Despite all of this, religion is "highly conserved" across cultures worldwide and across tens of thousands of years, deep into prehistory, almost without exception. If cultures are subject to selective pressure, this conservation would suggest that religion provides some advantage to the societies t...

dargorygel wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 15, 2018 11:36 pm

@Peterlund... disco is dead... but was never really a thing. And should NOT have been a thing.

1970s disco is awesome.

Is it still Australia's policy to intercept migrants arriving by boat and ship them to remote islands under Papua New Guinea's administration?

peterlund wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 15, 2018 5:33 pm

You are not able to produce high quality products to a reasonable price.

To some extent that is true, but that is because the baseline for "reasonable price" has been driven down through competition from countries with weak to non-existent worker and environmental protections.

BLISS IS ABOUT CONTENTMENT NOT EXCITEMENT ISN'T IT

peterlund wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 12, 2018 8:39 pm

You'd better start to prepare for the nuclear winter. I am. I got 60 l of water and plenty of food in storage for at least 2 weeks. I started prepping the day the shithead got elected ...

What's your plan for Day 15?

Trump is President because enough people believe that globalization in all its aspects (free movement of labor, capital, and culture) is not going to turn into a win for them personally.

I don’t really understand the appeal of watches. Watch lovers - why do you love watches? What am I missing? Time is ineffable magic. We don't even know what time is. Sometimes we don't even know what time IT is. But we can do something about the latter problem. Watches are an elegant manifestation ...

ssorenn wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 07, 2018 11:58 pm

Nice watches —Vacheron Constantine

The relatively new "Sistem51" (sic) watches from Swatch are awesome - they buck both the smart watch trend, and fancy watch trend, by offering a durable, 100% mechanical watch at an affordable price.

Apparently the secretive Bilderberg elite are worried about the 'post-truth' world https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/bilderberg-meeting-elite-focuses-on-politics.html Yet as recently as 2005 the Chairman of the Bilderberg steering committee made light of conspiracists and their theories: "It is unavoi...

That article is all over the road. The author seems to be complaining that the Presidency is too "big", yet agreeing with the idea that who is President doesn't matter (since Trump hasn't derailed the economy of much of anything else) and at the same time complaining that politics is now "personalit...

I never trust any politician or pundit who has to throw a non-specific "depraved" into the equation.

Anyone with a role in the public eye has a duty to their employer not to make public comments that bring them into disrepute. I don't have any sympathy for Barr's statements, but anyone can be thrust into the public eye, and employers can have different ideas about what constitutes disrepute. The s...

Contempt of court isn't a free speech issue. Trying to influence juries in his way is an impediment to justice, and every country has laws against it. Any courtroom reporter from any country knows this sort of thing. I believe in the US they sequester the jury, not the entire country, when reportin...

When reporting restrictions go into effect, it's a gift to demagogues like Robinson because their message becomes the only game in town.

Doubling down on it by attempting to blackout reporting on Robinson himself made it even worse.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A good society has freedom. Bam! And the US scores relatively low on that. In most respects the USA is very free, but law enforcement is completely out of control. Prosecutors, police, and the prison system have run amok because it never costs them anything when they're wrong; if there's a settleme...

The number one responsibility of a legitimate government is to uphold the rights of its citizens.

The USA has room for improvement in many areas, but among ambitious migrants choosing a new home, it remains the most popular destination. The number of people actively moving into an area relative to those moving out of it is an excellent metric for non-shitholeness, and the USA shines in this rega...

Sorry for the string of posts but I did find directly comparable numbers. EU population born outside of the EU (lower-right corner of chart): 31.368 million out of 501.098 = 6.2% from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Europe#2010_data_for_European_Union USA population born outside USA: 40...