"Aw'rite"

Wat? You know they are just giving their phone number rite not like, credit card details, their address etc.

yo, for those who are all like "doesn't sound like real anonymous"...who the fuck are the real anonymous? The people you agree with? I was under the impression that anonymous wasn't a clearly defined group - pretty much anybody can call themselves anonymous, the point isn't from whence the message comes but the message itself rite.

Every time I read a news story that starts "Anonymous hacks x" or "Anonymous announces y" I read it as "Some people did Z".

Because lowering taxes isn't a financial gift from the government to the voters. Rite?

I won't go as far as gorillaman, and say you're being paranoid and oversensitive...that's not really for me to decide. But I will say that from what I'm hearing you say, it seems more of a "pet peeve" than something that actually is going to make a difference to anyone else. I can relate to that...I have a number of those myself (many related to the English language, like irregardless, and alot).

But he does have a good point about the way they use the term "men" being in reference to a rite of passage, and I have indeed heard similar statements from women (well girls, technically...too immature to be called women).

I don't agree with him about feminism in general...I do think there are many gender-related issues still worthy of support. I just don't find this to be one of them, even after having given it a fair amount of thought and debate over the years. Girl, boy, kid...there are many different uses for those words, and I do use them pretty evenly. Well, kids probably gets a bit more use, because it covers multi-gendered groups of people < 40 years old. >> ^bareboards2:

Sorry my response was so pissy..... I am just frustrated that after forty years of talking about this, I am still hearing the EXACT SAME RESPONSES from folks who don't take the time to actually think about the topic. It all just parroted back, the same old same old.
I sound like a broken record because I hear a broken record. For forty years.
Anyway, had you gone back and listened to the beginning of the clip where they call themselves "real men" or something like that, my comment might have made more sense. Can you imagine three young women saying "if I do this amazing act of bravery, then I'll prove myself as a real woman"? We just don't talk like that in our culture. And that makes me sad. And had done for FORTY YEARS.
If it is still going in ten years, I shall be even more sad.
>> ^bareboards2:
You are off by decades....
You boys are so touchy. I just made a suggestion that you think about something in a different way and your panties are all in a bunch.
It wouldn't hurt to think a new thought. Just lie back and relax. You might enjoy it.
>> ^Stormsinger:
>> ^bareboards2:
For folks out there who call women "girls", please note the use of the word "men" in the beginning of this vid, and store it away for the future.

What use of "men"? I can't take watching it again...
I assume it was one of them, referring to the three of them? Worrying about that is like worrying about whether the pug down the street calls himself a puppy or a dog. Utterly pointless and irrelevant.
As far as I'm concerned, the terms "girls" or "boys" are totally appropriate for my friends that are my age or younger (which doesn't rule out too many of my friends any more at 50+), or when used in informal conversations. I'd be unlikely to use it in a speech I was giving, but in day-to-day life, talking about a boys' night out, or girls' night out...well, I can't see why it matters.
BB2, I generally agree with you, but this particular issue carries distinct hints of college-age-rabid-feminist. My advice would be to pick fights that are worth fighting. Revisit this one to see if it still seems important in a decade or so...I suspect it won't.

>> ^bareboards2:

Sorry my response was so pissy..... I am just frustrated that after forty years of talking about this, I am still hearing the EXACT SAME RESPONSES from folks who don't take the time to actually think about the topic. It all just parroted back, the same old same old.
I sound like a broken record because I hear a broken record. For forty years.
Anyway, had you gone back and listened to the beginning of the clip where they call themselves "real men" or something like that, my comment might have made more sense. Can you imagine three young women saying "if I do this amazing act of bravery, then I'll prove myself as a real woman"? We just don't talk like that in our culture. And that makes me sad. And had done for FORTY YEARS.
If it is still going in ten years, I shall be even more sad.


I have some exciting new thoughts for you to try out, but let's start with the mundane specific case of the gentlemen in the video. It seems obvious that they're contrasting 'men' with 'boys' rather than 'men' with 'women/girls'. That's the old rite of passage being invoked, nothing to do with sex at all. Being British, they also can't help talking with a certain degree of irony that some might miss. These points are only worth making because they highlight your paranoia and oversensitivity.

Sex is ultimately irrelevant; at a 50/50 split it's too shallow a distinction to be meaningful in most cases. Gender is a personal construct, which scarcely signifies outside the individual who inhabits it. If someone, for whatever reason incomprehensible to us, chooses to incorporate their ability to tolerate capsaicin into their gender identity then it's really none of our business. We've certainly no cause to be threatened by it on a personal or cultural level.

