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DuplexFields

Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.

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joined 2022 September 05 05:51:34 UTC
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DuplexFields


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And since abstinence from sin is a human impossibility, God provided an escape hatch: tell Him you don’t want to be that way, accept Jesus’ sacrifice as payment, and have certainty that you now have the good end firmly in grasp. Thereafter, expect to see your choices change as the Holy Spirit sanctifies (cleans) your choicemaker.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yep. Only instead of a correct-so-far predictive alien, it’s the literally omniscient unfoolable inventor of human brains.


And instead of a thousand bucks or a million, one box holds a hundred years of short-sightedness and uncaring utility of others’ suffering. The other holds an eternity with billions of caring, noble people who would never betray you and a loving God even more amazing; in a body not subject to entropy and a mind not capable of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or any mental illness; freed from the Dunbar Number of friends you can make and able to explore universes of new places and thoughts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Calvinist predestination (which is the only truly contentious point out of the five in Calvinism) is basically Schrödinger's cat: the only way to know where one is predestined is to die, and there is a single truth value in the future which cannot be directly known from the past.


However true it may be, though, it is also possibly the single stupidest way to approach Christianity, faith, free will, and eternity.


Jesus has guaranteed that whoever turns from wickedness and asks Him for forgiveness will have eternal life in the presence of overwhelming love; the kind of love which cares for all victims of others’ misdeeds, and seeks that none should be wicked. If you ask, then, what God finds wicked, He asks you what you find wicked when others do it and asks you to shun it from your choices, now and forever.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Counterpoint:


The shift to women creators and LGBTQ+ lead actors might be coinciding with a dismaying shift from GenX to Millennial entertainment production. My favorite hobby-horse, MLPFiM, was created by a woman several years my senior, Lauren Faust, and it has a GenX worldview behind it, contrasted with the Millennial storytelling of its biggest contemporaries, Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Those are shows which delight in subverting the Hero’s Journey, and also pioneered the wide acceptance of the “bean-mouth” rubber-hose stylized animation trend.


Consider also the Cobra Kai series which leaped from YouTube to Netflix. It has been a tremendous accomplishment because it takes its farce seriously and yet doesn’t skimp on powerful character development. Film schools should be studying this phenomenon for the next decade. The creators were born in 1977 and 1978.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is singlehoofedly responsible for:


    

  1. Reducing my depression to manageable levels which a support group managed to finish off
    2. 

  2. Giving me enough confidence to get my degree
    3. 

  3. Reigniting my passion for writing
    4. 

  4. Teaching me about healthy relationships in a theoretical and logical enough way to break through my autism and show me what everyone had claimed was so profound all my life which I couldn’t see before, to the point people are now generally shocked when I say I have autism and I mostly don’t feel I have it anymore
    5. 

  5. Showing me how journalism really works, and why never to trust a journalist
    6. 

  6. Rescuing a long-time family friendship I accidentally almost broke
    7. 

  7. Getting me the third best job I’ve ever had
    8. 

  8. Revealing a piece of theology which is sorely underserved, the true meaning of shalom
    9. 



I would be a completely different person today if I hadn’t seen the first episode I ever saw, S1E4, at that exact moment in my life.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If the definition of discrimination hadn’t shifted from “treating people as members of a race” to “treating people as if they’re not members of a race”, we’d be there for 90%+ of red tribe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The user above you cited a specific “miracle,” restoration of eyesight, and you cited a lack of a different category of miracle, regrowth of a removed limb. You wouldn’t claim Viagra doesn’t work because boners could have other causes but it doesn’t make bald people grow hair.


Even disregarding the categorical error, there’s another point to be made. Instead of claiming your null result negates and dismisses the documentation of a positive result as a single anecdote instead of data, come up with a different falsifiable hypothesis rather than jumping to the null hypothesis. If there is a fully material way to restore macular degeneration, the world needs to know it to relieve much suffering.


