03 JAN 2017 by ideonexus
Little Wars
"LITTLE WARS" is the game of kings—for players in an inferior social position. It can be played by boys of every age from twelve to one hundred and fifty—and even later if the limbs remain sufficiently supple—by girls of the better sort, and by a few rare and gifted women. This is to be a full History of Little Wars from its recorded and authenticated beginning until the present time, an account of how to make little warfare, and hints of the most priceless sort for the recumbent strate... 1 
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notes02 SEP 2016 by ideonexus
Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Rationalia
In Rationalia, the Constitution stipulates that a body of convincing evidence needs to exist in support of an idea before any Policy can established based on it. In such a country, data gathering, careful observations, and experimentation would be happening all the time, influencing practically every aspect of our modern lives. As a result, Rationalia would lead the world in discovery, because discovery would be built into the DNA of how the government operates, and how its citizens think....
1 30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence and the Concept of Social Justice
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.” This has nothing to do with Women Who Love Too Much or Chicken Soup for the Soul; it is another name for vigilantism, frontier justice, taking the law into your own hands, and other forms of violent retaliation by which people secured justice in the absence of ...Folksonomies: violence social status
Folksonomies: violence social status
1 notes
notes21 NOV 2014 by ideonexus
The World of the Electron and the Switch
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murde... 1 notes
notes24 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
The Not-Believing-In-God-Glasses
But then I thought, "But I don't know how to not believe in God. I don't know how you do it. How do you get up, how do you get through the day?"
I thought, "Okay, calm down. Let's just try on the not-believing-in-God glasses for a moment, just for a second. Just put on the no-God glasses and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off. So I put them on and I looked around.
I'm embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, "Well, how does the... 1 notes
notes13 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Humans are Terrifying
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died...From a forum, why humans make a great monster race for other aliens to fear. Yet to find original reference yet.
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
When Does Human Life Begin
Careful and reproducible observations and measurements in the bbiosciences have similarly forced us to repeatedly refine our traditional ideas about what life itself is and when it begins. Is a human being first a life when it emerges from the birth canal? Does it have any legal rights is as a person before then? Or is it a life at the stage of development where > it is able to survive independently outside of the womb even if it is removed from there early, as can happen naturally with pr... 1 notes
notesIs it at fertilization, implantation, or after birth?
01 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Differences Between Humans and Apes
It is well-known that both rude and civilized peoples are capable of showing unspeakable, and as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics, and are unhappily truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with the bloodthirsty exectioner of the Reign of Terror, since the form... 1 notes
notesIt's not possible to compare the violence in the general animal world to that of humans.
03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Revolutions That Break with the Past Fail
Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision. Thus the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 each made brave new worlds that catastrophically failed. By cutting off continuity with the slower parts of their cultures they had no fallback... 1 notes
notesErasing the past is a crippling thing to do. The Founders of America built on the past in their revolution and Evolution succeeds by building on the past.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Overcoming Inherited Bias to Live In Peace
In our earliest history, so far as we can tell, individuals held an allegiance
toward their immediate tribal group, which may have numbered no more than ten
or twenty individuals, all of whom were related by consanguinity. As time went on, the need for cooperative behavior – in the hunting of large animals or large
herds, in agriculture, and in the development of cities – forced human beings into
larger and larger groups. The group that was identified with, the tribal unit,
enlarged at ea...Humans evolved to trust a small select group of individual, but as we live in a world community, a biologically diverse community, and eventually an outer space community, we must evolve culturally to see appreciate our differences.
