domain:mattlakeman.org
sockpuppet2
8hr ago
the establishment were deliberately relying on the public perception of vaccines being viral immunity
Who, specifically, and to what end?
aardvark2
16hr ago
Fun fact: Ahmed Al-Sharaa's older brother Maher, now nepotized in Syrian goverment, worked for years as a gynecologist in Voronezh, Russia, where he got his degree and PhD. Reviews on him as a doctor page: https://prodoctorov.ru/voronezh/vrach/510193-maher/otzivi
WandererintheWilderness
20hr ago
Your disagreement is too fundamental to be resolved on the level of ‘changing your gender can fit with your telos’. You don’t agree with the concept of a telos.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As I said here, my point is that appealing to phrases like "the dictatorship of the universe" and "look in the mirror" fail to make the concept of a telos in its full Christian sense compelling. They're rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The desirability of following one's telos in the theological sense doesn't follow from the blunt fact of the impossibility of ignoring one's material circumstances.
To put it another way, I think "biological males can't get pregnant" cannot get you to "therefore they shouldn't get genital surgery and change their names even if they want to" any more than "humans are not swans" can get you to "therefore they shouldn't become airplane pilots", no matter how loudly it is repeated.
(not falsified, however).
Is too. At least if by God we mean "an omnipotent omnibenevolent being" as opposed to an entity that's one but not the other. Still, let's not get into that.
sockpuppet2
10hr ago
Scott's "more than you wanted to know" assessment was that Sweden most likely did worse, albeit by a difficult to quantify margin.
To me mercy and justness simply seem like different virtues
Justice classically defined is to give someone exactly what they deserve.
Mercy classically defined is to give someone more than they deserve.
They are contradictory, and calling God both Just and Merciful is one of the classic "mysteries of faith."
In God they are all the same virtue, because God is one simple thing. The most simple thing in existence. He is composed of no components. He has no composite parts.
then you are "judging" God if your praise of His merciful treatment of mankind constitutes a positive claim that it is present; if you can imagine a world where God was less, or was not, merciful, and in which consequently you would not be moved to compliment Him in this particular way. This seems to hold even if you think no negative judgement would be warranted in the absence of that mercy.
I guess we are judging as in assessing. Like I judge an apple to be an apple when I eat it. I can assess that God is merciful. And by merciful I mean something like, "humans are merciful sometimes, and God is doing something analogous to that when He paved a way for our salvation." But not that God is merciful in the same way a human is merciful. Our version of mercy is a pale comparison. The reality of mercy that has its source in God's nature is beyond our comprehension and our own behavior.
The difference is that Orcus, as a pseudo-Devil (though not a fallen angel), would be a scriptural figure and thus one priests had cause to talk about
Ok, Dolphins aren't explicitly in there, but Genesis Chapter 1 does come up and I was actually explicitly thinking of it when I called dolphins good:
And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
God saw that it was good. Great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems. God saw that it was good. This is one of those places we see that word. I hear homilies all the time on the significance of this. So is there something else that is different between Orcus and Dolphins?
he's good in the sense of being a good person;
Don't get me wrong, He is both good and a person. Just our idea of a good person is limited by our overemphasis on our own species and nature.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10hr ago
that God is not just good by analogy,
God is not just good by analogy, but what humans like you and I can understand about His goodness is only by analogy. He is not good the same way you are (presumably) good. When we see a saint, we see God's goodness there. A saint is good in the way God is, but God is so far beyond human behavior that we can't work the other way back to him. It's directionally confused.
And pure reason would never imagine a God who is communion, who is Father, Son, and Spirit in an eternal relation of love.
Yes, we learned something additional to God's nature through revelation, that doesn't discount the things we can reason about His nature and is revealed in Scripture as well.
as though "well-behaved" exhausts what it means to describe someone as "good."
No, explicitly God is good but not in the sense we mean when we say a human is good. When we say a human is good, we colloquially mean something along the lines of a human behaves well. That is not what we mean when we describe God as good, that is entirely the point I am trying to make!
Omnibenevolence is a recent term and I object strongly to people outside the religious tradition inventing it and then using their own invention as an attack against the logical consistency of God. I have no objection to calling God benevolent. He is. I object to Omnibenevolent, because it can be defined any which way. It's the "omni" part that I object to.
Goodness, must I sing God's praises with every Motte Post!
God is great, He created us for such good things. He is an ocean of love. He holds nothing back, He takes pity on my who is weak and has entered into the depth of God-forsakennesss for our sake. God went out from God to the furthest reaches of not-God, to the furthest reaches of degradation, torture, despair, guilt, shame, DEATH! So that no matter how far we run away from him, He will always be there first. So we can always find our way back to Him. Forever His praise shall be on my heart!
If I start every theological discussion like that will it make people listen better?
