aaa
1d ago
you simply issue a new currency and print money to pay property holders at a laughable official exchange rate, giving them cents on the dollar, then briefly switch to using euros or dollars, then issue a new currency. This would require crashing out of the Euro and possibly EU but this, again, is perfectly legal
It isn't. As long as you are in the eurozone you are legally required to follow the stability pact and the eurozone is like hotel california. You might say "it's just fines" but mass deportation would also result in fines, at least in theory.
aaa
1d ago
Lower prices is just something you're supposed to say as a politician. If you vote for a politician because he said "lower prices" you are retarded and I can't help you, but I'm convinced nobody actually does that.
aaa
1d ago
But why not? If humans can exist billions of years before they evolved, before the universe, why not fruit or a snake? It works, though, it pushes everything where we cannot look so it works, I can't deny it. I wonder what the allegorical interpretation for the genealogies going back to Adam is, in this framework.
aaa
1d ago
That doesn't sound like an allegorical interpretation, it sounds like a literal interpretation but placed in, like, a different "dimension" (in the science fiction sense of "dimension").
aaa
1d ago
That sounds swedemborgian to me. He went further and said that hell basically wouldn't suck that bad from the perspective of the souls that chose it, I don't know what Lewis imagined. But I don't think it's the canonical view, that you get a final saving throw after death.
Does it work for you? Imagine the worst person ever, kills and rapes his whole life away, but after death he sees god, says "yep, I guess I was wrong" and just like that he gets the same reward as the most pious of humans. My position has been for a long time that the problem of evil is mostly psychological.
aaa
1d ago
I don't know. Science only happened once in the history of humanity (maybe twice if you count the greeks, but really at scale only once) so it's impossible to establish a causal link. But it makes sense to me that if you psyop every intelligent person into only worrying about the spiritual, because the physical world is evil, they're probably not going to get anything done.
Gnosticism went away probably because of the same trends that made the Dark Ages. The smart people disappeared.
The dark ages had a lot of causes, but I think that a lot of people getting into the mindset that the reign of god was coming soon probably didn't help either. Besides what's making smart people appear and disappear in your model, exactly?
aaa
1d ago
If Genesis is an allegory what is it an allegory for? Because its incompatibility with evolution goes beyond just the factual, it's a narrative incompatibility there is no space for the original sin, for the fall, evolution if anything goes from low to high, genesis does the opposite. Hence Teilhard being censored.
aaa
1d ago
Why couldn't God save his followers in Lisbon from getting obliterated by an earthquake on All Saint's Day, 1755? They lit their candles, gathered in churches. The earthquake knocked them down and the resulting firestorm, earthquake and tsunami razed the city.
What kind of omnipotent, all-loving God treats his followers this way?
Wrong question, wrong approach to the problem of evil. What happens over here is finite, what happens in the afterlife is infinite. If anything the question should be why doesn't God save all his followers like he did with the ones in Lisbon in 1755? Why does He grace only a few infants with death before they get the chance to sin? But the real question is another: can an infinite punishment for a finite crime really be called good?
aaa
1d ago
I will admit my belief is somewhat loaded on the idea that Jesus actually performed miracles. I lean towards this because I don't have a restricted prior against magic, I think all things are possible for the right being, and I think Jesus was obviously somebody because otherwise we would not have a religion about him, particularly one where he died very quickly, a material failure, with only a handful of followers.
I don't buy this argument because we have plenty of contemporary examples of people who were nothing special who nonetheless accumulated a substantial following, think Moon, Joseph Smith or even Hubbard all documented grifters and liars who convinced tens of thousands to millions. If you look at the sources we have about the early church, it's really nothing impressive. A handful of christian texts survive from the first 50 years, almost nobody talks about it. If you compare mormonism today with christianity in the year 200AD, mormonism will look wildly more successful and its basis is some guy saying he read in a gold book that's invisible to everyone but him that he gets to sleep with more than one woman. The success of christianity is far removed from the deeds of Jesus, it only really exploded when it became the religion of the emperor about 300 years later, by that point what exactly Jesus did or didn't do, or even if existed was impossible to know for anyone.
I will stop here, but I thought this could be a fun discussion to be had, because I think it deals with the main adversary of atheism from a different perspective
I don't get what kind of discussion you want to have but I've come full circle from thinking christianity would have had an easier time weathering modernity in the marcionite version, without the old testament, to thinking that we wouldn't have even had a modernity with only marcion. Gnosticism might be logically elegant but, if you think the material world is an illusion or the making of an evil god that you are supposed to escape, you are never going to get anything done, never going to make any progress.
aaa
27d ago
Humanity. Of course. Or at the least a God-given eternal soul.
