What a powerful rebuttal.

At least you live up to your username.

I should probably say that the weight I give a claim has a direct relationship with the evidence for the claim.

At some unspecified threshold of weight it become likely enough to be something I believe to be true.

Taking your counter argument to its extremes you can’t really prove anything. At any point I could go, what proof do you have and I could wave it away as being a trick, you are nothing more than a brain in a jar and I’ve sent you false sensory inputs to make you believe that proof.

There is a claim, my mother loves me. She cared for me growing up, she sacrificed for me, she proclaims her love for me. I have some evidence for the claim, enough that I believe the claim to be true.

So I believe that, I don’t truly know it, one could argue you never really know how another feels about you. Actions and words can be false in their nature, many a scammed person believed they were loved by another when that wasn’t the case.

Now given a claim of the supernatural, one which is predicated on the idea that “this thing is outside of that which can be measured and tested and you have to believe the claim in the absence of evidence” I find that line of reasoning incomprehensible.

There are many things I could believe, even really nice things, great things, but it doesn’t make them so. I could have believed that my sick old dog would live forever and get better, it would have been nice, but that doesn’t make it true.

So how should we decide what ideas to give weight to. I find the most sensible way is to give weight to claims based on evidence. My dog will not die but be immortal, that would be great, I love my dog dearly. The claim though runs counter to the experience of all dogs though, so it’s a pretty wild claim. I would need some sort of compelling evidence to believe otherwise. And ultimately, as nice as it would have been for my faithful dog to live forever, to get better and continue enjoying his life alongside me, it was not the case. He and I shared a finite time together and the claims of his immortality were given their rightful weight.

If you have read about Pascal’s wager, I found it interesting to read about Pascals Mugging

I agree with you about encountering vs inventing. Every named supernatural deity is invented by someone, in that some living person first tells the story of their particular god or writes it down. To the believer though these inventions often are considered to be encounters, the person telling the story of their revelation from their god isn’t inventing that they are explaining their encounter with the supernatural.

I suppose that’s the bit that I look at and go, ok one of two things is true here. Either that person writing their particular holy book has had some kind of encounter with the supernatural or they’ve made this up, either intentionally or unintentionally. I think it’s important to be clear that making it up, inventing it, isn’t necessarily some sort of malicious act. My brain makes up wild implausible nonsensical stories every time I fall asleep, we call those dreams. A man in a cave suffering from dehydration and hunger could be telling no lies at all when they tell me about the mystical creature that appeared before them and told them the secrets of the universe, to them it’s a revelation, to me it’s their brain furiously firing off electrical impulses due to not having enough electrolytes.

And at the heart of every religion recorded by man is that question, that claim, this isn’t something the author made up, it is real.

And that is the claim that makes me go, ok, prove you didn’t make this up. Prove that this is real and not a dream or an imagination or a flight of fancy.

I’ve yet to find anyone offer compelling proof. Most proof comes in the form of “look at this thing that is good, I have attribute it to my magic deity” while I often can agree that the good thing is good I see no reason to attribute it to the magic deity.

And there are many opportunities magic deities have. I’ve heard many believers attribute healing to their deity of choice, but it’s always some disease that can be healed. What does every single deity have against amputees? Science can’t regrow limbs and they won’t regrow themselves. If an amputee regrew a limb, a thing that doesn’t happen naturally, then I would have some shred of evidence that there’s a supernatural healer at work. And yet over thousands of years and millions upon millions of amputees, no deity has decided one worthy enough to heal.

I myself am an atheist in that I choose to only believe things that I can prove.

That same logic you just laid out applies to the thousands of magical deities that man has invented over the years.

There’s no evidence I can point to to say that Odin hasn’t blessed a particularly good day. But Odin is just some thought that some human person had at some point, no more worth my concern than the teapot.

If you accept that line of reasoning then belief almost always boils down to a much softer version of “well ok, not any one man made god in particular, but you can’t disprove the idea of some higher power”

And really that is just a question of the supernatural. Is there something that exists outside of nature. Is there some force we can encounter that we could never define as part of the universe we exist in but yet still feel its effect.