WandererintheWilderness
18hr ago
Oh, I make no claims as to the merits of the argument. I think publicizing and politicizing a teen's name like this would have been bad form even if we were talking about an unambiguous, garden-variety cheater (say, a kid who'd taken prohibited steroids). It's just not a responsible politician's place to name-and-shame a random minor like this, whether the kid did something actually wrong or not.
WandererintheWilderness
20hr ago
and has only publicly available information
I don't find this compelling. A vast majority of behavior that falls under "doxxing" involves the collation and signal-boosting of information that is technically 'publicly available' to a motivated sleuth, but not widely distributed. The most familiar example round these parts would be Scott's real name, which was always trivial to find through the Internet Archive if you knew to look for it. That wasn't a good reason for the NYT to publicize it against his express wishes, and I think the same goes here.
(Of course, that only proves Libby's behavior was either knowingly dickish, or irresponsible. There's still a leap from that to arguing it's so beyond the pale that it's worth barring her from fulfilling her duties as an elected representative. But as a matter of common decency, all else being equal, Libby should apologize.)
The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part.
But see, I don't think it is, or rather it's not the only contentious part. It might be the sole sticking point for a few idiosyncratic philosophers on Internet forums, but it isn't the objection in the real world. I think the conservative position, and in particular the argument from telos, is very much "you shouldn't cut your breasts off, inject yourself with testosterone, and change your name to Jonathan", not just "by all means do all those things if you want, but in an important philosophical and semantic sense, they still won't make you a man, sorry". I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
The ontological impossibility of becoming truly indistinguishable from a biological member of the sex towards which you wish to transition cannot in itself be a compelling reason not to transition, any more than "you'll never be a bird" is a compelling reason not to build a plane. The telos framework which argues otherwise is smuggling in more assumptions than the physical impossibility of ignoring the universe. I'm not saying there's no philosophical background behind those additional assumptions, but I do think they're a lot less intuitively compelling than "you can't ignore the physical universe" and it's disingenuous to hide them behind the can't-ignore-reality thing. Hence the motte and bailey accusation.
Kamala Harris - "The vaccine will prevent you from getting covid."
Link?
The closest I found was here, but it's explicitly about protection from hospitalization and death.
sockpuppet2
10hr ago
The trials presumably produced adequate estimations of the vaccines' effectiveness. I think the problem with public perception was partly that low rates of other infectious diseases created the misconception that sterilizing vaccines are the norm, such that reports that a vaccine "merely" health risks to the recipient by 90% triggered the confirmation bias of anti-vaccine people. (One person repeatedly told me "They changed the definition of 'vaccine.'")
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12hr ago
I, of course, agree that God is love and spend more time rejoicing in His love than getting into philosophical debates. I didn't pick the topic of conversation.
I am 100% correct to contest the word Omnibenevolence as it is not the Theist claim.
To say God is Love is to say God wills the good of all. What is that good? It depends on the nature. The God of philosophy is the Triune God.
As Catherine of Sienna reports God said to her, "I am He who is, and you are she who is not." When she wrote this, was she expressing how far away she was from God or expressing a closeness unfathomable?
I'm not writing about infused prayer over here. I'm picking a fight over a specific word.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13hr ago
To be merciful is to exceed justice, to give someone something more than they deserve. To be less merciful would not indicate moral deficiency on God's part. We can be grateful for God's great mercy to us. But if God was less merciful we would not be able to judge God negatively.
Funny you bring mercy up here, I recently heard a priest say, in summary, "God's mercy to us is justice to Himself. Divine simplicity entails that God's mercy and justice are the same thing. It would be just to humanity for humans to never be redeemed, but it would have offended against what God owes to Himself - God's justice due to Himself. He deserves our reconciliation because that is what He created us for. Therefore He offers to us salvation, which is mercy to us but justice to Him."
I still insist, that when Catholics talk about God, we are taking in analogy. There are very few statements we can positively say that are true about God. Most of what we can say about God is what He is Not. This is called Apophatic theology.
It is true that Catholic.com uses unspecific language, because it is a apologetic outreach website and not a university-level publication.
that did not permit making any deeper claims about the supreme deity than can be made about a pretty sunset or a cuddly kitten!
Obviously God's greatness is far greater than a sunset or a kitten! I'm also arguing that His greatness is far greater than human understanding of good behavior. These are all poor analogies to the reality of the full significance of God's goodness.
If Orcus existed, I maintain that Catholics would not routinely say "Orcus is good", even if the statement could be narrowly defended.
Ok, here. Dolphins are good. They also rape and murder other sea creatures. Explain to me in your example the significant difference between Orcus and Dolphins so I can understand what you think I would object to.
2rafa
14hr ago
It’s my theory that there is a psychosexual component to male envy. In any case I know I’ll just get flatly disagreed with if I make the case here, and I lack unfalsifiable / objectively compelling and comprehensive evidence. I’ve just always believed it.
God is adorable, but He is definitely beyond human judgement. We can only adore him and praise him by analogy.
You didn't answer my question. Why should we praise Him, if we cannot actually come to any conclusions of our own about whether he's morally good or not?
