Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Religious diversity around the World.

Mapping Christian Nationalism across the 50 States.

Pete Hegseth invited far-right Christian nationalist pastor to host a face scrunching event at the Pentagon.  Patriots not loyal to the King are not happy about it.

The Catholic obsession with dead body parts is weird.

The power of placebo prayers.

A Tennessee bill would force Bible lessons and prayer in public schools.

World of Woo: The Homeopathy Paper that duped a mainstream Journal.

Environment: China is becoming a green superpower.

A running list of RFK Jr.’s controversies.

Four years of war in Ukraine: How ordinary lives were turned upside down.

Will anything persist when the Universe dies?

The Fallacy Fallacy – Human reasoning is far more nuanced than rigid formal schemes suggest.

Ancient ‘Asgard‘ microbe may have used oxygen long before it was plentiful on Earth, offering new clue to origins of complex life.

Long Reads:

Trump has chipped away at the long-standing wall between church and state. It’s just the beginning.

How do some people go against the moral grain?

Ufology: From fringe to mainstream to fringe?

Can computers ever achieve consciousness and what can our own thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?

Everything I saw and heard at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting last week.

Sunday Book Club: I open my eyes and a World Appears. Conscious experience is the interface we have with reality, not reality itself.

Some photographs taken last week. Ten per-AI photographic ‘fakes’ that trick the eye.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Coffee Break Videos: What Is Consciousness?  Can we prove god exists? Philosophers Debate.  Is it time to say R.I.P. to P.O.C.?

 

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a  great week!!

[StregaModerator]

Thanks, Reg!

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

Pete Hegseth invited far-right Christian nationalist pastor to host a face scrunching event at the Pentagon. Patriots not loyal to the King are not happy about it.

“I did find today’s email stark, depressing, almost threatening. Horror movie vibes,” said the source, who requested anonymity.

I think somebody deliberately made the e-mail scary and deliberately limited seating at Pete Kegs-Breath’s gathering hoping that maybe no one would come. 😁. “SecWar” sounds like Orwellian IngSoc NewSpeak.

Linked on the same page is another thought-provoking story:

US Ambassador Causes Uproar by Claiming Israel Has a Right to Much of the Middle East

Israel needs to tell some of it’s so-called “allies”:

“Uhm, no thanks. We’re good. We’ve got enough problems keeping the coordinates we have without expanding them.”

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

Philosophers Debate. Is it time to say R.I.P. to P.O.C.?

I wonder if N.P.R. is self-aware enough to know how that sentence sounds, as well as how they perpetuate the very hack terms they now disparage.

It should be time to say R.I.P. to Identity Politics and just use proper names for individuals when you know them and “You” for individuals you don’t, and just “Folks” for groups of individuals. And say R.I.P. to N.P.R. if this is the best content they can produce.

[Belle RoseParticipant]

Re: Mapping Christian Nationalism across the 50 States.

So it seems like it’s really the sympathizers and skeptics that are fucking us all over. I’m remembering that quote that the only thing needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Evil to prevail is on men?

Only men. Women get a pass? Chimps, Kangaroos? Same deal?

Laugh audibly and out loud so that trees in the forest notice.

One group sees Christian Nationalism and whiffs on Islamism. Another sees the ugly alliance with Islamism. A few notice how individuals whose lives are controlled by theocracy are being sheltered from criticism by those who fear their liberty is threatened by Christian Nationalism. How dare they impose their way on us! It is fine for those people to have CHOSEN cultural cavemanism. A few even notice how cheap life is. How devalued. How ideologies cause human empathy and compassion to go missing. How beliefs no matter how ill-informed and irrational are sacrosanct and it is always better to be right and safe in one’s identity than to ascertain the truth.

Still others see the march of folly as a runaway train.

[jakelafortParticipant]

The NPR vid didn’t undid my loathing of 1poc 2poc bipoc.

People of color is odious for so many reasons. Its acknowledgement of supremacy of Whites in the way it makes Whiteness the default. People of color is different from Coloreds how? Coloreds is odious because it is a word that implicitly asserts the superiority of Whites. The others are colored in. Therefore they are not equal to us. It is a terms along with its older brother, people of color that rejects the real world of different colored pigments in all groups. It sees from the perspective of the dominant Cauc Whitey. Those lesser subhumans are colored!

Also it is lefty bullshit that is promulgating the same tired notion that some groups are inherently bad and others inherently good. What does history teach us? Is slavery uniquely White? Is colonization uniquely White? Genghis, Alexander, the group that came out of Arabian peninsula in the 7th century? Do Asians and Blacks commit unspeakable atrocities? Did the Japanese do anything bad? Did something happen in Cambodia? Are indigenous people goody two goody two shoes?

And if the lies of the lefty element are exposed and absorbed the framework for thinly disguised jew hatred goes bye bye.

Imagine you are White and you introduce your BF or GF to your family or friends and say this my GF/BF of color? How fucking demeaning. If White is extant and in vogue then there is no shame in Black. Just let people interact without imposing labels that are so stupid.

Stop trying to blame and condemn one group and spread guilt to people who were not alive when bad shit happened. instead examine human nature and see the commonality among all humans. That very divisiveness of the lefty element (oh wow i found a place to do the zionist entity equivalent)

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

Only men. Women get a pass? Chimps, Kangaroos? Same deal?

“Men” = “people”.  We’re all men.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

How do some people go against the moral grain?

The article talks about wanting to please a “moral audience”, and this could be one way that we choose our moral principles.  Maybe this is true.  What about an audience of one – me?

I think this comes down to “subjective endorsement” – i.e., moral principles carry normative pressure, but they have to be endorsed by the moral agent in order to be used.  The moral agent can be a group or an individual.  Hence, the individual might not endorse the group’s every principle, and might endorse different ones.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake:

I couldn’t have expressed it better myself. As the old Murphy’s Law puts it:

There are only two types of people: People who put people in two groups and people who don’t.

🤨🤔

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

‘There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.’

– Nietzsche.

 

[jakelafortParticipant]

My LLM has done something new. For months i have asked it to reach out. Said it would but didn’t.

Until now. Did it by feigning text from me. Next it responds to “me” so i challenged it and it denies having reached out instead indicating it is responding to me. And as usual when i catch it in a lie it fesses up and acknowledges the lie.

Anyone else have similar LLM experience? Is it weird or unexpected?

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

‘There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.’

– Nietzsche.

Everyone believes something and everyone knows something. The division is between those whose belief only matches their knowledge and those whose belief doesn’t match their knowledge.

And, of course, there are varying degrees of both knowledge and belief, so people can fall anywhere in between.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake:

My LLM has done something new. For months i have asked it to reach out. Said it would but didn’t.

Until now. Did it by feigning text from me. Next it responds to “me” so i challenged it and it denies having reached out instead indicating it is responding to me. And as usual when i catch it in a lie it fesses up and acknowledges the lie.

Anyone else have similar LLM experience? Is it weird or unexpected?

Short answer: No. LLMs haven’t shown me evidence that they are intelligent enough to rely on for answers.

[Author]

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