Category: Uncategorized
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Vestiges of the Stone Age in the Revenge Film Genre
Stone age technology makes violence very difficult and limiting. In order to kill someone you need to have good aim and, assuming we’re talking about stone technology before the Oldowan tool culture, blunt stones just make for crummy weapons in general. So you need a lot of people to join you. The Bible retains stoning…
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The Chemistry of Catharsis, Science, and Magic
A standard feature of magical thinking is to attribute non-physical causes to physical effects. A witch causes a man to be sick, and so a sorcerer will enact vengeance on the witch. If the witch happens to be found dead, or perhaps just apologizes, it’s proof of the witch’s guilt. Likewise, a rainmaker makes small…
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Interest Canalization and the Fruits of Mass Media
A lot of news All news will claim your group (whatever it is – men, autistics, etc.) is being threatened by some other group, a movement, political party, etc. The news plays a story of a member of your group getting persecuted, and you will naturally build an internal motor representation (IMR) (a sort of…
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Mindblindness Commentary Part 1 – Evolution Fail and the Problem with Autism Research
I’m going to do a play-by-play breakdown of Simon Baron-Cohen’s 1995 book Mindblindness, where he trumpets a theory that Autistics are handicapped by a lack of “Theory of Mind” (ToM) which most normal people find to be a straightforward and intuitive way of understanding the world. This is the same Baron-Cohen who claimed that Autistics…
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The Action-Researcher – A Look Back on Two Years of Reading
Every weekday I wake up around 3:30am and read from 4am until 9am. 5 hours of uninterrupted reading allows me to read roughly 600 pages per week. I started this regimen 5 years ago when I started reading the Bible cover to cover (albeit at the time I was only getting through maybe 200 pages…
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The 5 Disciples of Shaolin (and Bar Kokhba)
The story of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE culminates in the rabbi Judah ben Baba initiates 5 new rabbis and sends them away before being killed himself. (The Talmud, Arsène Darmesteter, 1897.) This story bears some similarity to the 5 disciples of Shaolin who fled the burning temple and went on…
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The Dung Beetle Fight
There’s a lot of radioactive waste coming out in the form of shows and movies. They take our favorite childhood shows and movies, turn them inside out, impale our heroes, and produce radioactive beasts. These shows don’t want us to love them. They want our attention. They do this through a clever gimmick that I…
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Soft Criticism of Maoism in Wushu Literature
Two different Wushu books written in China both have not-so-covert criticism of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, both written near the end of the Deng Xiaoping era of 1979-1997. This period seemed to produce some actual history and science surrounding Wushu. Meanwhile, Maoists were still defending Mao’s efforts to crush the “Four Olds: Old Ideas, Old Culture,…
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Cantonese Opera in America – A Hot Take
A humorous quote from a late 19th century editor Fitch who compared Cantonese Opera to the “clatter of the train”. Cantonese Opera had come stateside and he and other commentators judged it as far below the likes of a Shakespeare play. There are two contexts for this: first off, this was an era of US…