It seems that in the cited restoration of sight, the person knew they were being prayed for. We also know that yogis can perform incredible feats of biofeedback manipulation through meditative states and/or self-hypnosis. The accounts of Jesus at least once have Him saying, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Perhaps there is a method of hypnosis which can cure certain types of blindness. Come up with an experiment to falsify that hypothesis, changing no factors from the cited anecdote.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
WHY is there a culture war?


A proximal cause is "fellow travelers" being more able to find each other and create echo chambers where they don't have to spend time becoming exhausted by arguing their viewpoints for their neighbors (by chance or fate) with different views. This doesn't just happen online; since people who trust governments more than private citizens tend to congregate in cities and live in apartments and condos, cities become progressive and the rural and suburban areas become conservative. The busybodies and meddlers in each group who can't stand being told what to do by "those people" try to push laws and regulations and ordinances and speech codes to interfere with "those people" getting their way, even if they themselves would never consent to being ruled in such a manner. Thus, the cold culture war.


I do offer an ultimate cause, however, and I hope it'll blow a few minds.


My sensemaking journey began with a simple pair of concepts: The physical world and the world of logic operate on separate sets of attributes and rules, and emotions are a third and equally separate realm like unto the others.


    

  1. The physical: temperature, color, proximity, size, weight, direction, and so on - The What
    2. 

  2. The logical: axioms, premises, hypotheses, conclusions, categories, if-then-else, and so on - The How
    3. 

  3. The emotional: desires, needs, relationships, identities both singular and plural, attribution and transference, and so on - The Why
    4. 



Upon first making a list like this, I realized that the physical essence is masculine, the emotional essence is feminine, and the logical essence is neither. ("Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and geeks are from Vulcan.) I've called this worldview Triessentialism.


More recently, I observed that physically intuitive people tend to be red tribe/conservative while emotionally intuitive people tend to be blue-tribe/progressive, and logically intuitive people tend to be grey tribe/libertarian. In animal metaphors, the red tribe acts like a pack, the blue like a herd, and the grey like a hive; asymmetric but equivalent. Since coming to these conclusions, I've rarely been surprised when it comes to politics, which tells me my beliefs pay out in prediction.


I could go on and on about these mindsets, and I could even point to Jon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as a root cause as to why these mindsets tend to be the three fundamentals. I'd love to talk with him about looking at his data and suggesting three, not two, moral foundation mindsets, with the third being somewhat rare. But for me, I've sensemade enough to consider my theory substantiated.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What if I believe it was deliberately made structurally unfair going into the election, and that it was, in the end, stolen? Can I argue against the injury as well as the insult?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As much as there’s responsibility for the winners to examine if their belief in the legitimacy of their win might not be principled, by verifying the methods with the same scrutiny as if they’d lost.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Theology and soteriology (study of salvation) have always had a push-and-pull relationship. How much of what is true about God must be believed accurately for a saving faith? (Not much.) Does knowing a lot of theology  before being saved actually reduce the likelihood of conversion? (Probably.) Is the underlying reality of God, the afterlives, and the spiritual realm(s?) able to be modeled by human minds? (Comic books have tried in fascinating ways, from DC’s The Source to Marvel’s One Above All to Cerebus The Aardvark’s asymmetrical Light and Dark.) What does it matter if nobody believes on a gut level anymore?


So yes, please take it back to first century Roman-occupied Judea. Take it back to an era where reading the future in the guts of animal sacrifices was official Roman decision-making policy and the high priest of Israel transferred the sins of his people to a ram before running it off a cliff. Take it back to the era when “love your neighbor as much as you love yourself” was simple, spiritual, subversive, and called “atheistic” by the polytheists who ran the Mediterranean world. Take it back to when we didn’t have Superman and Wolverine returning from death whenever the comic sales slumped, like Greek heroes escaping the clutches of Hades.


