urquan

urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 3hr ago

I've seriously considered voting for him, should he be on the ballot in my state. (Is he going to be on all the ballots or just some of them?)

His voice is bizarre. And the brain worms thing is genuinely concerning. But I feel like we're at a point where the big two options in this election are so clearly and obviously not good for the job that I'm desperate for something I can do to signal my total displeasure at the direction of my country.

I'm a pretty conservative guy, and have become more conservative over the past few years. But I've also never voted for Trump. I have seriously, seriously considered it, not because I think Trump has magically become a better candidate, but because the ways in which lawfare has been invoked in an attempt to limit his influence is totally shameful, an insult to the democratic process, an obvious refusal to follow democratic norms on behalf of a party which continually claims its opposition has abandoned democratic norms.

It's the fact that this hasn't worked, and even backfired, that has made me back off from my initial intention to vote for Trump. Even him winning 45% -- which I think he's likely to do -- would be a solid and profound rebuke of the attempts to use weird lawsuits and criminal trials to bring down a major political candidate. But I am still much more incensed by the Democratic party's use of overblown criminal trials, especially the "hush money" one that seems like nonsense upon stilts, than I am by anything Trump has ever done. The Democratic party is the real threat to democracy in this country, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm also angry about the OSHA vaccine mandate, and Biden's general inability -- especially before the election year -- to actually assert control over the executive branch. He promised he wouldn't mandate the vaccine and he did it. People I know were forced to receive a medical procedure of limited benefit to them, on the basis of shoddy (or outright nonexistent) evidence, pursued by an authority that had no true right to make such a sweeping regulation, and required to continually present evidence of receiving this procedure, which has had utterly no value for at least the past couple of years, in order to maintain employment.

It's clear to me that Biden doesn't control his party, his party controls him. And I'm certain that has always been the case, even before he became senile. And however moderate Biden may have presented himself, his party is anything but moderate or restrained.

And what's worse is they're not even radical in the areas where the country desperately needs radical change. I agree with the tankies: the Democratic party is a party of woke capitalists. They'll talk every single day about "equity" and "diversity" and "racial justice" and "sexism," but when it comes to making real change in the real country, and doing things that help real people on the ground instead of boosting the status of various NGO officials -- they're a fucking joke. When's the last time you heard mainstream Democrats actually taking about real healthcare reform? Or making changes to employee benefits? Or consumer protection? Probably just a few times in the past few months, as the Biden administration has rushed to do a few things at the administrative level in an election year. But it's too little, too late. They burned their political capital on woke signalling and not actual policy, and the country has suffered for it.

Say whatever you will about him. But RFK seems to actually care about the direction of the country. I watched a speech he gave about our lack of direction, how medical debt and economic disparity has damaged our country. I heard him talk about how our young people lack direction and our society gives them no reason to have any. His message resonated with me. He's probably farther left than me, but I don't care -- he's passionate, he seems to my eyes to care about ordinary Americans regardless of their spot in the oppression olympics. He looks like the adult in the room to me, the guy who looks at the state of the country and cries out in the wilderness: something needs to change. I look at all the candidates, and the one who actually seems to care about Making America Great Again is RFK.

I think some of the extremes of his vaccine skepticism are kooky. But I admire the fact that he still seems to care about the crazy stuff we did during the pandemic. He hasn't allowed the mainstream to let him forget about all of our grave moral errors during COVID. I myself was infuriated that the red wave never materialized in 2022, after two years of injustice based on false facts. And I'm infuriated that our politics has devolved into culture warring, or whining on both sides about foreign wars, or paranoia about China, when it's clear to me that this country is facing a demographic implosion, a massive and unprecedented loss of meaning, and a rapid, unstoppable loss of national identity and values. We're re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and pointing to explosions on far-off iceburgs, when the ship is sinking, taking on the water of anomie, while our young men and young women are sharpening their knives ready to maime each other. We need transformational leadership, and a positive identity.

And I'm not sure RFK will give us that. But I'm damn sure Trump or Biden won't.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 1d ago

Yup, I think that’s exactly what’s going on. The mainlines have collapsed.

I also would add that Catholicism, unlike mainline Protestantism, forms a strong cultural block unlike other forms of Christianity. I’ve known many Catholics who hate the Church and are essentially apostate, but if you ask for their religion, they’d say “Catholic.” What’s funny is the only person on the Court known for attending mainline Protestant services is Gorsuch — who was raised Catholic and is often still called Catholic, despite being lapsed and attending Episcopal services!

