coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
“if you want tradition you have the traditions you have” can excuse any bad cultural practice. The NFL consciously marketed itself as tradition and TV football only started being popular around 1960. Boys playing games with ad hoc rules and a ball is tradition; the NFL is an invention coinciding with rising obesity and civic stupidity. Many of the original American traditions — Puritanism, freemasonry, Revivalism — did not value sports. And freemasonry is created tradition with a manufactured legend going back to Solomon’s Temple (reminder that we can create traditions and we ought to create good ones).
The NFL does not unify culture because it is anti-cultural: it is a commercial spectacle that alienates you, whereas playing a game with your neighbors is better at community-formation. It involves no family tradition. It destroys civic participation and replaces it with commercial pride with the players coming from all over the country. The “self-sacrifice” and “community pride” is a player moving across the country to make more money as soon as offered. The American who hates the NFL is the American who remembers that his country isn’t just an economic zone built around siphoning your energy and attention, but something grander. This is pure Americana: creating something new and better, inventing new traditions, recovering some old good ones, and leaving everything bad in the dust.
“Philosophy has always been tied to sports” ignores that from the advent of Christianity until the 20th century, sports were not esteemed in Western culture. That’s a long time. That’s more than 1500 years of Western philosophy not being tied to sports. Plato’s character Socrates was written to be good at wrestling in order to draw the vain to philosophy, sure. And wrestling also isn’t a commercial spectator sport.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
My humble CW opinion is that the NFL is immoral. It has married itself to online gambling companies, it decreases civic participation and exercise by marketing itself as a relevant national spectacle, it increases consumerism and microplastic exposure in the youth, and it reduces everyone’s attention to things that actually matter (discourse, philosophy, religion — your pick, anything is better than the sports).
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Probably on telegram, similar to the Z channels
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Where can I view media and read actual descriptions and see comparative breakdowns of Helene’s damage?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I was told by this person that said animosity completely goes away upon migrating to the West, that Pakistanis hate Indians because they are “uneducated”.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I happened to speak with two Canadians this month and in both cases housing was brought up. One told me that there were too many immigrants arriving too fast but that their country of origin was immaterial, and in any case Canadians don’t have a right to complain because of the residential schools controversy. The other told me point blank there were way too many Indians arriving, that it is ruining the country and that they would vote for Trump if they lived in America. The former was a white Canadian of colonial stock and the latter was a first-gen Pakistani replete with accent.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
You'll just tell it to do something and it'll do it
??? Whatis this supposed to mean?
You convey to the AI what you want to see using precision in language. There is no way for the AI to know what you want without you supplying information to it. Like, if you’re an architect telling the builder what to build, or a sketch artist with probing questions to a witness, or any other basic way in which humans use language to obtain what they want from other humans.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
AI may invert the common wisdom that studying English is worthless and studying computer science is the wise decision. If AI takes off as anticipated, employers will look for word people who are trained in analyzing prompt replies, using specified and nuanced language, and consuming hundreds of pages of written text per day. English and history students would be great at this.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
On page number 37, the court informs us that the girlfriend mentioned to the police she had information about the murder under no provocation. It was during a prostitution sting, but it defies any motive, because she later declined to cooperate despite the offers of 5k reward and charges being dropped:
On September 1, 1998, after being arrested for prostitution, Asaro told officers that she had information related to "the murder of the woman in U. City." (T. 1901; Ex. 8-Supplementary Investigative and/or Disposition Report dated 11/16/99 at 1). But when Detectives arrived to question her, she would not talk to them, stating she was "just trying to get out of the arrest." (Ex. 8, at 1). Police questioned her for two hours to no avail. Id. Although Asaro was known to police, after their interview with Cole on June 4, 1999, police enlisted Cole as an informant for the next four months to try to make contact with Asaro. (T. 1818). Detectives provided him with a pager so she could contact him, but Cole's efforts to get Asaro to incriminate Mr. Williams were unsuccessful. (T. 2439-44).
