VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I can see where this logic is coming from, but if you accept this definition, then New Athiesm is clearly an attempt at memocide of (primarily) Christianity. I don't think such a broad definition of "trying to convince people they are wrong" is viable as unacceptable behavior. But I can also see a reasonable place in which badgering, say, the Amish, to part with their longstanding cultural practices is probably not acceptable either, even if you do think their kids deserve the freedom to live their lives.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Phrasing this as a threat to existence evokes thoughts of genocide.
I always do a double take at the idea of a population that is (largely) voluntarily sterile could be subject to "genocide," since that term literally invokes the idea of a genetic lineage. Can we blame New Atheism for the "genocide" of the last remnants of the Shaker community, who practice celibacy and rely on conversions from outside the community? There are, last I checked, exactly two living Shakers, down from thousands at their cultural peak.
To be clear, I'm not attempting to lessen any of the usual definitions of genocide, but I think trying to wield the weaker definitions as a rhetorical weapon cheapens actual violence against actually-vulnerable groups.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).
It continues to surprise me how many of these blunders date back to the first weeks of the administration. I'm not a huge fan of the previous president, but many of Biden's first actions included repealing the "remain in Mexico" policy (which seems linked to ongoing trouble with immigration), making nice with Iran (which didn't prevent October 7th, and seems hotter now than before), and passing the final round of pandemic stimulus (which we were told wouldn't cause inflation).
It doesn't exactly inspire the most confidence in me.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States,
There are some subtleties to this (which aren't terribly relevant to the described incident): my jurisdiction allows parents (or guardians) to provide alcohol to their supervised minor dependents, as well as spouses. Obviously not to whole parties, though.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
Menswear question: I've found myself in the market for a new suit for a formal social occasion (needs to look good in photos). I have one from over a decade ago that probably still fits, but it seems like a good time to get a new one. That said, I don't really expect to get it much use out of it, because my line of work (engineering) is mostly business casual, and even when I've been interviewing within the last few years, it's just too warm here (American South) to wear a jacket around probably 10 months out of the year. But it's not inconceivable that I might want one to wear to the odd business meeting, funeral, or such.
My timeline is within the next month or so, and I figure my budget is at most a few hundred (probably not enough for a bespoke suit, although IMO that's a poor option because I really don't know what I'm looking for). Does the Motte have any good advice on what to look for or avoid? Fabrics, color (aforementioned occasion recommends blue, but not a specific shade), cut, features, specific brands or stores (I live in a fairly large city, but don't really want to go too far)? I'm not that familiar with current trends (slow as they move, they're not completely static in menswear), and I'm sure some of our members wear suits regularly and have strong opinions or good advice.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"? It's not a high sacrament: blessing meals is ubiquitous, and I've never seen a priest refuse to provide a blessing in lieu of communion to non-members. I know there are limitations on selling blessed objects.
I wouldn't be surprised at priests blessing weapons of war (although most of the examples that come to mind might be orthodox or protestant, there is a Catholic concept of Just War), but I can imagine a refusal to bless, say, objects of a prurient nature. Is this generally up to discretion or is there a general bright line rule I'm not familiar with (or more likely, some combination)?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8mo ago
What's funny about this is that my experience is largely the opposite: I recently visited some friends in the north Dallas metroplex, which is about as close to the platonic ideal of detached-house suburbia as you can get sprawling in all directions, and they know their neighbors on all sides by name (and which tools and skills they regularly trade), and live within a few hundred meters of an HOA-managed playscape where they regularly encounter the same few dozen children and parents. As far as I can tell, the folks I know in the NYC area have much more trouble meeting their neighbors behind closed apartment doors, with front yards replaced with dark interior hallways, and porches replaced with coffee shops and bars.
I'd buy that the experience varies a lot by personality, though: if you are looking for a particular niche interest friend group, the city is probably a better choice, and suburbia can be pretty underwhelming. But I do think suburbs are often undersold generally.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9mo ago
IMO Top Gun: Maverick did a good job of scriptwriting without throwing its title character under the bus. But that may be the only modern sequel/remake I can think of that does a passable job. Disney (really, Lucasfilm in particular) seems to like bringing up old characters and showing that despite when we last saw them victorious at the end of the movie, they've gotten old and have their lives falling apart.
