kgods Posts

What theme/style is that, even?

It means pledge (< Old English weddian, to pledge < Old Nordic, vethja, to pledge).

Close to 72 hours, during conscription.
It wasn't pleasant at all. I was getting dizzy, having problems staying coherent and focused, felt sick and feverish. I did a lot of things that made a lot of sense, and in reality they probably didn't.

It (the image)'s a 'shop from 2ch. Sorry.

Personally, I don't value marriage very highly, or even at all. It's ink on a piece of paper.
The relationship I'm currently in (6yrs) has outlasted any marriage I've seen among my peers. Why? Because if you're disloyal and dishonest with each other, if you're incompatible in personality, etc., no amount of vows and rings will nor should save you. On the other hand, if you are loyal and honest with each other, and you are compatible, then you won't need a piece of paper to confirm that. So, unless she wants to get married (not bloody likely, given her radical stance on the subject), I probably won't. If she wants to, meh, it doesn't outright bother me either. Marriage is simply devoid of meaning to me.



I'm an almost militant atheist, but no, it would not stop me from getting married. You can (and a lot of people do, these days) always have a ceremony that looks exactly the same as a religious marriage, only with a state official instead of a priest taking your vows.
It wouldn't even bother me to do it in front of a priest, because I don't believe in the (sorry) hocus pocus anyways, but the church wouldn't let me ;p


Absolutely and totally agree. The people who rush to get married at any cost don't make sense to me in this day and age. In times gone by it was necessary to get married to avoid a scandal, but these days? You can stay together for decades as a couple without the public starting a hoopla. And I appreciate that.

If you really regard marriage as a union for life, knowing your partner thoroughly should be a personal prerequisite for getting married. Hence, (no offense to anyone) those "I'll save myself for marriage" types always made me wary because of that. If you regard marriage as committing yourself for life to someone, you should know you're compatible in every part of the relationship.


Well, during the late 18th and 19th century, it was almost impossible for lovers to be together unless married. As the social pressure waned, the supposedly unique nature of marriage slowly eroded. Well, that's my view of the matter anyways ^.~



Personally, I'm not against quick divorces - if people decide they're unhappy and need to get the hell out, let them. What really bothers me are people that get hitched head over heels and then assume they have to stay with that partner forever, even if every day is a fight and they have long lost any sort of attraction or feeling for each other.


Mm, yeaaaa - but people can change. Someday you might wake up next to your husband and realize he's not the man you once loved anymore. That everything you once loved about him is gone and now you can't really stand anything about him anymore. Then what?
I dunno, taking a vow to love someone and be with someone forever seems slightly unrealistic to me - I don't think one can force themselves to love someone. And if you don't love or even like someone any longer, then being with that person forever can be very, very hellish.
That's why I don't think of divorces as wrong.

huh.

Huh? I don't have a schedule. I don't really keep track of it either.
So, whenever I'm horny and need an outlet for it I guess. Sometimes I don't feel like doing anything sexual for a week or two, other times I'm hot and bothered every day. Or go at it several times in a row.

Found it, it's actually Riddell, not Rowson...my apologies to Mr. Rowson.

PS: I don't read the guardian either, just Rowson's cartoons. The rest of it is the usual journo shod, as exemplified by that incredible "Knox can't be guilty of murder...because...because...she's female!" piece.


To some extent I agree. The far larger potential I see in the UKIP though is their pandering to nostalgia. They're constantly playing the record of the quaint Britain with red brick houses, white fences, neat gardens and a happy and rosy John Bull in the midst of it. I think that strikes quite a chord with people, when juxtaposed to the demons of globalization, EU, ... you name it. And people don't have to feel bad about being "racist", because the UKIP isn't! It just wants good old 1950s Britain back! Which just so happened to be free of foreigners, criminals, hoodlums, youngsters, jobless or travellers! Hooray!
The BNP by comparison is for the jackboot fraction. No wonder the leaked BNP supporter list includes a host of high-echelon army and police officers. No majority-garnering potential there however.


By domestic standards, I'm centre-right-wing - staunch adherent of the welfare state, and of laicism, slightly xenophobic (mea culpa!), strongly anti-authoritarian, anti-EU. But even so, I'm far left of Blairite-Brownite labour. Modern, "new" labour is Thatcherism with a mad eyeball (Blair) and a few extra poonds (Brown) to make it easier to swallow. The whole police-and-surveillance fetishism on one hand, and the slow, but sure axing of NHS and the education system and the gradual softening of employee protection standards on the other hand under new labour really, really bother me.
Sorry, to me labour is a lost cause, as is most of Social Democracy in Europe.


