Crazy how its just fascists telling on one another.

Wrestle with a pig and you’ll both get muddy, but only the pig will enjoy it.

Christian Nationalists long ago mastered parsing out the bits and pieces of the Bible they agree with and butchering anyone who disagreed with them. This is a tradition going back millennia. You’re not going to beat anyone in the Westburo Baptist Church at a game where the rules boil down to “Fuck You Heretic, I win”.

Except it’s not just some guy vandalizing a car

It’s not just one guy serial killing, drug running, or human trafficking either.

Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.

Now we’re stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source

That’s not how the game is played. You absorb the public losses. But they privatize the gains. Otherwise, there’s no deal.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US.

That’s the goal, yes.

Showing up in Midgard just in time for the Plate in Sector 7 to collapse on my head.

we are still many years from discovering the Epstein drive

If only he’d had a little more time to continue his research.

Love to be governed by an undead theocracy that persists through the deliberate cycling of apocolyptic events, because they’ve got 3D underwater volleyball in the capital.

My mom can’t flood the Earth killing everybody.

Ask the kids of Andrea Yates whether they can tell the difference.

The Internet will continue to function just fine, just as it has for 50 years.

Sounds of intercontinental data cables being sliced

Parents aren’t all powerful.

From the perspective of a newborn, they might as well be. Everything you need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable is actively managed by the parent. You don’t understand anything about your condition or your history or your source of care. All you know is the id-based impulses to complain when you don’t feel good and the soothing release of your feeding, playing, and sleeping cycles.

So it could stop any war, any disease, any pain, … but does not.

What would that look like, from a practical perspective? Imagine trying to explain to a baby that you’re going to stick a needle into its skin in order to prevent it from suffering a disease, when it has no conception of disease. All you know is the pain of the needle. Must you conclude, from that pain, that your nurse is fundamentally evil for inflicting this upon you? And that, by extension, your parents are evil for bringing you to this nurse?

“If parents were truly worthy of my attention, they would have found a better method of vaccinating me than this needle!” is the sort of thing you get to say as a child, precisely because you do not understand the underlying nature of the world you live in. All you know is the scolding language of a parent cajoling you into this immediate superficial pain.

Should humankind be incapable of performing wars? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of contracting disease? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of experiencing pain, even? Is that what you really want? An eternal numbness of being? Is godly perfection just being a particularly resilient tree?

Either it’s not all powerful or not good.

One can be both exceptionally powerful and exceptionally good without needing to draw a distinction between the two. One can be beyond comprehension, as well. But the argument that a single person experiencing a single moment of discomfort disproves a benevolent deity seems to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.

Kinda like blaming a President at war for not saying “thank you” to its “benefactor”

What’s crazy about this line is how frequently Zelenskyy has done the “America A#1, you’re the best!” media tour in the run up to this meeting. How many clammy-handed, rictus grin photo-ops does this guy have to do for you people? How many trips does he need to make to DC to say “Hello from Ukraine, I love you!” to Congress? Dude’s entire career as President has just been going abroad and brown-nosing for NATO support.

This reminds me of the British journalists who will cut an Arab liberal off in the middle of an “I am here to condemn Hamas and ask for release on behalf of the Palestinian people” automated response to grill them on why they haven’t condemned Hamas. It’s all just bullying at an international scale. I’m amazed Trump didn’t drag Zelenskyy into the restroom and try to give the man a swirly.

I mean, setting aside the “We’re from the Government and We’re Here To Help” liberalism that American conservatives reflexively recoil at, I do find it disorienting to pretend a heavily rural American breadbasket would need agriculturally scarce Europe to send food aid.

This reminds me of the 90s US effort to do welfare politics in West Africa, by dumping millions of tons of excess agriculture into Trans-Atlantic wholesale markets. The flood of “free” food (with tons of political strings attached) shifted the balance of power to the African urban centers, as local agricultural markets collapsed and people flooded to the industrial centers to get food at below the domestic production cost. Political leadership capable of controlling the influx of foodstuffs rapidly consolidated power within major port cities. This gave rise to authoritarian governments, political purges, and ultimately two horrifying Congolese Wars (the second often referred to as The Great War of Africa).

