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I feel like I need to tap in someone who is better at communication here, because clearly I'm not getting my point across.

It doesn't matter how closely your definition of God aligns with reality. That's totally irrelevant. I haven't even started making arguments about God's nature. We're still laying the groundwork here, or at least I'm trying to, but it's not working.

I'm trying to get you to concede that, where definition and reality conflict, reality should win out. If you can't concede that, then there is not even any theoretical amount of evidence that will convince you that your understanding of God is not both perfect and complete, and no point to this discussion.

This is why I opened with the question I did--if God himself were to tell you your definition of him is wrong, would you believe him? Or does your definition take precedence over his own words?

"In theory reality can never conflict with theory though!"

Yes, this is true of all theories, and yet reality conflicts with most of them.

I realize the hypothetical is a bit unfair--"If you were wrong, and knew you were wrong, would you accept defeat?"--but it's also certainly unfair for you to continue this discussion if your answer to that hypothetical is "no" as it seems to be.

Without the positive feedback of the classical conception of God, though, my spiritual life went nowhere. What does it matter if God isn't all that He is? If he's just like some alien dude who did everything in the Bible? That has no implications on who I am, what morality is, the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If He doesn't actually explain anything, if He's not actually the Summum Bonum? I'd be left with a cool role model but if I disagreed with His actions it's conceivable that my judgements are better than his. The Cool Role Model called God is just a potential tyrant.

What you're saying here is, "if my theological framework is wrong, then according to my theological framework, God would simply be a powerful alien."

I think we agree now. Overture isn't going to be transformative. If Concerto has another 20% better fuel efficiency per seat mile, a 5500nm range, and a low-boom design that allows Mach 1.7 flight over sparsely populated land areas (particularly most of CONUS and the Australian outback) then that probably would be transformative. But all of those are fighting basic physics - with the possible exception of the range they are not going to happen based on simple incremental improvements.

I like the idea of flying half the Overtures on a westbound RTW route, although you need to add a Singapore stop between Tokyo and Dubai (HND->DXB crosses too much densely populated land, including China which is not going to allow supersonic overflight by Americans, whereas HND->SGP is over water and SGP->DXB is over water if you do a small detour round India - also HND-SGP and SGP-DXB have better economics than HND->DXB). It also doesn't work with current airline business models.

They leave shit loads of comments.

Definitely. All the "wow this is amazing" and "thanks for this, I loved it" comments under really terrible quality Youtube videos which are full of errors and AI-voiced, if not AI-generated? I mean, they could be real people who really think this is great, but bots have now replaced "hire people overseas for peanuts to leave positive comments and reviews on your garbage on all kinds of sites".

I don't know much about the guy apart from recognising the name, but he seems to be leftish in his politics so probably a generic liberal who votes Democrat, and that is what the "just the facts for the citizens" initiative will be: did you know, dear hard-working American Joe or Jane, that the wicked misinformation and disinformation around [insert hot button topic of the moment] coming from the MAGA extremists is wrong and false and bad and yeah it might be technically true sometimes about some things but it's still bad and evil and you shouldn't be influenced by it?

Generally that's what I think as soon as I see the words "nonpartisan civic initiative" used about government or political material: oh, this is more Democratic PACs in action. Sometimes, they're Republican PACs.

The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?"

It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.

Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.

Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.

Daily Record

This is a Scottish newspaper, so it's local rather than national, unlike The Sun or The Daily Mirror (and you get regional versions of those, e.g. The Irish Sun). A lot of the daily papers got hoovered up by the Murdoch behemoth and brought downmarket as tabloids to become profitable. Your question is a bit like asking "Why do you need the Minnesota Star-Tribune, isn't USA Today enough?"

Somehow you replied to yourself on a completely different topic, as far as I can see?

I don't have much to say about this, even though little girls and bladed weapons form a major part of my life. It's cute, I guess. The incident in the video I mean. As far as propaganda goes, we've seen so much that this is just background noise. And as for the AI image...okay? Doesn't really do much for me. I found the real video more interesting, though neither is worth much. Even the real one could be staged or manipulated. And even if real, what did we see? A girl screaming at the camera and briefly pulling out two things that might have been weapons (in someone elses hands). Girls do dumb shit all the time. Maybe this one wasn't dumb but actually heroic. But we don't know. How the hell would we be able to tell?

We live in an epistemic desert, where all information is mirages.

the object level issue is too muddy to comment on until more information surfaces. Perhaps the teenager had sympathetic reasons for brandishing knives, perhaps she did not.

However, the general point in this case feels like a nothingburger. I don't think AI images are doing anything new. Before the advent of mass photography and telex, all pictures in newspapers, magazines and other contexts were illustrations, designed to evoke emotions yet supposed to illustrate real life events. Even with photography, many news photos have been intentionally staged to be evocative. During the past decade, meme texts, pictures and shopped photos have been cheaply available from 4chan. Only difference is that quality of freely available illustrations have been slightly upgraded, but it can be assumed the audience is soon desensitized.

Since you don't give this option, I'll have to record "neither" as my answer here. The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?" In a slightly different context, this would be "little thugs attack ordinary person going about their business in broad daylight".

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.

Friend, if crappy bog-standard AI beige cartoons that are blinkin' well everywhere elicit strong reactions of sympathy from you, congratulations, you are Pavlov's dog.

Which probably is the entire problem in a nutshell, now I come to think of it.

Does anyone else hate that cartoony style because of over-exposure to it, even for 'serious' discussions of topics? I was about ready to throw a glass at the screen when Freddie deBoer used the crappy cartoony bastardised-Ghibli chibi of Joe Rogan, for pete's sake!