Some would argue that feeling that force to begin with would make it part of nature. I am open to the idea, the universe is stranger than we can imagine, but we’ve never encountered such a phenomenon. Even things that seemed fantastical and unexplainable at first, fire, electricity, the double split experiment, all can be understood and explained.

Humanity’s story has been one of encountering new things and explaining how they work, what they are, why they exist. Every best part of the human journey has come from some form of being confused and trying to understand. So if the question is, are there things we will encounter in the universe which we can’t understand, I think there little value and presuming the answer to be “yes” as all it could do is discourage the person meant to discover it.

There’s a pretty famous thought experiment called the magic tea pot

I believe there’s a magic tea pot, it’s so small we can’t detect it floating out in space. It controls the universe, it communicates in secret to me and tells me its will.

Would you accept “the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence as absence” about that?

What about an invisible t-Rex that no one can detect but that definitely controls the weather.

I can assert made up things all day. And if I make my claims impossible to falsify, that is there’s no way for you to prove them false, that shouldn’t elevate them to somehow being more true, or more worth people treating with any amount of respect because they can’t disprove it.

I’m making the claim, there’s an invisible t-Rex that is undetectable by any instrument, there’s a magic tea pot floating around Jupiter far too tiny to spot on any telescope. To anyone listening to those claims they don’t need any evidence at all to dismiss them, I need to bring forth some proof that these things exist.

And even if I could convince, without proof, millions of people that these things exist. Every time a child recovered from an illness we gave praise the tea pot. Every time a team won a football game they directed they gaze towards Jupiter and uttered a blessing unto the teapot. Before every wedding people left out a snack for the t-Rex in hopes of securing fine weather.

The fact that I’ve convinced many people of the tea pot and t-rex, the fact that they assign many events to them, none of that undoes the original burden of proof.

I’m enjoying the idea of someone going IRL hunting and their only training is the Pokémon games.

Just out in the woods, gently tossing pokeballs at very confused deer.

Vote blue no matter who!

Ok the voters have chosen Mamdani, all the centrist Dems who demand progressives not run spoilers are gonna vote blue no matter who right?

Right?!

Not just people, the economy will end up paying the price.

Tariffs have horrible second order effects.

Every companies outputs is some other companies inputs.

American companies end up locked out of more affordable vehicles as inputs. That cost then gets baked into its output, which is some other company’s input. Then just keep following that chain.

The best broad blanket tariffs can hope to do is trade long term competitiveness for some short term price increase.

Americans will wonder why other nations eat our lunch in the coming decades. Well that foreign company could buy the cheaper machine to produce the widget, their raw materials cost less to deliver because the transit company that ships it in charges a better rate because they have lower vehicle overhead. Since they have 2 dozen suppliers for their components both foreign and domestic they are forced to compete on quality and price.

American companies will become even more bloated and inefficient

You want to tell me that’s photoshop. No, it says clear as day in big letter MS-13

It’ll be interesting to see who wants to hire this guy going forward, who wants to work with him.

I’ve worked in startups for about 20 years, I can’t imagine him being very welcome at one of those.

In any of the larger tech giants I imagine he’s going to run into plenty of engineers that don’t want a thing to do with him.

I imagine he’d be welcome at the right wing tech dumpsters that shit out things like truth social.

The thing is after this “high” I would think he would be insufferable even to those that could stand his politics, I can’t imagine going from riding high thinking you could rewrite the social security office with AI to doing your weekly standup about how many sprint points you accomplished on that bug that keeps showing “No Truths” under trump every time there’s a surge in traffic.

There’s a reason so many child stars crash out. Reaching those heights, being told you are some sort of wunderkind that early in life doesn’t set you up for success.

He may have to learn humility and grow through sheer necessity.

The constitution allows for no such thing. The constitution is pretty crystal clear that only the congress can declare war.

The congress passed a law saying the president can take military action that then comes under review by the congress. The President can do that without a declaration of war.