On the other hand, Maverick is probably the only good example I've seen in the last few years. I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits. At least from the outside, it seems obvious that many of these movies are going to be trainwrecks long before release.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11mo ago
This is the equivalent of a Japanese Banzai charge straight into dug-in machine gun emplacements and sighted artillery.
I've long thought that if the Catholics really wanted to win a battle in the Culture War, they should start repeating "anti-Catholic animus" (or perhaps some catchier -phobia or -ism term I'm not going to consider) in the same way that "racism" and "antisemitism" get thrown around. The historical citations aren't really unjustified: the KKK was founded as, among other things, anti-Catholic. All of the historical bias against Italians and Irish immigrants is at least somewhat rooted in anti-Catholic bias, as is some of the bias against Central and South American immigration. The Nazis persecuted Catholics. And they continue to be victims of hate crimes in the US.
On one hand, repetition legitimizes and a constant drone of "we're persecuted" is functionally how various groups on the left have achieved their existing hierarchy -- this seems to bear more relation to the quantity and quality of complaints than to any particular metrics of measurable oppression. On the other, I respect that Catholics absolutely could claim (some degree of) martyrdom in the Year of Our Lord 2023 but choose not to because silent stoicism better aligns with their principles.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Kids are expensive, stressful, time consuming and have high variance.
Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect." Think skydiving or similar. IMO the availability of easy and effective family planning makes it really easy to look at that description and decide that misery doesn't sound fun, and hedonism seems like a better short-term choice. I think it's similar in that regard to, say, unhealthy-but-tasty food and living metabolically healthy.
I don't know that I consider birth control to be a net negative, but I can at least see how given the choice people might decide to not take the leap that turns out better primarily in hindsight. I would agree with other posters that this can probably be countered with a reasonably small amount of culture shifting to make child rearing and families higher status, and perhaps a bit more general encouragement to temporary discomfort that makes things better in the long run.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
I was quite surprised when I worked at a startup that was in the process of winding down, and one of our (older, single, but pretty sharp) engineers indicated a backup plan to "go back to grinding at poker." I'm not a gambling man, but I was surprised that there was market space (and still is, since we're still friends) to eke out rent and bills somewhat reliably at a casino in Vegas. Apparently it works (only with certain card games -- you will lose at slots), although he's also bounced between a few engineering gigs.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5mo ago
Large parts of the Western world have embraced the idea of home ownership as an investment vehicle (IIRC Japan is an interesting exception). In the last few decades this has worked as prices have increased, but it creates crossed incentives between current owners and people who want to buy a house. IMO my house's value to me (beyond the sentimental) is almost exclusively as a dwelling, and day-to-day it's price doesn't impact me.
I don't know that the idea was completely wrong, but there does seem to be a theoretical limit of residential property values in terms of wage-adjusted incomes before the average family can't afford to own anything ("and be happy"?).
But actually unwinding the model (reducing prices) will probably hurt a bunch of middle-class voters pretty badly, which seems like political suicide so I expect it to be put off as long as possible and maybe an attempt at gradual deflating.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5mo ago
There's a lot of disinterest in "tracking" (dividing students by ability groups) in the United States because it makes the racial divides in educational outcomes very obvious. This isn't to say that such things don't exist (most notably magnet schools), but there's also a portion of the political left that attempts to stunt or eliminate such systems: selection to attend Lowell High School in San Francisco, one of the best (public) schools in the city, was switched from an academic basis to a random lottery in 2020. This led to a huge increase in failing grades in incoming classes, and a successful recall election of several school board commissioners in 2022 -- the school has returned to merit-based admissions as of this academic year. Stuyvesant in NYC also sees similar calls to end merit-based admissions from time to time.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5mo ago
I'm not exactly sure what your plans are, but Chris McCandless died in a schoolbus in Alaska in 1992, later made famous by Into the Wild and a more recent movie, and just a few years ago the state had to remove the bus because tourists kept drowning or getting lost trying to find it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Are we committing some crime against them? What if we think we've designed them to like it? It still seems all very I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
I think there are a whole host of ethical questions about consciousness that don't (yet?) have good answers like the ones you ask. What is ethical for a consciousness that can be trivially duplicated or paused indefinitely? What level of intelligence merits protection?