How do you know what does and doesn't have a God-given eternal soul?
aaa
27d ago
Concern and dislike are different things. The pew poll is about concern. The reason they are concerned is because they don't want AI to take their job, the reason AI applications have so many users is because it's convenient when AI takes someone-else's job.
aaa
27d ago
Suppose we have two groups of people, A and B. Group A generally finds right answers, but for wrong reasons. Group B generally finds wrong answers, but for right reasons. Which group would you rather be in?
I think you are overdosing on philosophy. If group A generally finds the right answers it has a generally correct model of the world. They could be wrong in the sense that newtonian physics is wrong but a better way to think about it is that it is approximately correct under certain circumstances. Your hypothetical presupposes a definition of correctness that's beyond just making correct predictions.
To the general point you were addressing, you shouldn't adopt a model of the world that correctly predicts one thing if it happens to do it for the wrong reasons, because it will be generally wrong.
aaa
1mo ago
The argument that the wrong side won comes from people that have externalized all the problems the west developed onto the jews.
aaa
1mo ago
if the Nazis had won, there’s no indication that they would suddenly have switched from their extractive economy based on slave labour and exploiting conquered countries for raw materials.
I don't understand. It doesn't seem to me that german economy was any more dependent on slave labor than any other european country, arguably less since they didn't have any colonies. The countries they conquered during WW2 they had for a handful of year, all of which spent at war.
The average person is obviously worse off in a Russian-aligned economy, I don’t see how you can argue otherwise
I don't know, to be honest, that you can extrapolate the past into the future. The EU has made some serious mistakes in the past 15 years, it seems to me that we are set for irrecoverable decline. Not that Putin's rule would make things better, but also not much worse either.
As someone who lives in a EU country, that’s just plain false. I can live, work and retire in 27 countries
No, you can't. You can work in 27 countries and you can live there as long as you can prove to be self sufficient but not retire. Even access to healthcare, beyond emergency stuff, is going to be complicated.
You don’t get screwed by hidden fees, whether you’re booking a plane ticket or getting a hotel.
Well, actually, regardin hotels a lot of places now have a tourism tax that you get charged for at checkin time. That sales tax is always included is really cool but the EU is still a bureaucratic mess, I'll refer you to Draghi's various reports on the difficulties of starting cross-border european companies.
You can take almost any cultural form of degeneration and you can plot it out.
Nudity in movies is almost completely gone. Basically all forms of drugs taking except pot were more accepted in the past. Heroine was legal for about 20 years 100 years ago. Calling things you don't like gay was ok in the 90s and now it isn't. Calling things you don't like was ok, then it wasn't and now it's back. Most of the world until the mid 1800 had no age of consent laws, the places that had them often set it apallingly low (like 12), in 1980 the blue lagoon was released with partial underage nudity, these days there's talk of raising the age of consent to 21 or 25, which would make the blue lagoon underage pornography because of the male lead . Slavery was almost universally legal until 200 years ago and now it isn't unless it's men getting drafted to go to war. Abortion before quickening was legal under common law until last century, then it wasn't and now it's back. Alcohol consumption was ok for most of history, then people advocated against it and now it's back. Eugenics was bad for most of history, then people advocated for it, and now it's back to being bad. Absolute monarchy was considered the good christian way to rule a country and now it isn't. Etcaetera.
If you dropped your 25 year old grandmother fresh from 1959 or 1949 she’d be shocked by how far we’d fallen culturally and morally.
She would probably also be thrilled at how much women have advanced in society.
aaa
2mo ago
Definitely agree, but it's very different. The prequels were not a problem of vision, but of execution (for the most part). They failed because Lucas was old and thought he was better then he was, not because he tried to please too many people.
The basic idea of the prequels is fundamentally bad. The cool thing about the original movies is that the force (and jedis by extension) was mysterious it could do miracles but you didn't know if it could any specific thing. That only works if there are almost no jedis going around (which the original trilogy did, Luke wasn't even a real one), if you fill the setting with jedis it either becomes a fixed set of spells (the prequels), which only appeals to DnD nerds, or a deus ex machina that solves every problem (the sequels), which appeals to nobody.
