Gregg R Thomas

I dropped the above last paragraph into an LLM. It returned this:

Here is a revised version that preserves your intent and tone, but sharpens the ontology and removes the last smuggled metaphors of time having “flow”:

The idea of temporal change is an evolved intuition. Human cognitive architecture developed to model the world as three spatial…[Read more]

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

A moment isn’t precious because it will be gone. It’s precious because it is what it is. In the Block Universe, time and eternity are not “things” that can be harmed.

“If there is no fundamental particle… no beginning and no end… there is no reality as we intuit.”

Yes, correct. That is exa…[Read more]

The fox guarding the henhouse and the Great Writ. Yeah, a Republic if you can keep it…..

The paramilitary murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is exactly what arbitrary force without effective oversight looks like in practice.

jakelafort wrote:
Don’t knock sexual repression. It is great for creating teenage and early twenties suicide bombers.

It’s worst in highly patriarchal countries, where the rich men hoover up all the wives, and the poorest men are left with no-one to marry.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”

Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and searches for explicit content like “po…

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Yes, it is all in the data but but the truth is likely more nuanced. States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”

Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and sea…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.

This article is super-interesting.  I know you’ve got to be clever to do all that statistics stuff.  Evangelicals are conservative and have conservative (i.e., highly patriarchal) views.  Non-religious are mainly liberal and have liberal views.  That makes a lot of sen…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
ask him to justify his framing of almost every issue through the narcisstic lens of Trump. How is it that the president of the USA subordinates the interests of the people he is representing as the ultimate public servant to his own interests?

If you did that, he would ruin you, and possibly have you shot, lol.  Is anyone still…[Read more]

The rationale switched from Theological irrationality to Pseudoscientific irrationality.

Yes, that is a good point and a good distinction. I agree that Classical liberalism did not generate antisemitism. It was probably a 1,000 years too late for that. Classical liberalism attacked the fusion of church and state and religious privilege or legal…[Read more]

Yikes, here I am, late to the party!

Thanks, Reg!!

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
My take (yours may differ) on the cause of the fracture was replacing (or displacing) the concept of universal individual rights in favor of group-identity moral ranking. A lot of modern progressiveness has moved away from treating everyone as equal individuals and toward treating people primarily as members of…

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Have a great week!!

After WW2 the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sounded good. But ““Lest we forget” implies history contains lessons that we should learn from and  remember past catastrophes to avoid repeating them. But with human nature this always becomes “History is bunk” and the past becomes obsolete noise and only the present matters.…[Read more]

The UN stated out with noble ideals but it has lost a lot of respect. It was never a moral body, just a diplomatic one that existed to keep states talking to each other. We will never get moral clarity out of a system where Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, and liberal democracies all get equal seats at the table. At best we get a consensus of…[Read more]