domain:parrhesia.substack.com
I don’t think Reddit is really perceived as being “neutral” any more. It never had the mainstream traction Twitter did, and my general perception of Reddit is that it was always a fringe platform, probably less popular than, say Discord. In my real world social circle, only one person uses Reddit, and the general consensus is that our Reddit user is a bit of a loose cannon.
Reddit is so inaccurate, I would get more fair and balanced reporting at DailyKos (another far left progressive site), and I really don’t think anyone in the real world has the same respect for Reddit that they have had for Twitter. Wikipedia, of course, doesn’t consider Reddit reliable.
As an aside, I have a lot of respect for Jesse Singal because he defended Alcoholics Anonymous in an era when the left wing media was using questionable (and ultimately false) science to claim AA didn’t work. Waffles indeed.
anti_dan
18hr ago
And if the state delegates the power to a medical board because they think the 1st Amendment is icky then???
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
18hr ago
I admit I forgot abot Von Braun, so I deserve that.
NunoSempere
18hr ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18hr ago
it looks to me very much like you wanted a religion and went shopping and chose the one that suited your goals and lifestyle.
Then you have clearly missed what I have said, both here and elsewhere, about this church specifically. My mother was born into, and baptized into, the LDS church, before leaving it as a teenager. I come from several generations of Mormons, going all the way back to one of the earliest waves of Scottish converts. It is the only extant religious tradition to which I can claim to have an authentic ancestral connection; my dad’s side of the family, so far as I can tell, has not had any serious religious convictions for several generations now. Mormonism is all I’ve got in terms of an inherited faith.
One of the primary things that attracts me to this church is precisely the fact that I’m not just choosing it a la carte from a menu of options. If I was, this isn’t the one I would pick! I would just pick one that still allowed me to drink coffee and beer and a nice glass of white wine. I would pick one that didn’t have such an improbable origin story and didn’t require so much epistemic legwork to accept. The fact that I’m instead twisting myself into some knots epistemically in order to make sense of this church’s claims should be evidence to you that I’m not just opening up a menu of religions and picking the one that suits me the best.
Pynewacket
18hr ago
Which is all well and good, but I just wish people who did this would be open about it instead of deceiving others about their embrace of self-deception over truth.
one of their self delusions is that they are unbiased of course. Rationalism isn't about rational thought but rationalizing our own biases.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
18hr ago
I see from the $500 bill article I'm not the only nitwit to conflate the two:
In June 2024, Representative Paul Gosar introduced a bill into Congress which would, if passed, require the Treasury to issue $500 bills featuring President Donald Trump
lagrangian
18hr ago
Big fan of caffeine pills. I agree about 200mg being too big. You can buy 100mg or even 40-50mg. Pills exist in many sizes, though at the smaller end, there's more of strips/mints/gums. It's also not hard to cut pills, or even to buy powder and diy some gel caps.
FlailingAce
18hr ago
Punishment is not generally as powerful a motivator as reward, but if you are training a dog to specifically not do a certain action (leaving his position) then punishment is a necessary part of that training to indicate the boundary conditions he can't break.
How else do you recommend to punish the dog? The most important part is that the negative stimulus must be temporally as close as possible to the infraction. Was yelling the correct response? What if the yelling is not getting the point across? Are you going to, what, ignore the dog so he feels bad?
Honestly I'm really interested by the large number of commentors who really think that shock collars are beyond the pale. They are a normal and often necessary part of training a dog.
erwgv3g34
18hr ago
Cleveland was on the $1000 bill. McKinley was on the $500.
theincompetencetheorist
18hr ago
As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you?
I'm actually not a right-wing listener. I'm a victim of the youtube algorithm where in my past I used to get him recommended, when I saw the dewaffle article I went back through my memory and remembered that particular channel as someone on who comments CW things. Two things of note, I'm not English native speaker so I'm not as sensitive the mannerisms and tone in the same way and the second is that I'm a disappointed socialist who abhors what the left has become when post-modern identity politics. I dabble with libertarian and conservative ideas, but I'm not a true believer.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
18hr ago
There's already a perfectly good dollar coin, the Presidental Dollar. I say keep that along with the quarter, eliminate the $1 bill and move Washington permanently to the dollar coin, and cycle through all the presidents on the quarter. Replace the half-dollar coin with a $5 coin, and put Lincoln on it. That would leave us with three useful coins. (Note the current iteration of the quarter, in 1932, was worth over $5 in inflation-adjusted dollars, so this is not a ridiculous value for a coin). Keep the $5 bill but add a $500 bill, and put JP Morgan on it.
