FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Another layer is that Jonah himself is not destroyed. Even after doing as God commanded, he still wishes to see Nineveh destroyed, and is angry when it is not. The story ends with God attempting to reason with him, rather than simply smiting him for his rebellious attitude.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The comment above yours is still filtered.
Fixed.
That's one of the fundamental questions on the American right at present: Does classical liberalism necessarily produce a level of pluralism it cannot survive?
Speaking for myself, straightforwardly, obviously, unavoidably, yes.
Classical liberalism as it is commonly understood and described is built on axiomatic assumptions about the possible range of human values, and those assumptions are observably wrong because the observable range of human values is significantly wider. You can track the obvious cross-sectional ways in which those assumptions have decayed by degrees across our entire society over time, and how our institutions and social structures have decayed with them.
Classical Liberalism increases tolerance. Increased tolerance creates values-diversity, and then values-incoherence. Values incoherence creates conflict, which reduces tolerance. Perhaps this cycle can be retarded or bypassed in some ways or in some circumstances, but certainly classical liberalism cannot do it because it cannot even begin to adequately frame the problem. It believes tolerance is a moral precept, axiomatically, but Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
....I think one of us is misunderstanding something here.
My understanding is that algae eat phosphate to grow, and therefore an algae bloom should reduce phosphate levels, not elevate them. Algae do not need elevated phosphate to bloom, but will bloom a lot more in the presence of elevated phosphate. further, my understanding is that the most common source of elevated phosphate in water is from fertilizer runoff.
Again, this seems like a pretty straightforward question of fact to me. CNN is reporting elevated phosphate levels in the pool; it seems a reasonable inference that these levels are elevated versus the water that's being pumped into the pool, but if I'm wrong about that, I welcome correction. If the water in the pool has more phosphate than the water being added to the pool, then phosphate is being added to the pool somehow. Given that there is an ongoing vandalism campaign being conducted with relation to the pool and its surroundings, it seems logical to me that the phosphate is being added by the vandals.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Why do we need a conspiracy here? Hasn't there been algae in this pool all the time?
Because it's not just the algae, it's the water having elevated phosphate levels feeding the algae, per CNN, at the same time that people are definitely intentionally vandalizing the nearby green, and also definitely intentionally damaging the new liner material. Again, I'm open to other explanations, but those explanations really ought to account for the observable evidence.
It's actually worse than that.
Aztec blood sacrifice is a legitimate religion. How should freedom of religion operate for people who wish to adhere to that religion? The answer, speaking plainly, is that it doesn't and can't, right here and now, not in some hypothetical "someday" far in the future. If we have a significant population that wants to seize outsiders and rip their hearts out, there's no way we're going to be able to coexist with that population long-term. Nor is there any principled distinction between their claim to toleration of religious practice or mine; there is, in fact, no objective definition of "harm", and yet there is no way to maintain society without enforcement against those inflicting harm; this enforcement will be both necessarily subjective and entirely indispensable.
The logic of the First Amendment assumes that the range of religions is much narrower than the observable range of religions, just as it assumes that the range of ideologies and of values is much narrower than the observable range of ideologies and values. When you get out past the borders of the range it was built for, the logic it runs on simply stops working. The fact is that you cannot actually run even a minimally-cohesive society if your population is too values-diverse to cooperate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Is that how the water system in question works? If so, I'd have thought I'd have heard of it by now, but again, I'm willing to be corrected if there's clear facts available.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I'm entirely willing to accept that interpretation, and in fact this is my interpretation of the culture war as a whole: we no longer have a cohesive society, and so attempting to pool resources or coordinate effort or share institutions in any way cannot be expected to work. You cannot build or even maintain memorials in a society that fundamentally cannot agree on what should be memorialized. Ditto for public schools, public libraries, public justice systems...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
State bans on CNC aren't preventing the import of auto-sears for criminals by the containerload, and they can't prevent me from constructing a functional bump-stock out of cardboard and hot glue. The law, at this point, mostly functions in an attempt to keep people from talking about what a failure it is to actually exert meaningful control in the real world.
