upinsmoke1980

I use Fastmail and recommend them. I'm never going back to Gmail.

I learned from the documentary 13th (which I HIGHLY recommend) that something like 97% of people incarcerated in the US have never had a trial, because they're persuaded, manipulated or otherwise cajoled into making plea bargains.

97%!

What if the truth is somewhere in the middle?

The US has enormous problems, there are many downsides to American life, especially if you're poor, black, or both, and there are many ways in which the US lags behind comparable Western countries.

There are also many fantastic things about the US and things it does very well compared to most if not all other countries, and a very large number of Americans live happy, prosperous lives as a result of what America has to offer. There are lots of good reasons why someone would want to migrate to the US. I'd love to migrate to the US, or at least live there for a few years, even though I know I wouldn't like certain things about it compared to Europe.

America is neither uniquely virtuous, nor uniquely evil.

> In fact I think that personally, given the choice I would choose death.

I, too, am not sure that I'd prefer life in prison over death, but in practice it takes decades to execute a convicted prisoner in the US, and since you're considered a particularly dangerous prisoner (since you have nothing to lose) you're held in particularly isolated and unpleasant conditions during those decades. If I thought I was going to get the death penalty I might prefer to just blow my brains out quickly and easily before they have a chance to slap the handcuffs on.

I can't be arsed to fact-check it, but I'm pretty sure I've read that death row inmates are more likely to die of natural causes while awaiting execution than they are to actually be executed - that's how long the legal process waits.

Who would have guessed?

Yes, Europeans had some general idea that disease was contagious, but that doesn't contradict anything I said. Smallpox blankets were used at least once and this was obviously terrible and should be condemened, as should the Aztecs' widespread practice of human sacrifice and the Iroquois's well-documented history of slavery and torture. Humans are great at being shitty to each other.

It's still true that far, far more native Americans were killed by European disease than through any deliberate act of European volition, and that's a fact that sits separately from any moral judgements we might make about anything.

> why is it okay to inflict pain and suffering only on the less intelligent animals?

I don't think anyone argues that it's okay to inflict pain and suffering on animals. We do inflict pain and suffering on factory-farmed animals, but most people oppose it (at least in a half-assed verbal manner; people say they don't like it but still buy products made in that way, in the same way people say they care about slavery and racism and inequality and exploitation of the third world but don't change their consumer behaviour to avoid supporting those things.)

> I also have a suspicion that orca intelligence possibly matches that of humans.

I thought similar things after watching the documentary Blackfish (which is excellent.) Some of the orca behaviour documented in that film - in captivity and in the wild - is remarkably intelligent; some of the most obviously-intelligent behaviour I've seen from any non-human animal.

Europeans hardly acted like saints, but it's still true that orders of magnitude more natives - perhaps as many as 90% - were killed by disease than by direct action of the colonists.

I highly recommend the book 1491 by Charles Mann which talks about this (and much else). He explains how scientific estimates of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas keep getting revised upwards as we discover more evidence of just how many natives were wiped out by disease. It took Europeans hundreds of years to explore the entire continent; by the time they arrived in, say, the American West, the land was largely empty and the Indian population was very low. Only more recently have we started to figure out that European diseases spread through the continent much faster than European settlers did. It's likely that some of these "sparsely populated" areas were in fact much more populated in 1492, but the population collapsed through disease many generations before Europeans came into contact.

I don't think we can fault Europeans too severely for this; the germ theory of disease wasn't understood until the late 19th century, and Europeans suffered greatly from epidemics too (when Colombus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 it was only about 150 years after the Black Death had killed a third of the population of the Europe.) But it's a fascinating book, and it's mysterious and sad to think that so many complex societies were devastated and erased while leaving so little trace of their existence.

I've wondered if I have synesthesia. When I play music I don't literally "see" colours anywhere except in my mind's eye, but I definitely associate certain notes with certain colours. It's not something I think about actively or even notice unless I'm paying attention, but it's definitely there.

And it's only really when I'm playing music (I play guitar), not when I'm listening to it. It's less about keys than it is about specific notes. A is red, B is blue. C is more yellowy orange. E is... I'm not sure, just dark, maybe black? G is kinda dark blue, maybe turquoise.

This is the hardest I've ever thought about it and the first time I've ever tried to write it down, but those associations are definitely there and have been there for as long as I can remember, and I've been playing guitar for at least 15 years.

Do I have synesthesia?