-final interjections and punctuation practices are actually extremely useful tone-signifiers that have developed as we adapted to rapid, informal text-based communication.

"Yeah so I went to Richasee College in Pembrook County New Jersey - 'Go Red Socks!', y'know".>American missionary, addressing Peruvian Indians that have never seen a white man before.

Genuinely admire the local and national self-assurance of Americans, that they will off-handedly refer to some random second-rate college in provincial Ohio, utterly confident that everyone from New Yorkers to the Taiwanese will ofc be familiar.

Always fascinated by the phenomena of works that are so widely known, but so rarely read, that there exists an entire body of jokes, memes and common quips that rely entirely on everyone knowing, but nobody ever reading the actual text.