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Advice puppy, how have I lived 16 years without experiencing the extreme amazingness of De La Soul?
And why is pretty much all of my brainpower put into music? You'd think I was an aspie it's such an obsession.

Not all vegetarians are bad. I stand as an example of that. Admittedly, it's only because I don't really like meat aside from fish. And the idea that what I'm eating might be intelligent enough to have a consciousness doesn't sit well with me, so I just avoid it by not bothering. Pork is the only normal meat I avoid on principle though, because pigs seem smart enough to have at least a rudimentary understanding of themselves, so killing and eating them seems more like actually snuffing out a personality. Cows and chickens, on the other hand, seem too dumb to have any concept of themselves beyond a basic "don't die" instinct. I don't really claim it's rational, but it is my perception.

And the whole "Life is a constant struggle.  Kill or be killed. Fuck anyone who gets in our way." mantra is a really, really bad idea to act on. It tends to not work out very well for anyone.

Go for the eyes and they get weapon-tastic.

I was generally raised with only minimal religion. We went to church on (some) Sundays, and the only church I can remember attending is a UCC (the one that was advertising how much they like gay people) church in Ann Arbor. My dad pretty much never went to church with us, his defense being that he had been to a parochial school and had a minor in philosophy, making his religious education complete.

Around the time I was 10, I got curious and decided to read through some of my dad's old philosophy books. After reading some, I came to the simple conclusion that God was bullshit and obviously not real. (and one year previous had come to the conclusion that Santa still wasn't real, but was a metaphor that people held deeply and has some positive impact, making him about as real as anything needs to be. It's still kind of funny to me how I had a more nuanced opinion of Santa than God at first.)

Admittedly, I never really cared about God. It was pretty obvious that it didn't make sense, but I spent most of my time learning/thinking about science and more abstract sorta scientific philosophical concepts (I remember being 7 and trying desperately to figure out what the hell time was. My final conclusion was that the universe is constantly being destroyed and reformed, but so fast we couldn't perceive it, and time is our way of connecting the constant changes in the universe in a way that makes sense to us.)

:patiently awaits another hemp + LastLump inspired shitstorm:

Today I made a song that, in a radical departure from most of what I make, is slow and sad. It came out sounding a lot like Boards of Canada, and I figured you spags might like it. It's called Rosemary Record.

Streaming audio:
rosemary record.mp3 - 6.94MB

[absolutely no need]

English already has a word for the generic singular human:  "he" and "him".  It's no more sexist than saying "mankind" and anyone who thinks differently is the same kind of person who thinks saying "herstory" instead of history is a brilliant idea.  Attempting to create gender neutrality in a non gender neutral language is utter idiocy.  At worst, excessively sensitive people can say "they" and "them" even though it is grammatically correct.  There is absolutely no need to run around making up new words for a non-issue.

No, English doesn't. Nobody that speaks English will assume that a "he" is anything but male.

However, until our culture makes some huge change and a third set of pronouns gets used, "they" works just fine, won't upset or confuse anybody (sane), and is already in use enough so that it takes virtually no effort on your part to just use that when you don't know the gender of who you're discussing.

To be sure, many Western ideals are alien to Islamic culture. Self-government, individual sovereignty, gender equality, sexual and religious freedom, freedom of speech, human dignity, and civil liberties are at the very root of what the majority of the public has been deluded into believing actually defines many Western societies.

Fixed.
We really aren't that different from the Islamic world. There are obvious cultural differences, and theirs is notably  less warmed up to enlightenment ideas, but those ideas are nowhere near important enough to define our culture. We hold the mythology and slogans of freedom and independence very dearly, but as I think most of us could point out, not very many people really take those ideas to heart.

i didnt know this either? especially since you mentioned something about not having a Y chromosome in the other thread, but i might have gotten that upsode down or something.

You kinda did get that backwards. I do have a Y chromosome. But I am a girl, because I'm transsexual (male body, but I identify as female) So...yeah.

Teh Lizzie is 5'9 too.

I was halfway hoping that you'd go "martial artz masta" on their asses.  The cop bit was brilliant though.  Stupid fucks    If it makes you feel better, you can bat around Drama llama 1 for a bit. 

DAMNIT  i as hoping i was the tallest female here
5'7"... not good enough 

6' 3" I win at the "tallest female on the board" game. (Though I think the Y chromosome makes it not count. )

well shrooms will always grow somewhere, right? or not in the US?

also i really dislike people on coke, so i don't think i'm ever going to try that. and opium, i dunno exactly what it does, but i'm expecting a sort of wuzzy high like a cross between thc and alcohol? doesn't sound too interesting IMO.

Opium is like cramming 8 really lazy Sundays into a few hours while eating a really, really tasty dessert. And it makes eating ice cream really, really awesome. That's about it, so it's not that interesting (and you get the corresponding amount of shitty Mondays when it's done.)

noooo i heard the mix, then he said check out his radio show and i didnt see the link to THAT

"She" please.

Thanks LMNO and Suu!

It's already too late to do anything about it. Our entire culture is based on cheap fuel. It's how we have goods and services available at comparable prices from coast to coast. It's why our cities are 50 miles wide. It's our way of life. With gas about to hit $5/gallon there's absolutely no way around the fact that the next 10 years will see a dramatic, forceful, possibly violent reorganization of American culture.

What pisses me off though is not the high gas prices as much as it is the idiocy of people who think that allocating more land for oil production will actually fix something.

This. The suburban, sprawling layout of the US is going to die a horrible death. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the suburbs become ghost towns (or about as close as anyone can get in this day and age) in the coming 20 years.

A good diet and lots of exercise does seem to relieve many "symptoms" of disorders which are probably misdiagnosed in the first place.

However, knowing a couple of kids who REALLY DO have Asperger's, they're totally different from "regular" kids. No one with an actual Asperger's kid is going "gosh, we thought he was a little different but we didn't pay it much mind" because these kids are fucking INTENSELY different from "normal" kids. That's one reason I don't buy these social retards who are dicks and then say "but we have Asperger's! It just wasn't diagnosed until I was an adult because my parents didn't notice!"

BULL SHIT. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was an adult because when I was a kid, only boys could have it. I was, however, subjected to all sorts of testing trying to figure out what WAS wrong with me, and I was such a terror in school that my mom pulled me out and "home-schooled" me (which mostly meant ignoring me while she partied with her little circle of hippie activist actor friends). There is no "my parents didn't notice". If your kid has a really real disorder, you fucking notice because the very first thing they do is make YOUR life insanely difficult.

I had a friend, Mike, when I was little, and he had Aspergers, and it was really, really obvious something was up with him (to everybody but geeky me, who couldn't fathom why a kid so smart was in special ed.) Had just about zero ability to control his weird crap and made his mom's life hell (or so I hear. Again, I wasn't paying attention, but I vaguely remember him doing weird aspie things whenever his mom wanted him to do something.) He's a far cry from some antisocial nerd making up excuses for being weird, and in his case, meds & a long stay in a private school for autism spectrum kids was the only way to keep him under control.