VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Weren't a relatively large chunk of victims in the Holocaust, especially early in the war, basically rounded up and shot? The death camps were, IIRC, a fairly late addition, and even then many of the deaths were from forced labor and disease.
Which isn't to say that the death camps didn't exist, just that "The Holocaust" is a much broader event than just gas chambers. And also isn't to suggest that deaths from bullets or starvation are somehow more morally excusable.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
But I do try to wear the dressiest shoes that are comfortable throughout the day.
As someone who mostly wears retired running shoes (Altra, not New Balance, and generally more muted colors), do you have any recommendations for finding durable, comfortable, and good-looking shoes?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
My wife, but I believe her when she says she was taking them as directed, even at the same time daily. She wasn't very excited by the unexpected news (although we are both, in hindsight, glad to have the little one), and I was there when she was taking them pretty often.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Pill wise. I know zero people that have gotten pregnant on it unless "oops" I missed a few.
I can personally vouch that "99.9% effective when taken as directed" is not, in fact, 100%. If you take the word of an anonymous Internet stranger.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
I could see myself doing that if it was already in written form. If you asked me verbally, or I looked somewhere else, it would be verbal, though.
Definitely an interesting exercise.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
In part, that's pretty funny, but I'm not exactly sure how my brain answers that question. I think by spelling it out loud in my head (even though I would parse it as a single token while reading or listening), but I could imagine someone more visually-oriented might describe something like what you're saying. The mind is weird, man.
How does your brain answer the question?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Blocking federal student loans for students (let's limit it to not-yet-admitted students to avoid tearjerking stories) would probably be hugely detrimental to the academic rankings of any institution, even Harvard.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
I can't speak to experience, but I've often wondered how the cultural milieu on the Internet differs for non-Anglophones. English as the default seems ubiquitous enough culturally that it seems like a bit of a "fish describing water" question to ask what everyone else sees.
Is the, say, Francophone Internet (or culture more broadly) quite as, um, gestures broadly at The Internet frenetic and self-hating? That alone seems like it might make people happier.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
In my experience, I don't think you're wrong that bringing up abortion in campaign ads is a bad strategy. But I will say that the loudest pro-life voices I've encountered in life have been women, mostly Catholic ones. I believe the stats bear out that women tend to have much stronger opinions on the issue (in both directions!) than men. I think one thing the left gets wrong is assuming that pro-life advocacy is primarily male-coded, even if the politicians in question tend to be men.
In some ways, I think it's funny that we've made a full cycle from "those geese belong to your feudal lord" to various democratic revolutions, all the way back to "you can't eat those geese because of the treaty on migratory birds your duly-elected representatives approved generations ago".
Not endorsing any particular side there, just observing.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
I will admit that the emergence of AI may finally give some interesting answers and maybe closure to philosophical questions about how introspective and abstract philosophy and mathematics are. As much as (some) math claims to be proof pulled from the ontological ether, can the concept of, say, prime numbers be explained to an intelligence with no real-world sensory inputs? Does the notion of counting make sense in an absence of things to count?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
dumbest possible species capable of building an industrial civilisation.
Is there any good theory basis for this claim? It seems to me just as likely that "intelligence" is more like large-scale Bayesian inference, and that for a given quantity of sensory input the possible predictive performance is quite bounded, and potentially even grows logarithmically such that billions of times more input data may only marginally improve the output.
But I will admit I'm somewhat spit balling here and not familiar with the existing literature.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
I think most would agree with this choice put in front of them, but the faith in the public health system generally is low enough that it might poll surprisingly poorly, especially if stories of (pro-choice) doctors handing out "totes serious health complications" notes for late-term abortions like prescriptions for emotional support animals. Witness the slippery slope that euthanasia in Canada has wrought.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
As far as I can tell, she inherited the debate agreement from the Biden campaign, and would look weak backing out of the already-reduced debate schedule (and rules!) he had committed to. I believe the last few cycles have had three debates, all after the conventions.
I think there are rumors they tried to get the rules modified (unmuting mics), but I don't think they changed them. IMO if Harris were a strong candidate, they'd be trying to schedule another one or two, but I haven't heard any such rumors.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
I seem to recall reading that US and South Korean border guards are selected to be particularly tall specifically for, er, diplomatic reasons. But I don't have a citation on-hand.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.