There’s a line in Leo DiCaprio’s Catch Me If You Can, where the main character, who repeatedly creates false identities, is caught by his fiance, whose immediate response to realizing her life had been totally manipulated was to ask, in tears, “You’re not a Lutheran?” Such a thing is unthinkable today, and was played for laughs in the 2000s even.

So it’s no wonder the court is considered made up largely of Catholics and Jews — they’re both faiths with a large cultural/ethnic component. That means the identification outlives the practice. The other member of the court is a Black Protestant, which is its own ethnic/religious fusion.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 1d ago

I believe the scotus size was set by statute, meaning that the house is required to consent to an expansion of the court size. If only the senate and president had to conspire to add additional justices, I figure it would have happened already.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 2d ago

How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination?

To me it seems very simple.

Conservatism in America is deeply connected to religious conservatives, especially Christians. Of those, excepting very small groups like Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Anabaptists, you have essentially three subgroups: confessional Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics.

Confessional Protestants are often very engaged in ideas (they love their long confessions full of them, of course), but they're, relatively speaking, a rather small group, even compared to the shrinking mainline Protestants with whom they have a shared history. Think the Presbyterian Church in America (not Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), the Lutheran Missouri and Wisconsin synods (not the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), and perhaps even the Anglican Church in North America (not the Episcopal Church). I'm not from the region of the country where this form of Christianity is very large, so I can't speak to their absolute numbers, but they're relatively small as far as I understand.

I have ancestors who were members of these churches, but in my family, which is pretty standard for the religious right, evangelical Protestantism predominates. Baptists, Pentecostals, and non-denominational Christians (who I consider, from personal experience, Baptists-in-denial) make up a majority of conservative Protestants in the United States.

So what is there to say about evangelical Protestants? Well, I'm very fond of them. They're a large part of my family. But they also -- and I say this just to be brutally honest -- have a very poor track record when it comes to fostering a culture that values higher education or elite status-seeking. They have much in common, I think, with the pietist movements of magisterial Protestantism, which stress direct experience of God and simplicity in faith, rather than scholasticism, education, and learning. Put more bluntly, their cultural and biological ancestors are mostly the Borderers (Scots-Irish), who never valued education and were associated with anything but book learning.

Today, you look at Pew Research's table of educational attainment by religious affiliation, and you find evangelical groups like Baptists and Pentecostals filling up the bottom. This is simply not a group that produces Supreme Court justices, who are universally elite and educated persons.

This leaves, of course, Roman Catholics. Catholicism has a long and storied history of higher learning, being associated with many of the major historical universities of Western Europe. It also has a strong focus, at least among conservative and traditionalist Catholics, on deep knowledge of faith and resistance to common patterns of behavior. It has institutes of higher education in the United States, like Notre Dame (which another poster discussed), which are considered elite enough to possibly matriculate a future federal judge. And, as others have pointed out, Catholicism has a long history of legal scholarship and a rigorous tradition of religious law that makes legal interpretation a rather natural choice for a smart Catholic to study.

While as a whole, Catholics are middling in their education attainment, this is largely determined by the large numbers of Latino immigrants. Native-born, white Catholics (if I understand correctly), have rather high educational attainment, even if most are liberal or lapsed Catholics. But those who remain in a conservative understanding of their faith -- like Harrison Butker noted above, often have a well-developed and intellectual understanding of their religion and a desire to put it into practice in broader society. This is the right combination to produce elite jurists.

You could of course ask, what about non-religious conservatives? And I would simply respond: "who?" While I have a great deal of affinity for right-wing atheists and know some, this is not a large group by any stretch of imagination. I am inclined to believe there are more Jews keeping the strictest interpretation of Torah in the United States than there are atheists who would even consider voting for a Republican.

So, if Republicans are going to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, and they've gotten to do that quite a lot lately, they've got to be Catholics. It's the only group in the United States that produces large enough numbers of educated, elite, status-seeking, but traditional and conservative, people.

It also helps, of course, that a large ethnic minority in the United States are Latinos who are often Catholic, which means that Democrats also have a reason to appoint certain kinds of Catholics to the Court, as they did with Sotomayor. It's notable also that the one clear, life-long Protestant on the Court is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who identifies as a non-denominational Protestant but doesn't seem to have a strong connection to her faith. There are, as far as I'm concerned, no committed evangelical Protestants on the Court, and plausibly there have never been.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 7d ago

By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.

