“Without the precursor of gender roles, there can be no morality.”

“Without the precursor of tradition there can be no morality.”

“Without the precursor of >insert social structure< there can be no morality.”

Some of our social structures have things to say about morality. Sometimes they’re saying"love your neighbor as yourself," and sometimes they’re saying “burn that city to the ground and keep all of the preteen girls as sex slaves.” Just because religion and spirituality have things to say about morality doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re worth listening too, and it doesn’t mean we couldn’t have developed a system of morality in their absence.

Without religion and spirituality, we may have developed a better, more universal system of morality, rather than the patchwork of haphazard and contradictory traditions we currently enjoy. We’ll never know, because religion was created early in our history, and for the rest of eternity, we get to listen to asinine armchair theologians tell us “without religion, there would be no real morality.”

Second that. I Am A Strange Loop is a fantastic book on consciousness.

Once upon a time I was installing Linux on a tiny little laptop, whose brand name I’ve forgotten. It was probably a Lenovo. Anyway, it was extremely difficult to install anything on it, and they went to great lengths to make sure no one would be able to install Linux on it. I spent an entire day messing around with the grub terminal, and began to suspect that it had a built-in cut off for the USB port during boot. I think I saw some log output to that effect, but I couldn’t find any way to disable it. After some thought, I got back in grub, unplugged the USB stick that I was installing Linux from, and plugged it back in. The laptop detected and mounted the external drive and I tried to install again.

Worked perfectly.

I recently wrote a little library that adds some neat little features to enums in Rust. It’s tiny, does one thing, and does it pretty well, I think.

The diagnostic criteria and the culture that determines that criteria are both subject to change. lots of things that people consider perfectly normal now would be classified as a disease or disorder in the past.

I know. I’ve read them all. I just thought “potentially” was slightly understating the probability of a NSFW Oglaf comic, and it made me chuckle.

“potentially” lol

I knew I left it around here somewhere.

I’m aware, and I know how to simulate choking without harming the person.

When I say “choke”, I mean I lock my fingers in a grasping position and lift up against their jaw. It’s simulated choking. I’m well aware of the danger in cutting off blood flow to the brain.

Someone called me a rapist for saying that I’ve choked women during sex. Consenting, adult women.

I think you’re in it

Oh shit. I need to watch this.

Minecraft. You think that there’s no way to play Minecraft “wrong”, right up until you accidentally fall into the 4-block wide valley that I’ve cut through the entire map or walk into the liminal space that I’ve mined out just above bedrock. Fuck cutesy cottages and Minecraft in minecraft- let’s just build superstructures that disappear beyond the draw distance of the map. Fuck creative mode- let’s do it while we’re facing down mobs day and night. Fuck explosives- do that shit with a pick like a goddamn man. You haven’t really seen confused rage until your child discovers hundreds of unexplained and unexplainable brutalist towers extending into the distance like the gravestones of alien gods when they thought you were building a farm over the next hill.

Hell: An eternity of the skin-peelingist, ball crushingst torture you can imagine. Eyeball needles. The works. Because everyone has a creative psychological hell that’s worse than actual torture-hell, but to those people I say- have you tried torture-hell? Humans can rationalize anything, but it’s hard to rationalize a good ball crushing.

Heaven: The abandoned residential belt around Birmingham, Alabama on a hot Saturday afternoon. Immediately following two months of torture-hell.

Puddleglum the Marshwiggle shoe shopping

Oh yeah. Fair.

There is zero reason for the wizarding world to have social classes. Allow me to explain.

Although food can’t be created with magic, any graduate of Hogwarts can cast the Herbivicus Charm (I think it’s called) or the Greenhouse Charm to grow plants in moments. There’s also a spell that produces fresh, clean water. They have spells that make the insides of things larger than the outside. Spells that clean dishes. Spells that levitate objects and automatically perform rote tasks.

Every wizard or witch is maybe a month or two of moderate work (at the absolute outside) away from having a private pocket kingdom with crops, furniture, fireplace, teleport pad, beds, clothing, swimming pool, pets, cattle, enchanted kitchen, self cleaning floors, and fucking golf course if they want it.

If they can’t create, craft, grow, or summon something, they can buy it with money taken from an entire world of gullible muggles. Sure, dollars and yen are worthless in Diagon Alley, but you can still buy food and an enormous range of physical comforts with it. And if you absolutely have to spend money in a magical store- muggles still have gold. Even at the extortionate exchange rates that I assume the goblins would charge, the process of turning essentially free cash (in exchange for magic tricks or conjured trinkets) into gold and then into goblin coin is basically nothing but profit. A lot of it.

Which brings me back to social stratification. Why are the Malfoys considered a powerful family? Why do people differ to government functionaries and Dumbledore? Why do witches and wizards run businesses or work at all? Social hierarchy is a result of power imbalances, and other than direct, physical force, there are no power imbalances in the wizarding world. They can take your job, but who cares? You don’t actually need one. They can take your home, but who cares? You can make another in a few weeks (and this time the hot tub will go on the balcony instead of in the backyard).

A wizard does not need anything from society or from other wizards.

A probability field with delusions of grandeur