<<< Both political parties agree there’s “no good reason” to put cannabis dollars back into voter’s pockets, and lawmakers are scrambling to figure out how to avoid it. That would most likely require asking residents to vote themselves out of the extra cash, by voting to exempt cannabis taxes from the refund requirement . . . >>> Why not just cut the weed taxes? Jesus. #SimpleSolutionsToStupidProblems

Jesus Christ people it’s 2015, why does your password field only accept “8-10 characters”?

War Is Never Over. <<< "I think in the crafting of the AUMF [authorization for use of military force,] all options should be on the table, and then we can debate whether we want to use them,” [Gen. Martin] Dempsey said in an interview with an in-house Defense Department reporter published last week. “But the authorization should be there." Dempsey’s comments were also echoed by Secretary of State John Kerry, who said THERE SHOULD BE NO LIMITS ON POSSIBLE ACTIONS BY THE PRESIDENT. HE ADDED THAT THERE SHOULD BE NO TIME LIMIT ON THE USE OF FORCE, according to the Detroit News. The lack of authorization didn’t stop Obama from launching the campaign against ISIS over the summer. More than $1 billion has been spent fighting ISIS since then, including conducting 1,700 airstrikes and sending 3,000 U.S. troops to Iraq to assist Iraqi forces fighting the militant group, according to the Huffington Post. >>> #AbolishThePresidency #AbolishCongress #USOut

In another thread, a friend was polling people for their oddest, fringiest views. Of course I could just list a bunch of things about political radicalism, but yo that’s what I do all day, and where the fringes of a conversation are at is relative to an audience. So yeah, believing that the state as such ought to be abolished or being against voting or public schools or whatever is weird in some circles, not weird in others. So here’s what I went with instead: 1. I think that mathematical objects can be, and often are, the objects of direct perceptual experience. (Including supposedly ideal objects like planes, triangles, perfect circles, pi, e, complex numbers, etc.) 2. I also think that modal properties can be, and sometimes are, the objects of direct perceptual experience. (So e.g. you can under the right circumstances gain knowledge of possibility and necessity not just by inference but by literally feeling possibilities, seeing necessities, etc.) (I will also say that I’m a modal realist, but my understanding of what modal realism actually entails — contra Lewis — makes this a somewhat less sexy and less fringy view than it might initially seem.)

http://ift.tt/1JSzj4i Correction.

http://ift.tt/1xTvMgH Ethics

http://ift.tt/1vKnO7d Somebody spent a great deal of time making this.

In the United States, the word “moderate” in mainstream political discourse has absolutely no meaning other than “pliable to the interests of the United States government.” Here, a theocratic absolutist tyrant, notorious for his regime of religious censorship and rigid gender apartheid, is described as “a force for moderation” because of how many enemies he beheaded.

The closest allies of kings are always other kings. The first loyalty of government is always to other governments. King Abdullah was a misogynist, theocratic, totalitarian tyrant, but rulers of the US will never stop singing his praises, because their alliance his regime was important to their own strategic objectives in the Middle East.

Mike Hubbard is wrong, again. The state of Alabama’s marriage bans were an unconscionable government intrusion into Alabamian’s private lives and consensual marital arrangements (for example, in this case severely interfering with a married couple’s ability to arrange for their own child’s care), and however limited this ruling, I am immensely glad to say that for the last 24 hours I have been living in a state freed of the dead weight of such discriminatory laws.