Interesting, so what is the main cause now, if you don't mind my curiosity? I'm not familiar with this situation at all, so I'm now just intrigued.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 9d ago

Is the economy better because Biden is a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?

You can turn this one around, too, though: was the economy better under Trump because he was a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?

Or was it because the establishment republicans like tax cuts, and Trump was happy to oblige?

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 9d ago

I mean, you know who you replied to, right?

And I guess we lost a cath recently, maybe not so trad but certainly conservative. Hope she comes back.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 10d ago

It’s still fascinating to me we got the people who investigated money to be the presidential guard. I guess all around they’re there to make sure the presidents’ face stays intact.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 10d ago

Bill McKinley

I definitely had to look this up, you’re talking about William McKinley. I didn’t recognize the name from the list of presidents stuck in my head, I thought you were talking about some other politician.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 11d ago

I'm not an economist and I don't understand much about it, so I wish you and @LateMechanic would have a discussion to illuminate this a bit. He seems to be pro-MMT and you seem to be against. You two have any thoughts on the other's view?

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 12d ago · Edited 12d ago

Not only is the idea of students leaving for lunch unheard of, but using devices was strictly limited until I got to high school. It was a revelation actually being able to use my iPod at lunchtime when I entered high school. Maybe it's different now.

And once you were old enough to drive, you could technically schedule your classes with free periods at least in my area and leave during those, although it's strongly discouraged to leave gaps in the schedule. In my senior year of high school I had a free period in the morning and got to sleep in part of the week, which was heaven for a night owl like me.

Public schools are incredibly liability-averse and letting kids loose just isn't in their vocabulary. The US values freedom, but is terrified about children's safety to the point of neurosis. To some extent this reflects the safety profile of the US being different than Europe, to some extent it reflects the lower density and car-dependence of the US, to some extent it reflects our tortious legal system, but to a great extent I think it just reflects the neurotic substrate within American society.

How do they even stop you or know what you're doing?

Once the school day starts, almost no one is allowed in or out except in specific circumstances and those who are allowed have to be screened. In that way, schools are kind of run like airports.

Why do they care where you eat lunch?

They care because between the hours of 7am and 3pm, they're responsible for your welfare and if they let you leave and something happens to you, there might be civil or criminal liability. Parents would also be pissed, because the primary function of public schooling isn't education but daycare.

There's also the fact that if they let you out they'd also have to let you back in, and that opens a whole can of worms about random people strolling into the school or setting up a huge infrastructure to screen students returning from lunch.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 13d ago · Edited 13d ago

I'm trying to parse that translation you offered, but it's very dense and I'm having trouble making sense of it. Could you summarize the point of view Quenstedt is offering here? My guess is he's saying Christ's humanity deserves latria ipso facto, which would be fair, I get that, I'm actually rather uncomfortable with the whole presupposition here that we can separate our worship of Christ's humanity from that of his divinity, even in thought, I'd rather not even conceive of categories here, let's just worship Christ the Incarnate Son of God.

That being said, while there's clearly a strain of theological opinion here, I don't actually think there's a dogmatic definition on the matter even in Catholicism. I know of no teaching authority in the Catholic Church that focuses on this issue, though maybe one exists. More solemnly, Church councils have resisted talking about Christ's humanity and divinity separately, probably because talking about offering different worship to each hypostasis is incredibly misleading and dangerous.

I think it's enough to say that Christ deserves to be worshipped as God because he is God, and also to be devoutly honored as the greatest among men because he is the greatest possible man. Delving too deep into where both things come from and how that relates to the hypostatic union and such strikes me as perhaps scholasticism delving a bit too deep into the mystery of the Incarnation in a way that could easily lead someone who's not incredibly careful into serious error. This seems like something where a non-Chalcedonian could easily say, "see, look how Chalcedon is misleading!" Let's just agree not to send this to the Oriental Orthodox, hm?

I was on mobile when I typed my comment so I didn't see the hyperdulia reference in the Summa. Good catch! This is something that's never talked about in lay theology, I have never seen hyperdulia in reference to anyone but the Virgin Mary. It's generally treated as a gerrymandered category for her alone. But saying that Christ deserves hyperdulia with respect to his humanity makes a lot of sense, it puts it as essentially "dulia intimately connected with the incarnation of the Word."