This isn’t surprising. Ghetto people don’t rat. Although she originally mentioned the murder to the officers, she refused to cooperate despite enormous reward offers. It was only after officers told her she could be charged for withholding information that she decided to cooperate. According to the lead prosecutor, she was a perfect witness:
she was amazing, she said -- first of all, she was with the defendant when he sold the computer to Glenn Roberts. She was there in the car. He walked up to Glenn Roberts' house and he sold him the computer. She took the police to the house where the computer was. She said, The guy that lives in that house has the computer. And the police knock on the door. Glenn Roberts comes to the door and says, what can I do for you? officers say, Do you have a computer? He says, Yes, I do. The police said, Bring it to me. He brought it to them, and it was the computer. They said, who gave it to you. And he said, Roberts said Marcellus williams. Marcellus was staying about three houses down living out of his car. Inside his car was Mrs. Gayle's calculator and Post Dispatch ruler in his car 15 months later. The computer, these are the things taken at the crime. The computer was found at Glenn Roberts' house about three doors down from his grandfather's house where he was staying in a car, a Buick, on the front yard or the side yard.
The prosecutor also tells us about the jailhouse informer:
Henry Cole said that the defendant told him that he jammed the knife in her neck and he twisted it and left it in her neck. And that's exactly how they found the body. And the knife was bent. And no one knew that. That was not on the news. That was not in the newspapers. The only people that knew that were the police. And cole had written it on a piece of paper while he was in the jail.
The lead prosecutor also informs us that the officers on the scene believed with certainty that the perpetrator wore gloves, due to spots left on the broken window. Which, of course, renders the entire dna subplot void, even if the lead prosecutor didn’t additionally inform us that he only learned about “touch DNA” in 2015!
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Is it plausible that one out of every 50 or so executions is of someone falsely accused? I think so.
Why? There are 21k murders a year in America. The clearance rate may plausibly drop that down to 16k resulting in a trial. Perhaps 14k convicted. Out of 14k, those with the most evidence and evilness become candidates for execution. The amount of inspection that these cases get would not lead to a 2% false positive rate. It is the legal equivalent of building a bridge, the failure rate is more like 1/10,000
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Those aren’t the main points.
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The murder weapon was improperly handled by the police, and they did not use “touch DNA” at that time. This means that DNA could not be factored into the murder, not that DNA either exonerated the suspect or acts as evidence against his involvement through omission. The DNA on the murder weapon was from the police, and it’s greatly misleading to just write “the DNA wasn’t his”.
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From my reading, the shoeprint sole pattern wasn’t his. That’s not a big deal because the perpetrator would have disposed of his bloody shoes if they were sufficiently bloody as to leave marks (they were). The Appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court makes no mention of shoe size.
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You are wrong that there was a financial motive. The girlfriend never requested reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder. (Don’t make top level posts explaining the “main points” if your main points are wrong, this isn’t Reddit).
You ignored significant other main points:
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The jailhouse informant provided information about the crime that was not publicly available, yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams’ involvement. Other individuals were present when Williams bragged about this murder, and they were disclosed to Williams’ team before trial and have been discussed in subsequent proceedings. “On August 31, 1998, Williams was arrested on unrelated charges and incarcerated at the St. Louis City workhouse. From April until June 1999, Williams shared a room with Henry Cole. One evening in May, Cole and Williams were watching television and saw a news report about Gayle's murder. Shortly after the news report, Williams told Cole that he had committed the crime. Over the next few weeks, Cole and Williams had several conversations about the murder. As he had done with Laura Asaro, Williams went into considerable detail about how he broke into the house and killed Gayle. After Cole was released from jail in June 1999, he went to the University City police and told them about Williams' involvement in Gayle's murder. He reported details of the crime that had never been publicly reported.”
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Gayle’s personal items were found in the trunk of Williams’ car. “Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle”.
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This was his face around the time of the murders. The media likes to show him as a weak old religious man today.
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This is sufficient to use the death penalty. There is zero chance (zero.) that he otherwise came into possession of these personal items, and he happened to have these worthless items in his possession (of no monetary value), and his cellmate just happened to accuse the wrong person who happened to have these possessions, and that he happened to guess the right details, and that the made up confession happened to also be reinforced by two separate made up testimonies that the confession occurred, and that the black hood girlfriend with a strict no snitching policy happened to rat our her boyfriend immediately. No. Come on. He did it. It’s not a question.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
One of the go-to locations when a horror movie wants to give you a sense of fear and eerieness is an old church in a traditional style. You see this in Resident Evil, Midnight Mass, in the architectural motifs of Harry Potter, etc. But when a movie wants to show alienation and social disunity and emotional coldness, they use brutalism. You see this in A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and the new Dune movie. Horror movies are unlikely to use brutalism to convey a sense of fear and people are unlikely to visit brutalism to feel a sense of awe. The Christian way to feel guilt is to look at the crucifixion and the way to feel fear is to look at the Last Judgment. Which architectural style is a suited home for the body of the God we killed, the spirit of the God that rose again, and the return of the God who raises the dead to life for an eternal judgment? I would say not brutalism, most concretely.