You would think modern ethicists (or sci-fi authors) would be interested in these sorts of things, but I haven't seen much. They seem very focused on "alignment" or wrongthink, rather than the IMO hard questions. Open to, er, novel suggestions if anyone has discussed this more deeply that I've missed.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
In other words if a church says a group is sinful,
I think this is how it's perceived more broadly by non-Christians, but misses the specific point that (most?) Christian denominations believe everyone is sinful. If you described a group of devout Catholics as sinful, I suspect the response would be "yes we are," with some commentary about confession, forgiveness, and repentance.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work and battery tech is still not close enough to compensate
While this sentiment is probably unpopular in the green space these days, over the past year or two I've realized that actually fielding scaled renewable systems anywhere roughly north of the Mason-Dixon line requires something like two orders of magnitude more battery capacity than even "battery-backed renewable" systems design for these days. Expected grid usage needs to go up. Way up.
To fully switch from fossil fuels, we presumably need to switch heating over from largely combustion furnaces to heat pumps: heating a home in northern Europe in winter takes far more energy than cooling one in a warmer climate. Electric transportation adds to grid usage. Including these, total demand is almost certainly highest when solar is least useful. A few net-zero days in summer is cute, but doesn't really provide a viable path to storing summer sunlight for winter, and without that investments in solar would be better placed in nuclear.
As we’ve discussed, the IDF will be humiliated if they go into Gaza on foot, and I say that as someone very sympathetic to Zionism. It’s a losing move.
I've seen lots of anticipation of a ground operation, but very little in the way of what its actual goals would be. What would the IDF's success criteria be, short of "roll in and flatten any buildings that return fire until either an unconditional surrender is reached, or no buildings are left"? I don't think global opinion is going to give them quite that much of a leash. Are there specific targets they might want to get their hands boots on?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Keep in mind: there is absolutely no sex/gender distinction in our local language.
There is barely one in English either, to be honest. It seems to have been shoehorned retroactively because the sex descriptors are adjectives -- "female" as a noun is, er, quite objectifying as used, and I can see why it upsets some feminists -- and the gender descriptors are nouns: "woman [career]" is awkward too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I think the biggest problem with that argument is that cars pretty much entirely kill unintentionally.
While I'm not completely onboard with anti-car YIMBY urbanists, I think they have a reasonable point that most automobile "accidents" are the result of avoidable negligence, and that our auto safety standards reflect a growing allowance for carelessness on the part of drivers. IMO limiting road-legal cars to 90mph (5 over the highest legal speed limit in the country) with strict liability and enforcement, and limiting power to fairly modest acceleration would anger a lot of gearheads but probably save lives overall. Europe does reasonably well with average velocity enforcement of time between fixed measurement points.
I'm not opposed to people owning performance cars, but I don't think they should be "performing" on public streets. There's probably some reasonable middle ground with separate "road" and "race" modes in car computers that I'd be willing to go along with.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter?
From a technical perspective, absolute net neutrality was probably never a tenable prospect: there are all sorts of reasons why ISPs want to optimize traffic flows. Interactive applications (Zoom calls, video games) prefer minimal latency, while streaming services focus on bandwidth and can happily buffer enough to handle less continuous data. Legal streaming being a huge bandwidth user, many services were interested in distinctly less-than-neutral contracts where ISPs would host either hardware or data close to customers to reduce bandwidth costs (these are largely mutually beneficial). Some internet plans are cellular, and IRL bandwidth is a very finite resource: do we really want to enforce that wireless providers can't throttle video streaming (not necessarily completely, but perhaps forcing a lower resolution) to make sure your neighbors in any sufficiently crowded space don't prevent you from checking your email. Honestly, some sort of traffic prioritization is probably inescapable, and it's very unclear to me that "neutral" is either well-defined or desirable.
There's also a decent argument that it was only really an argument because the people pushing for it thought they might lose. Millennials and Zoomers with Netflix accounts were scared their ISPs were going to rope them into costly plans to replace falling cable TV package revenue. Sometimes this takes the form of a generic data cap, which exist but aren't universal even on cellular plans. I don't know that those fears were misplaced, but in the past 5 years I think it's clear that between the political will of streaming companies and their (voting!) customers, legislators can't outright ignore their concerns.
