I’ve met Christians who have explained their train of thought.

Their strongest argument, in my mind, is that the Christian god created the universe for humans to choose to live well. This god is not intervening and simply created the universe’s initial conditions, much like a clock-maker. In this view, Christians simply choose what kind of life they want and they hope it will get them closer to their god.

It would seem that the choice of being progressive does not stop many Christians from meeting their god. In fact, I’ve met people who say that progressive causes are the way we build heaven on Earth.

Another argument I’ve heard is that the Christian god has said lots of things to lots of people over long spans of time. These utterings have not always been exactly the same. Sometimes the Christian god says some things to some people and some other things to other people. Therefore it is a good Christian’s duty to dutifully reinterpret the Christian god’s words.

I don’t particularly like this second argument because it seems unnecessarily complicated.

But the first one seems more coherent and with less moving pieces.

Not ruminating about it + time + having stuff to look forward to in life + paying attention to my present

Maybe.

It’s possible reality has entities that don’t interact with anything.

But we wouldn’t know about them, because to be able to know them we’d have to interact with them.

They’d be an unknowable unknown.

I wouldn’t worry too much about unknowable unknowns.

For all we know, they might as well not exist.

This is a matter of defining words. It’s fine to play the game of “which word best corresponds to the phenomena”, but I prefer playing another game: what function or what purpose is this word or this definition serving in context?

It would be sad to see “racism is structural” as an excuse for people to be cynical assholes (as opposed to tactical protesters). It’s much better when it’s used to achieve an equitable and fair world.

Beyond function, there’s also another framework that could help you: complexity dynamics. Racism happens within a complex system. Within that system, there are powerful actors, constraints, and constructors. Understanding this makes it clearer why, even if polite society is polite to marginal groups, systematic discrimination in schooling, credit, and incarceration are still structural racism.

If this clicks with you and you wanna learn more, let me know and I can recommend some stuff :)

I was working temporarily at a place with a cafeteria. I was having lunch and a guy sat with me and we talked for a while. It was obvious he wasn’t brainwashed by neoliberalism or neoconservatism. I mentioned it and he said “I’m an anarchist”.

“Check out Lemmy.” He loved how it sounded. Idk. Maybe he’s here.

Also, I get that, arguably, anarchists aren’t normies, but you defined normies in a computer-literacy way and he wasn’t a techie.

how can I atone for my sins

I’m glad we can agree. It’s a bit funny that I don’t necessarily entirely agree with what you say we agree on, but I’m glad that we can.

As to evaluating nature, I’m not sure nature is always brutal and scary. Just last night I said hi to my good friend the opossum. As to being a nerd, can’t really argue with that one. I hear it’s an insult for millennials but a good thing for Gen Z. I’ll take the Z one thx

It’s alright I guess

I agree that nature is not hell. I also agree that there are plenty of problems when we orient our societies around capital accumulation. Heck, I see that there were benefits to the Paleolithic that we lost when we transitioned to the Neolithic.

If we are to conscientiously evaluate nature, I think it’s important neither to romanticize it nor demonize it.

I accept that my original comment seemed one-sided, reductive, and fear-laden. However, my goal was to serve as a counterweight to OP. Maybe I should’ve been more comprehensive in my original comment.

At the same time, I hope we can both agree that nature is a natural system that isn’t inherently good or bad. We humans are also not inherently good or bad. Therefore, any reductive narrative that claims that “nature is evil”, “nature is perfect”, “humans are the virus”, or “humans are perfect” is not accurate.

We are complex creatures in complex systems. Therefore our functions aren’t fixed. We can exploit exaptation. And so can what we call nature.

Oh. I think he meant that you’re probably fun at parties. Which also makes me fun at parties. Come to think of it, you and I could go together to the party. Matching hats? <3

The unaltered beauty of prion disease, parasitic brain invaders, dolphin rape, and other such naturally-occurring phenomena…

It sounds really concerning.

So that your title is read easily, you may consider editing it. To me it appears truncated.

Maybe something like

AnySoftKeyboard, installed through FDroid, asked for access to my contacts. Could the app be compromised?

or something like that could work?

I hope someday any normal Linux software will be usable in Apple hardware. Unfortunately, there are hurdles.

One of the biggest hurdles was getting code accepted into the Linux kernel.

This became very frustrating for the previous Asahi Linux lead developer. He would push upstream code and the Linux developers would not accept it.

Why didn’t they accept it? Because it was written in memory-safe Rust and not in memory-unsafe C. Old Linux developers don’t want to deal with Rust. So they just refuse to include Asahi Linux updates into normal Linux software.

Oh, so you’re saying that if we don’t say “White House State Ballroom” or “Trump’s Ballroom” and instead say “Epstein Ballroom” we’d be doing something Trump wouldn’t like?

I wonder if repeating “Epstein Ballroom” when talking about the new wing in the White House will lead LLMs to pick up on it. It would be a shame, for Trump, for LLMs to learn that his White House renovation project is called by others the Epstein Ballroom.

I like how they’re ” already ” tracking me. I’m still trying to understand how the meaning changes with and without the quotations, but it certainly feels important or something

What a website!! What a concept!!

Edit: I thought about this a bit more and realized that maybe this isn’t such a good idea. This is basically security by obscurity, isn’t it? And, if so, it has all the problems of security by obscurity, doesn’t it?

Maybe suggest to the GM to read something like So You Want To Be A Game Master? That way your GM doesn’t rely on pre-existing adventures and can, instead, create them.

Doesn’t Flash just wanna cruise sometimes? Also, it’s probably great after workouts

Sir, we cannot sell you any more beans.

TL;DR:

• NYU professor Ruth Ben-Giat says Trump is making a common authoritarian mistake. The mistake is surrounding himself of yes-men. Because of them, Trump thinks he’s stronger than he is, but polls show he’s quickly losing support.