I don't consider myself to have a gender. The rational thing to do is treat people as individuals. When you talk about the cultural implications of calling someone a girl, that means as much to me as a teenagers complaining about discrimination against vampires.

It's possible to think very seriously about a topic and decide it doesn't matter. It's just as important to point out what doesn't matter as what does. Then we can stop wasting our energy, forty years worth in your case, on trifles - and concentrate on what's actually worth thinking about. Feminists seem to only think about things that don't matter, which is why everyone hates them. Every human being on earth, and I mean that literally, agrees that the various sexes and genders don't need to be assigned different rights, or at least that we're not sophisticated enough to be able to tease out and codify the very subtle differences between those groups, individuals, and any individual at different moments in their life. That's where the issue ends. There is nothing else to talk about, but when you've squandered so much time on and identified yourself so strongly with such a simple little idea you have to invent a lot of nonsense non-issues to rant on about just to make it all seem worthwhile.

Stop being a feminist; start being a rational person who naturally agrees with the single sensible point feminists have to make and go and do something useful with your time.

They're all fixed up now
In reply to this comment by jonny:
*dead

Wow, slow down there hotshot. I better go in netscape and search for something relevant on altavista.
>> ^PostalBlowfish:

hey guise chuck norris is badass im cool rite
check out this super awesome - hahaha rick astley I GOT YOU SO GOOD
now back to my napster

hey guise chuck norris is badass im cool rite

check out this super awesome - hahaha rick astley I GOT YOU SO GOOD

now back to my napster

I started off with MJ and the Beach Boys at age 5. Then around 2nd grade it was Vanilla Ice & MC Hammer. Then 3rd it became Ice-T, NWA, Ice Cube. 4th grade it became Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse. 5th Grade it was Kyuss, Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Nirvana. 6th grade it was local punk bands, Lookout! Records, Minor Threat, Rancid... 7th grade I delved into the heart of Legendary DIY underground punk music. Ebullition records (Econochrist, Born against, Downcast, Spitboy, Iconoclast, Los Crudos), , Gravity Records (Heroin, Angel Hair, Antioch Arrow, Clikatat Ikatowi), Dischord (Fugazi, Hoover, Rites of Spring). The list goes on and on. The next ten years were all about underground hardcore/punk/noise/power-violence/sludge/grind/doom.

Then I moved to San Francisco. LOL. I'm an Aquarius. AQUARIUS RECORDS!!!!! I still listen to some of that stuff from time to time. A LOT of it was way ahead of it's time. These kids these days can't hold a candle to genuine, innovative, raw DIY music.

Let's imagine for a moment that there is no conscious "higher power". (Inconceivable!)
Is prayer still useful? I would argue that it is, though without a "higher power", prayer begins to resemble (or simply becomes) a form of meditation.
I believe prayer accomplishes several things from a practical perspective:
- It forces us to prioritize our desires. If we are praying for something, then it makes us stop for a moment and ask "is this really something I should be asking for?" or "why am I embarrassed to ask for this?" We tend to prioritize good and meaningful things, which feeds into the second point.
- It gives us goals to pursue. Many philosophies recommend mantras as a way of verbalizing what we want such that we tailor our actions toward achieving those goals, consciously or subconsciously.
- It allows us to "get things off our chests". I believe verbalizing our shortcomings and mistakes promotes improvement in future behavior.
- It helps us "count our blessings". The religious template of prayer often includes thanksgiving. Listing out those good things in life is a positive experience.

(I think there are a number of other aspects of religious rites, rituals, and practice that have practical benefits even in the absence of a divine creator.)

Was the ring super-cold?

Fucking magnets, m i rite?

>> ^Crosswords:

>> ^kceaton1:
It goes beyond evolution though, if I'm getting this right. FOR HELL'S SAKE we can use the speed of light to see things FAR, FAR, FAR, FAR, FAR^100 older than 10,000 years!!! It's a fucking joke. If you believe this you are an idiot. Period! = .
It's not just light and carbon dating, we have LOTS of ways to show this place is WAY older...

You're forgetting the Law of God Physics which clearly states God can do anything including making the universe appear much older than it actually is for the purposes of fooling his human creations so he has a way of testing their loyalty when he's not asking them to kill their first born son and saying, JUST KIDDING, at the last minute.


