Words and Needles

Shane comes out of the closet sometime after Scott does, and in some random, lighthearted interview, they ask him what he's looking for in a man. And Shane's just, off-hand like, "Well, he'd have to have at least one Stanley Cup. Obviously." And when he gets a good reaction from that, he keeps going, like "Needs to be amazing at hockey. Definitely needs to be at least an All-Star, if not a captain. Hot too. If he can't bench-press me, I'm not interested."

Looks like the cat's finally out of the bag! Last year I was able to assist in identifying 4 (FOUR?!?) members of the Franklin expedition! I researched Bridgens, Young, Orren, and Peglar, and was able to find and contact living descendants of their families who agreed to do DNA tests!

Let me put it this way. I really like the ocean. However I don’t think it’s a good thing for the ocean to flood inland destroying ecosystems and villages because some of the natural hills that kept it at bay have been mined away. Me building a dam to keep the ocean away to bring back some of the natural barrier that was lost isn’t me trying to destroy the ocean. It’s me keeping the ocean out of my goddamned ecosystem where it isn’t meant to be anyways.

Can you hear the deer deterrent (high pitched screeching, not the low rumble) in this video? I was on a house tour and was the only one out of dozens of people who could hear it, it drove me insane. I’m assuming it’s more audible to younger folks?

Well that's just biochemistry, that would assign free will to to any sufficiently dense collection of biomass and sunlight

A part of it is, I think, a system with free will is one that we can't predict the states of, since it's of the same order of complexity as our own minds.

Now you're assigning free will to like, turbulence in fluid dynamics, or multi-body gravitational systems. Except when you talk about "predicting states" you're using the language of quantum mechanics to talk about philosophy and now it's an uphill battle for me to take any of this seriously unless you're a physics PhD.

And also, all these attempts at defining free will just seem like people deciding what has free will (humans, usually, or primates, or maybe dolphins) and then trying to come up with a box to put that decision in. And then a couple centuries go by and science advances and now there are so many counterexamples that the box falls apart.

Why, that's what people are! The system also has to be organized , but you get my drift!

Now you're assigning free will to like, turbulence in fluid dynamics, or multi-body gravitational systems. Except when you talk about "predicting states" you're using the language of quantum mechanics to talk about philosophy and now it's an uphill battle for me to take any of this seriously unless you're a physics PhD.

Well, what's missing from those systems is any manner of sentience, but I suppose they *are* closer to it than say, a rock rolling down an inclined plane. As for the second note, I'm not sure the language is reserved to quantum mechanics either... and for the record i'll glibly say I'm actually a physics PhD dropout, technically :P

And also, all these attempts at defining free will just seem like people deciding what has free will (humans, usually, or primates, or maybe dolphins) and then trying to come up with a box to put that decision in. And then a couple centuries go by and science advances and now there are so many counterexamples that the box falls apart.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.