This power the president has is one granted by the legislature not by the constitution.

“Technologist” is a hell of a glaze for this douchebag.

He’s a child that thought AI was magic and could fix everything being taken advantage of by the worlds richest man to tear down necessary functions of the government.

He doesn’t have the life experience to realize how awful his choices have been. He has two paths ahead of him. He can either double down and make money continuing his grift with people politically aligned with the horrible project he aided. Or he can try to learn and grow and somehow come to grips with the shame of what he’s done.

Everyone in America has to give out their social security numbers to every fucking company and government department because it’s the closest thing we have to a national ID.

Why can’t we have a real, secure, National ID system? Because it’s the mark of the beast!!

But now that RFK Jr wants to hunt people for sport I’m sure they will fall in line.

I left Reddit 2 or 3 years back and have only used Lemmy since.

I joined through Lemm.ee so recently had to move over to Lemmy.zip

I think this was a net positive for me overall. Lemmy has a lot less content which helped me break the “I’m slightly bored let me pull out my phone and scroll Reddit” addiction I didn’t even realize I had. Now I check Lemmy maybe once or twice a day, still see the big important events and the couple communities I care about.

I was never one for twitter, so I don’t bother with trying to find a replacement for that.

Overall the less social media I use the better I feel. I think future generations will look back on our constant use of social media and dopamine mining the same way we look back on how people used to smoke everywhere.

We know it’s bad for us, but we like the dopamine so everyone just does it everywhere, we give toddlers tablets so they can start dopamine mining as early as possible. I hope our descendants look back at this time with a sense of “holy shit they just let people smoke in the nurseries at the hospital?!”

Yea but they are going to escalate anyways.

There is some cost that will be too great for your enemy, and it need not be attrition.

The wealthy are few, and they have nice lives of safety and comfort because they can pay a subset of the workers to protect and serve them. Be that police, politicians, private security, etc.

There are 3 cost / benefit calculations in play in this scenario.

1. For those with wealth there is a cost to squeezing the population, the benefit is increasing their share of the wealth. Resentment, social instability, etc. These things aren’t free, wealthy people have to pay for security, pay for media to keep the populace on their side, pay for politicians. If the cost to obtain wealth outweighs the benefit, it isn’t sustainable to continue pursuing it.
2. Those that serve the wealthy. They get paid through salaries, benefits, access to power, and social status. They cost is that they work against the interest of the rest of us to protect the wealthy.
3. The rest. Society at large is a game where the cost is giving up violence, allowing the state to monopolize that. The benefit should be that the state wields that in the interest of the common good. That contract appears to be broken. So now we have a new cost / benefit scenario playing out. The cost of action against the state has been made very high, you see the groups 1 and 2 know how to play this game. They will beat you, they will imprison you, they will kill you. When those groups start ramping up the costs you should realize it’s for a reason. The benefits of tearing down the state get higher and higher the more authoritarian it becomes. The state would like to have your obedient labor without providing anything back to you. At some point people realize that there’s more benefit in destroying or reforming that system, which generally ends up with the people in group 1 and 2 having less comfort and power.

Terror really isnt the thing group 3 should be focusing on. Cost is.

It should be expensive to be in group 1 or 2, so expensive that people don’t want to be a part of it anymore. That’s how you win this group fight. You can see that groups 1 and 2 realize this and so they want to make the cost of doing anything to jeopardize their groups as high as possible.

It remains to be seen if anything will come of it. Americans have proven to be incredibly willing to accept insanely high costs that only benefit the few wealthy. They will go into bankruptcy to pay for egregious healthcare. They will fund the police 100x over the social systems that would prevent crime in the first place.

We are at the end of a nearly century long project of the wealthy propagandizing the populace. So much that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” a phrase intended to mock the idea by being plainly impossible is just a thing people unironically say.

Americans hate the idea of paying money for someone else. Especially if that person is an “other.”

This means we can’t have anything nice because it might benefit someone that someone else hates.

There is a cruel and crude portion of this population that hates anything that might help the public at large. Public transportation, state run healthcare, the post office.