The funny part about this stuff is that they typically say that God "moved the photons" (atleast the semi smarter ones will) and the STILL dumb ones will say that, well light was, you see going a different speed back then so it still all adds up...YOU SEE!!!

BUT THEN!...If you understand relativity correctly like me you understand that you can change the speed of light all the time you want. In fact make it go 1 ft/second! It doesn't MAKE A DAMNED difference in how we will STILL measure the time gone/go/will go by! People never get this at all and it really is the sort of thing were someone mumbles under their breath when they finally understand what I'm saying/going to say: "Is that not amazing!!!". You see mass and energy are the same thing and light is special, it goes the same speed EVERYWHERE, EVERY-TIME, ALL THE TIME--and this thing called "light" are these little tiny particles/waves called photons that as I said before, but not quite as directly, they literally ARE mass and energy, so the relationship between us and light is so fundamental it SHOULD blow your mind. But, so many people went through school and listen to their preachers and have no idea how vitally important that "little" discovery that Einstein made was!!! So, even we at 1 ft/s light speed STILL notice everything moving and everyone we know moving at that same "time" measurement of one second (funny isn't it; but, light is traveling at one second as well, how can this make any sense..!?!?! Well here it comes, it is called relativity and the fact that light is a constant and the other very important fact that our measurement of one second really measures...what?) as we are literally stuck in a cage (this "cage" is called The Universe) that cannot be tampered with. This is all due to that little fact that our perception of time IS relative and our view of one second can be EXTREMELY messed with, but to us it will always seem to be one second--even if 1 Billion years went by. The age of the Universe comes from the SHIFT of energy in the photons present that we can see coming from other places in any direction around us; so God would need to put THAT hologram there nothing else, BUT there is a giant problem in doing this (because due to our friends that want God to actively fuck us over for some reason--the hologram only extends technically 10,000 years out and "hides" the rest--if God put everything the way we see it and it isn't even an illusion--what can I say at that point if God was real I would join the Devil in less than a heart beat to overthrow his LYING, SADIST, and moreover EVIL ass!) If the hologram WAS there then: the hologram, it would need to be different in EVERY single direction you look; every time you move one Planck length (I might be wrong, maybe just the length of a photon) further out into space God would need to fix the energy distribution to make his illusion look correct... YOU HAVE no idea how absurd to the absurd degree this sounds, even GOD would spend his entire existence doing this because the job would require this long to do it: forever (until the UNIVERSE STOPS!). I'm not kidding it would be utterly ridiculous (from Earth his "image" would look right, on Mt. Everest, it would look wrong,; in space it would look wrong--in fact if you have sensitive enough equipment every square foot you took would somehow end up looking incorrect--we're talking about the cosmic background radiation, the little thing that lets us know how old our Universe is and that everything around us is moving away from us...

So that comes to the "putting the photons into place syndrome". For the most part I'm starting to think that these people like to abuse their brain in secret rooms with paint, huffing it until they collapse in a heap. in the morning they slowly scrub the white vinyl paint off their nose and mouth and go start with the blue. The problem with this is God had to of atleast put photons 13.5 Billion years out for this to even work--so in the end it falls so flat on it's face it makes no sense. If he was using a hologram, where is the border? Why do we detect gravitational anomalies when those have been proven to be real locally? It just goes on, and on, and on, and on.

I'd love to hear them explain why space may be full of Dark Matter or better yet why is "nothing" full of something called "The Quantum Foam"--you may have heard of "Vacuum Energy", same thing more or less--look it up it's fascinating and may even be the source OF "The Big Bang". Why can we pull photons (from "nothing") out of the Quantum Foam? According to lots of religious folks you can't create something from nothing, but WHAM, there it is! Sometimes, it just might be a bad idea to hold onto your old per-conceived precepts if they do not allow for change. BTW, the photon coming out of thin air was in a very well-known (now) experiment and is HIGHLY worth looking up; you can find details about it in my Videosift Blog (which is entirely about it).

