OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
What are the odds?
In the chaos of the Charlie Kirk shooting, a lot of people forgot about the weirdness of the multiple arrests. Immediately after the shooting, George Zinn reacted in a very unusual way. He insisted that he was the shooter and police arrested him, allowing the real shooter to get away.
Was he an accomplice? No, it doesn't look that way. There's no evidence that he knew the shooter ahead of time.
So that leads to the first, "what are the odds?" Online, we saw leftists explode into cheers of support for Kirk's killer and suggestions for the next victim. But we are told that this represents a small fraction of the left, only the most politically deranged. But a random person in the crowd didn't just cheer on Kirk's death, he was willing to risk arrest, possibly death (if you claim to have a gun during an active shooting, you can't really be surprised if you wind up shot.)
BBC says there were about 3,000 people at Utah Valley University when he was shot. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yev470d59o. At least 1 of those people were very clearly supportive of the assassination. 0.03% isn't that bad, I suppose. There were also several people on a balcony cheering (I saw this on video, I don't have any desire to find that video again for hopefully obvious reasons so if you don't trust me on this that's fine.)
So let's say .03% willing to take extreme lengths in support of political violence, .3% immediately visibly excited by political violence. As a percentage that's low. It's a really, low, comforting percentage. Except when you see it happen in real life. Then it's not so comforting.
Every time you go out in a large enough crowd, there is a high chance that at least one person is kind of crazy. The kind of person willing to take the fall for someone else's crime. This is not comforting at all.
Another set of odds
What brought this on was a press release Andy Ngo shared from the county sheriff's office. Not only was Zinn a political extremist, he was also in possession of Child Pornography (real children, ages 5-12.) He also distributed this material to others.
Now, you might think such a person would have a strong incentive to avoid being picked up by the police and have his phone searched, but Mr. Zinn did not seem to have much hesitation.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
In context, I guess? But right wing commentators are calling for Trump to ax her over all this mess.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
I have been happy to see right-wing commentators call our Pam Bondi on her "hate speech" comments:
https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1967948684886450235
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1967950157095530518
Bondi later clarified that she meant incitement to violence: https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1967939882980085980
I have also seen push back on Libs of Tiktok posts where she calls on people to cancel those who simply didn't like Kirk.Unfortunately, those don't have as many likes as her posts calling for the cancellations.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
I could express it as -infinity < t < infinity; robot hands = down.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
What is finite here? The number of robots and the lenght of time can all be infinite. You are objecting to "initial condition?" It is a rough analogy to the concept that no part of the universe has within itself the ability to cause itself.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
Knitting with an audiobook or podcast on.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
Then if the theist's arguments are that the world resembles the line of robots, then their argument does not hinge on the impossibility of infinity. They might be wrong that the world resembles the line of robots, but that puts the objection somewhere else.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
No. I'm not arguing for God at all. I'm arguing that the arguments for God's existence do not depend on the non-reality of infinity.
If there is an infinite line of robots that all have an initial condition of their hands down and they are all only programmed to raise their hands if the robot on the right raises their hands, it does not matter how infinite the robots are, none will have their hands raised. Adding to the number of robots does not increase the possibility of a robots hands being raised. Do you agree to that much?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
I'm not arguing for God's logical necessity, I am arguing that the argument for God does not rely on infinity not being real.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
My intuition is that O9A stuff looks left wing to those on the right (Satanism is often coded as left wing due to the anti-theistic libertarian strains) while it also looks right wing to those on the left due to being Neo-Nazi. Truth is no one wants it on their side, which should count for something.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
at any point in time an infinite number of robots on the left has their hands raised.
Not necessarily, some robots on the left might have their hands raised for a long, long span, and then there might be once again robots that do not have their hands raised. I'm not advocating for a starting point in the sense that the line cannot be infinite on either side.
So: infinite robots with hands down, some point on the line something outside the line of robots intervenes to make a robot raise their hands. We know this thing cannot be a robot with its hands down.
I think this counters your argument about the robots lowering hands too?
The point is you can disagree that the world is like the robot analogy but saying that it is infinite does not counter it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
15d ago
I haven't laid out a proof for the existence of God here because I don't have the time to write one out. All I am doing is objecting to you saying that ALL proofs for God's existence rely on the non-existence of actual infinity. But based on what you're saying I'm not convinced you've understood a single proof in the slightest.
I'm going to try to write it out again without mirrors:
Imagine a circle of 100 robots facing each other. Each has a command to raise their hands if the robot next to them raises their hand first. Each robot starts with its hands down. After how many hours will every robot have its hands raised? They never will.
What if you made the circle bigger? 100,000 robots. 10^100 robots? Infinite robots? (Please understand, I am not implying that a universe of infinite robots is possible without God or anything like that. This is a thought experiment to demonstrate an aspect of a different argument.)
Just because there are infinite robots does not mean that they will all raise their hands with infinite time.
Now we come upon a circle where some robots have their arms up. We know that every robot is programed to not raise its hands until the one in front of it had its hands raised. What can we deduce from this?