You are assuming that malevolence is a presence instead of a lack
I'm assuming no such thing. I am asking you to picture an entity with abilities comparable to those ascribed to Satan, but which never used to be an angel; a being for whom it is instinctive to maim and torture and corrupt in the same way that it is instinctive for a scorpion to sting. If the existence of a creature which instinctively stings frogs is conceivable, so is that of a creature which instinctively flays infants, whether or not God did or would ever create one/allow one to be created. The metaphysical nature of evil doesn't enter into it. I maintain that by your logic, Orcus the Babe-Slayer would have to be deemed "good", to the same extent that a healthy poisonous scorpion is "good"; and that when sermons advise the faithful that "God is good", they are knowingly implying something rather more about God and how you ought to feel about Him than if they were saying "Orcus the Babe-Slayer is good" in this narrow technical sense.
And then you go on to say that the theology that is routinely mocked for arguing about friction-less thought experiments like "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" isn't set up for friction-less thought experiments
I said it wasn't setup for frictionless thought experiments that assume away core tenets of dogma. I wasn't even saying it as a criticism.
Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."
I'm sure that isn't the motte, but I rather think it's the bailey. Or rather, the bailey is "God is Good and therefore, among other qualities, benevolent". And even doctrinally, while I take the point about God necessarily not being accountable to anyone in the way that a human being is accountable for his actions, it seems incoherent to conclude that God is beyond human judgement, while also asking man to sing His praises. Praise is by definition a value judgement. If God isn't an admirable being, then on what basis could the Church recommend that I praise Him, i.e. express admiration? What does it even mean to praise an entity whom I would not be allowed, counterfactually, to criticize?
(Fair enough on the Devil-as-fallen-angel angle. Still - supposing you substitute your preferred nonexistent deity whose nature is destructive and malevolent, then I don't think the logic of Catholic morality can sanely hold that human beings could make no moral judgement of that being if it existed. But I recognize that Catholic theology wasn't really developed to return sane results in frictionless thought experiments that abstract away core tenets of dogma, so maybe it's okay to bite that bullet and say it's irrelevant because that's not the world God made, so it's alright that if Baal existed it would be moral to worship Baal? Still seems off.)
I'll take a look at the Brian Davies book, though going off the title - unwise, I know - I do want to clarify that I'm not talking about the general Problem of Evil here. I'm not convinced it would be immoral for a human being with arbitrary magic powers to create a universe like ours that contained evil - so the conventional Problem of Evil is not necessarily a defeater to "God is morally good". The Catholic God, however, is asserted to have actively performed deeds which I would judge as immoral if performed by a human being of equal power in the same circumstances.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
22hr ago
I constantly had this voice in my head saying I wasn't worthy, I was a failure, everything I did was wrong, everyone was secretly laughing at me, yadda-yadda. I mean it was nonstop. I was mired in this sticky fog of self-hate and doubt that I couldn't see past and it was making me suicidal.
I can relate to this voice. I think many in the modern world can. While there are definitely "psychological" components based on family history, social situations, etc, as you say later on I don't think that necessarily rules out the frame of demonic influence as a useful view.
In terms of it being not uncommon, totally agreed! I think the majority of people will experience something like this at one point or another in their lives. And perhaps for some tail of people, working through it purely on an emotional level and tracing back the trauma or whatever is the best way. This is actually now reminding me of @FtttG's recent post on polyamory and such, where he claims that a lot of alternative lifestyles promoted work well for a small subset, not so well for everyone.
I wonder if, all else being equal, most people nowadays would be better just labeling a suicidal voice in their head as Evil and being convinced via religion that they have the power to overcome it. That's why I love that quote at the end, from St. John Chrysostom.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1m ago
I'd actually consider cutting down on coffee and seeing if that helps. Could be a caffeine crash.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
This article is a good top level summary. This post was unverified but the reasons seem to match other reporting that the most recent model is a massive sunk cost. The head and VP not only both resigned last month but also asked their names not to be put on the eventual release. “Most of the team” probably overstated sorry. I accidentally took out of context the still notable fact that 11 of 14 of the authors of a major paper on the fundamental AI research team at Meta have left since publication and formation in 2023. Either way, Meta is behind absolutely but everyone is slowing. IMO we need another theoretical leap, probably about implementing “memory”, to keep progress rolling.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
Not to forget being primed before that by loads of disease-related apocalyptic fiction (sure, that stuff generally doesn't show lockdowns as something that works, but there's still indications that they would work if you just locked down earlier and harder).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
The closest comparison here is the influenza vaccine, and I don't recall anyone saying that the influenza vaccine makes you immune from influenza.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
I'm not sure why there are so many people insisting that we should have used a more inexact name for this disease just because it fits a certain naming scheme (or geopolitical interest).
I am not saying Libby's actions were doxxing, or even that they were particularly blameworthy (though I do think they were dickish, a much lesser charge). I am saying that "the information was publicly available" doesn't prove it wasn't doxxing.
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