domain:acoup.blog
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1m ago
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities
No background in Aristotle needed. The word "quality" is just being used in its ordinary sense. Intelligence is a quality. Beauty is a quality. Nothing fancy going on.
But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself
Sure. But then, all people would be the same in that regard. Love has to single out a particular person (or a particular thing) in contradistinction to others.
In my own view, universal love is at worst incoherent, and at best it's a particularly tepid form of love. There is no love unless you can draw a distinction between those who are loved and those who are unloved; and so universal properties shared by all people cannot be the basis of love.
swift
2m ago
Sorry to hear, that does sound very frustrating. It does look like they have traditional academic prestige on their side, maybe that tipped the grant over to FRI. Did you apply for the same objective, or something else? Would you consider joining them so they do a good job?
TIRM
7m ago
I've seen proposals for tech worker unions. It's mostly bullshit about social justice and workers refusing work due to ethical concerns. As though a union could block a corporate contract with the Israeli government or the US military. As though less work is good for us.
Another main issue is making it harder to fire tech workers. It being easy to fire tech workers is a good thing. Driving out weaklings is obviously good. It makes the rest of us more valuable.
The one defensible point they make is regarding number of hours worked. I understand why some people don't want long hours. I'm still against the proposals since hiring more people to do the same amount of work would probably result in a decrease in compensation per person.
The above points are pushing for more people and person-hours with less work. That should result in a decrease in total compensation per worker. My entire concern is total compensation. Their concern is progressive culture warring and an understanding of workers' rights that amounts to encouraging mediocrity. Our values are incompatible and I don't want a union forced onto me. They would be taking my dues and spending them on progressive political lobbying while working on goals that would decrease my total compensation. In every way bad for me and opposed to my values. And then people act like "techbros" are fools working against their own interests.
Hieronymus
14m ago
It means that love of neighbor follows from love of God, but the former doesn’t subsume the latter.
Let me give an example that I read a zillion years ago in the New Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I may get the details wrong, and I haven’t confirmed the thoroughness of the book’s sources, but it works just as well as a thought experiment anyway:
A woman was in the custody of the Soviet secret police. These sometimes took a perverse joy in breaking people they weren’t going to let leave alive anyway, and they had decided to break her faith. When maiming her legs didn’t do it, they brought in her children and threatened to shoot them if she did not deny Christ. She refused, and the secret police shot her children in front of her.
If love of God is the higher good, she did the right thing. It’s not that she didn’t love her children enough; it’s that she loved God more than that.
Throwaway05
22m ago
it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way.
This is not the fault of the "mental health industry." Ask any clinically practicing therapist, social worker, or psychiatrist what they think of "little t trauma" and they will BITCH.
The problem is some combination of wokeism/snowflakeism/safetyism/influencer culture etc.
You will find professionals supporting this kind of garbage but it is more often non-clinical/non-practicing people.
You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.
Additionally, something that often gets missed when therapy is mentioned - the goal of therapy is to stop therapy. Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.
mr_bailey
26m ago
Most US prostitution is not streetwalker (estimates range from 10-20% streetwalkers). The dominant forms of prostitution are call-girls/escorts and pseudo-brothels (e.g. massage parlors, etc.). Both claim the fig leaf (with varying seriousness/success) that the payment is nominally for other legal services and any sex is just happenstance.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
I have never understood why some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women.
Presumably, as a luxury belief.
hydroacetylene
37m ago
It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).
Why should we expect evolution to push for ‘getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible’? This is not an offspring maximizing strategy(for humans early and stable marriage is the fertility minmax).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
46m ago
Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman.
I suppose so, in the sense that both men and women can be paraplegic or born blind or whatever.
The ADHD comparison falls apart in that when someone claims to have ADHD they're trying to get the treatment for ADHD (meds, extra exam time) to get an advantage. People who claim to be asexual claim don't want to be treated for it at all.
Pigeon
coo coo
47m ago
It is perhaps more accurate to consider the pre- and post-Mao CCP as entities that share continuity but otherwise represents a break, in the same way that the Tang overthrew the Sui in the 6th century (after the Sui were bankrupting the country to invade Goguryeo) but essentially retained its institutions.