Even if the robots had been there for an infinite length of time beforehand, the answer remains the same. There must have been something different from the chain of robots - like a robot that started off with raised hands.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
If the meaning was as you speculate, why would he call that a very, very radical view?
Because from Elementary School on kids are indoctrinated into treating MLK Jr. as an American saint who saved us from our sins of racism. We study his pastoral letters and speeches while teachers coo about how enlightened he was. Even saying, "he was a good man, but not perfect," would be radical. And he wasn't perfect. He plagiarized his PHD dissertation and a lot of his speeches. He cheated on his wife with multiple women, one of whom he struck. He still likely had a positive impact on the country, because most of these pecadillos were not widely known during his life or even today. But if more people knew these details about him, I don't think it would become a very radical thing to say that MLK Jr. was not a good man.
Thank you for turning up more than I could, but I wish I could watch a video where he actually goes into what his beef is with the Civil Rights Act so I don't have to strongman him myself.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
For these things I've learned to go straight to the video. Especially after the NYT had to release a revision because they quoted Kirk as saying something he was actually rebutting.
From what i can tell, the article is referencing the event TPUSA's "America Fest 2023". I have watched the video and couldn't find the quote. I have tried to find other videos of this event with Kirk but couldn't. I asked Gemini to help but still can't find the quote on video.
If he said it, based on other things he said that day on the video I could find, the context was probably something like "The Civil Rights Act didn't go far enough to protect all people of all races, whites included." Because on camera that day he's decrying racism against all peoples.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
Now there is actually a (semi) synoptic gospel that does tell us it was recorded by an eyewitness the gospel of Thomas.
Gospel of Thomas is a different situation because it's young, likely 3rd Century, doesn't have 2nd century sources quoting it or talking about it, and the early Church did not treat it as of Apostolic origin. The early church treated Luke/Acts as having Apostolic origin and they had access to lots more sources than we do today.
Similar response to the Apocalypses of Peter. It's young and doesn't have popular attestation to Apostolic origin.
I am not arguing that every writing throughout history has been entirely honest, not propaganda, etc. The gnostic gosples are examples of people lying through their teeth to create their own cults where they have special knowledge people can't get through the (small-c intentional) catholic Church. A comparison might be made to the Book of Mormon in modern times.
However Luke/Acts does have popular acclimation of Apostolic origin. Luke uses "we" in Acts to describe him going on trips that match up with his presence in letters of Paul.
Another interesting thing, Paul quotes gLuke as scripture:
1 Timothy 5:17–18: Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honour, especially those who labour in preaching and teaching; for the scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and, “The labourer deserves to be paid.”
Maybe you will argue that Timothy isn't a genuine Pauline letter but as you can imagine I'm not very persuaded by such arguments so far.
I've always felt like Bart Ehrman has just wildly different intuitions than I do to the point where we are reading completely different New Testaments. It's a personal failing of mine, but I saw him in a debate start to lose and then go on a rant saying (approximately): "If it were all true that would be horrible! It would mean gay people shouldn't get married and evil things happen and God lets them happen! It can't be true!" I wish I could find it again without watching dozens of hours of debates but his arguments haven't had the same credibility to me since then.
Acts has the martyrdom of Stephen and James in it. I disagree that Luke would shy away from Paul's martyrdom as some kind of defeat of Paul or his preaching, when so far he's treated martyrdom as a crown jewel on someone's life. Stephen gets one of the longest sermons recorded in the Bible before he "fell asleep."
Also something not explained by Ehrman's quote is why does Luke say Paul was in Rome for 2 years, instead of 5? It's almost certain that Paul was in Rome for more than 2 years.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
In real life, the government of Mexico is the cartels.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Yeah, RICO'ing Antifa would be a good start, and if goes up to Soros then that would be good. I wouldn't want necessarily to just start harassing Soros until we could figure out a crime to pin him on and get him that way. Identifying a crime and finding the criminal is how the system should work, not identifying a man and then finding the crime. That's what happened to Trump and it wasn't good.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
But what I see overwhelmingly more than either is a fervent push of cancel culture, in exactly the same way as the left were doing and being complained about for the past decade+. Lots of minor and even a few right-wing influencers digging through BlueSky and Tumblr accounts, looking for minor nobodies who said egregious and extreme things in celebration of this murder, and fishing for doxxing info to try to get them fired. It's just more of "I believe in free speech when it's useful for me, but not when it's costly to me or my desire to see people I dislike punished" that we saw the left go through in the past 2 decades. And, again, depressingly predictable.
I had a somewhat different reaction. When I saw what was happening, I felt a sigh of relief. I'm not for doxxing, generally. I was against that one woman getting fired from Home Depot for wishing Trump was assassinated. But I was getting worried that the Right would collectively do something bad. And so if this is the thing the Right does that is collectively bad, then it's a lot better than a lot of other things they could have decided to do.
If they can make it unthinkable for someone to publicly celebrate domestic assassinations, then that would be a step away from the precipice we have been creeping towards. If every public official, military member, cultural influencer, professor, and teacher stops comparing their political opponents to Nazi Fascists who need to be killed, then maybe we can heal as a nation. And one way to get that to happen is to do this cancel culture exercise.
