Check out my digital garden: The Missing Premise.
That's not exactly wrong, but it's not the only reason. I've never been particularly interested LGBTQ+ issues, and Contrapoints's transition first was kinda like, "K, I'm glad I'm learning about this stuff, I guess, but I have other interests." After all, what drew me to both in the first place were their philosophical analyses and how they applied it to social issues. They were important to me for how they showed me how philosophy can be used, as opposed to DarkMatter5555 (I think that's his name. Also, add him to the list), who I also used to watch, but that dude never grew out of the same stale template of animating god and the angel and regurgitating the most basic atheistic ideas.
So, my purpose in watching them was to learn how to apply principles to reality with a little learning along the way. But when they started focusing in on their transition, I just dropped off.
Yes. As a black man, America has produced a long very involved legacy of which I'm proud being my heritage.
Sure, it was absolutely founded on treating people like as sub-human, and there are people today that are trying to return me to that state, but fuck them as they've been fucked for the last century and a half. I'll be damned if I let them represent America.
It's interesting to me that, as conservatives and Republicans gain more political power, people are generally increasingly upset by the state of the union. But their perceptions of responsibility hinge on who controls Congress and the presidency rather than how the government works. So, they're blind to how conservatives and Republican ruin everything good under the sun.
So, even as the Supreme Court undermines the FDA and NLRB, Americans will tend to blame the wrong party for it until they're knee deep in literal shit.
Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube were two big ones. I'd still watch Carlos Maza if he produced anything, but he hasn't in like two years, so...I'll include him, too.
From Kagan's dissenting opinion:
In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education. See, e.g., National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA, 595 U. S. 109 (2022); West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U. S. 697 (2022); Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U. S. 477 (2023). But evidently that was, for this Court, all too piecemeal. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice.
[...]
The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.
What do you need Project 2025 for when you have the unaccountable conservative majority on the Supreme Court?
Yes, as someone that got into photography many years ago:
- Rule of Thirds—Honestly, this is the easiest thing to learn. It won't make your photos amazing or anything, but it is a consistent way to view any scene, which is very useful.
- Then watch some random video on photographic composition. There are many different ways to view a scene.
- Learn the Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO/Exposure Triangle. Absolutely crucial for learning to shoot manual.
- Learn to shoot manual. Try taking good pics of fireworks on July 4th. It's tougher than it looks.
- You don't need to get into editing raw photos, but it's fun af. I switched from Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop to ON1. I'd also recommend Affinity Photo. Unlike ON1, Affinity does not have a subscription and their software is comparable to Photoshop.
As for your photo, at a glance, I can't really tell it's shot as such as high ISO. But once you zoom in, you can see the fuzziness. Still though, I think it's kinda clear why you took the picture. It looks you're focusing on several interacting subjects (the bunny, the butterfly, the turquoise fence with the bunny outline) that all framed really well by the wooden house and the negative space at the top and right edges of the frame. I, for one, like it a lot!
Anyway, have fun! Photography is one of the hobbies I'm happiest to have. I hope it ends up being as fulfilling for you!
The "solutions" to this are called theodicy and are definitely a fascinating rabbit hole. They're all unsatisfying, but philosophically interesting
Still the both sides thing?
Biden is demonstrably better on policy. For example, he has them.
Trump doesn't have any at all.
No one wants to hear about issues. They want to hear promises on issues, but they don't care to actually know, let alone understand, the policy.
That's because long ago America was in fighting shape against internal threats to democracy. Mike Tyson hit on the jaw isn't going down the first, second, or even 10th time. But each punch wears down Tyson's form, so too do the unconstitutional attacks against America. Trump's administration made America stumble on the edge of the ring, holding onto our institutions like the only ropes between us and losing.
A hit like that again will knock America out cold. Guaranteed.
Probably the same people Barry Goldwater warned us of:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them
That study is so old! It's even worse now!
Okay, so like....the green skills are stupid.
These could be technical skills relevant to renewable industries (knowing how to preserve water systems or install heat pumps for example), or broader skills such as climate action planning, corporate sustainability, sustainable procurement, sustainability reporting and impact assessment
Corporate sustainability?! Come the fuck on.
I got one.
Boomers are desperate to be good people but the experience of a whole three generations after them said they are so underskilled they actually pose a 'risk' to democracy.