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 14d ago

I'm guessing this will mostly blow over, a relatively small number of contributors and slightly larger number of users will leave, whether publicly or silently. I suspect people on both the left and right will do this, thr left being louder and the right being quieter. Then the project will continue, but with less enthusiasm from evangelists.

The technology has a lot going for it (hence why Anduril wants to use it!) and it'll probably move more into a "used as a tool professionally" space rather than a "get excited about it personally and make it part of your identity" space. I'm not sure any side of their community, such as it is, trusts anyone else. The community will die but I'm guessing the technology will live on.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 14d ago · Edited 14d ago

I'm not familiar with that, and it sounds like Nestorianism to me. I have never heard hyperdulia applied to anything but the Mother of God.

Looking into the matter, I found Thomas Aquinas arguing the opposite, that Christ's flesh is offered latria on account of its unity with the Word, but also that it receives dulia on account of Christ's human perfection:

And so the adoration of Christ's humanity may be understood in two ways. First, so that the humanity is the thing adored: and thus to adore the flesh of Christ is nothing else than to adore the incarnate Word of God: just as to adore a King's robe is nothing else than to adore a robed King. And in this sense the adoration of Christ's humanity is the adoration of "latria." Secondly, the adoration of Christ's humanity may be taken as given by reason of its being perfected with every gift of grace. And so in this sense the adoration of Christ's humanity is the adoration not of "latria" but of "dulia."

He also adds, "So that one and the same Person of Christ is adored with "latria" on account of His Divinity, and with "dulia" on account of His perfect humanity," which sounds misleading, but is really saying that Christ the Hypostatic Union is worshipped on account of his divinity and venerated on account of his perfect humanity, in an additive and not mutually exclusive sense.

I'd argue that if you're not doing systematic theology like St. Thomas, talking about separate worship for the humanity and divinity of Christ has already taken you far afield of Nicene Christianity. Later on, Chalcedon would seem to argue with any other interpretation:

our Lord Jesus Christ is to us One and the same Son... acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis

And of course the Miaphysites, who disagreed with that definition, did so because they believed it wasn't insistant enough on the inseparability of the divine and human! In recent times, they insist on the formula that the humanity and divinity are inseparable "except in thought," i.e. when you're doing a Summa and not in actual worship. Chalcedonians, including Catholic theologians, agree with that stipulation.

Except in the tomb, Catholicism doesn't really like talking about Christ's body apart from his human soul and divine person. It's for that reason, when affirming the Eucharist to be the real body of Christ, they're quick to add the gloss, "blood, soul, and divinity," because separating these things just isn't something they do. The tomb is a weird case -- maybe that's where your quotation was from? I'd be inclined to offer the crucified Lord latria in any case. The body is not separate from the soul, that it ever is is an abberation due to sin, which God will correct on the last day.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 14d ago · Edited 14d ago

Even after looking at that, I still don't understand what the drama is about. People are "running for the fire exits" and abandoning usage of a piece of software because the author wrote a tone-deaf letter? A well-drafted and professional communication disqualifies someone from running a birthday party? Every time I see info about this drama I feel like I understand it even less. No one seems to want to actually accuse anyone of anything, except being "insensitive." And I don't know what that means, that's such a broad term it could include repeated and personal bullying or saying an unpopular belief. And whenever specific conduct is discussed, it sounds more like indifference than malice to me.

I still have no idea what's going on and I'm continually bemused at people who make such an identity out of their software that they'd abandon such a useful concept because a major author isn't maximally on their side. As someone who understands why people like Nix but has never cared for evangelists talking about the tech of the future, I'm slightly bemused that this was apparently all it took for some people to abandon The Future Of Linux. I mean, I love Linux too guys, but can everyone just get a life?

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 17d ago

I presume the primary proponents are persons who prefer to partake of provisions procured without the pain of prey.

(Sorry, got to "proponents" and couldn't help myself.)

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 18d ago

I might humbly suggest that if a person's biggest fear about being stuck in a forest is being catcalled or labeled a lesbian, their priorities are way out of whack. I think @SlowBoy's obviously correct that the bear doesn't really exist to these trend-chasers, they're not actually thinking about staring down a bear. It feels like we're dealing with very sheltered, not-worldly-wise people who have no concept of what danger is like. Sorry to reference The ~~Book~~ Movie Series Which Must Not Be Named, but I'm reminded of a quotation from Sorcerer's Stone:

"Now, if you two don't mind, I’m going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed or worse… expelled!"