It's not what I wanted, but when I see the Right say things like, "They want to kill you too, they just don't know your name yet," I'm relieved the steam is releasing this way. I don't think it's just opportunistic politicking. People are upset that Kirk was assassinated for civilly expressing views 30% - 70% of people in the country share. People are more upset to see others say that Kirk deserved his assassination for civilly expressing views 30% - 70% of people in the country share. Particularly when they share a few of the views that likely got him killed.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Under what circumstances would you feel that a foreign drone strike targeting a terrorist living or operating in the United States was justified and acceptable?
I can imagine some Hollywood type situation where the US military was disabled or distracted and there was a terrorist attack planned and James Bond stopped the attack himself.
A borderline case would be if Mexico took out a cartel leader on US soil that for some reason we were refusing to extradite. I think there'd be outrage, but just at much aimed at US leadership for not extraditing the guy before it got that far.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you. Something had greater energy and it transferred this energy in the form of heat to the water. We can go deeper and talk about entropy and the average velocity of the molecules. I took Thermodynamics, too. The specifics doesn't change the fact that something acting outside the water caused it to heat up.
It's just light in some arbitrary pattern
But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.
An infinite series of mirrors cannot exist in reality, it's an analogy to the idea that claiming that an infinite amount of causes can explain itself. It cannot.
A single atom moving through space still needs an explanation. There are many things it could have been otherwise. For instance, the atom has a certain number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, but it would have been possible for it to have fewer or more. Why is it moving at this velocity and not another velocity? Why is there space for it to move in? A single atom has the potential to be something else, so something must have caused it to be as it is instead of in another way.
You're arguing for a kind of existential inertia, but that is a whole other can of worms than an argument for infinity.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Fine, not Obama, but some Left wing commentator? That would be a better comparison to Kirk anyways.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
The number of college-age Americans is going to start decreasing the next couple of years. If the US restricts the number of foreign college students, colleges are going to have to compete for these students and the bottom 5-10% will shut down. The schools that do not want to shut down will have to start being more attractive to these students and their parents. Meanwhile, conservatives are much more likely to have children than those on the far left. The combination could contribute to a pressure to at least reign in the more luxury beliefs universities have cultivated.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Whereas Paul states emphatically many times that he has seen the risen Jesus and even uses this to claim his apostleship.
You're assuming that the Road to Damascus is the only time Paul had a vision of Jesus, while Acts itself contradicts this (Acts 22:17 has Paul seeing Jesus.)
The rest are likewise things that I don't see a contradiction with, but I'm not going to argue exhaustively each one.
Regarding Luke's stated process, there are two things he says to indicate sources. The first is that they were "fulfilled among us," something that seems to denote that he is a witness. The second is, as you highlighted, "those who from the first were eyewitnesses."
This statement is at the beginning of gLuke, not gActs. No one argues that Luke was an eyewitness himself of gLuke. It makes sense for gLuke to start with him indicating that it's a collection of eyewitness accounts passed on to him. In Acts he doesn't reiterate this. He just launches into it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
I'm bringing this as proof that the authors are far removed from the events and your response is "well, under the assumption that they are not far removed from the events this is impossible". You are making my point.
No, I'm not. Unless you hold to a later Mark date than most scholars today. And many scholars belive Mark was Jewish, such as William Arnal and Julie Galambush who are hardly Christian Fundamentalists.
You wouldn't write the parable of the fig tree if the destruction of the temple hadn't already happened: the jews have already failed to deliver and god has already punished them.
Jesus is clear that is goal is to create a new Exodus and a new covenant. Will the Son of Man find faith when He returns? He came the first time, no faith, predicts destruction of the old practices. Establishes a new covenant, says he will return to see if it goes any better.
But just looking at events in the 40s, they match to the predictions better than the full Temple destruction? Atheist New Testament Scholar Maurice Casey argued that Jesus’s prophecy about the “abomination of desolation” where it does not belong is obviously a reference Caligula ordering a statue of himself be placed within the Temple around 39 CE. The portion about the destruction of the Temple is largely taken from Jeremiah 7, and Casey doesn’t see it as a reference to the historical destruction of the Temple by the Romans, but rather an eschatological threat of sorts about God destroying the Temple if it’s desecrated.
What's causal power.
The ability to bring an effect into something else. Right now I do not have boiling water. If I were to fill a pot with water and put it on a stove and turn it on and heat made the water boil, all that chain of events was required to make the water boil. It's also clear that there was something about that chain of events that caused the water to boil, when otherwise the water would have stayed in my pipes without boiling. The heat of the stove had the causal power to change the water from liquid to gas.
But I don't think this is the case, I think there's actually nothing logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors you are tricking your brain into thinking there is because the brain thinks in aristotelian terms,
I am not arguing that there is something logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors. The argument is, even with an infinite series of mirrors there would be no face if there was nothing imparting an image of a face.
Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible?
Yes! The thing impossible isn't the speed of the atom, but the fact that the atom exists at all.
My post was mostly a musing that, even if there's a small percentage of crazies in the world, the odds of encountering a crazy is not terribly small in a large enough public gathering. But your point is also noted.
More options
Context Copy link