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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Epicycles are good, actually.

There have always been atheists. There has never been a long-lasting atheist society. Maybe some of us are able to productively deal with a cold, uncaring universe that grinds us to dust for having the temerity to exist, but it seems that most can't, and epicycles give their minds something useful to work with; help them function.

You could use that to justify anything.

I think models with epicycles are strictly inferior to models which don’t need them.

I guess this is that "postmodern religion" thing I've heard so much about. "Religion is a pack of lies - believe it anyway"?

No worse a lie than equality, representative democracy, trans-anything, blank-slatism, pacifism, deindustrialization, fiat currency...

In what sense are equality before the law and fiat currency lies?

In some senses, not in all. I meant to paint a picture, not to provide an exacting argument. Equality in general is often taken to mean that all humans are somehow equally valuable/competent/moral, which is laughably untrue even on very casual observation, and equality before the law often comes with a lot of caveats regarding enforcement, court costs, procedural shenanigans. Fiat currency is valuable only because market participants agree to pretend that it is. I'm not saying that those concepts aren't useful and beneficial, or that they're eactly as untrue by some metric as believing some other fiction, but they do require some level of suspension of disbelief or kayfabe to work.

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