nednobbins

"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that."
-Homer Simpson

So you're not actually arguing that the IDF is not committing massive war crimes, you're just saying you don't care?

Are you claiming that all of Gaza is Hamas?

Are you referring to Method of Loci? I've experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don't remember how long they were. It wasn't that useful though. It took me a really long time to "store" numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn't have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the "memory space" was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated "walk-throughs" ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn't thought about in decades

I think I'm much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can't really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I "look" at the image in my mind I can't really see her face. It's hard to describe. Almost like there's an image with a tag that says "link to wife's face here" without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of "line art" version of her face. I don't have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.

I used to do a lot of visualizing meditation. I can get myself to the point where I could imagine a different room all together (for meditation it was always the same fantasy "place" so that made it easier). When I was really into it I could change the perceived orientation of gravity. That is, when I was lying in bed I could sometimes complete the hallucination that I was standing in that "room". That typically lasted only a few seconds but it was pretty wild.

This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I've always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I've never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don't understand it at all it just seems natural.

When there's a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It's not that my memory is particularly good but I can "synthesize" shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.

With music it can be a bit distracting. I'll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it's incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I've never heard before. I can play that enough times to "drive out" the other one but not enough to "light up" the new one and I'm fine.

As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven't found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.

As an aside, I'm also one of those people that's terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone's name and face within minutes of meeting them. I've started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I'm supposed to know and run through them every night. It's a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I'm one of those people that never forgets a face.

The thing with symbols is that they don't have have objective meanings. Their meanings are entirely a matter of interpretation and they're incredibly fluid.

Necklaces can also be symbols of oppression. Chains, in general are far more commonly used as symbols of oppression than any article of clothing. There's the obvious association with collars that are used to control slaves and livestock. There is also slavery symbolism associated with ankle and wrist bracelets, largely due to their similarity to shackles.

The ultimate test is what the individual thinks of it. If we're forbidding a girl from wearing some article of clothing that she wants to wear, we're the oppressors. If we're truly worried about some situation where parents are forcing their children to wear some clothing a more appropriate response would be to either ban all religious clothing or to adopt a policy of clothing choice being a protected privacy matter and barring schools from discussing a student's clothing choices with their parents.

From the evidence I've seen, this policy is less about protecting the rights of girls and more about using that as a rationalization to marginalize Muslims.

Every once in a while I really wish jamming devices were legal.

Yeah. Even 6 year olds know their Lego houses will fall apart if they don't interleave the bricks.

Forgive me. I'm old so I'm not up on the current vocab. I thought "woke" and "tankie" were opposite pejoratives. What is a "woke tankie"?

And more to my original question, what have they actually done that causes any problems? Even if these "woke tankies" have terrible ideas, who cares if they're not actually causing any problems?

What have they actually done?

I'm all for defederating from instances that cause problems but all the quotes above basically seem to say, "I know you want a revolution but you still gotta follow the rules of whatever instance you're posting on."

It's your server so your under no obligation to provide a reason for defederating beyond disagreeing with them but it leaves me wondering if there's anything else or if it's just a matter of disliking them?

Interesting point. I looked into it a bit more.

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

You can sort that list by Muslim population.

The top one, Pakistan had a minimum marriage age of 18M/16F but recently changed it to 18 across the board.
Indonesia is at 21M/19F.
India has 21M/18F.
Bangladesh is 21M/18F.
Nigeria is 18+.

It looks like when a bunch of Muslims get together the trend is that they reject child marriage and enshrine that rejection in law.