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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.

    Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that’s potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.

    I don’t have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don’t have a lot of people working on the answer because we’re still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we’re doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We’ve broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we’re paying dearly for it.

    The other problem is, like recycling, there isn’t a lot of money in the solution, so it’s hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.


    1. We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
    2. We use the nutrients to grow plants
    3. We eat the nutrients in our food
    4. We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
    5. We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
    6. We need new nutrients to grow plants

    Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it’s just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don’t notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.

    We need to close the loop again!





  • I prefer “things which aren’t objectively true that we act as if they are true”. The first line of the Wikipedia article on ideology uses the same definition more beautiful phrased “An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which “practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones””

    A good example of an almost universal ideological belief is that “killing is wrong/bad”. It’s not objectively true, we kill animals, we kill in wars, we euthanize people in medicine. But we act as if it’s true none the less in our day to day lives because no one wants to live in a society where killing is generally acceptable, for obvious reasons.

    That being said, I don’t see anything wrong with what you’re saying in a vacuum. I just feel like as soon as you place a naive person in society they begin to interact with and adopt aspects of various ideologies without “deep thought”, sometimes even subconsciously.

    The beauty culture is a good example of where people will adopt definitions of beauty that are ideological (beautiful people are good, ugly people are bad/dangerous) without conscious effort or deep thought. Then they will act everyday as if they believe in it.

    The people who watch Fox news hold complex ideological beliefs, mostly subconsciously. It becomes apparent when you ask them to explain their beliefs that they didn’t adopt these ideologies based on deep thought, but will fight fiercely to defend them.

    I think that these people’s behaviours are driven by ideology even though they themselves weren’t the one that did the deep thinking.

    Honestly there are good arguments that in complex systems even basic cognitive functions can and will create ideology. An example is birds in a cage with a button that when pressed gives them food. If you disconnect the button then give them food randomly, they’re likely to start creating complex dances and rituals based on what they think was responsible for activating the food dispenser. This in a lot of ways mirrors primitive religious behaviour which are certainly ideology.

    Perhaps you have another word you prefer to use for deeply held beliefs that affect our behavior but are attained through means other than deep thought?




  • Not having empathy isn’t enough to be evil. Just like having empathy isn’t enough to be good. You need ideology.

    For example, the guy who lacks empathy could use basic libertarian or anarchist ideology for why we shouldn’t hurt people using logic instead of empathy.

    Another example would be if you use fascist ideology you can turn empathy into a weapon for evil. The us vs them ideology requires empathy. The idea is that they are going to hurt the people you love just by existing is what dehumanizes them enough for a normal person to attack them.








  • The headline is a bit misleading. What it should say is that “men who score low toxic masculinity traits are more likely to seek enthusiastic/affirmative consent”. Which is a bit of a “duh” thing.

    Even the authors admit that passive response is normative consent, and as much as I love enthusiastic consent, a lot of men AND women feel very awkward when you try that paradigm since they’re used to normative human sexuality. That’s especially prevalent with older men and women like millennials and gen X. Escalating sexual behaviour with passive consent is different from escalating without consent or against consent. Perhaps when affirmative/enthusiastic consent is normalized, we can have a different conversation.

    “A passive response to a sexual advance is a normative indicator of consent, but also might reflect distress or fear, and whether men are able to differentiate between the two during a hookup was important to explore,” said Mattson.

    That’s the exact point. In a future study they’ll be able to see if men who score high in toxic masculinity traits are more likely to not notice or actively ignore distress or fear.

    I honestly suspect yes since empathy is not a valued trait in performative toxic masculinity, but with science it’s unwise to jump to unsubstantiated conclusions, like this headline does.



  • I’m really torn about this. He’s in jail now for driving without a license. That in itself doesn’t harm anyone. It could very well be that he just didn’t have the money to renew his driver’s license. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing deserving of jail time by itself. As for the driving, in a lot of places it’s not possible to keep a job, or go to the doctors office, without a car.

    That being said, since he doesn’t have a license, his insurance, even if he had any, is void and therefore he is a liability. He clearly isn’t going to stop driving when he isn’t legally entitled to.

    In a society where driving isn’t often optional, I feel like the law is more callous than necessary. I don’t have a solution though. Maybe drivers licenses could be free so that your license would only be suspended for cause?

    The video is absolutely hilarious though. The comedic timing is as good as a sitcom. No marks.