American Exceptionalism, Baby!

No no no. None of this should be acknowledged, because Whataboutism.

We still have forums and blogs. Search engines just don’t both including them in search results.

You need to know about these niche communities, which are increasingly in micro-spaces like Discord or Mastodon channels or unmonitored communities like Lemmy.

Which is more in line with Bad Old Web 1.0 than Good Old Web 1.5

At some point, the mistake was using Reddit to begin with.

If you’re a US citizen, resist.

Easier said than done. There’s no clear point of leverage for people to lean into. The cops are ruthless. The liberal opposition is toothless and lame. People don’t really trust one another. There’s a strong attitude of “I’m just going to keep my head down until it blows over”. But we’re not even really in a crisis per-say, just yet. Trump’s a fucking menace, but the economy is strong and we’re not currently at the peak of a pandemic and there’s no hurricane about to decimate a random corner of the Gulf/Atlantic Coast.

I suspect we’ll see more points of galvanized opposition when the winds change. But for now, looks like Americans are going to lay back and think of England.

Hard to get an unbiased answer on a question of subjective experience.

I’ve seen a new vim and vigor in my local Houston PD’s crusade to ruin the lives of homeless people. I have to assume folks in ethnic and religious minority neighborhoods, LGBTQ communities, and anyone easily designated as “Woke” are have it particularly hard right now.

But if you’re just some white-cheeked, white-collar, middle-class schlub, things haven’t meaningfully changed.

They should ask again when we’re in the grip of a Bird Flu epidemic or another Tech Sector crash. But for now, life drags on in America not all that much different than under the last regime.

Wrestle with a pig and you’ll both get muddy, but only the pig will enjoy it.

Christian Nationalists long ago mastered parsing out the bits and pieces of the Bible they agree with and butchering anyone who disagreed with them. This is a tradition going back millennia. You’re not going to beat anyone in the Westburo Baptist Church at a game where the rules boil down to “Fuck You Heretic, I win”.

Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.

Now we’re stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.

I’m not saying we have state-mandated couples

The need to make this clarification should be grounds for divorce.

People that litter are atupid/lazy/poorly educated.

Littering is a function of the laziness of the individual combined with the inconvenience of normal waste disposal. If you live in a neighborhood where trash pick-up is infrequent or unreliable, you’re going to find a lot more littering as a matter of simple convenience compared to one where trash pickups are regular and routine.

The public expectation of efficient trash pickup also creates social pressure on individual neighbors not to dump illegally.

Hardly an issue of stupidity. We’ve got shops a short ride away that sell you disposables with the intent of bringing them into the park. And we’ve got a park that’s removed the bins used to cart the waste back out again.

The stupidity is in the policy. Either you have to prevent people from bringing this stuff in (incredibly difficult) or you have to manage the waste that exists by centralizing its collection and export (significantly easier and cheaper).

Showing up in Midgard just in time for the Plate in Sector 7 to collapse on my head.

we are still many years from discovering the Epstein drive

If only he’d had a little more time to continue his research.

Love to be governed by an undead theocracy that persists through the deliberate cycling of apocolyptic events, because they’ve got 3D underwater volleyball in the capital.

I love how in a world where we banned straws

We didn’t. If anything, we are in a world where we banned banning straws, because even this trivial token concession was considered a Violation of Our Fundamental Freedoms. Media personalities screaming and nashing their teeth over straws was a PR stunt by petrochemical companies to backstop any kind of radical anti-plastic reforms.

Anybody who asks me about Windows 10’s EOL date will be introduced to the option of using Linux before i’ll help them select a replacement system.

Cheers to this.

My mom can’t flood the Earth killing everybody.

Ask the kids of Andrea Yates whether they can tell the difference.

Parents aren’t all powerful.

From the perspective of a newborn, they might as well be. Everything you need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable is actively managed by the parent. You don’t understand anything about your condition or your history or your source of care. All you know is the id-based impulses to complain when you don’t feel good and the soothing release of your feeding, playing, and sleeping cycles.