And if you want to see what such a simple, awe-filled faith looks like, watch The Chosen. It’s a bingeable dramatization of the gospels, in prestige TV format. It shows how a simple rabbi from the rural hill country overturned the world. And it’s making white Baptist-flavored Christians invite their neighbors to watch Brown Jesus unironically.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s hilarious that we as a society take far too much melatonin and far too little vitamin D, seeing as they both regulate sleep. I’ve found myself sleeping like a morning person (not tired for three hours if I wake at 7am) since starting on D before work. (I don’t take melatonin at all, and drop off within five minutes of bedding down.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wow. So the 10k IU (250 mcg) D3 I take daily is almost certainly no big deal? Maybe skip a day or two each week?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I, a minarchist, am of the opinion that the elected governor should be the one to throw the lever, turn the knob, or fire one of the guns with a 1/4 chance of having a blank. The denial of an appeal for mercy is basically this, so let her feel the moral weight of the death and the moral hazard of the doubt of “maybe he truly was innocent”.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Visible damage usually causes suffering. Visible distress, such as this man’s doomed attempt to hold his last breath or George Floyd’s struggles as he died of overdose under an officer’s grip, is the hangup. Distress is easily interpreted as a sign of damage, but the obvious is not always the underlying truth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Now I want to see a documentary about game hunting-as-conservation and the game meat trade, titled “A Flavor Of Mercy”.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nowadays, Trump could probably murder someone on live TV and a majority of the Republican voters would say he didn't do it.




If I saw that, my first thought would be that I’m watching an AI-generated deepfake that was put together ahead of time and the fact that it’s “live TV” was a lie.


My second would be, “Did that person deserve it?”


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I once worked (late 00’s) at an architectural plans copy/scanning shop where they manually renamed the scanned PDF files by opening them in Adobe Reader, closing the file, and renaming the file. Sometimes they didn’t rename them by page name (M3, E24, etc) and just renamed them 001, 002, 003, etc., which saved time, but since the scanner didn’t flip the pages, they were always last page first and people would lose count.


I scanned mine as TIFFs, opened them in Irfanview, and renamed them there. Then I did batch conversions to PDF. I was so fast. Since the files were sequential in reverse, I could rename them in backward order with batch renaming.


Since the other guys didn’t want to learn IrfanView, I set up a batch file to reverse-rename them. It worked, but the final file was always numbered 200 and the first was somewhere over number 1.


So I did what any reasonably smart programming-trained DOS-user would: I wrote a BASIC program to generate nearly identical reverse-renaming batch files for 5 to 500 pages, and also generated a 495-line “chooser” batch file to pick the right one based on if file 500 existed, file 499, 498, etc. Then I added it to the shell:sendto menu so all they’d have to do is right click the last file and send it to the renamer.


In my next job, also document scanning, I created all sorts of image conversion and PDF manipulation scripts, storing their shortcuts in shell:sendto. By the end of that job, my sendto menu was taller than the screen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Fixed.


I’m curious on that point. Would jail be mandatory if Clarence Thomas or Kamala Harris were subpoenaed, and refused on separation of powers grounds? If so, that’s a huge way for one branch to wreck another.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Trump aide Peter Navarro has been sentenced to jail for contempt of Congress; Navarro has cited executive privilege as a Presidential advisor, on separation of powers grounds, in his refusal of the subpoena. Per NBC News:




Navarro helped spread misinformation about the 2020 election after Trump's loss and issued a report that Trump falsely said proved that it was statistically “impossible” for him to have lost the election. Trump referred to the report in his infamous "will be wild" tweet on Dec. 19, 2020, encouraging supporters to travel to Washington for a "Big protest" on Jan. 6. That tweet, many Jan. 6 defendants have said, is what drew them to Washington.






Navarro's lawyer asked that any sentence imposed Thursday be immediately stayed due to "novel issues" presented in the case, including Navarro's purported belief that Trump had invoked executive privilege.




NBC has gone all in on bad journalistic practices. The highlights in the quotes are mine, and are my focus.


