Richard Dawkins first coined the word ‘meme’ to describe a self-replicating idea, akin to a gene. He gave religion as a prime example with the form something along the lines of “statements X,Y,Z are true. It is your duty to make others believe this, or they will go to hell”.
It’s been 40 years - I can’t remember the original formulation 🙂
I grew up in the middle of Miami, with developed streets and houses in every directions for at least 5 or 6 miles. But I lived in the corner of this dead end that ended at a path There was this huge area of woods like two or three city blocks worth, about 10 feet lower than the rest of the neighbor. There was a steep path down, by far the only stretch of mountain bike - worthy riding anywhere around, and all kinds of trails and huge boulders to climb. It wasn't wilderness--I think it was a coral rock quarry, and all of the trees were an invasive species that meant the original pines had been taken down. But it was just a beautiful place, and all the neighborhood kids hung out there for hours and hours. We could cut through there to get to school, and there was also a big covered basketball court. We could literally play basketball rain or shine, in this huge pavilion. The soccer fields were there so we could cut through those words for our games. There was a pool, too.
Hurricane Andrew came through when I was 14 and destroyed that forest, since those invasive trees couldn't handle the winds. The court and pool made it longer, but it's all gone now. Oddly enough, especially for Miami, it became a park and soccer fields, instead of more houses. My kids and my brothers' kids all still go there to play when they're visiting my parents, but that beautiful magical place from my elementary school years, where I could be wild and free in the middle of the city, is so gone.
The lost cause doctrine and related overall glorification of the u.s. civil war era confederacy. The fact that there are confederate statues in states that fought for the union is insane…
I wish I'd known how nice a place this is ages ago! After 10 years I was so institutionalised to the way reddit was, it was really hard to imagine using anything else and having anything like as nice a user experience. So many times over the last few days I've suddenly realised that for hours I've been browsing Kbin and not reddit. It's a nice feeling. Also, now I've replaced all my reddit bookmarks with Kbin ones which makes it feel a lot more permanent.
That the Confederacy was a noble cause. They say history is written by the victors; the American Civil War is a counterexample. Even today you still have people who fly the Stars and Bars and populate the KKK.
" Oh yeah? Which rights were that? And which states' rights? Did all states have these rights, or were only certain states able to express their rights?"
Crickets
It amuses me how often these people haven't even read the articles of confederation or the sessession letters that specifically state that slavery was one of the main reasons they seceded or that they were actively trying to remove the rights of other states to not participate in slavery.
Oceanic plankton produces like half of the world's oxygen. Trees get too much credit. I'm not sure what the exact impact of losing so much oxygen would be, but... Not good?
You and I thrive in oxygen, because we evolved in its presence, but oxygen is a really potent corrosive chemical that destroys a lot of life. When blue-green algae first showed up and started dumping oxygen everywhere, it in turn was a cataclysmic event for life on Earth.
The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), also called the Great Oxygenation Event, the Oxygen Catastrophe, the Oxygen Revolution, the Oxygen Crisis, or the Oxygen Holocaust,[2] was a time interval during the Early Earth's Paleoproterozoic era when the Earth's atmosphere and the shallow ocean first experienced a rise in the concentration of oxygen.[3] This began approximately 2.460–2.426 Ga (billion years) ago, during the Siderian period, and ended approximately 2.060 Ga, during the Rhyacian.[4]
The sudden injection of highly reactive free oxygen, which is toxic to the then-mostly anaerobic biosphere, may have caused the extinction of many existing organisms on Earth — then mostly archaeal colonies that used retinal to utilize green-spectrum light energy and power a form of anoxygenic photosynthesis (see Purple Earth hypothesis). Although the event is inferred to have constituted a mass extinction,[7] due in part to the great difficulty in surveying microscopic organisms' abundances, and in part to the extreme age of fossil remains from that time, the Great Oxidation Event is typically not counted among conventional lists of "great extinctions", which are implicitly limited to the Phanerozoic eon. In any case, Isotope geochemistry data from sulfate minerals have been interpreted to indicate a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80% associated with changes in nutrient supplies at the end of the GOE.[8]
Probably be pretty bad for us, but I suppose if you're an obligate anaerobic organism, you'd be having the best situation since a couple of billion years ago.
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