Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
10d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
10d ago
A job that shouldn't have been done; it would have been better if they had refused!
This is almost literally that meme from The Good Place!
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
10d ago
virtually no Auth-Left or Lib-Left
And what am I? The two of clubs?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
10d ago
I'm just saying that the differences we see between cultures are not hard-coded into our DNA.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
10d ago
...turn Japan into Afghanistan.
You mean the Sengoku jidai?
Admittedly it's not a perfect parallel, but it does go to show that countries can change rather dramatically.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
the Ranch is basically underwater in debt and always has been, but that it's so much debt that the bank keeps letting Dutton roll it forward to avoid having to deal with the write-down / write-off.
"If you owe the bank $100,000, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100,000,000, the bank has a problem."
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
[I]s Iran a threat to America's interests, or only a threat to Israel's interests?
I'm not certain that one can meaningfully separate these; to allow, through inaction, the destruction of Israel would invite a metric arse-load of bad karma on a country already on shaky ice after the MS St Louis.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
You're right, my recommended alternative wasn't totally airtight and perfect. I am so sorry for having voiced my tiny brain solution.
Your recommended alternative has been tried, and it had the shortcomings I specified.
Do you have a solution?
Yes. Congress gets off its collective arse and provides the assistance people need, even to people whose neighbours think deserve to starve in a ditch.
[A]re you saying that the current state of affairs of relying on state employees / state subsidies to look after your children ... is better?
I'm saying that before you tear down the fence, you should have some idea of why it was put up.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
The larger point I was driving at is that voters shouldn't have to be in the position of relying on congress to provide things. Mostly, it should be done through semi-formal social networks.
...which work very well until the semi-formal social network decides that it doesn't like your face, or whom you marry, or the vocabulary you kept using two days after it was declared problematic because you were too busy working to keep up with the ever-changing list of naughty no-no words....
I generally think that its ok to trust scientists and that they can self regulate with their dangerous toys, and that was my viewpoint for biological research back then. Now I'm in alignment with everyone here, fuck this research, it needs to end and we can't trust you with these dangerous toys.
A permanent end to such research would cost us the possibility of spotting potential pandemics before they occur naturally, and having preparations in place to stop them, thus condemning the Human Race to forever living under the Sword of Damocles of pandemics with death tolls in the 7-/8-digit range at best, and 9/10 digits at worst. (I once came across a story of a post-collapse society which believed that preventing people from dying of infectious disease was morally wrong because it 'interfered with the balance of Nature', i. e. denying her the ability to commit mass homicide whenever she felt like it; it was at that moment that I realised that I understood the meaning of the word 'cuck', and that my disagreement with the frog-posters was a matter of my considering the relevant 'race' to be one that includes Charlemagne, Sejong, Mansa Musa, Hiawatha, and all 400+ of these people.)
However, recent progress in spaceflight has opened the possibility that dangerous research could be conducted away from inhabited planets; thus potentially hazardous biological experiments do not need to be permanently ended, merely delayed until a secure bio-lab can be constructed in a heliocentric orbit away from earth.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
There's no airborne variant of Ebola, even an artificial one, AFAIK.
The Reston variant has been hypothesised, but not confirmed, to be airborne; it is to our great fortune that it is not pathogenic in humans.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
Eleven million people would disagree with you, were they in any condition to do so.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
Re Paul Ehrlich, it is rather appropriate that I should hear of his death on St Patrick's Day; some of his rhetoric is only a search-and-replace away from the sort of things they said about the Irish a hundred years prior!
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
11d ago
Their whole field of study needs to be nixed and made illegal.
That's a bit excessive; just postpone gain-of-function research until they've gotten the Big Falcon Rocket Starship working, and then put it in a distant orbit.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
13d ago
Exactly. The world may not be black and white, but there are paler and darker græys. The post-1945 liberal order has moved us closer to the Star Trek future, while the belief that "The U. S. isn't perfectly virtuous, therefore all possible international orders are equally lex silvæ." moves us closer to Warhammer 40k.
I hope I don't need to explain why the former is preferable to the latter.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
14d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
17d ago
If Iran was ruled by people with the character and belief system of EU bureaucrats they would have surrendered on the day, shaking their heads.
If Iran was ruled by people with the character and belief system of EU bureaucrats, we wouldn't be bombing them, because:
- they wouldn't have spent the last 47 years setting everything they could reach on fire out of a bloody-minded obsession with Israel's mortal and inexcusable sin of [checks notes] existing,
- they would thus be less likely to be pursuing a nuclear arsenal,
- the prospect of them having such would be a lot less frightening (cf. France),
- they wouldn't have massacred their citizens for protesting, and
- the citizens might not have been protesting, given that EU bureaucrats, to the best of my knowledge, haven't bollocksed anything up to anywhere near the degree as Tehran has.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
17d ago
From what I heard, the school had previously been part of the military base until it was repurposed, and an AI apparently mistook the old target list for an up-to-date one.
If true, this certainly makes Anthropic seem a lot more justified in their unwillingness to extend carte blanche to the Pentagon....
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
18d ago
it is vital to the health of any society that Karen must be oppressed
Only in the sense of "You're oppressing me by not letting me oppress others!" (cf. the Cavaliers in Virginia.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
18d ago
'Late' can also mean 'recent' or 'current'; viz. the War of Southern Treason being called 'the late unpleasantness'.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
18d ago
it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof.
And there are further ways to avoid giving away your Valid Personal Nomenclature....
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
18d ago
Another thing we could aim for, possibly something we should aim for first, is decreasing the friction on the alternatives.
What would you rather children and adolescents do instead of watching things on screens?
Are there obstacles to them doing that now?
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
19d ago
"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?/Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
--Sir John Harington, who might have also invented the flushing toilet.
Celestial-body-NOS
🇺🇸 Noli tangere naves nostras.
19d ago
So now we have the classical Bomb-Throwing Anarchists to deal with again?
Earlier this week, the conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg described Mayor Mamdani as a “jihadist” and a “radical Islam cockroach.”
And hundreds of eyes in Little Kigali started twitching....
No, because the consequences of getting it wrong are very different.
If a society believes that smoking causes cancer, and they are wrong, some people don't get to enjoy setting fire to foul-smelling leaves and covering their walls and furniture with discusting gunk.
If a society believes that Black people are less intelligent and more criminal, and they are wrong, millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces.
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