So it could stop any war, any disease, any pain, … but does not.

What would that look like, from a practical perspective? Imagine trying to explain to a baby that you’re going to stick a needle into its skin in order to prevent it from suffering a disease, when it has no conception of disease. All you know is the pain of the needle. Must you conclude, from that pain, that your nurse is fundamentally evil for inflicting this upon you? And that, by extension, your parents are evil for bringing you to this nurse?

“If parents were truly worthy of my attention, they would have found a better method of vaccinating me than this needle!” is the sort of thing you get to say as a child, precisely because you do not understand the underlying nature of the world you live in. All you know is the scolding language of a parent cajoling you into this immediate superficial pain.

Should humankind be incapable of performing wars? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of contracting disease? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of experiencing pain, even? Is that what you really want? An eternal numbness of being? Is godly perfection just being a particularly resilient tree?

Either it’s not all powerful or not good.

One can be both exceptionally powerful and exceptionally good without needing to draw a distinction between the two. One can be beyond comprehension, as well. But the argument that a single person experiencing a single moment of discomfort disproves a benevolent deity seems to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.

the horrors god would be responsible for if god is in control

You’re forgetting the counterfactual. Namely, that we live in The Best Of All Possible Worlds and what you describe as horror is actually the nicest things can conceivably get. The standard Christian argument is that, without God, existence would be significantly worse. Also (depending on your flavor of Christianity) the mortal life is a proving ground not a final destination. Life is a trial one experiences before being eligible to enter the Kingdom Of Heaven, where God is fully in control.

The horrors are a consequence of Free Will mixed with the corruptive influences of evil spirits sent out to tempt mortals to sin. And they are transient, while the Christian Reward is supposed to be eternal. You see this best in the Story of Job, during which he suffers a litany of torments but holds firm to his faith. This faith is ultimately rewarded, not just through the restoration of his material pleasures, but through the promise of an eternal blissful afterlife.

You could replace “God” with “Parents” to the same effect.

But arguing that a parent is evil because they see a child committing an error, know it is an error, and decline to intercede doesn’t rationally follow. If you helicopter over your kids and intercede every time they make mistakes, they never develop into independent and mature adults. You also induce a lot of anxiety, as you’re constantly interposing yourself between the child’s desires and actions without the ability to convey the wisdom of your decisions. So the kid sees you as the harmful force, rather than the thing you’re seeking to avert.

So what’s a Parent/God to do? Do you puppet your child, never letting them stray farther than the length of a string? Do you lock your child in a padded ceil and hand-feed them every day? Do you hardwire their programming, so they can’t deviate from your design, acting exclusively on a divine instinct?

Is that really what we consider “Goodness”?

There is also the Calculation Problem to consider. A God-like intelligence might be able to observe far more than a human without being perfectly omniscient. Similarly, they might be able to calculate probabilities more quickly and accurately without being perfectly prescient. If a Parent/God knows most of the things but is not omniscient, does that mean they are unworthy of your attention or the reception of wisdom? At the same time, is it the duty of a Parent/God to restrict the actions of the others in their domain to the things they can calculate in advance? This brings us back to the idea of the Child Prisoner or Brainwashed Child. You’re safe at the expense of any kind of growth or personal liberty. God treats you like a farmer treats a veal calf - perfectly unspoiled through inaction.

And finally, there is the problem of Entropy. A God who can foresee everything and recognizes that Evil is inevitable. Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it can perceive it? Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it cannot prevent it? Is this flaw in God’s power a reason to reject it as a source of virtue?

Consider Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, his eye plucked out in pursuit of a way to prevent Ragnorak. He is not all-powerful. He is not-all knowing. He is routinely makes mistakes and even acts out of anger, lust, or petty vengeance. He is fundamentally flawed as dieties come. And yet his primary goal and function - to prevent the end of the world - seems noble enough to justifiably cultivate a religious following.

Death to America