nfh

Opposition to genocide isn’t an option on the ballot, you can’t vote for it, especially not for president. And not voting sends a very clear message whether you intend it or not: “I don’t care”.

Do you value minimizing harm? If you care most about genocide, Harris seems to be the least-worst option. But if you care more about ideological purity than harm reduction, you can vote for a non-serious candidate like Stein, or none at all. Nobody will ever solve this kind of problem at the ballot box, that isn’t how democracies work, but if letting things happen instead of exerting what little power you have eases your conscience, that’s your right. Doing so does mean a greater risk of a Trump presidency, especially if you live in a swing state.

I would rather minimize harm, so I’m voting for Harris, and encourage others to do the same.

maybe some quokkapox blankets for good measure

We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.

Hasbro announces Magic the Gathering’s latest expansion, Universes Beyond: World War II!

I knew about ad blockers before I started using one. Small sidebar or header ads weren’t really enough to convince me I needed one.

Now the Internet has so many popups, ads, aggressive video players, requests to accept cookies, all because some people figured out how to make websites more profitable by making them worse. It’s sad, really. The Internet of old was great.

And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.

If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.

Andrew Conru, founder of AdultFriendFinder, apparently.

Not well known, but good to name and shame anyway.

First result? I couldn’t get it as a result at all. I get a bunch of quora threads and articles from really low profile news outlets.

Yeah that is troubling, even if the cause of it is corruption as the second article implies. I understand the draft given the circumstances of the invasion, but sneaking people into vans, beating them, and asking questions later isn’t justified at all. Becoming a brutal authoritarian in order to repel the invading forces of another is kinda futile.

I can only find reports of Russian soldiers kidnapping people in Ukraine, reports of things that seem clearly like conscription and not kidnapping, and things from sources that aren’t credible.

Do you have a credible source that shows that this is a real phenomenon? I can’t find one

Except Putin is actually doing those things. Ukraine has a draft, which is not great, but isn’t kidnapping people off the streets. That’s completely disingenuous at best.

It’s a state elections law, Supreme Court of Georgia is the ultimate authority on what it says. States have a lot of leeway to determine their own election laws, so it’s hard to mount a federal law challenge to them in the first place. The RNC voter suppression consent decree was a rare exception.

IANAL, but it’s hard to imagine an opposition to this where federal courts even have jurisdiction, much less a path to SCOTUS.

Or nationalized.

Knowledge is what happens when you’ve evaluated enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that something is false. If you haven’t seen the evidence, but still think it’s true or false (you don’t lack belief), then you have a belief about it. As such, knowledge is a type of belief with extra justification.

If I’ve reviewed enough evidence I’m comfortable saying I can reject the null hypothesis, that is I have a belief that it’s knowledge, I’ll call it as such. If I haven’t, I’ll couch my confidence in my belief accordingly.

I’d stage a Research Ethics Committee, to make sure their data collection methods don’t have any unforeseen consequences for people who haven’t consented to them

I think he might actually be worse off with a hundred billion pennies for the full billion dollars. Not only would dealing with that many pennies in one place legitimately be challenging, but having that percentage of the total pennies in circulation suddenly removed could be enough to get the US Government to reconsider deprecating them, leaving him with the bag.

I say give him the full billion in pennies.

PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.

I will not stand for this gorgonzola slander

Only one of these men taught high school. Coincidence, I think not

I’ve been thinking about this for a minute, and I think a good standard here is making a list of (relatively) non-overlapping causes of death that have claimed over a billion human lives.

Infectious disease is almost certainly at least one entry on this list, primarily secular war as well, starvation/famine probably a few times over, cancer and heart disease are probably distinct entries, and death attempting to grow/hunt food. I suspect deaths by religion could be on that list as well, but it’s the entry I’m least confident in.

In every sense of the word, this is a bad list to be on, but I don’t think religion is near the biggest culprit on the list, even if you do a lot of special pleading, and group all deaths by religious cause together, but split each disease, war, etc up for some reason.

I think we agree that most self-identified conservatives aren’t actually very invested in the status quo or tradition, and are actually regressive reactionaries, but I think it’s a clearer point to say that most self-identified conservatives aren’t in fact conservative, than that conservatism isn’t actually what people (claim they) mean when they say conservative. At that point, conservatism loses its meaning.