guns and bullets at their heart are just atoms, just like human bodies, and reality is just a construct of the mind to give the illusion that it's all something other than particles. give your kids guns 'n ammo to play with so they can do quantum mechanics investigations. there's no "killing" involved, it's just heisenberg uncertainty about where all the particles will land.

that's called a historian :)

polymaths are good at more than one thing. I don't think you can be a history polymath.

Ah, Tina Brown, how quickly they forget the debt they owe you.

you did read it wrong :) but plenty of people do think i'm a jerk, and plenty of people don't.

I wrote 'jerk with an apostrophe as a shortening of circlejerk, meaning the site likes its own circlejerk tone, and tries to maintain it.

They downvote me because of the following: I read sites like these for learning and for humor. Most of the time, i just lurk, or really, just read along enjoying the jokes, learning here or there, and ignoring the noise. If I agree with what's being said, why comment, right? However, when somebody says something that is both wrong/uneducated, and I can tell it's emotional, bigoted, and antithetical and intolerant of things I believe in, then I get motivated to set the record straight in a way that "does not suffer fools" (yeah i realize that's not very grammatical, im lzy). As an example, I think the various Occupy movements are retarded, which is ok, it's ok to be retarded, but coupled with their venom or selfrighteousness...

I get plenty of positive karma for many things I write (i'm pretty smart and pretty well educated); karmawise I'm way net positive; and I participate in friendly back and forths with people I disagree with. However, if I "put an uneducated slob in his place", that collects a -1, and very quickly. If it were reader passion that was driving it, you'd expect more downvotes over time as more people see it, and you'd expect more downvotes on the rest of the thread. But for a certain kind of post that I make to repeatedly and quickly zoom to it's final number, and for a it to consistently be the "hinge" of a subthread means it's not governed by Poisson arrival times, and it's not passion. (clever eh, neither passion nor Poisson) My humor often gets upvoted, my informative posts often get upvoted (still talking about reddit here) but my tart rejoinders get a very precise treatment.

And btw, I rarely write stuff like this, because when i figure out a good indicator that something "is a lie", why teach the liar how to improve? Some of you are thinking "oh, like reddit cares what it says in this thread"... believe me, they are poring over it.

Still today, if you pay attention, you can tell that the tone of the site is maintained by editorial up/down voting. I know, because my tone they hate and it consistently gets one downvote. Not a lot, just the two needed to make it negative. Then if people reply to me, that discussion is not manipulated, but that comment that started my thread sticks with the negative one. It happens over and over. Regular folks can swoop in and pour more ups or downs, but more often than not, there is a "first psas" (ha ha First!) that zooms through right away and keeps the 'jerk tone pristine. Used to be that way on Slashdot too, you can tell by how quickly the needle moves to where it "wants" to be. I don't know any more, I don't pay attention or post.