    

  • misinformation - a Newspeak word meaning “inaccurate information that people write and spread inadvertently” but implying deliberate disinformation (lies or misframed/“spun”/“technically true” information). Note no “alleged” before this; they’re claiming this as a fact, but without specifics or scope. If Navarro ever mistakenly spoke a single piece of untrue information between 11/2020 and today, this sentence is defensible were Navarro to sue for defamation.
    • 

  • and - the placement implies that the report mentioned in the next clause is the misinformation mentioned in the previous clause. My journalism professor would have marked my grade down for that on any assignment.
    • 

  • Trump falsely said proved - They don't say the report has been debunked or disproven. They imply that by flatly stating Trump was incorrect (implying but not alleging he was lying) in saying that a proving of the report had occurred. What standard are they using to define “proof”? No idea; no statistician was cited herein, nor court documents, nor any other attempts to prove.
    • 

  • “Big protest” - quotation marks which indicate Trump’s actual words, doing double duty as skepticism quotes, heavily hinting that Trump intended insurrection, not first Amendment petition for redress of wrongs.
    • 

  • Navarro's purported belief - here they’re weaseling their words as a good journalist does with any statement which is unprovable, but on something they know Navarro would never sue over for defamation, giving the impression that Navarro may be lying when he purports that belief.
    • 



This piece is propagandistic in these sentences at the end of the article, which are designed to give the reader background info about the case.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Reminds me of the time when I was a kid; my parents listened to oldies compulsively in the car when driving anywhere. One day “Cat’s In The Cradle” came on, and I listened carefully to the lyrics, and they hit me like a ton of bricks. Before and even after then, my relationship with my dad was antagonistic,  but I got a job under him at his work when I was recovering from two abusive relationships, and since then we’ve had a great time being father and son, mostly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s “not GOF” for a legally narrow definition of GOF, but the concept of isolating the deadliest natural strains of virii is usually a prelude to using it as an “ingredient” in GOF/biowarfare research.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The three unique essences in Triessentialism are The Physical, The Logical, and The Emotional. They deal with reality, truth, and value (good/toward vs. bad/away from); change, ordering, and incentives is another perspective on these, as is The What, The How, and The Why.


Science, philosophy, and psychology are fields concerned with pairs of essences: truth and reality, values and truth, and reality and values, respectively. Morality/ethics is the combination of all three, the uniquely human realm in which choices interact with other choices. Draw up a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles, the moral view of the world is at its center.


The value categories of experiences, utility, and esteem are all morally valuable things people can choose to seek for, and so the very choice to seek things of value does itself have value. We can call this choosing by several names: freedom, choice, control, interface, power, reach, and so on. It is valuable enough that people are willing to give up their very lives just to have the assurance of having a freedom they possibly will never have to use. Thus I class it as the fourth of the three categories of value.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I believe they don’t consciously do that, but it likely is how bureaucracy grows. As Randall Munroe of XKCD puts it, “Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.”


Imagine “User Interface” testing for government programs, where the goal is to make every form legible to and usable by a ten-year-old child. Imagine being able to take your pink slip to the unemployment office and have “social safety net” programs guarantee you’ll have rent payments and medical insurance that same day.


I’ve played open-world RPGs which simulate civilization-level legal systems by detecting if you take or break anything which isn’t yours, or if you try to hurt anyone else, and it’s a decent enough level of realism most of the time. One thing only the most devoted game modders do is to try to make the economy and tax laws semi-realistic. But if it were their job, they’d build systems so complex, only they could interact successfully with them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Kevin Dolan - 2023 Natal Conference: "In our lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on Earth will pass through a bottleneck -- a bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question: will your children have children of their own?"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why not germ cell selection for positive traits? I’m one of those “religious extremists” who believes creating new people just to throw most of them in the trash is evil incarnate made more evil by its banality, and I’d have no problem picking the right sperm and egg to combine and grow.