domain:parrhesia.co
I wish to register doubts concerning the "Europe" headline of some items.
Without knowing anything about your ideas I can only assume that the LLMs, as they are prone to do, have glazed you too much on their value.
Ha, can you imagine if civilization collapses and doesn't rise for another 100,000 years. Then that civilization thinks we were cavemen and finally gets to the moon only to have their heads spin over abandoned flags and moon rovers. Or in another unlikely scenario, we get to Ganymede and find some weird cro magnon trash and porno mags in a pre-fab.
Stuff I'm looking at this week:
Geopolitics
Americas
Court paves way for Trump to yank billions of dollars worth of foreign aid, concluding that aid groups lacked standing to bring the case.
US offers $5m bounty for Haitian warlord 'Barbecue'
Terrible health conditions at Alligator Alcatraz prison
US appeals court says Trump administration can cut billions in foreign aid
Europe
Musk chatbot Grok says it was 'censored' after suspension from X over Gaza posts
Children dying of hunger in Darfur's el-Fasher city
Attempted coup in Mali
Russia Has an Arsenal of New AI Drones Built with Smuggled Nvidia Chips (old news tho)
Zelenskyy: Ukraine won't cede land for peace amid US-Russia summit
European leaders unite behind Ukraine as Trump-Putin meeting nears
Europe says U.S. and Russia cannot decide on Ukraine land swaps at this week's summit
Migrants swim from Morocco to Ceuta as officials say enclave 'overwhelmed'
Middle East
Ireland intends to pass bill to ban the import of good from Israeli settlements despite US pressure
Iran
Where Next for Iran's Supreme Leader? Another review of his unstable grip on power.
Iran arrests 20 Mossad spies, executes nuclear scientist for providing classified information.
WWIII: Palantir CEO Alex Karp Says 3-Front War With Russia, China And Iran 'Very Likely'
Gaza
Israel strike kills Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza due to allegations of his leadership of a Hamas cell involved in rocket attacks.
Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly in talks with South Sudan to take Gazans
Gaza Sees Five Starvation Deaths in 24 Hours
11 more die from malnutrition in Gaza, Hamas-run health ministry says
Israel faces growing global condemnation over its plan to take over Gaza City
Gaza terrorists caught using emblem and vests of the World Central Kitchen.
'It's a horrible picture': Gaza faces new threat from antibiotic-resistant disease
Gaza health system 'catastrophic' with hospitals overwhelmed and medicines running out, WHO warns
Yemen
Yemen's Houthis say they launched 3 drone strikes inside Israel
Asia
Morning Brief: US Coast Guard Commissions First New Icebreaker in Over Two Decades; US, China Trade Accusations Over Panama Canal at UN Security Council
China's Chikungunya Outbreak Surpasses 10,000 Cases, Spreads to Taiwan
Chinese Authorities Mandating Blood Tests, Releasing Lab Mosquitoes to Fight Chikungunya Outbreak (although Epoch Times is not generally a reliable source)
A U.S. destroyer illegally entered the territorial waters of China's Huangyan Island; the Southern Theater Command lawfully and according to regulations warned and expelled it.
On August 13, Navy Colonel He Tiecheng, spokesperson for the Southern Theater Command of the People's Liberation Army, announced the unauthorized entry of the U.S. Navy destroyer "Higgins" into the territorial waters off Huangyan Island. This action was described as a serious violation of China’s sovereignty that undermines regional stability and breaches international law. The Southern Theater Command's naval forces responded by tracking, monitoring, and ultimately expelling the U.S. vessel to assert their legal authority and maintain security in the area.
Key points include the assertion that the U.S. military's activities threaten both China's sovereignty and the peace of the South China Sea. The Chinese naval forces remain vigilant and prepared to defend national interests, emphasizing a continual state of readiness against foreign military actions.