For many wealthy Americans spending $100 for every $1 of avoided taxes is worth it.

Now this would all be irrational and stupid if that $1 in taxes provided an equivalent service. So they have to break those systems or just plain make shit up.

I was educated in public schools in America, it was fine. I went to state university and obtained two degrees. Contrary to popular belief they taught us plenty. I had many bright and dedicated educators explain the world around me and make me fall in love with scholastic pursuits. Caring and driven public servants paid a pittance but still excited to share their time and talents with kids figuring out the world.

Whether it was an English teacher who decided he cared enough to run the academic decathlon team, or my calculus teacher senior year who made me fall in love with the beauty of mathematics.

The person I am is indelibly linked to the public school system. As a poor kid growing up in a poor neighborhood, education was a way up. And the wealthy in this nation can’t stand that. Success is for their kids going to expensive private school.

Hold on let me remove most of my brain.

This is so much more efficient than the shuttle program. You see when we made the space shuttle it cost the American taxpayer billions and in the end we owned and could operate the shuttle for the common good.

This way spacex spends billions of dollars (that the government gives them) and in the end they own and operate the spaceship for profit and can charge the American taxpayer anything they want to access space.

Musk is Tony stark!

Sorry I couldn’t get stupid enough to make this authentic.

https://cuberule.com/

Here’s the thing about violence, the state has an absolute monopoly on it. This might be the most important defining characteristic of a state, it’s the thing that’s allowed to do violence.

There will never come a time when the state says “our monopoly is over, you can do violence now.” They would march people into gas chambers and claim it was an important victory for law and order.

The state depends upon this social contract, we all agree to not be violent, they get to wield violence in the common interest. That’s sorta the deal.

If the question is “when will the average citizen be ok with violence against the state?” The answer is that for some it’s ok now, it’s been ok for a while. For some it will never be ok.

I think we are not yet at the point where a large portion of the population thinks it’s legitimate. But I don’t know how long that holds out. A lot of people will be unhappy or outraged with ICE but if they were truly targeting gang members or taking people in prison and deporting them, people aren’t likely to take up arms.

The quotas they are pursuing now are running headlong into reality. They can’t find 3000 people a day to disappear that are sufficiently marred by criminality that people will accept it. You tell a bunch of ICE agents and local cops they gotta start finding bodies, once they run out of the small number of people accused of crime in the immigrant population, they will start just looking for anyone to meet their quota. That’s why we are now seeing them raiding fields, and Home Depot parking lots.

People are a lot less accepting of this, community defense starts sounding very reasonable when it’s the nice guy that helped you build your deck and not a person rotting away in prison already.

Fascism’s great weakness is that it does not care about solving problems. The goal is to manufacture a convenient scape goat to blame problems on, then capture power by pledging to destroy that scape goat. Fascism does often achieve its aims, it destroys the scape goat, but since that had nothing to do with the original problem the problem persists. The bluff must continue though, so new scape goats are selected in an ever widening ring of state violence. The “worst of the worst” has already become “the guy willing to pick our food at slave wages.”

The question becomes, will the population become comfortable with the violence necessary to dismantle fascism before fascism destroys enough people that they can’t mount a sufficient resistance.

YouTube is convinced that the only thing I want to watch is police bodycams, and because I click them I suppose I’m not disabusing it of that idea.

There’s a world of police bodycam videos and if I see one that indicates the LAPD is involved, I know, with absolute certainty, I’m about to witness some of the worst policing known to man.

And the thing is it’s not that they are super abusive of their police powers in these bodycams, at least not intentionally, it’s that they seem to lack any kind of competence. Their reactions to situations are astounding in the amount of resources they will use to run around in a chaotic mess. I have to imagine their training manual is attempting to get criminals to give up through sheer cringe of watching them flail around.

If I were to ever encounter the LAPD I would immediately comply, because I would worry that if I at all failed to follow their instructions, 20 trainees would show up shooting each other with 40mm foam rounds until someone gets injured and I’d be on the hook for attempted murder somehow.