Obviously, more complicated than this. Along with food “aid” we also delivered a surplus of “military aid” to our regional allies (a list that was constantly shifting between US and African administrations, particularly during the fallout of the failure of the Soviet Union). Then there were a host of local tribal conflicts and score-settling that got ramped up to eleven with the sudden glut of foreign wealth.

But maybe I’m drawing lines where none exist. Can you really imagine how the US economy might be upset by a sudden shift in who controls the supply of cheap imports? Can you imagine what our country would look like if it was flush with small arms or if we had a bunch of local land barons with short tempers and delusions of grandeur? Can you conceive of an America that had a bunch of poorly defined interior borders that suddenly become flashpoints of political tension?

I certainly can’t. Bring on the flood of EU eggs!

the horrors god would be responsible for if god is in control

You’re forgetting the counterfactual. Namely, that we live in The Best Of All Possible Worlds and what you describe as horror is actually the nicest things can conceivably get. The standard Christian argument is that, without God, existence would be significantly worse. Also (depending on your flavor of Christianity) the mortal life is a proving ground not a final destination. Life is a trial one experiences before being eligible to enter the Kingdom Of Heaven, where God is fully in control.

The horrors are a consequence of Free Will mixed with the corruptive influences of evil spirits sent out to tempt mortals to sin. And they are transient, while the Christian Reward is supposed to be eternal. You see this best in the Story of Job, during which he suffers a litany of torments but holds firm to his faith. This faith is ultimately rewarded, not just through the restoration of his material pleasures, but through the promise of an eternal blissful afterlife.

You could replace “God” with “Parents” to the same effect.

But arguing that a parent is evil because they see a child committing an error, know it is an error, and decline to intercede doesn’t rationally follow. If you helicopter over your kids and intercede every time they make mistakes, they never develop into independent and mature adults. You also induce a lot of anxiety, as you’re constantly interposing yourself between the child’s desires and actions without the ability to convey the wisdom of your decisions. So the kid sees you as the harmful force, rather than the thing you’re seeking to avert.

So what’s a Parent/God to do? Do you puppet your child, never letting them stray farther than the length of a string? Do you lock your child in a padded ceil and hand-feed them every day? Do you hardwire their programming, so they can’t deviate from your design, acting exclusively on a divine instinct?

Is that really what we consider “Goodness”?

There is also the Calculation Problem to consider. A God-like intelligence might be able to observe far more than a human without being perfectly omniscient. Similarly, they might be able to calculate probabilities more quickly and accurately without being perfectly prescient. If a Parent/God knows most of the things but is not omniscient, does that mean they are unworthy of your attention or the reception of wisdom? At the same time, is it the duty of a Parent/God to restrict the actions of the others in their domain to the things they can calculate in advance? This brings us back to the idea of the Child Prisoner or Brainwashed Child. You’re safe at the expense of any kind of growth or personal liberty. God treats you like a farmer treats a veal calf - perfectly unspoiled through inaction.

And finally, there is the problem of Entropy. A God who can foresee everything and recognizes that Evil is inevitable. Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it can perceive it? Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it cannot prevent it? Is this flaw in God’s power a reason to reject it as a source of virtue?

Consider Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, his eye plucked out in pursuit of a way to prevent Ragnorak. He is not all-powerful. He is not-all knowing. He is routinely makes mistakes and even acts out of anger, lust, or petty vengeance. He is fundamentally flawed as dieties come. And yet his primary goal and function - to prevent the end of the world - seems noble enough to justifiably cultivate a religious following.

Death to America

It’s awesome when some students go from C’s to A’s based on my feedback.

If you can get a really positive feedback loop going, where the student trusts the teacher and you can harmonize, that’s awesome. I’ve been in classes like that. I’ve also been in classes where the RA didn’t speak English and I had to argue trivial subjects straight from the textbook that got graded wrong.

There’s real quality education and there’s diploma mills and weed out classes, and you can find them two doors down from one another on some campuses.

I mean, I was joking before but I work O&G and can say confidently that my firm’s petroleum engineering department wouldn’t exist if it didn’t.

Via the lytic cycle. It just takes a while.

Saavik: On the test, sir. Will you tell me what you did? I would really like to know.

McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.

Saavik: How?

Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.

Saavik: What?

David Marcus: He cheated.

Kirk: I changed the conditions of the test. I got a commendation for original thinking. I don’t like to lose.

Saavik: Then you never faced that situation. Faced death.

Kirk: I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.