Good.
And, in the process, he brings up “conspiracy theorists” branding them as undermining the judicial process in the US – because they dare question the validity of a particular judicial process that aimed at former President Trump.
No, they don't merely question it, but vociferously claim it weaponizes the government against Trump. But anyone that's not balls deep in the MAGA cult knows that the judicial system is weaponized against Trump in the same way it's weaponized against any criminal. In fact, the entire system, at every level, has treated Trump with the whitest, purest gloves for the most egregious things he's done as as president and as a civilian.
As the law and order candidate, Trump must submit to the demands of the law to maintain the order his very presence is upsetting.
They're not stupid. I doubt they're even evil at first. But business demands have a way of disciplining economic actors.
What's the roadblock? Oh, of course, corporate heavy-handedness against the government:
This year, a former Caltrans executive said she was demoted after raising concerns about a repaving project that surreptitiously widened 3½ miles of the freeway where the toll lanes were being proposed. That project removed bushes and paved the median, creating more space for lanes. State regulations demand environmental analysis, a public airing and mitigation before major freeway widening, but none of that occurred.
Surprise surprise!
Sociopaths, a term often used to describe those living with antisocial personality disorder, operate within their daily lives without a “conscience,” can be characterized as acting without feelings of guilt, remorse, or shame coupled with a tendency to reject the concept of responsibility.Antisocial...
Because of Trump's conviction, the entire GOP is determined to destroy the law and pave the way for retribution.
How come there aren't any moral geniuses?
When kids do linear algebra or they rise to the level of GM in chess within the first two decades of their lives, such people are obviously geniuses. Their intelligence is undeniable.
But it's like moral/spiritual geniuses aren't recognized in the same way, if at all. How come their intuitive expertise isn't recognized so easily ?
When pigs fly, your dreams come true!
All those things that would happen when pigs fly, are gonna happen now!
Iran-backed militias inciting anti-Israel agitators to escalate on US campuses
Students at Columbia University have been alerted that all in-person classes will be held virtually through the end of the semester as anti-Israel protesters have taken over the campus. Columbia President Minouche Shafik set a deadline of midnight Tuesday to reach an agreement in negotiations with a...
Current front page of Fox News: ! It takes you here to a page titled "Antisemitism on campus surges as agitators take over", with the pinned post from Bradford Betz saying what the front page says.
In a new Roosevelt Institute analysis authors Shahrzad Shams, Deepak Bhargava, and Harry W. Hanbury make the argument that neoliberalism must be understood not only as a policy project but also as a cultural project.
This is report discusses the cultural environment in which men's liberation occurs. It points out that the right has successfully weaponized neoliberal discontent to further it's anti-democratic goals. Under the heading "Self-Help Toxic Masculinists and Conspiritualists Weaponize WASH":
> Self-help, already intimately intertwined with the hustle mindset, is today being infused with deeply misogynistic propaganda by far-right popular culture figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate. [...] Through podcasts, webinars, interviews, lectures, and books, these men and others like them are using their enormous platforms to offer solutions to the so-called “crisis of masculinity”—a conservative talking point that warps the complex and legitimate social and economic issues facing men, particularly working-class men, into a rallying cry against progress and equality—in an effort to reassert male dominance, heteronormative gender roles, and traditional patriarchal family structures. To do this in a way that reaches wide swaths of people and allows for a shred of plausible deniability, they use the seemingly innocuous language of self-help and self-improvement.
Self-help and self-improvement reinforce the "neoliberal self", "an entrepreneurial subject" where "personal grown and fulfillment are said to be attained through competition with others." But, as the report repeatedly emphasizes, neoliberalism as a cultural order generates and regenerates deep, deep dissatisfaction with it.
Reading what I've read so far, I thought to myself, "What does men's liberation mean, exactly?" (I'm not sure why this community popped into my mind...but it did). Because, without this neoliberal angle, men's liberation risks thrusting men back into a misanthropic culture as feminists. Sure, that's better than being a right-wing, patriarchal zealot, but it's not truly liberating.
While I would obviously recommend the report itself, given that it's 50 pages, I understand that's incredibly unlikely. Maybe throw it in Claude and ask it some questions.
In any case, what do you think?