An aside, but I don’t understand why there is so much contention about what constitutes good architecture. Buildings are obviously not just for “economic function use”, because humans have human needs beyond economic function and they experience a positive mood from beauty. Beauty makes us value a thing more and makes the beautified thing more memorable. This is all obvious from glancing at cultures in history, understanding psychology, or just common intuition. There is no need to justify any architectural style beyond “I find this sufficiently beautiful” because beautiful things make us happier. You don’t need to scientifically explain why repeated motifs in a building make us happy (does it imitate foliage? Human symmetry?), because if it is beautiful it is beneficial to our emotional state and community. There may be edge cases where it is unclear whether prioritizing function or beauty is better, but this is trivially solved by simply asking its users which they prefer — it is always going to be some balance which is intuitively obvious.
My theory is that the inhuman competition to become a top architect actually selects for inhuman people: strivers who have undeveloped faculties for sensing beauty or intuitive philosophy, and whose architectural values are downstream from their senseless avarice and vainglory. Normal people — the people who create civilization through their balanced moral living, and for whom civilization exists — are disgusted by these people and their creations. Normal people are filtered out of being top architects because they care about beauty and balanced living (the symmetry of seasons): they pass off studying to enjoy a beautiful day or a beautiful girl or a beautiful moment, while the senseless one doubles down on his blueprints.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
I like the Biblehub commentaries for ease of use and I also like Abarim Publications word studies even if he is kind of insane. After that, I’ll maybe look to see what Origen / Tertullian had to say. For Old Testament, Philo’s allegorical readings are goated. For particular interesting passages I’ll run a search on AcademicBiblical (Reddit) or the EarlyWritings forum. Is there any interesting passage or book you’re interested in right now?
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance
Women would prefer a 90s-era Jude Law or a Timothee Chalamet over any MMA fighter. Most prime-fertility age heartthrobs are not physically imposing or good at fighting, but instead possess obvious indicators of health (which is a fitness) plus social grace (which is a fitness in civilization).
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
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The story of Genesius of Rome. An actor who wanted to parody and mock Christian rituals, he had a religious experience during one of his mock baptisms and genuinely converted. It gives me a fun mental image of an actor whose role is to exaggerate, but one performance his baptism was genuine, and so the audience is left quizzically wondering what is going on, like a Charlie Kaufman skit. It’s also symbolic of the “fake it ‘til you make it” nature of affirmative rituals — probably, in some sense, everyone’s worship is inauthentic until it’s not.
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St Sebastian is interesting because his art is so sexually-charged. Example 1 and 2. Some mistakenly think that the nature of these paintings is sexual, with the religious garb acting as plausible deniability. But it is closer to the opposite. Girls (and gays) are attracted to attractive men, so portraying an attractive saint in attractive situations is a valid way bring the lustful to God. They start at the lust, they end in identifying with a holy struggle.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
Even people who use Reddit hate Reddit. “Redditor” is synonymous with loser online. Reddit clones have been terrible for a number of psychological reasons which are actually pretty easy to deal with.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
I think Reddit is a more sophisticated psychological operation than is publicly known. There is compelling evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell ran one of the top moderator accounts. The account MaxwellHill was an influential power-mod on the default subs since Reddit took off and it posted almost nonstop since the early days of Reddit’s acquisition. The account shared common interests with Ghislaine Maxwell, was named after the nickname of Maxwell’s estate (Maxwell Hill), and randomly stopped posting the week Ghislaine was arrested. (Imagine possessing powerful influence over a community for more than a decade, spending about every day on it, and you randomly quit forever without any sign of discontent and no public comment.) Ghislaine on her Twitter (iirc) showed an early interest in forums and I think specifically mentioned Reddit. Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell was a media mogul who has been labeled “Israel’s Superspy”, and Ghislaine was partners with Jeffrey Epstein who is theorized to be an Israel-associated intelligence asset rather than a financier.
I also think that the Reddit feed structure betrays its utility as a psychological manipulation operation. There’s a community called “AmITheAsshole” which is inorganic. The top content often follows the same structure: “is [following tradition or conventional wisdom] and [having a special affinity to family] good, or does it make someone an asshole?” The answer is going to be that it makes you an asshole, a status which is to be deterred. This acts as psychological shaping for the Reddit user where he gradually learns that everything he has learned is wrong and can’t be trusted, and that he can only rely on Reddit for what is right. This is accomplished through dramatic and unusual social dilemmas. This cognitive habit is kept when the user consumes the rest of Reddit’s content which is commercial + political slop. Now the user is primed to assent to what is presented on Reddit, because he has previously learned that Reddit overrules everything he has understood before.