I will observe that a number of successful youth development/leadership programs focus on (mostly-)safe, controlled "stressful events". Thinking of things like NOLS, JROTC, and various sporting and scouting-like organizations. It's usually pitched as building confidence, but dropping kids into the wilderness and showing them how to survive (and even thrive) in unpleasant or even hazardous conditions seems, from this angle, to be deliberately aimed to calibrate this hedonistat. I've been through things like this, and while it's not a controlled experiment, it didn't seem like it was Earth-changing at the time, I've come to appreciate those experiences more as I've gotten older.
If I were looking at data to reduce confounding with heredity, that might be a place to start.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
I think it's an interesting, if somewhat abstract question. As a counterpoint, Maslow's hierarchy doesn't include "being superior to others", and plenty of religions try to challenge a relative notion of status: "the last shall be first", or the notion of kharma.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
The Roman emporer is poor in terms of what stuff he can access, but he is famous and powerful and has many slaves and hangers-on.
It sometimes crosses my mind that these are very different measures of wealth that people probably use interchangeably. The wealth of "other people's time" is actually zero-sum: the guy at the bottom of the totem pole will never get anyone's time. You might think robotics and computers could fix this, but my dishwasher saves countless person-hours and hasn't given me any (well, at least much) social status.
To some extent, it might make sense to consciously get people to adopt non-zero-sum measures for status. Not sure how practical that is, though.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Yes, actually? The First Amendment is often seen to cut both ways: it prevents the establishment of religion, but also prohibits enforcing secularism on the public.
It was broadly seen to include religious exemptions to generally applicable laws until Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, at which point Congress passed the RFRA near-unanimously, saying "actually, we meant to apply strict scrutiny to laws burdening the practice of religion". At its core, allowing Native Americans to use peyote for their religion, or the Amish to opt out of Social Security (some groups even object to the assignment of SSNs to people!), or Sikh soldiers to grow beards.
In practice, some of the Internet atheism crowd chafe at Christians taking advantage of the RFRA, but I'd say it's general use cases are fairly popular. But it also swings close to self-contradiction in legal arguments, like Trinity Lutheran: the state can't prevent churches from applying to generally available playground improvement funding.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
This gives me a hilarious mental image of center-right college students ironically donning Che-style shirts featuring Churchill, FDR, or Eisenhower. Maybe even Patton as an edgy choice.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Not discounting the first two, but I think there has been an interesting swing in voter opinion. I follow a number of local subreddits, and one recently had a controversial picture of a shiny new bus stop that had no shade and only a bench that could only be leaned on. There were upvoted comments about how this homeless-hostile architecture, but also upvoted comments about how functionally encouraging encampments at public transit stops is, practically, hostile to working-class transit users and the environmental cause of public transit more generally by encouraging those with means to just drive. Definitely a vibe shift since 2020.
There are probably some interesting parallels to consider in adjacent issues: "it's compassionate, and basically free to you so why do you care?" seems to slowly be losing ground to "it's obviously not free, and I'm not even sure it's actually compassionate" more broadly on several fronts, but it's not clear to me where that will stabilize in the short and long term.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
Arabist / orientalist sympathies were common in the subset of the British upper class that managed a lot of the foreign/imperial office
I would be curious to know more. It's hardly a True History, but what I know of T. E. Lawrence is, albeit a decade or two earlier, a story of seeming indifference to Arab priorities and nationalism. Maybe sympathies changed in the interbellum period, but Sykes-Picot wasn't done for the benefit of their Arab WWI allies that fought the Ottomans.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2mo ago
At the rate things are going, in 5 to 10 years tops.
Which is conveniently around when the last living memories of the war will be completely gone. At that point I've observed that historians are wont to jump in with revisionist takes. Not that they're always wrong: sometimes the living histories are corrupted by a sense of honor and flawed memories. But it often leads to "maybe the baddies weren't completely bad" takes.
Now you have me imagining an alternate world in which people instead resorted to sending Unicode characters for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Squatting man, beetle, eye, eye.
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