Soteriologian
1d ago
Surely it helps, no? Part of why it was so shocking to me is I'd been around a fair amount of dogs -- my immediate family had two, and I don't recall ever seeing either of them do that, not even to inanimate objects, much less guests. My extended family lives on a farm, and always had 2-4 dogs, and I don't remember seeing this among them, either.
I'm checking with Google now and it insists this is indeed normal for dogs of all breeds and ages. Clearly Google is not familiar with the level of reality-warping power behind the Disney world I was in, because this definitely did not happen, as I remember being repeatedly shocked and repulsed when leaving our bubble and seeing how the heathens' pets behaved.
Soteriologian
1d ago
my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things
Yeah, one of my first "I have been living in a synthetic Disney World" epiphanies I can recall having is when I was a teenager hanging out with a group of friends at one of their houses, and the host's dog just jumped on one of the guys and started humping him. The host immediately started shouting at the dog, grabbing its collar and trying to pull it off (the dog, not the collar). My first thought was "what kind of crazy dog is this?", immediately overridden by my much-more-rational thought of "wait, maybe this is what all those ads for spaying and neutering services were referring to. This is what animals are actually like when you don't do that!" My next thought was "And why is it doing that to a boy? I was told homosexuality is not natural and never happens except among godforsaken heathen."
Soteriologian
1d ago
IPFS is riding on venture capital. HL is not decentralised: it’s just a normal centralised gambling platform, where blockchain is as relevant as the stones in stone soup.
Soteriologian
2d ago
Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn.
Not really. There’s technically child porn stored in the bits of the Bitcoin blockchain, and there’s no way to remove it, yet this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I was honestly kind of shocked that no major government tried to use this as an excuse to prosecute anyone running Bitcoin as a trafficker of child porn, because this is in a literal sense technically true.
Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!
Soteriologian
2d ago
I agree in spirit, but in practice, I've gotta disagree. Many of the services you name aren't really decentralised: they're riding on venture capital, masquerading as decentralised systems, and in my estimation is there is no serious technical model to survive beyond the "subsidised by venture capital" phase.
Soteriologian
2d ago
I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums,
It's not merely a matter of moderation -- in the traditional tech model, there's actually only one governance system: absolute monarchy. Whoever controls the server controls the forum, and that's the end of it. They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want. I'd wager this level of power is not what anyone actually wants out of a discussion forum. The reason everything is built this way isn't because people want it this way, but because it's easy to build.
The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.
For what it's worth, even centralised platforms targeted at technical users often do have some level of mitigation to monarchal power here: for example, on Github (or any similar service), you can upload your SSH public key to the service and sign your commits. This means it's literally not possible for /u/spez to use his control over the platform to make malicious edits in your name, because he doesn't have your private key. (Well, there's a lot of asterisks here... but I'll spare the pedantry).
Soteriologian
2d ago
What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!
I'm not saying it should be free, but your power level should definitely not be proportional to your real-world wealth. If you want that system, there's no reason for cyber libertarianism in the first place: just play in the existing system, which already works that way.
The compute cost of good-faith contributors in a forum like this is a rounding error from zero. In a space where people share media, it could be non-zero, but I still think it's small. Cost only really becomes relevant in the presence of bad-faith actors (i.e., spammers). PoW is one method of mitigation, but it's not the only one. For example, making a space invite-only basically renders spam a moot problem, The problem then of course is how do you get an invite in the first place? Perhaps you could make the invite request PoW, relative to the current spam pressure on applications or something,
Soteriologian
2d ago
The underlying wrench in the works for cyberlibertarianism is spam. This is a fundamental problem that messes with the very notion of free speech. This was true even before LLMs, though obviously the problem is much worse now.
In case it’s not clear how this is related, consider trying to run a website like this one according to cyberlibertarian ideals: ideally, the website would be distributed somehow, not hosted on a centralised server where whoever is paying the bill has arbitrary control over what happens on the site. Each participant on the network would contribute some minor amount of resources for storing messages, and messages would be synced by having the peers talk to each other. But what do you do when someone spams the network with terabytes of messages? You say "Ok, well let’s put a rate limit for each user" alright, the spammer makes new accounts and uploads at the max rate for each account as fast as they can create accounts. You say "Ok, well let’s limit account creation." But how? Who decides whether you’re allowed to make an account or not?
With the advent of blockchain, I actually do think there are some answers here—you can bind account and post creation to payment on a blockchain, and that will cull the spam. But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition, but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?
And this isn’t even touching on the fact that building decentralised systems is really hard compared to building a typical centralised website. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a bit of grit can make their own website. But making your own decentralised system requires you to be a legit 140+ IQ big brain who knows the arcanery of software engineering inside and out.
