Are you talking about a philosophical zombie?

If I had to coin a term, I’d call it “aesthetic ergodicity”.

As in, a culture that keeps revisiting every combination of aesthetic parameters over and over with no long-term trend.

USA, too—Spanish and French.

If we’d had a third language it probably would have been Chinese instead of German—the cultural influence of German was minimal in the part of California where I grew up.

Confusion is a notification of prediction failure.

Your self is the private reservoir of knowledge and experience you draw on to interact with the world in a way that’s distinct from anyone else (and that couldn’t be predicted without access to that internal knowledge).

Nah, they’ll just add a “for entertainment purposes only” disclaimer to the government itself.

All cardinalities equal to or greater than that of the natural numbers.

I think machines have replaced the role of the chorus in classical Greek tragedies. Everyone knows they’re not supposed to represent individual people—they’re just the personification of social expectations and unconscious norms.

The lion-and-sun flag is the flag of the old Safavid Empire.

If you want to use a historical flag, a more appropriate one might be the pre-Islamic Sassanid Standard of Kaveh—the flag of the legendary blacksmith who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak. (But that flag has also been used by Iranians protesting the current regime, which may not be the overtone you’re intending.)

I will avoid saying why I’m planning on doing it now only because it will color people’s interpretation of why I’m doing it.

Flags are symbolic—they exist to communicate, and the only criterion to judge their appropriateness is whether they communicate the intended message to the intended audience.

Without knowing your intended message, it’s impossible to say whether or not you should use one in a given context.

Institutions aren’t the sum of their parts—their behavior is dependent on human participation, but is largely independent of the values or goals of the participating humans.

Unless you’ve identified a specific weakness and have a plan to exploit it before going in, your participation will probably benefit it more than any opportunistic harms you can do to it while participating.

Nationalism—the idea that there ought to be (or ever was) a 1:1 correspondence between countries, cultures, and ancestry—is a 19th-century invention unsupported by history, anthropology, or genetics. Ancestry tests that categorize results by country are obfuscating real data to meet a demand for pop pseudoscience.

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Any group can be empowering for its members. If it’s a group that already has an unequal amount of power in society, exclusive meetings will tend to exacerbate the inequality. But if it’s a relatively powerless group, it can counter the imbalance.

You can have a phenomenon that looks like noise at small sample sizes, but becomes obvious when the size increases.

For one small business, a 5% change in productivity for one day might be business as usual, while for a nation it would be alarming.

That, and Spain (or whoever else) wouldn’t be coming in fresh off the surrender of Granada, with the attitude that all non-Christian states must be conquered as a matter of principle.

Columbus’ return to Spain.

His failure to return discourages further attempts for a while; and when contact is eventually made, it isn’t Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Reconquista looking to continue its momentum.

Meanwhile, the New World is made aware of Europe and perhaps acquires some resistance to Old World diseases before any larger confrontations.

Saag paneer.

I ate the last one yesterday.

Did you really expect me to resist?

Global Thermonuclear War.