just because our enemies cannot be rationally negotiated with and deserve punishment and opprobium does not mean we cannot meaningfully reason with how they think and use that to plan how we deal with them

longer form position here www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news... i really like this part

We must treat people who don’t do the bad thing, but who are connected to people who do the bad thing, as if they do the bad thing.

“I have instructed the state police to begin arresting federal agents and shooting them if they do not comply” is an order that both very likely will not be obeyed and that you get to give exactly one time, I think some of you have expectations a lot out of line with that is possible.

Releasing a very small volume called “The Book of Mormon: the Good Parts”

At that day he will dwell in the hearts of the children of men, and drive them to anger against that which is good. And others he will pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion. And others he will flatter, and tell them there is no hell.

Politicians are a patch over the principal-agent problem. The problem largely goes away if the agent is auditable and has no incentive to defect. 😁

How do we boycott and divest from bad actors in the attention economy? Touching grass is one way – but it entails abstinence from all online social technologies, which is a hard ask. In order for boycott and divestment to be feasible tactics on a large scale, alternatives must be made available.

Big ol’ “yes, but” to this article. I personally think it’s not good to have a norm where people are swearing nominally sacred oaths that binds them to promises that they don’t think about and aren’t particularly likely to keep. I don’t think this is just a matter of taste!

The nuclear block is a fine solution to a problem that only exists because Bluesky started out as a Twitter clone, and is still beholden to that core design. Very glad that the devs had the foresight to center the protocol and give apps the ability to design their own systems. 😁

There’s a small part of me that sometimes regrets having given up my cis male privilege. Occasionally I think about the good I could have done as a normal-ass guy standing up for feminist ideals. And then I remember my choice wasn’t “woman or man”, it was “transition or death”, and I feel better. 😅

“Good person” and “bad person” are category errors. This isn’t just philosophical onanism – it matters. If your ethical framework assigns binary labels to people, then it cannot handle the actual complexity of real-world behavior. Bad models yield bad predictions.

Impact trumps intent, but only for other people. I know that my own intentions are pure. So if anyone claims that my words are harmful, they’re being unfair and putting words in my mouth. And if someone actually *is* harmed by my words, then that’s their own fault for taking offense.

you know i have real love for the religion i was raised in, because much like my "chosen" religion of Christianity, i love its core far too deeply to find its actually existing manifestations tolerable for a single monent

Department of Defense: You, infantryman, are the treasure of America. We will deliver you Burger King in the middle of the Afghan dessert. Department of War: Go to the food bank, fatty. *string of racial and homophobic slurs*

I think I would be more interested in this if it didn’t have the integrated chatbot, but I’m not not interested in it as is.

This is great. This combines all the strengths of both modes of transit, with none of the weaknesses.

“Each of us lives several lifetimes” is a framing device. It is a way-of-seeing; it is a post-hoc narrative. This idea is useful for some purposes, less useful for others. Likewise, it resonates with some people more than with others. … but is it “true”?

this is the correct take on pronouns — this should be the official policy position of Woke 3.0

Each life is lived in a different reality. This shouldn’t surprise anyone: the way we experience the world is a function of who we are. You can’t be reborn into the same world you left; rebirth means transition. I lived one reality as a boy, one as an adult man, and one as a girl.

Someone wise may once have said that each of us lives several lifetimes. The way I see myself, I’m just starting my fourth. I think it’s gonna be a good one.

It’s almost like No Kings was a wildly effective slogan

INTERCALARY CALENDAR SYSTEMS

Today in “ideas that feel like a good idea in the gut but would actually make us worse”

Wondering how we can bring this energy to online.

Deeply terrified that Mamdani will be driven mad by the office

at its core this election was a referendum on Wokism. and the people have spoken

I am hearing that on his deathbed Andrew Cuomo received the light of democratic socialism and unhesitatingly sang the Internationale. Even now he looks down on Bushwick from the gardens of Astoria. Truly there is no god but DSA, and Zohran is his prophet!

mine eyes? seeing the glory. the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored? trampled. the faithful lighting of his terrible swift sword? buddy, you better believe that's loosed.

For example, @offline.mountainherder.xyz and I imagine the development of a federation of affiliated, professionalized anti-hate-speech and extremism blocklists and labelers customized to a number of different countries cultural context, supported as a B Corp. I think it could work.

Light reading

"you can't make something from nothing" - ppl that don't know how to construct the naturals

The “wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire” of my “wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire” is my friend? I guess?

Paradox of intolerance but it’s about threats of violence.

Really need to be able to differentiate between “the robots are people too” (cares about AI welfare) and “the robots are people too” (wants to do whatever they want with AI without consequence).

If we imagine an afterlife that implements true and fair justice… What kind of treatment does Dick Cheney deserve?

Just remembered last Thursday when a doll told me that their main reason for disdaining philosophy is that it’s mostly navel-gazing without worrying about whether the ideas are actually true or not And I had a moment of apoplexy which fortunately prevented me from launching into a lecture

Halloween is about laughing at death. We send children off with treats because children are how we laugh at death. Death gets all of us, but it can't get us all.

As the local word police: No, the “prompting with Hitler” Peter is not fascist. Nor is it antifascist. It’s just garden-variety agitprop. It’s bad, but we’ve had bad agitprop before, inside, and outside of fascism.

Different kinds of things have different levels of experience. A rock does not, as far as we know, experience anything. We imagine that a caterpillar experiences more than a rock, but less than a cat.

Intelligence is the thing which I have. Admitting things are intelligent means considering them morally and socially equal to me. I will never consider a corvid morally or socially equal to me. Therefore no corvid will ever be intelligent.

“Hey, Greg – can I call you Greg? Thanks, yeah, I just have one question. Do you, in fact, know what tariffs are?”

Yeah. Like frankly, I suspect the majority of cis people I politely interact with don’t think I’m a real lady. I suspect they also disagree with my religious affiliation, Dungeons and Dragons class, sports team support, and favorite Pokémon. None of that has to be a problem ordering a burrito.

more joy in heaven over a sinner that repenteth

Chomsky: “So you see, the sentence is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.” Wittgenstein: “What the hell are you talking about?”

A game where you have tokens called “ideas”, which have colored types, and which can have status effects placed on them. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” has the effect of selecting all green ideas with the “colorless” status, and adding the “asleep” and “furious” statuses.

You can observe the public square but only from the alley. Something something asymmetric speech. I dunno. I'm honestly exhausted by the meta, because it's the same battles Twitter had, just .. worse. Same goes for the mod discourse, which has both good points and people with a lot of trauma.

An LLM just called a project idea of mine “fascinating and quite plausible”. Should the model’s use of the word “plausible” raise our confidence that the idea actually is plausible, in the real world?