Bangladesh Braces For Potentially Devastating Dengue Outbreak As Cases Surge. The country has documented 101 deaths and over 24,183 infections so far this year
India/Pakistan
Australia To Recognise Palestinian State At UN In September
Germany invites Trump, Zelenskyy, NATO, EU leaders to virtual meeting before Trump-Putin summit
Indian court orders removal of thousands of stray dogs from Delhi region, responding to concerns about rabies. India is facing the highest rabies toll in the world, with approximately 5,700 deaths annually according to government statistics, while some estimates suggest numbers could be as high as 20,000. The stray dog population in Delhi has surged, increasing from 60,000 in 2012 to close to 1 million.
Africa
Over 2,500 cholera cases, 103 deaths recorded in Sudan's North Darfur
Nigeria Emerging As Hub For 22 Islamic Terror Groups
40 dead in Darfur as worst cholera outbreak hits Sudan
FYI there was a pretty terrible famine in Darfur in 1998
US approves potential $346 million weapons sale to Nigeria to bolster security
US imposes sanctions on Congo armed group, mining firms over illicit minerals
Tech and AI
OpenAI gold at the IOI
Just curious where you are reading that? The NC Newsline article doesn't say that:
"The Governor has been clear since March that the General Assembly needs to fully fund the Medicaid rebase, and he recently reiterated his concern when their Band-Aid budget fell $319 million short of what is needed to fund North Carolinians’ health care,” the spokesperson wrote.
The NC Governor doesn't have much power because the NC legislature has a veto-proof Republican majority so I don't really see how you could lay this at his feet.
Edit: Oh, actually they aren't technically veto-proof anymore by the margin of one seat. One or two Democrat representatives have also been voting in step with the Republicans to override governor's vetos.
I'm not addressing every single person who holds a position. People think things for many reasons!
Surely you can recognize that there exist some anti-immigration individuals who would not care if the GDP went up if it meant the Great Replacement occurred.
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are inherently worse than India despite the only major difference being lack of Hinduism and castes.
India needed castes to create smarter outliers at the cost of dumber underclass which is a better deal than Bangladesh.
The world has natural order which wants the blue blooded to be with the blue blooded, the son also rises as they say. Why are castes bad? Do you prefer a slightly higher median with a way fewer smart people. Castes are religious but I'll only defend the sociological factors here.
This is simply untrue, these exams are the reason why French revolution happened and also why you see Asians represented disproportionately in places as their society lives and dies by exam conferred status. Did China or Korea produce anything resembling what Indo Europeans did until the 21st century?
We know aryans had varna, that euros pre Christianity had varna. The cream was skimmed but sometime in the medieval era, free labor from the underclass led to modern demographic issues.
Speaking as an anti immigrant person, I’m concerned we let in people who are ill suited for our culture and who aren’t the brightest. I don’t think the brazilificarion of our nation will lead to economic growth per capita even if it might increase overall gdp; I think it will per capita make it worse.
Insufficient resolution in your maps. The rural Republican counties that are pointed to as examples of Republicans voting against their economic self interest don't consist of 100% Medicaid users, they consist of a class of Medicaid users and a class of non-Medicaid users.
The latter class votes Republican because they hate the former class and want them thrown off Medicaid. This isn't poor people voting to throw themselves off Medicaid, it's contractors voting to throw addicts off of welfare.
Empathy and charity are easier at a distance. Racial Diversity is correlated with racist attitudes in the general public; this is equally true of economic diversity.
I mean exactly. It’s not a serious thing, at least not in the sense that they literally believe in theNeo-Hitler theory. If they did, and they wanted to stop it, they’d be doing that. I find it rather fascinating just from the psychological aspect as it almost seems like a rape fetish, but political. They want to be brutally repressed. They want the camps. They want the mass arrests. It’s exciting to them. That’s why they’re always speculating about canceling elections, martial law, and camps. Not because they believe it’s going to happen (in fact Trump would be stupid to cancel elections or declare martial law because it would create a huge backlash from the general public), but because they want to play out their vision of themselves as plucky rebels defying their Hitler. But because it’s a fantasy and they at least unconsciously understand that, they aren’t willing to accept loses of their lifestyle. They aren’t willing to be arrested, risk their job, make their kid miss practice, break the law, etc. they want to appear to have resisted without the messy stuff.
