“Sold as the armed wing of society – as the upholder of civilization itself – the state, in the name of combating terrorism, acts like that terrible friend who, finding someone at their lowest, encourages them to take a turn for the worst. A more rational society would be content with the threats that already exist – it wouldn’t need to breed them; a more empathetic society would view someone pondering a turn to terrorism as a threat, yes, but one that could be eliminated with a helping hand and reintegration into a society from which they feel alienated, not with a security bureaucracy and system of mass incarceration that profits only when they take the plunge, destroying their life before they can legally drink a beer.” – Charles Davis http://ift.tt/1BzC60u

We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn. #BurnMotherfuckerBurn

To-day, I saw one more person asserting “Numbers do not exist in reality, they are mental constructs.” So I knew they were wrong.

So am reading some Hyginus, which, in terms of manuscript history, is basically like the Wikipedia:Masters of the Universe of the ancient world.

Good. Why wait? Just go ahead and quit now. #DoIt #DoooooooIiiiiiiiiiit

<<< 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.)