Oh no, you could have had lots of babies with a beautiful blonde wife. The horror, the horror. So glad you escaped that tragic fate
This is Scotland. I'm convinced that natural blondes are a myth.
The other was about this Russian treatment for alcoholism. They take the alcoholic, and they put a medical implant in his arm, and tell him the first time he drinks after this, he'll get horrifically sick. The second time he'll die. The doctor is laying it on incredibly thick. Then in the back half of the episode, after all this build up, he breaks kayfabe and is incredibly jovial. Admits the whole procedure is a hoax, and the pill they implant in the arm dissolves after a week or two. But it will make them incredibly sick if they drink with it in (which they always do), but it could never kill them. Still, believing it will grants the procedure a pretty good success rate.
That sounds like a disulfiram depot or implant. Which is a real thing. That particular story about Russian doctors is not something I can source, but they're Russians, so I'll believe it.
Unfortunately, disulfiram depot and implants don't work. They don't beat placebo, or beat it by a pointlessly small. margin.
Oral disulfiram? That works well. It works even better when the patient is motivated and is supervised by a doctor or someone they trust. Current guidelines stress the latter.
(By motivation, I mean wants to get off the booze, not scared of dying)
Either way, it works by giving you a case of Asian Flush. Your body can't break the alcohol down properly, which screws you over with even a small drink. It doesn't matter much if you "believe" it will work, since it still beat placebo. Your disbelief will sort itself out quickly when a chug of beer leaves you wishing you were dead. The scare tactics are both uniquely Russian and uniquely pointless.
If it were easy to Just Be A Good Persontm then we wouldn't have nearly the problems we have, nor would the self help section at book stores be so over flowing.
Skill issue, I'm afraid. It's not like self-help books actually do anything, with narrow exceptions for things like targeted CBT books and checklists. People should actually read scientific literature and look for things that usually work. Don't read books on dieting if you can get Ozempic.
If there were one lie you could believe, and it would make you nicer, give you hope, give you purpose, and generally make every conceivable facet of your life infinitely better and more rewarding, and it might not even be a lie, why not?
That is a really, really big if. And the "might not be a lie" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It depends on how strong the might not is, and how honest you're being about it. I am not categorically against such a tradeoff, but I don't see myself making them. Even the more speculative things I believe (and which also give me hope) like the feasibility of mind uploading or AGI, those are probabilistic estimates and not things I intentionally delude myself into believing to avoid dealing with mortality. I genuinely believe they are more likely than not in my lifetime, and I engage deeply with the counter-arguments.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
18hr ago
I really do appreciate your willingness to get into the weeds regarding the basic articles of faith that make up the basis of the average American Conservative™’s bespoke reality.
Cynically, I think it’s a lost cause, but the effort is admirable.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18hr ago
Eeeeeeh, that's really not how the metaphor is used. At no point in any essay about "banning witches" has the premise been "but witches aren't real".
I mean, yes, in the real world there are no witches and witch hunters do more damage. But in the context of all the essays about "What happens when you ban witches, and by witches we mean right wing racist", witches are real and witch hunters are necessary.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
18hr ago
Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note.
We need a $500 bill. The prior one had Cleveland, who served 2 non-consecutive terms, which means the new one should have Trump. Perhaps not ideal, but the precedent has been set.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
18hr ago
Your Mormon apologia isn't of much interest to me–I can get similar superficially convincing treatises on why Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam is Actually Very Sound and Rational and The Best Way to Understand God from their adherents. You've chosen to believe, and it looks to me very much like you wanted a religion and went shopping and chose the one that suited your goals and lifestyle. Cool. But choosing which things you believe ala carte is very much against the spirit of most religious practices. That is of course between you and your faith. Whatever.
But your defense of the Noble Lie is profoundly unconvincing and even amoral. Adopting a false belief system and pretending to believe in it is wrong even if you find it instrumentally useful.
If someone accidentally agrees with all of your political positions because he thinks God told him you're a prophet, you might appreciate his support, but it would still be wrong of you to encourage him to believe you are a prophet. Telling an adopted child he's an actual biological child? In fact, I do believe you should tell an adopted child the truth (at an age-appropriate time and in an age-appropriate manner), and that not doing so is, in some sense, evil. There was another thread recently about Santa Claus. I don't have strong beliefs about letting little kids believe in imaginary things, but I will say there is definitely a point at which you should stop encouraging it. I am not saying telling a lie is never, ever justified under any circumstances, but in my opinion, those circumstances are extremely limited, both in situation and time.