GPT-5 is really dumb and basically unusable.
I asked it to write me a yt-dlp command to save all my liked videos into a text file. And it just couldn't do it. For whatever reason, it couldn't write a simple, one-line command. It began creating multiple overcomplicated batch files and calling functions that don't even exist.
For context, this functionality is already built into yt-dlp. Earlier ChatGPT versions, also with "thinking" turned on (!), all worked flawlessly.
I had to resort to Claude, which I previously avoided, but which, this time, instantly gave me the correct answer:
yt-dlp -v --cookies-from-browser firefox --flat-playlist --print "%(url)s" "https://youtube.com/playlist?list=LL" > liked_videos_urls.txt
The same exact thing happened when I tried asking it to compress a PDF using ghostscript and also with basic video manipulation with ffmpeg.
It just went on these unrelated rants with hallucinated commands.
Pretty much and that people who like Hinduism can't thank it without an asterisk since modern India has a bad image due to dysgenics.
I get what you mean, you could have messaged this exact thing, though I won't take offence since you mean well. I'm doing better and themotte is my only culture war outlet as I'm usually offline.
Brahmins supported the usurpation of feudal kingdoms to extract more power as they believed that exams and a democratic regime would favor them, it made us powerless and them homeless where the highest Tamil Brahmin can ever be is an employee and not a divine saint the way they could before. Iq is an important factor but not the most important, you can ce exams and have some outlier geniuses but that's not enough to have a functional sovereign society.
Yes, the focus is on saving what can be saved, though I'd much rather support a neo pagan than a Muslim Indian.
What can I say, I just want to starve on a dying planet in the arms of my loved ones, instead of having to eat or be eaten by them.
(In reality most of the time I am personally extremely unconfident about whether AI, low fertility or climate change will in the long-run hasten or put off the demise of our species, so actual existential continuity tends to fade into the background of my thinking on most issues.)
Also, yes, you are right, heat death is not actually certain.
There's zero Jain or Christian influence on Trika, which in itself differs from Vedanta, which also is the same, yes, there were Buddhist influences but the distinctions between Hinduism and Buddhism was not that significant in the Himalayas, where meditation was a thing that had existed for a millenia.
You have a personal, familial, societal God, faith, order and practice. There's an understanding that your own personal path is not fit for broader social order.
I think it's more an active vs passive thing.
I think you're definitely supposed to think about it this way, in connection with women's dress at minimum, but I also think this simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Catcalling is no more active a choice than wearing a bikini, especially with the intent to wear it somewhere conspicuous (i.e. not at the beach, although even at the beach a bikini can be pretty damn conspicuous). You are no more forced to listen to catcalls than you are forced to look at someone in a bikini--though you may not be able to initially prevent yourself from hearing the first or seeing the second, you can always respond to either by plugging your ears or closing your eyes. The idea that catcalling is somehow more "intrusive" doesn't make any sense; we're talking about people sharing public spaces, and finding the proper balance allowing that space to be used by everyone for the activities they prefer. Why does a man's preference for catcalling rank below a woman's preference against it? The answer can't be "intrusiveness" because we actually often want intrusiveness to be a feature of shared public spaces--for example, political protests are deliberately intrusive, and lose their effect when they are not at least somewhat intrusive.
(I think the most likely answer, as others have noted, is probably just "public hetero male horniness is a low class signal," and nobody wants to speak for the interests of horny low class males, who are also often criminal elements, undesired immigrants, the uneducated, the antisocial, etc. Plus I suspect that many men who can keep their mouths shut would like the catcallers to stop, simply because living in a culture where women regularly go out in public half naked is something many heterosexual men prefer, and quietly enjoy.)
