bascule

Ugh

Yay, red herring. Let me reiterate: The collapse of the twin towers is completely inconsistent with explosives.

The same book where she condones the murder of the indecisive

The way the buildings collapsed is completely inconsistent with explosives in the basement. The weight of the top of the building collapsed the floors beneath it, causing a top-down collapse. Had there been explosives in the basement, the entire building would've begun falling at the same time. That's not what happened.

Pain is the phenomenological experience of suffering, and therefore is meaningless without a conscious perceiver. An individual's nervous system may register pain when they are incapacitated by general anesthesia, but since they are not conscious there is no suffering. Babies are no different.

Perhaps because they aren't conscious

Causation can come about in one of three ways: First cause - Causality has an origin before which it did not exist... a singularity, God, or what have you Infinite regression - Now has arrived as the result of infinite causation, i.e. "turtles all the way down" Cyclical/oscillating causation - Time is a loop! Yup...

By that metric of age, we're all 13.7 billion years old. I don't know about you, but the way I define myself, I haven't been around for 13.7 billion years.

You'd need to have sets of data for both mass/energy distribution and temperature for the entire universe in order to calculate that. So I'm going to go with "not known" Hell, we have trouble calculating the mean surface temperature of the earth reliably...

There's an enormous difference between having the phenomenological experience of pain and a neural network registering information. The latter is no different from the self-diagnostic systems of modern cars registering a component failure. When this happens, would anyone say the car is feeling pain?

Seems like he understands superficial bitches (the vain and typically rather attractive type, not to say that you can't be both deep and vain) quite well. I really hate them though... The problem is that he's obviously overgeneralizing, which is the case with anyone peddling a "how to hook up with girls" formula. Want mine? Listen to them, and empathize. Figure out how the feel about what they're talking about, and let them know. That's really what people are looking for when they tell you about their problems: someone who understands and can sympethize with how they feel. In real life I'm much more of a listener than a talker, and I'm naturally empathetic to the point that if I harm someone, however indirectly, I feel horrible about it, and I've had people reduce me to tears with their stories too... that is, if I can empathize with what they're saying, which isn't always the case...

My problem with Hillary is that she's one of those totalitarian liberals who wants to trample all over my libertarian values

People like crims make me want to gouge my eyes out. I look at Charlie Sheen about the same way I look at Steven Segal when he claimed that HIV was created by the government as a way of combatting gays and blacks.

What specifically was wrong with her advice?

Here's a very simple argument that shows 9/11 wasn't a cover up. I'll take the conspiracy theorist approach of phrasing my argument in the form of questions and let the reader connect the dots: How many people would need to be involved in the conspiracy in order for it to be successful? What are the chances of not a single member of a group that large leaking the secret to the press Deep Throat style? If 9/11 is a conspiracy how are they keeping it a secret? Bush couldn't even keep the domestic spying program a secret.

On one hand I fear the security risk illegal immigrants pose, but on the other hand I think it's completely impractical to round up and deport 11 million people living off the grid. I'm not really sure what sort of damage control we can do at this point. The best I can think of would be a combination of: Improving border security Begin offering a guest worker program Offer illegals already in the country amnesty in exchange for registering with the state. Add them to the guest worker program, collect taxes, and implement screening procedures to locate potential terrorists. This may sound impractical for 11 million people, but it's much easier to get 11 million people to do something voluntarily that it would be to force it upon them, especially if you don't know where they live. Begin an internal crackdown on all illegals who refuse to register themselves with the government I don't know if these measures could even pay for themselves in terms of taxes collected from illegal workers. Probably not at first but maybe over time. It's an ugly solution, but it's the best I can think of...

Nice that we'll have a Philosophy & Religion moderator finally, and especially nice that it will be the omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent IMM

Well, I got introduced to someone new today although I have no idea where that will go

That's another way of saying "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts," i.e. a system of parts can have properties which do not exist in the union of the set of properties its component parts have.

Unrequited love is a bitch. If you feel you're stuck in the "friend zone," you better get comfortable with it or terminate your relationship. In your case you involuntarily chose the latter, and let me tell you, I don't think the former is really possible. Trying to stay friends with a girl you love and not telling her how you feel is an like an emotional roller coaster... when she's having fun with you it's elating, and pretty much the rest of the time you spend thinking about her is hell. All I can say is: time heals all wounds. You'll get over her and find someone else. As for me: Well, she used to talk to me about guys she was interested in. That was pretty much the most blatent hint I was in the friend zone. Have I mentioned that in the time I've known her I've had several male mutual friends who've talked to me about being stuck in the "friend zone" with her? I just spent an awesome night with her the other day and thought something else may have developed, but having talked with her since, that doesn't seem to be the case. I just moved to a new town anyway so... time to move on.

I was just about to post that story

Not really a game, but I was obsessed with Drawball for awhile. I made the smiley face on the left side which has undergone continuous defacement since. It was supposed to be the smiley face the Commedian wore in Alan More's famous graphic novel Watchmen, the one that spawned the whole meme of bloody smiley faces.

I don't see how we're genetically any different from most apes in this respect. Women being more ostentatious/vain then men is entirely a social construction, and the reason we don't see men becoming more showy is probably because people (or should I say other men) generally interpret that as a sign of homosexuality. However, let me reassure you that I'm generally quite colorful

The universe still glows... in the microwave spectrum, at almost absolute zero