[Content Warning: death, sexual abuse, suicide]
A young fellow I knew recently ended his life. We had discussed it before, and he was often miserable, saw no point in being alive, didn’t enjoy it, and as he said “never asked for it.”
Trolley car experiments seem to be a rich topic for “memes.”
I know a few people who were home-schooled as kids, and who grew up to be fine, decent people. I even new one who was incredibly precocious and was tutored (in addition to a good private school education) by both father and mother. Everyone in my high school class knew he was going to be somebody in the sciences and, he is! Yay!
Warning: Discussion of Violence from a Favorable Viewpoint.
This is something I’ve been pondering for a long time, and I have no answers. But it bothers me; I feel like everyone ought to understand the dynamics of power and be able to resist people who seek to abuse the system for their own ends.
I was thinking about “trolley car problem”s the other day and thought, “I have a friend who has kids, maybe I should give them a trolley car experiment playset for Xmas”*
I saw a UFO, once. I was going north on I-70 outside of Pittsburgh and suddenly there was a gleaming shape in the sky, reflecting light, receeding slowly from me. It looked sort of conical and had a pair of leg-like things at the bottom, and blade-like things from the sides which curved down slightly.
Somehow this escaped my notice; probably because I don’t watch much funny television. (Can we still talk about “television” anymore?)
Recently, the commentariat(tm) was joined by a christian believer, who managed to drag a fairly minor thread into a gigantic, sprawling debate by responding to philosophical enquiries with glibly well-intentioned bafflegab.
There’s something about the internet mindset – the anonymity (or, I should say, “apparent anonymity”) on both sides, that brings out the worst in people. It seems to me as though half of the new internet entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to screw the other half. And both are trying to screw their customers.
Whenever I hear the word “tsunami” I get a reaction, in which I want to crawl up a tree and hide and wait for it to be over. Not a good strategy, I know.