I expect Cameron to just stay where he's at now and dither a bit. He's gonna keep his feel-good shine glowing and have some backbenchers yelp some BNP-proof bullshit every now and then, for the sake of media-worthy "gaffes". Giving the BNP/UKIP the full "hug of death", as Sarko did with the Front would damage his carefully built proper guy image.
Labour's melted down on their own, but not due to their policies. They'll go for some disastrous infighting, but not budge as far as their political position (half a hairsbreadth left of the tories) goes.
The libdems are just sad, they're like a three-legged, one-eyed puppy. Nothing to say here.
BNP/UKIP will get their twenty to twentyfive per cent (together, in total) with their "BRITAIN FULL UP! ROAR!" shouting and their merry melodies of John Bull And His Quaint Suburban Home respectively.

Plays out to a decade or two of Tory dominance to me. Sigh.

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Abroad where to? Same shit, different name all over everywhere.
Basically, you have two choices - stay in developed nations and suffer the boot of the panopticon.
Or, move elsewhere and suffer in the midst of child soldiers and malaria. Terrific.
Might as well stay home and duck and cover.

Yeah. I was just trying to address the original brainwashing claim and the behaviourist example at the same time, sorry if the suggestion came off as haughty. It wasn't meant to be.

I believe that commercials have some influence, but a limited one, mostly linked to recognition (brand/product), but not as extreme as Pavlovian conditioning. I don't really buy into ads conditioning us subconsciously.

Huh? What attitude?
I was just trying to keep from going off topic and thus kept it as short as possible.
Sorry if it came out wrong.

Hi, if you are interested in concurrent findings in neuropsychology related to repetition and its effects on human behaviour, I recommend the "BRAIN-Study" (stupid name, but it's quite excellent) by FEHR, Thorsten (2009).
I don't want to annoy anyone with a tiresome excourse - but from today's perspective the human brain cannot be "washed" or conditioned by simple repetition alone, there's much more involved. Porn, movies or video games do not make for conditioning on their own.



I'm fairly sure it will. If you have been following concurrent legislation efforts throughout the west, you will surely be aware of the british "extreme porn" law and the german §184c, the latter of which makes any sort of "hentai" entirely and absolutely illegal to possess, view, traffick, import, export, buy or sell.

doswillrule, did you see the guardian cartoon on the BNP and the expense scandal? (Rowson I think, who is a genius in my eyes) I'm no fan of the guardian, but it summed it up pretty nicely.

I've been following the obliteration of labour in the county elections and the rise of BNP/UKIP pretty closely. To me, though, from an outsider's perspective, the BNP isn't all that dangerous by itself. They'll garner (and already have) the vote of those who want to slap labour in the face for the expenses frauds, those who are dissatisfied with the "establishment" (and perhaps rightfully so). Their martial rhetorics and self-presentation may be more unsettling at first than the tory or new-labour style chest-beating (although "seas of blood" wasn't so nice and squeaky either). But on the other hand, the BNP can hardly hope to gain the majority over prolonged periods with such outlandish demands, it tends to scare people off, too.

No, the BNP by itself isn't going to amount to much. The much bigger problem is that the BNP's demands will cause the rest of the spectrum to travel even more to the right, because they want to one-up the BNP's outlandish demands by being "more catholic than the pope". That's a huge issue, especially with labour and the tories; the LibDems (as much as I revere some of them, such as the Lady Chilthorne Domer) don't and never will amount to much. The tories have already incorporated some of the BNP rhetoric under IDS and Howard; and "new laba'ath" and their taste for authoritarianism go in the same direction. Remember Howard's campaign against immigrants and travellers? That was an attempt to encroach on BNP turf, and it was the same under the "quiet man".

And that's why outlawing the BNP wouldn't help; their irate rhetorics and outlandish demands will continue to live on, even if you ban the party. Instead, the major players (tories/labour) need to find a different strategy to deal with right-wing populism. Neither the currently popular strategy of simply encroaching on rightest-wing territory, as Sarkozy's UMP does, nor the briefly popular "cordon sanitaire" à la Belgium will work.

Never said the acting in porn was good, because it isn't. In fact, I didn't mention porn at all ^^;
But that's beside the point. Porn acting being worse doesn't make the other one magically super ;p

I like them. They're funny, they're powerless enough not to make a real difference, the guy's sermons are hilarious, they're the personification of that ugly little side christianity has to it, and because they're so literally adhering to the bible, they can't simply be labelled apostates.
In a way they're what the taleban are to islam, the ultraorthodox to judaism, the hindu-hindi-hindustan folks to hinduism, etc.
As such, I welcome their very existence as a reminder and living monument of extremism.