Part of this may be a "noncentral fallacy" problem, too--honking your car's horn at a pedestrian when there's no actual danger is a very obnoxious thing to do quite regardless of whether it is part of "catcalling" someone. Whereas wolf whistling is not coded as threatening (though some women take it that way, and seem to think every woman should, even though this is actually fairly paranoid on their part). To use some other examples of obnoxious public behavior, carrying around a protest sign with graphic imagery of aborted babies is gross. It's surely as "intrusive" as someone yelling sloppy compliments in your direction. "Well you don't have to look at it" doesn't really acknowledge the depth of discomfort many people experience when seeing such imagery.
LOTR is a good pick. I've even watched much of the extra material a few times
In general I rarely watch things multiple times. Even on this list, nothing has probably hit double digits. But these are just very relaxing for me, and I come back to them when I just want something comforting.
For me:
- Harry Potter movies, especially the first 4
- Lord of the Rings
- Supernatural (mostly the first few seasons)
- Haibane Renmei
- Tatami Galaxy
- Mushishi
For my wife:
- Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella
- Gilmore Girls
That's interesting. I know of these differences just from reading around, wikipedia and the like.
I suppose why I said that they, to me, seem like different religions is that the differences theologically between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are essentially whether the single supreme God (who we all agree behaved in the same way up to ~0 AD, and is the same entity) sent a Messiah or not, the nature of that Messiah, and then subsequent contact and contracts he had with the human world (via a prophet and a book). Then there are somewhat different practical legal matters that must be resolved. Islam and Judaism differ remarkably little in core theology imo.
The differences between the branches of Christianity, which have sparked wars, range from the relatively large (the precise metaphysical nature of Jesus, or different aspects of God) to the small (the matters of ordination, celibacy amongst priests). Considering your own former branch vs. say Advaita Vedanta (or even your current path), one strictly monist, one dualist, the different devotional practices and liturgy, the different teachers, the different Gods, the disagreements in the nature of those entities. I'm sure you know much more about this than me, and I guess you could say "well at the end of the day they still have the same origin", but they do seem rather different. What counts as a religion is probably a bit like what counts as a different language, relying on socio-political aspects as well.
And then finally it doesn't appear to me to be immediately obvious that the more refined and philosophically elite practices of Hinduism (e.g. Kashmir Shaivism or Advaita Vedanta) are the same religion as that of the Indo-Aryans, let alone the Indo-Europeans. There have been centuries of Buddhist, Jain and Islamic influence on these practices, even Christian, so a 19th century or 20th century revival which posits essentially a monotheistic faith with dharmic elements doesn't appear to me to be obviously close to ancient polytheism as does say neo-Platonism or Sol Invictus to the faith of the anicent Greeks or Romans. And as we know, those practices influenced early Christianity heavily, especially aesthetically.
And of course, no amount of money can save you from the true black swans e.g unaligned superintelligence, gain of function^2 electric boogaloo or nuclear war
The first, sure. The latter two aren't that hard.
The middle one requires a few million for the bunker, and quite a bit more than that if you want a bunker-ready wife (bunker-ready as in, won't break quarantine even when the government is still pretending everything's fine) and money's the only lever you have in that regard (if you have other levers, much less so). So yes, expensive, but a billion's definitely enough.
The last one is really not that hard. I'm mostly on top of that one for like $1000, although there are some things I'd be buying closer to the date. Admittedly, it gets trickier if you're in the USA, because the USA's far more likely to go tits-up in the aftermath (fallout's also a bigger deal), but "move to Ireland/Guyana/Insert Country Unlikely to be Nuked Here" is still something you can definitely do for like $10 million max.
I wonder if this is really true. Let's say you're on your deathbed, everyone you personally care about is dead, you have the option to give yourself a bit of morphine on the way out but it will make everyone currently alive not want to have children and as such humanity will die out in a few generations . Do you press that button? I consider myself rather nihilistic but I wouldn't press the button, so I have to assume I have some preference somewhere for humanity to continue on. This means it's not actually a categorical preference but one based on trade offs.