I'm sure there are some principled cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis, but I am pretty confident that most of the folks involved circa 2017 were probably more concerned about who was going to bear the financial burden of growing bandwidth costs. Personally, I was loosely in favor, since ISPs are often monopolies. Since then, though, high-bandwidth internet usage has gone mainstream (even outside of the pandemic) such that (even self-interested) neutrality advocates aren't a minority.
There's probably also a darker view that the mainstream left that supported net neutrality as anti-censorship when they were plucky upstarts are now in positions of power and their interests against censorship were never principled, just self-interested. I'm not sure I would endorse that view, but I see how someone could argue it, and it's not a great look.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Epps' suit against Fox News will be allowed to continue, suggesting the possibility that he could win millions of dollars.
On a purely academic level, I wonder if there's an argument that, in isolation, "he's a fed!" is not actually defamatory. The claim is (I assume) that he was defamed as "working for the feds by encouraging protesters to enter the Capitol," but the second half of that claim is pretty evidently true from the video evidence. Is the first half alone, even if it is false, a negative claim about a person? I'm sure it is to some people, but it seems fraught to allow a court (in which most of the professional parties probably see "working for the government" as a positive, or at worst neutral claim) to generally rule as defamation something that only a small minority actually find disparaging. The overall claim is probably disparaging to the government itself, but I'm not aware of any law against alleging government conspiracies.
Sure, I believe he's received a bunch of hate mail for these accusations, but I'm pretty sure that's par for the course of anyone who achieves that level of infamy.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Everything should be horizontally expanded to fit its container at all times.
There are some legitimate concerns about readability and column width on widescreen monitors. The old school 80 column wide text terminal is a decent width, but a bit wider is fine too. That said, there are definitely designer-driven layouts that are way too narrow, but manually adjusting my browser window would be a PITA to do frequently.
Some width limit is reasonable, although maybe allowing sites to specify it might have been a poor design choice.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool;
I have always been told that dry-firing (most?) guns is bad mechanically because certain pieces aren't meant to hit together repeatedly (hardened firing pins on non-brass surfaces?). Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?
I'm definitely not an expert on this, so I'd be curious to hear more from someone who knows.
Part of the problem with this is legal case is that with a few (largely nuclear-related) exceptions, all classification guidance exists in the form of Executive Orders. The current guidance is EO 13526 from 2010, but that revoked and replaced a whole list of orders from previous administrations dating back to Harry Truman. So if the question is "could Trump have declassified this?", he could have declassified (almost) everything by mere a executive order revoking 13526 without replacement. In addition, the EO 13526 explicitly designates the President (and Vice President) as a "classification authority" able to determine classification.
But what constitutes an executive order? In general, the separate powers of the US federal government are given broad leeway to determine their own rules and procedures (see Noel Canning, which found that the Senate is in recess only when it declares itself as such). I can't see any reasonable court deciding that failing to write on official White House stationary invalidates an executive order. There might be an argument that the President wasn't faithfully executing the laws as passed by Congress, but the Legislature has its own means (impeachment) for enforcing that.
If the contention is that the illegal acts happened after he was president, that's a potential case, but I think it still faces a fairly high bar to show that keeping the documents wasn't justified by actions taken as president: that would require a court to take significant leeway in interpreting how the executive ran its operations. A precedent of "just because a President [claims to have] issued verbal instructions to do things that are lawful except for violating prior executive orders doesn't prevent your prosecution for violating those prior orders" would be terrible.
Does an elected President (in particular, one with no prior service) even have to sign SF 312? That NDA is the vehicle through which most criminal charges for mishandling classified information flow, and without it it's unclear that any charges could stick to a non-signatory. That's why the powers that be can't charge the journalists at The Washington Post who published the Snowden leaks.
Now, the fact that classification is almost entirely due to Executive fiat is, I would agree, a terrible arrangement, and it would make quite a bit of sense to codify (much of) the existing ruleset through an act of Congress. But, in its great wisdom, Congress hasn't decided that doing so is worth its effort. Ultimately, I'm not a fan of Trump, but this really seems like a politicized effort to bring historically unprecedented charges.
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