While “colorblind equality” has a better ring to it than the DEI regime, nonetheless, the concept is unworkable and actually contributes to worsening racial
> If we were to treat the notion of “colorblindness” as the animating principle of the Constitution, the law, and the very concepts of justice and quality, we would thereby concede the moral, ethical, and ideological debates to those who assert that our interpretation of the world must be based, one way or another, on race. Instead, we should regard liberty, not “colorblindness,” as our highest ideal.
What does it mean that many more young women than young men are leaving American churches?
>To be a Christian in America today is undeniably low-status, and all the more so if one ascribes to any form of orthodox theology. High status jobs, meanwhile, are cordoned off by advanced degrees, and therefore inaccessible to men who do not graduate college. [...] Young women leaving church might be doing so due to a staunch commitment to egalitarianism, but more likely they are leaving because of a more general sense that church is not cool.
The first name on the 2024 list of Atlantic storms is Alberto Saurus.
- Chris Cross
- Debby Downer
- Ernesto Cattywampus
- Francine Leanmean
Faith and flag: How the Left used ‘Christian Nationalism’ to undermine traditional values
> At the country’s founding, “there was a Christian political theory that was assumed as a consensus position, and the laws of nature and nature’s God don’t make sense without a common shared understanding of the divine and of created order,” Meadowcroft said, adding that the belief that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” as the Declaration of Independence states, “only makes sense within the long story of the Christian West.”
> Biblical language has been used throughout American history, from the founding and Abraham Lincoln’s arguments to end slavery, to combating communism and advancing the civil rights movement.
> “We’re saying we need to return that biblical language and an acknowledgment of our Christian heritage to the public sphere if our institutions and our assumptions about human nature and the law are going to make sense, and that the longer that we keep those out of the public sphere, the more unmoored we become from these core moral assumptions that undergird our whole constitutional system and the more lawless our future will be,” Meadowcroft explained. “So this is not a call to revolution, or civil war, or any such thing, it is rather a restoration, a re-founding, and an establishment of genuine constitutional order again.”
> To get a clearer picture of what Bidenflation looks like, we need to compare prices between now and when Biden took office. That's what TIPPinsights did, and the results show you that Bidenflation isn't just worse than the White House wants you to believe — it's worse than you might have realized.
> Food prices increased by 20.6% under Biden compared to only 2.2% as per BLS CPI, a difference of 18.5 points.
> TIPP CPI data show that Energy prices increased by 29.6%. But, according to the BLS CPI, energy prices improved by 1.9%. The difference between the two is a whopping 31.5 points.
> The Core CPI measures the price increase for all items, excluding food and energy. In the year-over-year measure, the Core TIPP CPI is 16.5% compared to 3.8% BLS CPI, a 12.8-point difference.
> Further, gasoline prices have increased by 29.9% since President Biden took office, whereas the BLS CPI shows that gasoline prices have improved by 3.9%, a difference of 33.8 points.
The latest IRS data on who bears the income-tax burden demonstrate yet again the benefits of lower tax rates over higher rates.
> The latest IRS data on who bears the income tax burden demonstrate yet again the benefits of lower tax rates over higher rates.
> When President Donald Trump entered office, the richest 1% of tax filers ($675,000 income and above) paid a little more than 40% of the income taxes collected.
>The 2017 Trump tax cut reduced the effective highest federal tax rate to 37% from 42%.
> But the most recent IRS tax return data (for 2021) confirm that even as these rates were lowered — not to mention the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% — the share of the tax burden shouldered by the 1% rose to almost 46%.
Written by the guy who came up with the Laffer Curve, Arthur Laffer.
The American Conservative: If Your Side Wins, Do You Care How the Winner Was Selected?
Divisions over the nature of voting are pushing American democracy into a new phase.
> The great constitutionalists, from Aristotle to Montesquieu to Madison, believed that the populace should have a voice, but they also thought, with Cicero, that the well-being of the people was the highest law. Survival and flourishing is most important, not pandering to popular passions.
> Any small “r” republican knows that a good society divides up power among authorities, repositories, and mysteries, such that all are checked and balanced; neither the bounder nor the mobile vulgus can become tyrannical. Pluralist theory seeks both safety and stability in multiplicity. The wisdom of crowds—and brokering institutions.
