QuietCupcake
@QuietCupcake@hexbear.net
(it’s a vegan cupcake, in case you were wondering)
- Comment on Feynman rules 5 days ago:
If I remember right, he did have more to tell the interviewer about the workings of magnets but much of it was about how they’re just a specific peculiarity of something that happens all the time with literally everything we see that we don’t question because we’re used to it, only that we think the same thing is strange when we see it lined up a certain way on a macro level, so we try to look for analogies that make us feel like we’ve made sense of it. But that ultimately there is no analogy that he or anyone could make to the macro human-experiential world that would be adequate. It’s like rubber bands - well no, it’s really not. It’s like the solar system - well no, it’s really not. And that while he could tell you a bit more about what was going on at a deeper level, which he did, eventually you and everyone else just has to accept that yeah, this do be what it do, and there truly is nothing further that we can say about why it do. In the same conversation he talks about how physics, rather our understanding of it, is like peeling an onion, and we don’t know if there is a final deepest layer we haven’t reached or if it just keeps on forever with more layers (either way it’s fun to try to find out).
- Comment on Feynman rules 5 days ago:
He was something of an idol to me for a while when I was young. “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” was one of my favorite and most often read books. But the chapter where he spoke of his experiences at bars, infamously referring to women who would accept drinks from him but not sleep with him as “bitches” always really bothered me. I remember being shocked by it and trying to rationalize it with things like “well, he came out of it realizing they weren’t and that he was in the wrong,” (yeah right, that’s a stretch) or “when his wife died so early when they were both so young it broke him, damaged him emotionally, and he lost the ability to relate to women,” (non-sequitur garbage excuse). But no, he was just deeply infected with misogyny like so many other shitty men.
It also bothered me, not as much then, but a lot more now, how involved he was in the creation of the nuclear bomb for the US and his cynicism about humanity (fully expecting we would all die in a nuclear armageddon). On the one hand, he expressed some modicum of regret, and if I remember right, spoke of feeling only sick when his coworkers were celebrating its use in “ending the war,” on the other hand, he never actually tried to understand let alone criticize US imperialism and the role he played in cementing its dominion over the world (hegemony).
- Comment on Been there 1 month ago:
Well as a human, if they learned just a little bit more that panic should melt away to be left only with awe.
- Comment on cookie combs 3 months ago:
- Comment on cookie combs 3 months ago:
It’s what all of us really are at hexbear: circle bears. We only developed the hexagonal shape from pushing against each other over time - the result of countless struggle sessions. But at heart, even now we’re still just sweet, circular bears once you look beneath the hard hexagonal edges wrought by all the outdoor cats and stacked rocks.
- Comment on Oh, the humanity! 1 year ago:
To be clear, where I was using the word “them” I meant the ruling class, not people in general. I see how some of my sentences weren’t worded well.
- Comment on Oh, the humanity! 1 year ago:
Bringing the ruling class into it… I don’t get it.
The idea that humans and human progress are inherently destructive is a lie told by the ruling class because getting people to believe it benefits them. Among other things it absolves them of their own crimes of destruction while simultaneously blaming the rest of us and our positive traits for those crimes. Somewhat ironically it’s a lie that helps lead to more destruction. See my other response to u/Sagittari.
- Comment on Oh, the humanity! 1 year ago:
Maybe could’ve done without the “The fuck are you on?” though I guess
To me it’s honestly a disgusting thing to claim that human progress and creativity is all based on destruction when in reality it’s the exact opposite. I don’t think my response was at all over the top given how harmful of a sentiment I think that is.
This stuff matters. Our biosphere is facing destruction at human hands but not because of our desire to create and build things, not because of our ability to express ourselves through our ingenuity to shape stone and wood. Those are not “destructive traits” but profoundly constructuve attributes. The destruction on the scale that it’s happening now to both the environment and much of human culture is because of, like I said, a social pathology that’s rooted in a system that rewards greed instead of trying to prevent it. It is a pathology that tries to equate greed and destruction with the creative aspects of human nature… just like the comment I responded to was doing. It’s a lie. Even if someone who has fallen for it may be well-meaning, they’re still perpetuating a very harmful (and destrctive!) misconception. So I think it deserves a strong, even emotionally-charged critical response.
- Comment on Oh, the humanity! 1 year ago:
The fuck are you on? “Destroy” stone? There is a vast gulf of difference between altering something, including in creative and constructive ways, and “destruction.” Most of us know the difference today and our ancestors certainly knew the difference. Human labor is in general a constructive force even if it can be used to destructive ends. Saying that “our willingness to destroy is the trait that powered our rise” is ahistorical nonsense and anti-human drivel. But it sounds an awful lot like the lying justifications the small subset of the current ruling class likes to use as an excuse and justification to exploit us and actually destroy our environment for the sake of their own narrow profit and greed. But that’s no more of a universal human trait than any other disgusting pathology that a select few are afflicted with.