You could disprove their crap all day. The truth is is that they did bad in their science classes, they just didn't get it and for some archaic left over juvenile resentment, they must have their righteous rite of "The Comeback Minister (or Preacher/Prophet/Father/etc...). So in revenge they are taking the easy way out and saying, "Hah, see I didn't need to learn that stuff from Mr. Scrampton in 12th grade! I'm a Minister now and I can just TELL you what is right, because I know it's right in my gut; especially after five cases of Budweiser!". Now they never tell you the truth. They lie, they tell you it "came" to them, like their a prophet now or something. ...Well if they can be prophets, why can't we? Oh wait, scientists do in fact fill this role and they do a good job at it. they constantly warn us of dangers and things the government should do. But, there are far too many damage control freaks with their own agenda running around and they seem to cling to religion as it satisfies very easily their questions, making it so they don't have to work to find the actual hard ones that exist and that we DO need.

It's not in the Bible that any of these idiots would tell us anything meaningful, nor the Koran, or any other holy book. So I find it strange that so many line up and then sit down and listen to these idiots blather on about the world and how to cure it and what it's ills are. They also as I said do a great deal of "re-education" in THEIR vision satisfying that old juvenile, washed up nothing who couldn't get over the fact that he wasn't good at science off the bat or maybe even when he tried too. This is the bane on America (and I would assume many other places, but America has a lot of this). They are teaching and re-teaching our people ridiculous notions and since they require very little work to understand, just community, people believe it--especially because it's being believed in numbers and that is the important part.

Now this was a longer post than what I wanted it to be and it also went past the scope of my original intentions. BUT, the reason why those statistics exist is due to the nature, the epidemic of how people are being re-taught forcibly (you think like us or you are no longer with us--it can have shocking community affects, especially when it becomes a inter-family problem...I know this EXTREMELY well due to my Mormon upbringing; when I became an atheist I was shunned and cut-off from the community, at first. they slowly let me back in when they realized I was an extremely good person, usually a better person than many of the people in the Church and so my neighbors finally no longer cared--cared what the churches stance was either--who or what I was, they took me for what I was--IT TOOK 20 years to happen!). So many people are started and taught young this is a HUGE problem, I know it's a major one with the Mormon church. You are baptized into the church at eight. You should hear the things they ask you to accept and agree to--they are things that only and adult with experience could properly answer (more like someone that is 25) yet an eight year old surrounded by their family and peers of course can give only ONE answer.

After that, you being to be taught all the incorrect things you could possibly think of. If you are even semi-devout like me (and this goes for many other religions as well) going to public school in Utah, the church has LITERALLY built seminary schools next to every High School and Junior High (and this is true outside of Utah too, as I'm SURE Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nevada--maybe more too, I'm sure they have them locally to attend--I'm sure many of these states have these institutions built right next door or somewhere for kids to attend) you will attend seminary due to the wishes of your parents (my parental situation was beginning to change--and for the better).

Still I attended seminary through grades 7-12 and could have continued in College, but I was agnostic by then...if not basically atheist, just not strong enough to say it. Seminary had it's wonderful parts, but the mis-information was a joke. luckily I was smart, very smart. So I was able to separate the information apart from each other and it allowed me to ask STRONG questions about my one time faith. These questions and their mis-information EASILY killed that religion for eternity, for me--for A LOT of reasons. Many of which, many of you know...easily. It came to ME slow. SO when i talk about helping other people you need to realize what we are up against. facts that do come to us easily usually don't to them and it typically has to do with their past. but, it is HARD to get them to talk about their past openly. For one thing there is no possibility of them being wrong or in danger of it. Somehow we MUST change this.

/Like I said longer, but I hope it was worth it.
/edited for more clarity and a few additions

^Thanks, @ChaosEngine, for having an open and inquiring mind. I do appreciate it.

Now the question is -- does language shape our thinking? "What if" women were always called women in circumstances similar to when men are always called men? (Context, context, yes?)

I remember where I was the first time I called myself a "woman." It was forty years ago, and I remember everything about that moment. It felt weird as heck. A responsibility was being assumed by me, it felt like. It was my nineteenth birthday, and I was lounging poolside at a UCLA frat house in the middle of the day.

In traditional societies, there were rites of passage, weren't there? Often brutal, but still. A marking of the transition from childhood to adulthood. The closest thing I have to that in my conscious life is that moment I chose to call myself a woman for the first time.

Do you remember the first time you called yourself a man, assuming that mantle of responsibility?

I suspect it is different for men, because the word is used so much sooner for you guys. "Look at the little man!" when you are three years old. I never heard "look at the little woman." Still, that moment of truly being called a man -- or choosing that word for yourself -- does it resonate?

Thanks for taking this seriously, chaos.

And I still would be interested in your wife's take on this. She married well, I can tell. You rock.