Hegar

Grifters trying to stymie competing grifts is the ideal use of our throughly corrupt court system. Just the perfect venue for that. It’s like an inception of lies and money.

There are no good or bad people, that’s not how being a biological organism works.

Everyone has a spectrum of different risk/reward tolerances and the perceived risks and rewards of an action determine individual behavior.

Ratcheting up the risks by imposing punishments lowers the amount of individuals who determine the action to be beneficial to them. Other factors can have more influence though - raising shoplifting penalties does little to influence the behavior of a starving population, for example.

Their obvious incompetence is why putin choose them to lead our country.

textual info, though. Like, something you can read.

I think they probably do, but like other early forms of record keeping, the focus definitely seems to be numbers. IIRC there are some knots that just don’t look like numbers.

The Chinese also used knots to record details of events, not just numbers, but the system that is used to decode the knots was complex enough that it functioned like a cipher - without already knowing how they did it, there’s just no way you’d be able to work it out.

I can’t recall the details but I think it’s covered in the Ancient Americas video on the khipu on youtube.

I can’t believe you’re censoring Baathist voices. So much for the tolerant global military hegemon.

First time I quit i was sick and cigarettes tasted awful for a week, so I figured if I had already gone a week without I might as well quit. Whenever I got a craving I thought about how disgusting they tasted with a cold, and imagined spongey lungs filling with black tar till I gave myself a shiver of disgust.

I started up again years later while traveling, then quit for good while visiting my parents for 2 months - I know I’m too embarrassed to smoke around my parents.

When I worked in a mall, there were no staff toilets. So I was subjected to a slightly less extreme version of that maybe 2-3 times a week.

I call that symphony “ringing the taco bells”.

If someone reads my comment, and they’our not sure if I’m serious our not, that’s ok with me.

Rebury the disarticulated ochre-painted bones of an important deceased community member!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatalhöyük

Yeah, I’ve never seen or heard that either. I’m sure there our plenty of dialects where those two words sounds similar or identical.

Why would you peel a carrot?

“Edomite!”

I was getting onto a bus, someone looked me over and spat out the word. It was clear from the tone that it was an insult, but it also sounded suspiciously bronze age, so I was very excited to find out what it meant.

Turns out it’s a biblical reference used by some black nationalist groups in the US to refer to white people as unclean or diseased. Edom was one of several late bronze age Canaanite kingdoms. At one point the torah describes them as slightly paler and dirty, hence the insult.

I really love seeing a well curated list, and that’s a well curated list.

It’s not a question of “look[ing] like distancing or lack of empathy”, or just “bitching about people in power”.

Scientific studies that look at your brain itself - not your behavior - show that as people get more power the brain’s empathy centers become suppressed and you are chemically less capable of being a good person.

There are many contributing factors. Part of it is russian and american oligarchs spending heaps of cash to amplify any and every message that could help trump win.

The fact that power results in antisocial behavior has been understood for millenia.

Lots of societies have had cultural infrastructure of equality that attempts to mitigate this weakness in our biology and prevent harmful levels of power accumulation. The basque village layouts that Davids Graeber & Wengrove talk about, or the practise of ‘insulting the meat’ of successful hunters.

Neuroscience shows that rulers will always become evil.

Getting more power actually changes your brain, suppressing your ability to use empathy. The very powerful will always struggle to remember that others are human and don’t want to be hurt.

Humane behavior and hierarchy are mutually exclusive. Heirarchical organization encourages humans to hurt each other.

What’s going on with the top of the map?

It’s a jeebus said so thing. Babies need to be baptized and sinners need to be sent to hell.

If your fantasy were remotely possible, mine wouldn’t be so appealing. Alas the rich are beyond justice of any kind.