Rational hedonism rocks.

If you have a worldview that includes gods, spirits, fairies, the universe as an entity, etc., that worldview often also provides you with the “meaning” bit. It can be stifling, reassuring, motivating, or depressing, depending. That was me for a few decades. Without that set of beliefs there is no built-in meaning afaik. You can study the stars or atoms or human behavior or plants your whole life and those things will not reveal a purpose or meaning for you, the universe, or humanity.

In the absence (for me) of any built-in meaning or purpose, we make our own meanings. If your meaning is “nothing matters so fuck it,” that is the meaning you are choosing or accepting as some kind of default. Like many other people I choose meanings around happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number, as Spock (and probably some lesser figure) said. In this mechanistic universe we somehow came to be, and we can think and feel and understand and learn. That is almost unimaginably amazing to me. We are people, not just idk viruses grinding away. I choose a set of meanings that value people and their happiness. Life is miraculous and apparently rare. In that special group we, humans, are the most phenomenal thing we know of in the universe. I choose to value us.

I’m sure this might be interesting, but the video is letterboxed so aggressively that even on fullscreen my laptop screen is 80% black with a postage-stamp of video in the middle that lasts about 3 seconds.

Yes, critical thinking is hard.

“I have no response to that.”

Wait, in the first one it looks like the S has a cape.

Thinking one step further: Even if I somehow got into MENSA (unlikely), I can’t imagine ever saying, “I see you have a MENSA discount…” ugh.

This is worth the entire post and more. I’m chuckling while my kid gives me weird looks from the other room.

According to almost every photo I take, about 3 degrees off.

Pretty sure this is a psychophysics question, though I don’t know that field well enough to know what’s there.

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If I believed in a god I’d ask them to save me from the baby communists who see a sickle and hammer on a flag and insist they must have represented utopia.

They have access to it if they threaten/indimidate/blackmail you into giving them access. Dummy phones are a real thing; saw a post today on masto by a company… person (?) who said they keep a stash of clean burner phones for when employees travel through US borders. These are all reasonable, and maybe even CalyxOS’s decoy partition (does it still have that?). The larger problem is that few people will use these things, not even bringing a clean phone. And once they start threatening your family and your long-term safety and freedom, it’s highly likely you’ll give them access, if they know there is any access to be had. Which they increasingly do, because universal surveillance blah blah.