And sure, this allows people in blue areas to be oppressed, so long as the vast majority of people are willing to cooperate with maintaining the system. This balance is not stable, and cannot be maintained in the face of even a small number of people sincerely wishing otherwise. You are correct that neither I nor anyone else has a way to give you current society, only less oppression for you. But if you are willing to let go of current society, the oppression can also go, and speedily.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Here's CNN reporting that the water in the pool has elevated phosphate. My understanding is that one of the more straightforward ways you'd get elevated phosphate in the water is by dumping phosphate fertilizer into the water. Given the other evidence of deliberate vandalism, I'm not sure why incompetence or corruption are supposed to be the leading hypothesis here.
I'm open to being corrected if there's some other explanation.
My understanding, perhaps out of date, was that legal manufacture of new select-fire firearms was still banned by the 1986 act.
"Full-Auto" as a legal term means multiple shots fired with a single pull of the trigger. Forced-Reset Triggers force the trigger fully-forward again during the firing cycle, which is then immediately pulled again by the trigger finger in a distinct mechanical action. Legally, they are semi-auto, just semi-auto at 600-800 RPM. Semi-auto's legal viability has never depended on how fast the trigger is being pulled previously, and indeed many shooters have demonstrated the ability to fire semi-auto firearms and even revolvers at speeds equivalent to machine guns with no legal repercussion. Likewise, mechanical aids such as crank-fire have also been legally-permitted methods for generating rapid fire for roughly as long as we've had gun laws. FRTs merely make this easier to do. They are "select fire" in the sense that they have a selector switch with safe/semi/rapid fire settings. They are not "select fire" in the sense that they do not have a legally-recognized "full auto" setting, only a setting that allows the shooter to fire legally-semi-auto at a consistent rate of hundreds of rounds a minute with no significant effort.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I too dabble in necromancy.
Anyway, I don't think this is what Exhalation thinks its own point is: it spends about ten times as long explaining entropy.
That is not my recollection at all. Everything in the story converges on the scientist's exploration of his own brain, and that exploration terminates at the idea of a manufactured mechanical system that is nonetheless entirely intractable from within a given material frame.
Eh, is it really more inaccessible than a program running on ram without a disk installed? If ram loses power, whatever it stores is gone, just like their brains.
But the point isn't just that a destroyed brain is lost, but rather that an intact brain is nonetheless intractable. The scientist figures that his mind is a machine, and thus that he should be able to interact with it in machine-like ways; gears can be assembled, valves can be opened and closed. But in fact his mind is not the machine, it is the air moving through the machine, and the exponential complexity is intractable. RAM/disks and microscopic air currents are both intuition pumps, but the latter leads in a very different direction than the former.
Entropy as a theme circles back to the same idea: our control over ourselves and the world around us is limited, and almost certainly always will be, in ways that we are very bad at recognizing for reasons similar to those related in the story. This is, in my view, a really good message to communicate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Or print/mill the parts yourself, that works too and requires no interaction with the legal system.
My understanding is that they're selling AR15 rifles with factory-installed and -tuned FRTs. Setting aside the legal arcana, it is not clear to me what the difference between these and "true select fire" is in any practical sense. I'd imagine they shoot a little rougher?
On the criminal side, my understanding is that it's just straight-up Chinese-manufactured auto-sears and auto-lockwork, no workaround at all.
fixed the link in the previous post. Here's a link to discussion of the new generation of belt-feds: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZDFtgEVkaQY&t=3s
...You understand that "automatic guns" are already unregulatable, correct? As in, it is no longer possible in any practical sense to regulate the ownership of automatic weapons in the United States of America. You can purchase a legal, full-auto AR-15 from Palmetto State Armory for a reasonable sum. Several companies are producing belt-fed light machine guns for the unregulated civilian market. Criminals have been mass-importing high quality auto-sears and full-auto lockwork from China by the container-load for years now. The government is incapable of keeping full-auto weaponry out of the hands of anyone who wants it, and is almost entirely incapable of prosecuting even those who gain such weaponry illegally, or even simply those who commit crimes with such weaponry. They are at the point of prosecuting a small fraction of carefully selected cases in a vain attempt to maintain keyfabe that meaningful prohibitions still exist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I would not be surprised if this happened, but would not bet on it happening either. It would fit the general pattern of institutional collapse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
I've seen video of sections of liner coming off the bottom, and they certainly appeared to be cut/torn away from the concrete. Like, roughly a roughly straight-line rectangular section about a foot long and maybe six inches wide, with ragged edges near corners.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
- Make your point reasonably clear and plain. Try to assume other people are doing the same.
