I knew when I first saw it that it was an unfamiliar version, bit I just assumed it was from one of the more modern versions of the Bible with which I’m not familiar.
In retrospect, I should’ve guessed that the version choice was a dog whistle. Fucking racists just can’t pass up an opportunity.
I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.
It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.
That just says to me that no near future Monster Hunter game is going to be worth playing, since that focus just means that gameplay and story are going to be sacrificed in favor of graphics and gimmicks.
In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.
They’re sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn’t going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it’s some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they’re fucking morons.
That has to be an unpleasant way to live.
Of course, they’re such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still…
Just another step toward making used-to-be-Twitter a safe space for cowardly fascists.
Normal.
In fact, I don’t think there’s a single person on the entire planet who doesn’t make that exact choice, with the only differences between individuals being which things go in which categories. And, I guess, how aware they are of the fact that that’s what they do.
Maybe you can answer a question for me.
Why do shit-stirrers immediately rush off to start separate shit-stirring threads if a mod accuses them of being shit-stirrers?
Do they - you - really not grasp the painfully obvious fact that by starting threads like this, all they - you - manage to do is demonstrate that the mod was probably right?
This is actually true.
Most notably to me, the ability to sift through and collate enormous amounts of data has led to surprising things like diagnosing diabetes through retinal scans.
But those sorts of things, beneficial and impressive though they might be, remain at the fringe of AI research for the simple reason that those sorts of uses are too niche to provide the revenue stream that all of the bubble-building corporate parasites demand. Their focus is on the AI-as-a-substitute-for-real-intelligence aspect (and increasingly “AI” as just a meaningless marketing buzzword), since that’s where the money is. And unfortunately but not coincidentally, that’s where most of the public attention is too.
And yet again it cynically amuses me that AI has become “artificial” intelligence in the sense of “fake.”
It’s a shabby substitute for real intelligence, used by people who don’t possess any of their own to impress other people who don’t possess any of their own.
I don’t.
Neither censorship nor reeducation would be generally voluntary, so somebody would have to be given the authority to mandate them.
There’s a simple test then for whether or not something is a good idea:
Think of the person or people or political party you consider to be the greatest threat to others. Then think of what they would do with that power.
Because it doesn’t matter what the original intent is - if such a power is granted, no matter to whom or for what, those people WILL, sooner or later, get their chance to wield it.
I not only haven’t seen such a thing on Lemmy - I haven’t seen such a thing on the internet as a whole for at least 20 years or so.
Gone are the days when reasonable people could discuss and debate issues. Now it’s just shallow, virtue-signaling dogmatists crashing around hurling rhetoric, fallacies, and cant in the general direction of anyone who bears a passing resemblance to their sworn enemies.
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Well, first off, I’d be enormously surprised to experience any sort of afterlife at all. Beyond that though, I think I’d be even more surprised if it was anything more than coincidentally similar to the Christian conception. So if, for instance, Hitler was there, I expect that I’d just file that away as an interesting detail about whatever this existence was in which I’d found myself. And I would presume that the extent of my emotional response would be some amusement at the fact that all of the sanctimonious Bible thumpers got it wrong.
No surprise there.
There was never even the slightest chance that that balloon could pass through US airspace unobserved, and China possesses FAR more effective, secure and difficult-at-best methods with which to spy. So very obviously, it was intended to be discovered. And presuming that to be the case, the important bit then was the reaction its discovery would trigger.
So it was safe to presume from the start (as I did) that some significant part of the social media noise about it was simple astroturfing explicitly intended solely to further whatever response whoever wanted.
It’s possible to debate the precise definition of the word “choice” without resorting to personal attacks.
If you don’t have food, haven’t for several days, don’t have funds for it, and don’t have a job (because you don’t have a house because you don’t have a job) and you steal some food, I would not say you made a personal choice to commit a criminal act.
And I would say that you rather have still made a choice.
It might be a constrained choice, but it is still a choice.
At the extreme, to illustrate my point: if you were to put a gun to my head and tell me that if I didn’t give you my money, you were going to shoot me, I still have a choice. Granted that it’s a severely limited choice between two bad options that exists solely because you’ve arranged matters to impose it on me, but it is still a choice.
And in philosophy, that kind of precision matters.
My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system.
First - I’m presuming that determinism is false - that human beings possess meaningful agency (if determinism is true, then there can be no agency and thus “responsibility” is incoherent).
With that presumption, then the problem with this view is that regardless of the situation, there came a moment when the individual was faced with the choice between acting in a criminal manner or not acting in a criminal manner, and they chose to act in a criminal manner. So the individual does bear “ultimate” responsibility.
It would likely make more sense, for the issue you appear to be avtually trying to address, to frame it in terms of proportion - who bears the most responsibility?
At the extreme, it could well be the case that society bears literally all of the responsibility for every single thing that led up to the moment at which the individual chose to act in a criminal manner. But that still doesn’t change the fact that at that “ultimate” moment, the individual made that choice.
“And it’ll cure your asthma too.”