Discourse Magazine: The Autodidact: To Improve Society, Start With Improving Yourself
Introducing a new column by Jon Gabriel: Learning lessons from the past yields big benefits for our future
> Intelligence is easy to find online, but there’s precious little wisdom. Those of us who spend too much time in the digital world (for me, it’s a job requirement) are all too familiar with the firehose of the latest news, trends and controversies. Within hours, they’ll be replaced by new topics just as meaningless.
> Many experts have sounded alarms that this torrent of ephemera and the mad chase for clicks are rewiring brains, reducing attention spans and altering how we process information. Too often, we focus on the transient and urgent and abandon the meaningful and eternal.
Some of y'all should do what this guy did: read a book and touch some grass.
Discourse Magazine is an online publication of the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank.
YSK Various Reference Sites
You should know about these sites, especially for this upcoming election season, because they are referential and nonpartisan. Each website has a line about the content.
Politics
ProPublica's Represent—Find your legislators and the legislative work they're undertaking on your behalf
Fast Democracy—Find legislation in all 50 states, but we'll probably focus on legislation in our state
Ballotpedia's Ballot Lookup Tool—Know how you're going to vote before you go!
Government Sites
Congress.gov—Information specific to both the House of Representatives and Senate.
Regulations.gov—Federal agencies need your comments on their proposed rules.
Federal Register— Everyday, the government compiles a publication of proposed rules, notices of Federal agencies, executive orders and various other things. You can find it all here!
USA Spending.gov—Investigate how your tax dollars are being spent!
Federal Election Commission—Wonder who is giving how much to a particular candidate during an election? Find it here.
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)—Not technically a government website. Has all the important economic indicators.
Reference
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy—An excellent resource about philosophy. You can dive into a comprehensive overview of logic, democracy, or whatever philosophy you can think of!.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia—A general encyclopedia
Britannica—Another general encyclopedia
Build Review Request
- Budget: $3000 (I can go over if its worth it...)
- Usage
- School:I plan to starting a masters in data science in the upcoming autumn or spring semesters
- Random number crunching: I like to dabble in PowerBI, R, Excel. It's just fun for me.
- Photo editing: Currently using ON1 Photo Raw Max 2024, but may consider going back to Lightroom/Photoshop
- Basic gaming: Stuff like Rimworld, Cities Skyline 1 & 2, and Dota 2.
- I mainly do not want to have to redo my whole build again in 5 years. Ideally, it'll keep for 10+. My current PC is 5 years old with a 1060-3gb that's doing it's very best, which is almost never good enough these days.
I'm really torn between the 7900 XTX, and the RTX 4070 Ti Super, 4080, and 4080 Super. Not sure which is going to remain a strong contender for the next 5 years. In that time, though, I'd be okay with upgrading my GPU, hence why I'd like the MOBO to have PCIe 5 compatibility.
Oh, and this is also a present to me for getting a really good job. If you have any suggestions to further personalize it, I'd appreciate them.
Type|Item|Price :----|:----|:---- CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 4.5 GHz 16-Core Processor | $516.72 @ Amazon CPU Cooler | ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 420 72.8 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler | $124.99 @ Amazon Motherboard | Gigabyte X670E AORUS PRO X ATX AM5 Motherboard | $299.99 @ Amazon Memory | TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 96 GB (2 x 48 GB) DDR5-6800 CL36 Memory | $374.99 @ Amazon Video Card | PowerColor Hellhound Spectral Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB Video Card | $999.99 @ Amazon Case | Lian Li O11 Dynamic EVO XL ATX Full Tower Case | $244.99 @ Newegg Power Supply | be quiet! Dark Power 13 1000 W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply | $219.90 @ Amazon | Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts | | Total | $2781.57 | Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-02-02 19:54|
How's this look?
Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone
> The report is a uniquely comprehensive and jargon‐free (to the extent possible) explanation of U.S. legal immigration. Contrary to public perception, immigrants cannot simply wait and get a green card (permanent residence) after a few years. Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.
DeSantis Lies
The more Ron DeSantis loses, the more he lies. Get the facts about Ron DeSantis’ latest lies about Nikki Haley’s record and his own.
A list of Ron's lies provided on a silver platter by none other than Nikki Haley