For these reasons, the ideal is rarely pursued, and even when it is, it’s in clunky ways that don’t provide the "full service" experience you get with centralised software. For example, torrents are decentralised, but they don’t address the very-much-relevant question of "where do you get the metadata for the torrent you want in the first place?" And answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay," where you get the regular old whac-a-mole dynamics of law enforcement seizing domain names and issuing warrants while the devs run off to some Pacific island and register a new domain there (and the US government will promptly bribe the local government to close the domain and arrest the devs, which may or may not work—they tend to just take the bribe money and not actually do what was asked, so you have to resort to aggressive negotiations, yada yada, but I digress)
Soteriologian
2d ago
Soteriologian
4d ago
He had John Bolton in his first term, and made him cry with edging and constant refusal to actually start any new wars.
Soteriologian
6d ago
pops up 800 miles from its closest recorded habitat in a cruise ship
Come on, is this where we're at? Most people on cruise ships live elsewhere. They're only on the cruise ship as tourists.
Soteriologian
13d ago
Nah, that's not the correct discriminator here. Football is vibe for men. Analysing player stats is the ick.
Soteriologian
13d ago
There's actually a passage in the Old Testament about numbering people, in II Samuel 24:
And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah. 2 For the king said to Joab the captain of the host, which was with him, Go now through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan even to Beersheba, and number ye the people, that I may know the number of the people. 3 And Joab said unto the king, Now the Lord thy God add unto the people, how many soever they be, an hundredfold, and that the eyes of my lord the king may see it: but why doth my lord the king delight in this thing? 4 Notwithstanding the king's word prevailed against Joab, and against the captains of the host. And Joab and the captains of the host went out from the presence of the king, to number the people of Israel.
...
10 And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the Lord, I have sinned greatly in that I have done
...
15 So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed: and there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men. 16 And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people, It is enough: stay now thine hand. And the angel of the Lord was by the threshingplace of Araunah the Jebusite. 17 And David spake unto the Lord when he saw the angel that smote the people, and said, Lo, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly: but these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, be against me, and against my father's house.
Traditional theologians do a lot of mental gymnastics for this passage -- where is this even a sin? Is there some secret list of sins we haven't been told about? How does David, and much less the barely-even-religious Joab, even know about this? Why is David being coerced to sin here? You don't even get the coy Calvinist cop-out like you do with Pharaoh in Egypt, where Pharaoh totally hardened his own heart first, sweetie, so now it's cool for the Lord to do it. You just outright have the text saying David was moved against Israel to do something he knew was a sin, then he's not even punished for it -- it's the people who are punished! What on earth.
To the social Darwinist, none of this is confusing. Obviously the judgment of God is upon any civilisation who measures its people to treat them like Amazon employees.
Soteriologian
13d ago
Women like people who can create vibe (or at least make harmony with those who can). Autistic spergouts about market dynamics, utility, and looks ratings are the antithesis of vibe.
Soteriologian
14d ago
The distinction between crime and conquest is that criminals are part of the social order that they’re violating. Criminals benefit from the system (roads/emergency services/military defence/etc), but are breaking the social contract that grants access to those services. Conquerors, in contrast, are not dependent on the social order they’re conquering: they’re replacing a weaker order with a stronger one.
Whether this is "good" or not is debatable, but suffice it to say that predators and parasites are distinct in biology, with the former almost universally considered beautiful across human cultures, and the latter universally considered disgusting and repulsive.
Soteriologian
14d ago
The thing is most great works of architecture were not built to be tourist attractions. They were built for other reasons, and now long after those reasons have been forgotten, they serve as tourist attractions.
When you set the goal at "let's built a tourist attraction", you wind up building Disney World, not Westminster Abbey.
Charity for the poor is honourable and I think well of Christians for engaging in it (and yes, they do so more effectively than secularists). But no, being kind to those less fortunate is simply not what the latter part of Matthew 5 is referring to. The examples are very clearly people with access to political power abusing that power for their own ends, not struggling people in poverty requesting legitimate aid.
This is not the only case like this. Paul clearly says in Romans you're not supposed to rebel against the government, and the government he was talking about was the Roman government, which was vastly less justified and more oppressive than the British government was of the American colonists. Yet, somehow, the Christian colonists found it effortless to disregard that part of the Bible and wage war against the British for taxing their stamps and tea, and Christians to this day in America celebrate it as a glorious and righteous act, not as a sinful act that flagrantly violated the mandate in Romans.
Soteriologian
15d ago
Let's give it a few years lol
The rumours of the death of God may have been greatly exaggerated.
Soteriologian
15d ago
Ask USAID.
Heritage Foundation, not Trump. Any Republican would have done this.
Ayatollah Khameni
That would be more wars in the Middle East for the donors, which Trump explicitly ran against. At least the typical Republican would have done the Captain America PR campaign correctly and made the war popular for 1-2 years instead of making it unpopular from the outset (Pew shows 44% strongly disapprove vs only 18% strongly approve, and the economic consequences haven't even hit yet)
tariffs
Ruled unconstitutional (by 2 of his own 3 justices lol). Lutnick made bank off of the confusion, though. Hard to imagine that wasn't the plan.
Soteriologian
15d ago
I guess, but I think the aesthetic difference is disproportionate to how this would have played out in practice.