To me, it's rather the opposite. Some of the voice-acting in hentai is ridiculous and doesn't sound like she's enjoying it, at all.

Depends on your personality and what you seek, I guess.
If you just want to shut your friend up, you could just pro forma go on the date, decide it's not for you, and be done with it.
If all you want is to desperately get together with a girl at any cost, you might also want to go and see how it plays out. Don't get your hopes up too high though, anyone other than you is a terrible judge of what you might like.

Personally, I wouldn't. I've always hated people meddling in my affairs, and above all such intimate and private affairs as my love life. I'd terminate the friendship with any person who dared meddle in this for good, effective immediately.
Moreover, I wouldn't jump at any chance of a relationship just for the sake of it. I was absolutely comfortable being single until I found a girl I really liked, and I strongly advise you to take the same stance. Just like Ziggy said.

Ah, what I meant is that people hate to be wrong, or when someone disagrees. Humans love agreement.

Person A has expertise (is knowledgeable) on subject X
Person B relies on crude, but popular layman's theories about X
Person B will react hostile to A's knowledge of X, simply because A disagrees, even if person A frames it non-confrontationally. The best A can do is feign ignorance (I always do! It works!), but that raises the question of whether A's knowledge really has any use in socializing.
Person A in turn will be put off by person B's perceived ignorance and hostility.

A would be better off not spending any time and brain capacity on subject X, where X is anything not immediately concerned with his or her trade, his or her survival, etc.
If neither person A nor B had any expertise in X, both would rely on superstition or popular layman's theories and find solace in perpetual agreement.

Society at large is hostile to expertise (QQ) that is of no immediate use to it (e.g. "how to repair a car" when a vehicle is broken), therefore it is most efficient not to have any superfluous knowledge.

Hey,

after perusing the search function as usual, and nothing turning up, I made this little thread of abysmally tiny, and low-profile bugs.

1. Nested spoilers

CURRENT BEHAVIOR:
When nesting spoilers, the nested spoilers break, making it impossible to use them.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR:
When nesting spoilers, they form a set of spoilers residing within each other, akin to nested quotes. This use case might seem purely academic and hypothetical, but I found myself wishing for that functionality repeatedly. For example: One might want to spoiler a piece of text, and within that, an array of images.

PROOF CONCEPT:
{spoil}this {spoil}is {spoil}a {spoil}spoiler {/spoil}{/spoil}{/spoil}{/spoil}

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2. {URL} wrap-around

CURRENT BEHAVIOR:
When inserting a hyperlink by marking a piece of text, then hitting the "insert URL" button in the editor, the editor prompts 2 input alerts; one for the URL (expected), one for the page name (unexpected). The resulting url-tag is then wrapped around the text entered in the page name query, not around the marked text. There is no way to cancel the second query (cancelling it will yield the error "You have not entered the page title", and aborts the entire process), or to otherwise ensure that the link is wrapped around marked text.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR:
When inserting a hyperlink by marking a piece of text, then hitting the "link" button in the WYSIWYG editor, the "page name" query is either omitted, or can be cancelled, resulting in the link being wrapped around the marked text. Formatting tags (bold, italics, etc.) already behave this way. For posts where a lot of links are to be inserted after writing out the text, this would increase usability.

PLATFORMS:
All tested browsers (firefox, safari, ie, ...)

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3. Tag insertion in mid-text

CURRENT BEHAVIOR:
When inserting a tag in the middle of a post, using one of the editor's buttons, without marking any particular piece of text to wrap the tag around, tags are not being inserted at the cursor position, but at the end of the post.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR:
When inserting a tag in the middle of a post, tags are being inserted at the cursor position. This is especially useful when working with posts that involve a number of quotations, when inserting images after post composition, etc.

PLATFORMS:
All tested browsers (firefox, safari, ie, ...)



I'm well aware that this is probably nit-picking and these are all extremely low-profile bugs, but figured it might be worth a quick fix at some point in the distant future. Please, forgive me if I was mistaken.

Is it though? The more you know on any given subject, the more you will annoy others with your knowledge, and the more you will be annoyed by their nonsense.

I would find it hilarious if someone took these lists to heart and based their behaviour in relationships off of them.

Oh wait, often enough people do exactly that. Hooray for advice literature.