...Often summarized here as "speak plainly". The Ol' Switcheroo is a valid rhetorical technique in some cases, and can be used to good effect, but this ain't it. Specifically, the part where you went multiple comments deep trying to get your opposite to change their answer while attempting to shame their attempts at deploying skepticism seems highly corrosive to the sort of debate we're trying to foster here.
It's a blinded trial. It was necessary to test whether you were actually clocking trans women or just making up tells because you already knew they were trans.
- Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
This is a discussion forum, not a sociology lab. Your opposites here are debate partners, not experimental subjects. It is entirely acceptable to propose a blind trial. It is not acceptable to exploit others' good-faith engagement by repeatedly lying to them to test a personal theory. The "experiment" justification in particular wears very thin when your opposite appears to have passed your "test" with flying colors, and this fact does not appear to result in any significant update to your own views.
You have one previous warning for booing the outgroup, no bans or AAQCs. I am banning you for one day. Please read the rules and attempt to internalize their intent before resuming posting.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
What if the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Exhalation, I mean. This one's actually pretty good.)
Exhalation is pretty good, but the point of the story is not "what if the Second Law of Thermodynamics," but rather to describe how a mind could be explicitly instantiated within a machine, and also remain completely inaccessible to technological comprehension/deconstruction.
Based on the number of societies in human history doing absolutely heinous shit and considering it to be normal or even moral, I'm not sure about this. In fact I suspect there's very few societies that don't involve something I consider horrifically evil until fairly recently. And even then I'm not sure.
Why would you expect a human society to not feature heinous evil? Why would humans frequently engaging in heinous evil reduce your confidence that Evil exists as a useful concept and is recognizable by humans?
Unclear. I'm pretty confident that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people.
Obviously.
But we can pretty confidently say that smoking increases your chances of getting cancer versus the counterfactual.
Can we confidently say that evil leads to misery, and good leads to happiness, even if this is not the case in every microscopic section of the causal chain that we can directly observe, yes?
I recognize that some kinds of things are evil, but religion calls many things evil that I don't recognize as such.
I am asking for a recognition that some kinds of things are in fact evil, not an agreement of any particular religion's listing of what those things are.
For the things you recognize as evil, what makes them evil? What does it mean for a thing to be evil?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
@sun_the_second also.
We've got a variety of fairly reliable evidence that smoking causes cancer.
Sure. But you don't know you in particular are going to get cancer, or that by abstaining from smoking you won't get cancer anyway. You don't know how having cancer will feel in a subjective sense. You don't know what else might happen that might obviate all downsides of cancer; maybe you're destined to die before any negative health effects would arrive and smoking would be a pure net-positive for you. All of these can "support" the absurd claim that one's decision to smoke three packs a day was not sufficiently "informed", if one's reasoning is motivated. And as I've argued a number of times before, all reason is motivated.
Do you recognize that Good and Evil exist, that the difference between them is comprehendible by humans, and that they have important consequences for humans engaging in them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
You never give informed consent to separation from God
Alternatively, "informed consent" doesn't work the way you appear to be arguing it does. Does a 3-pack-a-day smoker give informed consent to the consequences of smoking three packs a day? Obviously not, since they didn't know for certain what the consequences would be or what the subjective experience would actually be like, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
I know that especially Evangelical Christians would consider "God is evil" to be very nearly an oxymoronic statement, but if their God created me, why did He equip me with a moral compass that says it?
Do you believe that human moral compasses are 100% reliable and accurate? If they are not 100% reliable and accurate, would you agree that one of the ways we observe them losing accuracy is when people double-down or psychologically entrench on a bad moral choice?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Then you’ve got the actual politicians, who in theory have skin in the game. Elected officials are incentivized to call for calm, procedural responses no matter what.
This argument worked a lot better before lots and lots and lots of politicians very publicly and very repeatedly failed to do that, and continue to fail to do that, in situations where it really, really mattered.
high-res photo of a bunch of stamps on mail
3d-model the stamp's shape
3d-print the stamp in a rubbery material with a resin printer, so no layer lines.
gently weather/age the stamp.
...would be one obvious and probably undetectable method. You could use this to match an existing stamp's "unique" flaws/weathering, or use it to create a plausible stamp that doesn't match known stamps, whichever is more useful.
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