In terms of policy, how is Trump any different than Bush 2.0, proceeding along the expected trajectory? You get more wars, a bunch of hot air about immigration but nothing actually happens, a bunch of pork, and... this is exactly what you'd get no matter which Republican won. The only difference with Trump is you get this chaotic, hog-in-the-China-shop, WWE Smackdown aesthetic, rather than the typical Bain Capital, business-suit psychopath aesthetic. But the policy is the same.
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it." -Mark Twain
Soteriologian
15d ago
The thing is assassination almost never accomplishes anything, because the problems people care about are systemic and not caused by any one person. Part of the reason the supervillain archetype is such a prominent theme in fiction is because it gives you a world where you just need to kill the bad guy and everything magically gets fixed.
Here in the real world, you shoot the UHC CEO and nothing changes, because it turns out UHC CEO is a role, not a person.
Soteriologian
15d ago
There is actually a very fundamental reason why the sex ratio is 50:50!
Soteriologian
15d ago
I have to disagree here. Secular philosophy has been discussing justice and morality for centuries before Christianity even existed. That's like... literally what Plato and Aristotle were writing about. The notion that contemporary naturalists are hijacking morality from the Christians is simply false. If anything, it's the Christians that hijacked Greek philosophy and rebranded it under Jewish monotheism.
Anyway, the major ingredient that modern naturalist theory has that the classical theorists were missing is germ theory. An understanding of the omnipresence of pathogens, their transmission, and the human behaviours that mitigate their transmission is a Newton-tier "lights-on" shift for understanding morality. For example, using only the vocabulary of justice and fairness, it's quite difficult to argue that something like homosexuality is bad. Yet a lot of cultures have a pretty strong natural repulsion to it. Why? Well, germ theory clears this up! It has nothing to do with fairness: it has to do with pathogen containment.
Soteriologian
16d ago
The majority of secular atheists can't present any coherent presentation of their beliefs
I think you misunderstand my argument. This is not an argument explaining the morals of atheists: this is a naturalist argument explaining morals generally common among humankind, the majority of whom are not atheist. For example, Christians take some parts of the Bible much more seriously than others: the parts that say you're supposed to respect marriage are taken seriously. But the part that says you're supposed to just give away your stuff if someone tries to take it from you? Well, that part is *big theological treatise on why the text doesn't mean what it plainly says*. My contention is the mechanics of natural selection explain this: the people who give away all their stuff whenever anyone tries to take it die, and the beliefs that caused that behavior die with them: thus, those people are replaced with people who were capable of dreaming up an explanation of why that passage didn't mean what it said. Monogamy, on the other hand, is an effective mating paradigm that not only shows abundant success in Christianity, but across all major religions, and even across many other species! Thus, the passages about sexual purity are taken at face value: because the people who take those parts at face value succeed and reproduce, while the people who wrote big treatises saying "marriage is actually a metaphor for some uchronian age and you can ignore it and have whatever crazy sex you want" die (and this was doubly true before we understood germ theory and lacked any mitigation of sexually-transmitted pathogens).
This brings me to a paradox in Darwinism, which, incidentally, is also explained by Darwinisim: Darwinists are really bad Darwinists! I don't mean scholastically--I mean their fertility rate is terrible. Now, one can say, "See, this is proof that God is real!" But hang on -- the blessing of fertility is seen by religious radicals of all established religions, even though they all flatly contradict each other. So I don't think this is a good argument that God is real. Rather, it's a good argument that traditional belief patterns are well-adapted to reproduction precisely because, well, the people who believed that stuff reproduced.
Darwinism is too new of a system to have had any adaptation or sustainable culture built around it yet. Obviously there are the 491 genders leftist sort, but I don't mean to discuss them -- Darwin would not consider them serious students of his work, even though nominally they assent to Believing Science (TM). What I mean is Darwinists can say "Ah, well, getting married and having a big family like the Mormons is actually pretty great, by Darwinian standards!", but saying those words and even believing them to be true doesn't give you the capacity to make that happen. It's difficult to do this without a culture that has the social infrastructure in place for high fertility.
This is why apostasy is such a big deal for every major religion. If you have a religious family, they'll probably be upset if you don't follow the faith. They interpret this feeling as God being real, but there is a perfectly cromulent secular explanation: if your child leaves the fertile culture, there's a good chance the genetic line will die out within a generation! In fact, this is a powerful explanation because it explains why all religions feel this way, despite the fact that obviously they all contradict each other and thus cannot all be true. It's not a matter of an autistic sense of empirical truth, it's an emotional terror of your bloodline being in danger, even if not consciously recognised as such.
That was not my claim. Look, I'm aware of the smoke and mirrors behind all this, I don't care to discuss it further.
Technically true while de facto not true at all. The only way to connect IPFS to any relevant degree of real-world usage is via a domain owned by Protocol, otherwise you have to run an IPFS daemon locally, which nobody does. Like, I'm literally a software nerd and I have never met one person in my entire life who has done this (besides me, and that was only to try it out and be annoyed with how comically inefficient it was before turning it off and deleting it). Contrast that with torrents -- even many non-technical people I know who couldn't program their way out of a Python tutorial use torrents!
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