One important thing to note about the Mandate of Heaven is that it is less extensive than the divine right of kings elsewhere in the world. The right to rebellion is explicitly written into the Mandate of Heaven.
hydroacetylene
49m ago
The episcopal church has always been more or less defined as the liberal branch of the Christian communion least defined by doctrinal concerns.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 'We have a golden rule: "Mind your own damn business!"'🍞🌹
51m ago
I could be wrong about their motivations, but the impression I get from the Episcopal Church's decision is something along the lines of "The administration is aiding white people who are or might be in danger of their lives, while telling people of colour in similar danger that they are obligated to stay in their own countries and die. This suggests that the administration believes that the life of a white person matters more than that of a person of colour. This belief is a grave sin, and we refuse to be complicit in it."
hydroacetylene
53m ago
Christianity is, quite explicitly, not egalitarian. There’s the inequality between God and man and the angels, obviously. But then the New Testament describes an early church which is profoundly class based- there are different types of clerics, men are the head of women, and slaves are expected to obey their masters. These classes might differ in some regards from secular social classes but it isn’t the classless, property less, stateless society which is communism’s raizon detre. In fact Christian theology has from early days been very skeptical of hostility to the state.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 'We have a golden rule: "Mind your own damn business!"'🍞🌹
1hr ago
Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin.
At least some of those churches condemn sin, but merely disagree with you about whether certain things are sinful (e. g. whatever happens in Pete and Chasten Buttigieg's bedroom).
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 'We have a golden rule: "Mind your own damn business!"'🍞🌹
1hr ago
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important.
But if Man is made in the Image of God, is not 'loving our neighbor as ourself' how we 'love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our, &c., &c.'?
cjet79
1hr ago
It was 20k captured soldiers that were killed including some 8k officers. Which has always been a huge deal for militaries everywhere. They care way more about how their soldiers are treated as POWs than they do about much else.
Elsewhere the volume also discusses French civilians being killed by allied operations, they estimate 80-100k deaths and their attitude is kind of "this is a bummer, but we are trying to kill Hitler so it's worth it."
Also as I said before Dresden's fire bombing is also barely mentioned, 25k dead. The nukes barely mentioned combined death toll of 200k.
Death tolls are rarely mentioned anywhere in the book. It is a dry accounting of a military campaign, and the Holocaust had minimal military impact.
The Germans had experience investigating mass killings, they knew how to cover their tracks, like a good murder investigator is better at getting away with murder. The Allies also announced in 1943 that German soldiers and officers would be returned to countries to face trial for any atrocities they committed, so they gave them an incentive to try and cover it up. But even with that there is still evidence, lidar and excavations have taken place at Treblinka have found the burned up human remains and cremation sites.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
Even at 30% children's pyjama's from Aliexpress are still better than what's on offer domesticly with all the US safetyism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Tree paper? Like the stuff you wipe your ass with? I only read works scribed on vellum.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1hr ago
some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women
Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that they're genuinely asexual (or just uncritically repeating asexual talking points), so sex work to them is legitimately not meaningfully distinguishable from any other work.
This doesn't prevent them from responding to other incentives, of course- for instance, a prostitute might prefer prefer porn be banned if they believe it would lead to greater demand for their services. Whether or not they're aware they're prostitutes is another matter.
No_one
1hr ago
I've heard it was fine from people who came to a game I was then playing and complaining "Well I had to play this because they made WoW suitable for braindead people". Is that a fair description of changes between WoW classic and WoW? Basically the guys were saying WoW skill ceiling, at least re: PvE content was nerfed to the ground so anyone could get the good items etc.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
with a chess or go tree search there's still a ground truth model keeping things from ever going entirely off the rails
MuZero would like a word.
At one point during training, the training environment was needed to keep MuZero from going off the rails and making illegal moves. Once it learns the rules of the game well enough, though, the policy network becomes sufficiently unlikely to output illegal moves that I expect it would continue to improve indefinitely through self play without sampling any illegal moves.
I do wonder if anyone has tried that experiment. It seems like it gets at the core of one of the cruxes people have about recursive self improvement.
FtttG
2hr ago
Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "dog bites man" stories.
There's also a Bandcamp.
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