There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically). If you’re serious about making one let us know because there’s a lot of psych wisdom that can be implemented to make it take off.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
There are no new games we continue talking about for years after release
Roblox and Fortnite are the big ones for young people. The reason there hasn’t been a ton of new contenders for popular games is that the industry has figured out which game types are most addictive and have optimized for it. If you want to compete against Fortnite, you will have to compete against a company with 100x more resources and half a decade in specialized knowledge. You need a psychological zero day to compete against Fortnite, in the way that Fortnite competed against CoD (more colors, more discovery, more progression, third person skin views, updated maps, etc). Fortnite was such an insane piece of popular culture that when I saw an opera in ~2019 a character did the dancing emote to the laughter of the crowd. Fortnite was plausibly more culturally dominant than any other game in history — it changed how kids danced and created new slang (“bro did the default emote”)
There are no new phenomena like the Deadheads or 80s goths where media spearheads an alternate lifestyle
The egirl and eboy aesthetic is arguably new, and it’s not like there were many 80s goths
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
Makes sense, why would you want a flood of competitors to lower your wages?
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
He had donated to ActBlue and attempted to kill the Republican incumbent. A Republican would not do this, but a Democrat would have a motive to vote in a Republican mid-term.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
Routh? No.
Public records in North Carolina, where Routh is a longtime voter, show he has been registered as an unaffiliated voter for years but has most recently voted for and donated to the Democratic Party. An elections official confirmed that Routh was also registered as a Democrat at one point
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
It’s noteworthy that most of the extremist attacks this election have been anti-Trump, while a section of the population still believes that the Republican Party is the “radical”, “extremist”, “violent” party. This is despite Republicans having twice the gun ownership, and being out of office. Judge a tree by its fruits. Who is producing the most violent radicals? This shows (once again) that media propaganda can exist completely outside the realm of facts — propaganda doesn’t need facts to undergird it, you can genuinely just manufacture and shill it.
had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later. From Wikipedia —
When the Mongols invaded the former lands of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, Moscow was still a small town within the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal.[27] Although the Mongols burnt down Moscow in the winter of 1238 and pillaged it in 1293, the outpost's remote, forested location offered some security from Mongol attacks and occupation, while a number of rivers provided access to the Baltic and Black Seas and to the Caucasus region.[28] Muscovites, Suzdalians and other inhabitants were able to maintain their Slavic, pagan, and Orthodox traditions for the most part under the Tatar yoke
What happened to Kievan Russ is actually relevant to the topic. Kyiv decided to fight against the Mongols, which led to the total desolation of Kyiv and the destruction of the original Kievan Russ culture. Something similar happened to Baghdad. But the Slavs in Moscow decided to acquiesce to Mongol rule, which allowed for the salvation of Kievan Russ culture and the continuation of Russian Orthodoxy. So there are two important things to consider here: Moscow and Kievan Russ are historically the same culture / people, and history shows how delusional concepts of self-determination have destroyed Kyiv before — until, of course, Moscow liberated its former territories, because they chose to submit to the Mongol’s greater strength. (nota bene: being zero percent Slav, I don’t care about anything happening east of Poland, and having the Slavs destroy each other is as beneficial to the West as having the East Asians destroy each other or the Semites destroy each other. But I genuinely feel that there is something deeply wrong with the waste of life in the Russian-Ukraine war especially with Ukraine’s low TFR.)
The NFL employs marketers, psychologists, designers, sociologists, media people for the purpose of tricking you into buying their product. They might do this through an advert, paying a celebrity to post about the sport, through youth influencers, or by associating their stupid game with an actual American tradition like Thanksgiving. They are more clever than you and me and they have more money to spend on their image.
People “desire to watch” (did you mistype when you included the word “participate”?) things that they consider relevant and important. The problem is that they aren’t wise to the extreme lengths that corporations go to trick you into thinking their product is relevant and important. Arguing that the NFL doesn’t trick people because few watch Lacrosse is like arguing that Nike doesn’t trick people because few buy Rebok: not every corporation is equally adept at shilling their product.
Then let’s just bring back the colosseum. We are close enough with the MMA. We might as well let them kill each other instead of just causing brain damage. Truly, the people yearn for the colosseum, and it is immoral to keep them from bloodsport.
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