Autism runs rampant on the Motte, and remember that anime is often preferred to 3D reality because it is easier to parse and safer to consume.

This probably sounds a lot more hostile than I intend.

My buddies get extremely frustrated by teamkills, so I maintain the best trigger, stratagem and comms discipline I can manage. I try to lead by example and take my friendly fire deaths with good grace and cheer, but so far it isn't rubbing off. Hell, they even get prickly when they smell a whiff of gas or have to take five slow steps through an EMS field, never mind the fact that it just saved their lives! They'd rather get eaten by bugs than accept that sometimes danger close is the correct response, and good luck getting them to take cover. No, they'll stand out completely in the open, on the wrong side of a chokepoint, with me calling out to them to just take ten steps back and not get mulched, but they'd rather magdump and then complain about running out of stims and ammo.

I like my friends, I like playing with them, but they really don't want to think about what they're doing. To them (nominally very intelligent people), play-time is brain-off time. And they will absolutely, every time, die trying to get back their support weapon rather than just call in a new one.

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but what the fuck are you talking about? It isn't even a good AI-generated image. You were hyping it up and I was wondering if when I clicked on your link I was going to see some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context). But what you've actually given me is like a low-rent obviously-AI-generated Ben Garrison knockoff. Get a grip, man.

I usually don't make it very far into puzzle games (me dumb), so I'm reluctant to part with an entire month's fun budget (me poor) if I'm not very confident that I won't regret the purchase.

That said, I should probably just try the demo.

I still feel bad about Cjet gifting me a copy of Factorio: Space Age and me never making it to the multipalyer sessions. Based mottizen, too generous for his own good.

It seems funny to me that the idea of Believing Women (w.r.t. them actually being harassed when the women react as though they were) is widely mocked on the right internet... unless the accused are migrant and especially unless the accuser is below the age of majority.

The media landscape I've been brought up on suggests to me that a certain demographic of women learn/are taught to scream rape to ward off any sort of attention, warranted or not, from very young age.

Bots don't leave comments

They leave shit loads of comments. There seems to be some kind of system for limiting these though since they never seen to go beyond a certain percentage of the overall comments.

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video

So, I don't agree here and I'm curious as to which of our perspectives is the more common one.

Please answer the poll on which of the options elicits stronger emotions:

https://strawpoll.com/NoZrzw9oBZ3

Then there is the question of which of the two garners more engagement and there I don't really think it's a question of which is more engaging but rather which is easier to consume while still being reasonably engaging. An image is much easier to consume than a video and it fits much better in a text feed than a video does. You can glance at an image and then scroll right by, while a video breaks your engagement flow with the feed.

I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment

Well there's also the fact that the left has huge budgets to propagate their ideas, they don't need AI. They can pay 50, 100 people to make propaganda for a single show. They have entire broadcasting companies all around the world. They already have endless NGOs and cadres and academics pushing out meaningless words, they don't need to automate it. Automating it might even hurt them in absolute terms rather than just relative terms, rendering their patrons unemployed.

See my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348142?context=8#context

Ah yes, can't pick a better human representation of inhuman evil than fking Balmer. When I see Balmer I remmember all the shenanigans he got up to back in the day and his roid rage fueled hatred for Linux and open source software.

https://www.postbulletin.com/news/local/crowdfunding-campaign-for-alleged-woman-involved-in-viral-tiktok-garners-over-100k

The video depicted a man, who is not white, confronting the woman for calling a Black child a racial slur. Though the original video was taken down, Michael McWhorter, known online as TizzyEnt, reposted the video on Wednesday, April 30, to his more than 9.5 million followers across TikTok , Instagram , X and YouTube.

In her campaign, Hendrix claims the child stole from her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at the Soldiers Field Park playground.

“I called the kid out for what he was,” Hendrix wrote.

For context, this happened right after Karmelo Anthony, a black teenager, stabbed a white high-school student to death at a track meet and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via fundraising sites. Hendrix also started a fundraiser to cover relocation expenses, and it went viral in the aftermath of the Anthony incident. From the sentiment I saw on social media, it seemed like mostly spite donations and people supporting her refusal to cave to the cancellation mob. There was a concerted effort to get her fundraiser above the Karmelo Anthony total, and it ended up raising something like $800k.

And just as it seemed like her 15 minutes of fame were up, she was just charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, apparently for simply using the n-word.

behavioral issues

This little girl has absolutely had it with the rapacious diversification. That she has had to arm herself to protect her sister is a kind of condemnation on UK society we can't even come close to making ourselves.

Here are a few riffs on the video that have crossed my feed (all should be viewable without logging in): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzUEppFW0AA_Ucc?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzSGAjkakAAp7VP?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://x.com/bitcloud/status/1960179071511585038/photo/1 https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1

I do think these new capabilities benefit the right more than the left in the current environment. You correctly point out that these are asymmetric weapons, but that needs to be interpreted in the context of an information "battlefield" that is heavily tilted against the right. There are comparatively very few right-wing institutions that staff full-time paid journalists, political cartoonists, and commentators to pump out high production value propaganda in response to the news cycle. Technology that allows anons on Twitter to turn their idea into reality with a few prompts and a bit of tweaking in photoshop is a democratizing force that helps level the playing field. Twitter is an incredible incubator for these ideas and messages as well, now that they have dialed back the censorship. The most effective messages rise to the top, while the low-effort slop (mostly) languishes at the bottom of the replies section.