Series of court opinions:
-
A wife gives birth to a child. However, around the time of the child's conception, the wife was intimate not only with her husband but also with a paramour, so the child's paternity is uncertain. When informed of the pregnancy, the paramour at first disclaims interest in it, but a week later changes his mind. Shortly after the child is born, the paramour files a lawsuit to compel genetic testing and establish paternity. The husband testifies that, regardless of any DNA test's result, he will continue to love and care for the child.
-
The trial judge rejects the paramour's request. (1) State caselaw incorporates an irrebuttable presumption of legitimacy: If paternity is uncertain, but around the time of conception the mother was in an intact marriage with a husband who was not absent, impotent, or sterile, then the husband is automatically considered the father, and this determination cannot be changed even with a DNA test. (2) State caselaw incorporates paternity by estoppel: After the paramour disclaimed interest in the child, the child and the husband were entitled to rely on that declaration, and the paramour was not permitted to change his mind and "pull the carpet out from under" the developing relationship between the child and the husband. The appeals panel affirms, solely on the first basis since it is dispositive.
-
The state supreme court vacates and remands. The irrebuttability of the presumption of legitimacy is an outdated relic of the days before in vitro fertilization, minimally-invasive (cheek-swab rather than blood-vial) DNA testing, and nondiscrimination against illegitimate children. The presumption of legitimacy now can be rebutted with a DNA test if (1) there is a reasonable possibility that DNA testing will reveal the paramour to be the father and (2) DNA testing serves the best interest of the child. (The doctrine of paternity by estoppel is left unchanged. On remand, it may serve as an alternative basis to affirm the trial judge's ruling.)
-
Two of the state supreme court's seven justices dissent in part. They think that the presumption of legitimacy already has been eliminated by the legislature, and therefore courts should be empowered to order DNA testing without a pointless multifactor test. One of the dissenters would go even further:
I cannot cling to the notion that it is the public policy of this Commonwealth that children’s interests are necessarily served by "the stability of an intact family unit" led by married parents. I would emphasize that families regularly flourish under non-traditional configurations and that families regularly falter under traditional ones. Nowhere is it assured that a stable family unit, defined as one involving a married couple, will remain as such for any prescribed period of time let alone the entirety of a childhood. Ultimately, it is the legislative prerogative to identify and implement the Commonwealth’s policy preference, especially in an arena as sensitive as marriage and child-rearing. The Legislature provided for no fault divorce, making severance of marriages relatively easy; it endorsed scientific testing to determine paternity allowing for the potential involvement of a third party in a married couple’s family unit. As to the preferred structure of the family unit, the clearest statement of the Legislature is that in all cases, the best interests of the child must prevail in custody matters. Given the co-existence of the statutes that recognize expedient termination of marriages, the recognition of a third party’s genetic paternity to a child born to a married couple and the dominance of the child’s best interests in custody matters, I am hard pressed to find a legislative declaration that it is the clear public policy of the Commonwealth that marriages involving children must be preserved.
(The other dissenter refrains from joining this footnote.) -
On remand, the appeals panel reverses the trial judge. Regarding the presumption of legitimacy: DNA testing serves the interest of the child in knowing its biological father. Regarding paternity by estoppel: In past cases, the doctrine has been applied when a paramour filed his paternity lawsuit multiple years after the child's birth. However, in this case the paramour filed his paternity lawsuit just eight days after the child's birth, so there was hardly any "developing relationship between the child and the husband" to be torn asunder. (Of course, after all this lawyering the child is two years old.)
But does the former class not also vote Republican? Folklore seems to say that they do, and are motivated by a mixture of "willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing" and spite ("we suffer either way, but at least this way we get to wipe the smug grins off the city-dwellers' faces").
More options
Context Copy link