And, of course, the relevant reply:

"She needs to sort out her priorities!"

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 18d ago

"Strange" can also mean "unknown," as in "stranger." In context, I think that's the meaning of the word as SlowBoy's using it. I don't think he's saying the man and bear are weird.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 20d ago · Edited 20d ago

Woah, what happened to the formatting there?

All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow.

I had a similar insight in an old, now deleted, comment. Allow me to repeat it for posterity:

Lacking (or refusing to use) the rhetorical condemnation of hellfire and the violence of the noose, the language that comes out when modern progressives hate their interlocutor or feel prone to self-justification involves, in some way, the hatred or approval of the future: "the right side of history," "your children will hate you," "the future is female," "let the elderly bigots die, then we win."

Now, I think their take is bogus, even if one agrees with their view: as I've argued before, history is a fickle mistress, and I think it is much more likely that "history" or social consensus will condemn all of us for some bizarre thing none of us realize than to affirm the entirety of any one of our belief systems.

And if your views are defined by social consensus, or what we anticipate the social consensus to be, then are we truly philosophers? Are we not the same as any witch-burner or troglodyte convinced that the world will not change from what we anticipate? In this sense I fear the progressives who follow this chain of thought have become the very thing they swore to destroy: hegemonic oppressors.

No one in the America of 1900 would ever imagine that two men and two women would ever be permitted to have sexual relations with each other, let alone that they would be not only permitted but encouraged to couple up and call it marriage. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that's a good argument against it! But it certainly demonstrates that what is imagined about the future by the past doesn't always work out. Things change, now more than ever, and the progressives pushing for radical social change while believing they are entirely on the "right" or "winning" side of it are acting, in my view, incredibly foolishly.

Robespierre didn't think the French Revolution would conclude with his head on the chopping block, or with the establishment of a dictatorial empire. But it did. Neither did Lenin believe his great people's revolution would end with a personality cult and a dictatorship -- not of the proletariat, but of his general secretary, the guy who took notes at meetings. But it did. You push for a revolution for the people, and sometimes what you get is a new regime just as wicked as the old. Different words, but the same melody.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 20d ago

It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.

This is also my suspicion about what's going on in the West. Not to the same degree or because of the same factors, but because social atomization drives people apart. This leads to fewer connections with other people, fewer relationships with opposite-gender people (platonic and romantic), fewer intimate connections with people you share a background with, alongside more internet doomscrolling, more online dating, more echo chambers. The main way men and women are coming into contact with each other is through online dating apps. And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.

It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 23d ago · Edited 17d ago

US conservatism is more tightly connected to religiosity than the hard-right parties popular with young people in Europe. I know several young people who are critical of migration, concerned about crime, skeptical of the transgender movement, and opposed to critical race theory, who nonetheless dislike and distrust Republicans because of their strong assocation with evangelicalism. I personally hate to say it, but abortion access is popular among young people and our Lord and Savior isn't.

Bizarrely, I also know young Southern Baptists who went woke, and are moderately hip on gender identity and sexuality issues. I actually have a strong suspicion that within 80 years, respectability politics and the evangelical drive to 'meet people where they are' will result in most big evangelical churches going the way of the mainlines. Traditional Christian morals will probably be the purview of a small minority in insular communities. "I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Ba'al..."

By contrast, among European conservatives, Christianity isn't very popular. In fact, my general understanding is that European conservative parties are typically less religious than the center, where Christian Democratic parties are very strong -- essentially being the mainliners of Europe. European conservatism is typically blood-and-soil, not God-and-guns or even throne-and-altar. They're nationalist with ethnic undertones (except in France), and combine that with a commitment to social welfare. They believe in using the government to provide services to citizens, and hold that the best way to afford this is to limit citizenship to natives and a small group of deserving immigrants. They're nationalist, but also kind of socialist. Hm.