If you think religious Noble Lies are good because it makes believers behave in an appropriate manner, I wonder why they can't be persuaded to behave without those beliefs. I am sure you are familiar with the old dialog between a Christian and an atheist: the Christian tells the atheist he's scary because without belief in God, the atheist can just decide that murder is good. The atheist responds that the Christian is scary, because he's saying it's only his belief in God that keeps him from murdering.
Needless to say, I find the atheist position more convincing. I think people should be convinced murder is bad without resorting to "Because God says so." If you want people to live a Mormon-ish lifestyle, you should be able to sell them on the virtues of that lifestyle without fables about Lamanites and golden tablets.
As for measuring them by who hates them, that seems a particularly poor way to choose who's right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. In my blacker moments I won't say the thought of voting to make wokes cry hasn't occurred to me, but I've never considered joining a church to own the libs.
lurker
18hr ago
I don't see how it launders in such a premise, especially if you know that all real world harms caused by witch hunts was caused by the hunters, not the witches.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18hr ago
Bluesky is apparently imploding
One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.
As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?
Pongalh
18hr ago
I actually wrote about this a bit ago: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/3337822/pennies-trump-target-second-term/
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
18hr ago
The meat of the disagreement is what constitutes a "bad reputation". At best it's scissor statements, my "efficient law enforcement" is your "brutal tyranny" but you started this with adjectives like "chaotic" that are pure outgroup messaging, and far from anything ICE is promoting about themselves. Seriously, go look at the @ICEgov twitter feed. The message they want out is "We are always getting bad guys, and if you act like a baby about it, we'll still get you and make fun of you for it, too."
That's a far cry from "chaos marauder stormtroopers".
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18hr ago
Well, I still haven't hit my 200 rep 54# Kettlebell Snatch goal, but I have settled into two sets of 100 reps fairly reliably, assuming my form doesn't degrade to such a degree I rip my hands up.
Instead, I managed to military press my 88# Kettlebell! I haven't done that in probably 10 years, and even then I could only do it on one side, and not remotely reliably either. So yay! I'm not too old for improvement.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18hr ago
I am increasingly happy to have turned down invitations from two pairs of hot bubbly blonde Mormon missionary girls in a row, I had an intrusive thought pop into my head, perhaps I should attend their sermon that Sunday, I wasn't doing anything important and it would be funny. I'm glad I didn't, because I look at this and think "there but for the grace of God myself go I".
Oh no, you could have had lots of babies with a beautiful blonde wife. The horror, the horror. So glad you escaped that tragic fate.
If you had been capable of living a lie, of snatching all the benefits of their community without compromising yourself (leaving aside the virtue of not being a liar), then I'd be marginally less concerned. Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
I forget when I heard this, could have been 12 years ago, maybe 15. But it was an episode of Radio Lab about telling yourself a lie to beat addiction. I remember two segments from it, one where two women quit smoking together, and decided that if either one of them starts smoking again, they'd give the other $10,000 or something like that.
The other was about this Russian treatment for alcoholism. They take the alcoholic, and they put a medical implant in his arm, and tell him the first time he drinks after this, he'll get horrifically sick. The second time he'll die. The doctor is laying it on incredibly thick. Then in the back half of the episode, after all this build up, he breaks kayfabe and is incredibly jovial. Admits the whole procedure is a hoax, and the pill they implant in the arm dissolves after a week or two. But it will make them incredibly sick if they drink with it in (which they always do), but it could never kill them. Still, believing it will grants the procedure a pretty good success rate.
If it were easy to Just Be A Good Persontm then we wouldn't have nearly the problems we have, nor would the self help section at book stores be so over flowing. If there were one lie you could believe, and it would make you nicer, give you hope, give you purpose, and generally make every conceivable facet of your life infinitely better and more rewarding, and it might not even be a lie, why not?
Well... I guess for that last part I'm more speaking about my own personal dalliances with Catholicism. The Book of Mormon is still bad bible fan fiction, but I can't judge too harshly these days.
Hey, no time like the present to fix the right’s headstart!
EDIT: Since I figure this’ll probably get caught in the filter like most of my other comments, might as well just leave it there. I stand by what I said, but it’s admittedly glib and not particularly productive, so no point in approving it.
It is not a working dog, and "lay around to be a prop for a stream" isn't a job a dog is bred for, nor is it one we should be training them for, it completely absurd.
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