Don't bring up the EU, nobody reads that.
aaa
2mo ago
I've seen about an hour and a half of the beginning and about 30 minutes of the end. It seems ok. A handful of observations:
- NKB has this weird idea that the head writer for something like fallout or masseffect isn't a public figure and criticising the work of Pagliarulo or Hepler is offlimits, I don't agree. Saying that Hepler leaving didn't improve BioWare's output isn't a defense, incompetent people in positions of power are usually a symptom
- The only thing I didn't already know from the parts I've seen is that Zoe Quinn has claimed that her mother died on three different occasion. It makes a good pair with her birthday having multiple different dates
- I wonder if anyone, when the fullbright company imploded, wrote the stereotypical "we all knew gone home sucked, but we couldn't say anything because the detractors were misogynists"
- Gamergaters insisted that McIntosh was ghost-writing Anita, judging by the performance of feminist frequency after he left they were almost certainly right, I don't know if he goes over this, but it's interesting
- At the end he mentions Dames Making Games in passing. That part of the story is really unclear (what was her involvement, how it intersects with Holowka), I hope some day we get the real version of Zoe Quinn's adventures in Canda
- I think it would also be interesting to look forward from Gamergate. If you see it as a "war" of sorts, or a battle within a war, it can be argued convincingly that anti-gamergate won. All the reputable references to gamergate describe it as an harassment campaign and Anita Sarkeesian's objective of making gaming more feminist was undeniably achieved. Yet, gaming journalism is basically dead, a fraction of a fraction of what it was in 2014, and this years gamescom was wall-to-wall chinese games featuring tits and ass.
aaa
2mo ago
I suppose I’m advocating for the spectrums to be less sticky, or for words to have less of a gravitational pull. Clancy will likely receive a modified sentence based on her state of mind. Yet, what ought we to do with people in the midst of mild, manageable psychosis who may still yet have impaired judgment? Maybe they don’t get away with a full insanity defense, but their sentence could be modified accordingly. This is why I oppose mandatory minimum sentencing. The job of the court — and the court of public opinion for lesser matters — is not just to determine what happened, but to determine the appropriate consequence. The question is whether or not this is a utopian suggestion. Is human nature too punitive to implement this mindset at scale? Are we interested in justice or just blood?
I lean in the other direction. Tying justice to the concept of freewill, the way we did, is a mistake. Freewill doesn't exist, everything we do has a cause it's just that sometimes the cause is too complicated and indirect to understand it. We call this type of ignorance freewill. The more we understand of psychology the less people will look culpable under this model.
This is a mistake, the point of justice (as in the institution, not the philosophical concept) is to make society better. A low IQ, hearing voices, to me are signs of an individual that is inherently defective and so should be given a harsher sentence.
aaa
2mo ago
A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym
I really don't think this is true. In fact, you don't even remember the year correctly. It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared. The story started to pick up steam with the weird-online-right years later with pizzagate, it became a mainstream right wing talking point during biden but mainstream media continued to mostly avoid it until last year.
Even on google trends you can see that few were interested before he died. Bill Gates for reference.
It's very possible that for those people Epstein was just this guy with access to money that knew everyone. He had served a sentence but he was fully discharged and it was for getting a massage from a girl he might or might not have known to be underage, so whatever.
Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together
Ethics its one of the most bullshit branches of philosophy. All ethics needs to conform to your gut feeling of what is right and wrong and since that's not based on any a priori simple rule system they all need to be malleable enough to be made to conform. Outside of completely irrelevant thought experiments they also all end up being homomorph. How about we pretend they were christian? It says in the book of virtues that rape is bad but you also have to forgive, he paid penance, he shows contrition, Mary Magdalene and shit. There you go.
At the end of the day many evangelicals vote for an adulterer who grabs em by the pussy, why? Because there are other considerations, more important things. Ethics needs to be flexible, to bend which ever way. This is a good thing actually. The worst people in the world were the ones that took ethics seriously enough to suppress their gut instinct.
aaa
2mo ago
It's fantastic, isn't it? Medicine and car safety getting so far. I don't think I would have guessed correctly the order of magnitude of people who die in car accidents in germany.
aaa
2mo ago
"You successfully took down Cambridge's credibility and disappeared without leaving a trace. Nobody suspects anything. Great job, Agent 47".
Nope. That's for the european union, not for the eurozone. There is no procedure to leave the eurozone. Once you are in the eurozone you're there and in the EU forever.
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