I think opponents of this worldview are kind of right that there are similarities between it and the National-Socialism of Nazi Germany, which was also skeptical of religion and committed to both ethnonationalism and social welfare for the ethnos. It at least lies in the quadrant of skulls and crossbones which has been poisoned by memories of mustache man. But I don't see the irredentism, the genocidal hatred, or the fanaticism of fascism in them. I think there are occasional glimmers of such things -- I recall a discussion on here a while ago about Finnish? politicians saying the n-word in texts and joking about racial superiority. But the situation in Finland re: black people is lightyears away from the situation in pre-war central Europe re: Jewry, and I don't see these as driving motivations for continental European right-wing parties the way they were last century. I see more opposition to recent immigrants causing real, observable problems in society, where the solution doesn't have to do with loading people in camps but in deporting people committing crimes and not taking in new ones.

Even in Anglosphere Europe, the appeal in recent times has sometimes been "let's stop participating in these globalist enterprises/admitting culturally-incompatible migrants so we can fund our social welfare." Such a message was famously emblazoned on a bus. This combination is clearly appealing to many voters, and the unique thing with the Anglosphere is it isn't very appealing to young voters. For the UK, I would pin blame on austerity (however needed) for young voters' skepticism of the Tories, though I think that goes hand-in-hand with a feeling that the Tories represent upper-class Etonian elitists, not the needs of average people.

And across the pond, there are many bread-and-butter issues where the Republicans' traditional fiscal conservatism alienates young voters. Health care reform and workers' protections are the big ones; there are a lot of young people who feel like their lives are controlled by large corporate employers who don't do right by their employees. There are also many who, because of policies of said large corporate employers, struggle to maintain health insurance; they are angered by Republican opposition to even incredibly moderate reforms like Obamacare (even if the most popular component, the parental-health-insurance-under-26 rule, was supported by Trump), and many believe in a single-payer system.

My views on these issues form the biggest divergence between myself and the Republican party. I even support a lot of fiscally-conservative things you might not expect -- I think supply-side economics is a great idea, I oppose wealth taxes, and I think 'pricing gouging' during emergencies provides an economic incentive for people to supply needed goods to a disaster area! But I think there are areas where more needs to be done to make sure Americans have a good quality of life, and aren't exploited by unscrupulous megacorporations or buried under mountains of medical debt.

Of course, it's also possible that I'm full of shit, and talking about a continent I know nothing about based on little more than internet vibes. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 26d ago · Edited 26d ago

I've thought about this before -- free will, even if it didn't exist, is not something that you can act like it doesn't exist. At the very least, it's kind of trippy, you have to act like you believe there's free will even if you don't believe there's free will, it's baked into the pie. The very principle of "acting" requires, in some sense, a "belief" in free will.

I'm not actually sure what "acting like free will doesn't exist" even looks like -- you could sit on the floor and do nothing, I guess, but that is an action that requires a "choice" you "make" to do it. The concept is just an aspect of everything we do. It's even more fundamental than breathing -- you can stop breathing (and suffocate), but in doing so you're taking an action that you could choose not to do! It's impossible to choose not to act like you have free will, since by doing so you've acted like you have free will.

It's rather the opposite of Descartes' old claim, that thinking proves the mind's existence, in a way beyond even radical doubt: acting proves free will's existence, but in a way that not only doesn't silence doubt but even invites it by its total immediacy and inalienable connection to our existence. It is so automatic as to be unremarkable, and thus it becomes so incomprehensible that it becomes impossible not to remark on it. In other words, it's impossible to act like you don't have free will, but it's easy to think you don't have free will. And the unbridgeable gap between act and thought demands an explanation. Thus free will debates are a massive playing field in philosophy.

I act, therefore I have free will. Or not.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 27d ago

I feel the same way about George Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm are great but I find his nonfiction even more insightful.

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 27d ago

You're not as wise as you think you are
You're a better person than you think you are
Chasing after truth rather than utility will not lead you where you want to go
Study technology, not humanities

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urquan The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings 28d ago

I actually found my experience at the selective high school to be more humbling than the alternative -- while I was rarely intentionally elitist towards other students in the younger grades (typically I felt inferior to them), there were definitely a few times where I was like that. Going to the selective school put me in places where I wasn't the smartest guy around. I even met some people who were more intensely elitist than I had ever dreamed of being, who looked down on anybody who struggled with things they found easy, who couldn't even get along with the very smart student body because they thought themselves better even than them. I went from the top 1% of students to the top 20%. Being not the smartest guy in a room helped me understand my limits and be more empathetic toward people not as smart as me. If I hadn't had that experience, I do wonder if I would have turned out like the "I am enlightened by my intelligence" guy.

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