OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Low is normal, who's going to upvote the automatic threads? But negative seems weird.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Is there a roving gang downvoting all the topics? Why is this at -1 and the Culture War thread at 0? Are we being brigaded or is someone just having fun?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
In the real world, almost all parents want what is best for their kids, they just disagree about the facts.
Yes, and a conservative is more likely to have a kid than a liberal.
Is this actually a thing
There are surveys that say it's gotten worse, but whether that's a screen-time effect or an inherent neuropsych effect I don't know. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/is-student-behavior-getting-any-better-what-a-new-survey-says/2025/01
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Conservatives are the ones having kids and so are the more concerned now about what they're putting into their kids bodies.
They are also more aware of the breakdown in classroom behavior, increase of violent outbreaks, and having a medical reason to pin it on is useful.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
It might be cultural, my parents always preferred ibuprofen. But also migraines run in the family, and ibuprofen is more useful for that sort of pain.
In the US there was an infamous Chicago Tylenol Murder spree when my parents were in the 20s, which probably gave the brand a bad name.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I hate having Tylenol in the house. It was one of the scarier parts of pregnancy and neonates. My 2 year old slurped up half a bottle while I was trying to dose the 3 month old and I called poison control crying. Couldn't sleep all night from shaking, though they told me it was below their threshold for going into the ER. An overdose is a miserable death.
That said, pregnancy sucks and you have to be able to give women something. If they can't take willow bark tea, can't have a shot of brandy, can't take anything more modern, they're going to come up with something. And that something is likely going to be dangerous.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Sinclair plays both sides. Sinclair Quietly Backs Out of Airing Charlie Kirk Special People are floating around X that it is due to threats made to Sinclair stations.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I think there are many diverse opinions on the Right, some who are Libertarian free-speechers. But there were some who have been honest from the start.
Tim Pool told Jack Dorsey that he was introducing a bias against conservatives through Twitter's policies. Ironically I think Pool is more Libertarian, but the point he makes is specifically that the "neutral" policies mostly harmed normal, ordinary conservatives. Not that there shouldn't be moderation at all.
Kevin Dolan was up front about supporting cancellation over a year ago: It's different when we do it
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
The best way I've seen it put is that the Right isn't actually against cancelling those outside the Overton Window, they were just protesting the arbitrary narrowing of the window by a handful of powerful state and corporate actors. In that frame, the recent cancellations make sense and look less hypocritical.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up.
It's kind of an anti-novel. You hope for character development, but it doesn't happen. It's more like a series of vignettes.
His other novels do have more development and plot, but never to the point where the main character advocates for themselves.
I found his body of work poignant and depressing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up. Klara and the Sun is the same. After reading The Remains of the Day, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go I realized that I've seen pretty much all he has to say.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Jesus' prescriptions were all about making the aggressor view you as a human, not so much as non-resistance. It's resistance through excessive submission.
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.
In order:
If someone slaps your right cheek, present them your left cheek. Most people are right handed, so to strike a right cheek they need to use the back of their hand, which denotes an inferior. If you turn your cheek, you are demanding that they slap with the palm of their hand, something that would denote an equal.
Jesus does not say, "Let him beat you up to a pulp."
If anyone sues your for a tunic, let him have your cloak as well. This would leave you naked, which is not allowed. You are shaming the person who sued you for your tunic.
Go the extra mile - you are acting like it was your choice to carry the Roman soldier's gear. The Roman soldier can only force you to carry their gear for one mile, but by going two miles you're shaming them.
The message is - by humbling yourself just the same amount you've already been humbled, you can shame your opponent A Lot.
"I forgive you," is comparatively a small sacrifice next to actually losing her husband. But by saying it she is shaming the killer and everyone knows it.
Regardless of her forgiveness, society has a need to keep dangerous killers off the streets. Even if Erika began advocating for the killer's release, every judge, police officer, etc has a higher duty to keep the killer imprisoned.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I assume when people talk about women being inherently more valuable than men they mean it in the sense of:
If you have 100 men and 1 woman, the most babies you can have at the end of the year is 1-3. If you have 1 man and 100 women, you could have 100+
But that doesn't hold as true in a monogamous society so I don't understand where the idea that men are extra expendable is coming from.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
You would still only have as many pregnant women as there are men, making men a bottleneck to reproduction the same as women.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Only in a polygamous society which I'm not sure is very common in Gaza.
Historically, marriage to cousins was once common. Polygamous marriages are rare among Muslim Palestinians, except among some Bedouin communities. As Palestine does not have a civil marriage option, marriage law follows the religious faith of the couple.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Maybe a Starbucks coffee from 10 years ago, those things have gotten expensive.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I'm not going to make a comprehensive argument for the existence of God, any suitable argument would be at least chapter-length. You brought up Feser earlier, I wonder what you've read of him. Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides five chapter-length proofs. If you've only read The Last Superstition or even his beginners guide to Aquinas I don't think you've seen the best he can do.
As far as what relation the robots have to a proof of God, the analogy is this:
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The robots with their hands down express now everything we see does not exist necessarily.
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That the robots are programmed to raise their hands if one next to them raises theirs reflects how contingent things derive their existence from another contingent thing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Ok.
From -infinity to t, infinite robots have their hands down. We are an observer at time t. All infinite robots have hands down. Looking at the robot code, we see that they are only programed to raise their hands if a robot next to them raises their hands. We can deduce that no robots will raise their hands from t to +infinity.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
I could express it as -infinity < t < infinity; robot hands = down.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo 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.
I really liked The Way of Kings but looking back on it the reasons I liked it are not that good.
For background, I was in college, depressed, and hadn't read a physical book for pleasure in a long time. In search of a familiar comfort from my childhood, I got a library card and picked up The Way of Kings because it was the first of a series and the author seemed familiar - like one of those you saw come up on Reddit threads.
I liked that the world felt like a puzzle. It was a truly alien world! And there were mysteries that happened in the past. It felt like the reader had more clues than the characters, so we should be able to put things together faster. This wound up disappointing me in the sequels, but for the first book it felt full of potential.
I liked that the book was easy to read, which makes the motivation required to read it much lesser. I think a lot of the "I enjoyed reading as a kid, but now I don't" that young adults experience is tied to attempting to read more difficult books, when as a kid they were probably reading books with simple prose and an uncomplicated plot.
But what I liked the most was that Kaladin seemed to get it. Yep, there's no point. Nothing matters. But he made the oaths to put life before death anyways. And then goodness was vindicated in the end. Trite? Sure. But it kept me off a bridge of my own.
Now my reading palate has expanded and I can see all the flaws with it. But it still holds a special place in my heart.
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