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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Well I dunno if he is an anti-christ. There never is a specification that there is a singular anti christ and they are often pluralized. There’s a pretty low bar to be an anti christ and they aren’t particularly a big deal. Basically according to script anybody who denies Jesus as being the son of God is an anti-christ and that’s pretty common. Any given day you’ll encounter a half dozen anti-christs. “The Antichrist” as in the one big one though isn’t super specified in character and there’s a bunch of options of not goodos who could fill the role

    There is a separate nasty called the “the man of sin” and “son of perdition.” supposedly he will come at a time of a general apostasy, deceive people with signs and wonders, sit in the temple of God, and claim to be God himself. And a “Little Horn” (which I am not unconvinced just is a reference to a tiny dick) setting himself in the wing of a temple acting as though he is a divine authority and causing devistation of the Holy land… Which could fit?




  • That the tech has evolved to be better actually is an assumption. The novel data problem hasn’t been meaningfully addressed really at all so mostly we assume that progress has been made… but it’s not meaningful progress. The promises being made for future capability is mostly pretty stale hype that hasn’t changed year to year with a lot of the targets remaining unchanged. We are getting more data on where specifically and how it’s failing, which is something, but overall it appears to be a plateau of non-linear progress with different updates being sometimes less safe than newer ones.

    That actually safe self driving cars might be decades away however is antithetical to the hype run marketing campaigns that are working overtime to put up smoke and mirrors around the issue.




  • A lot of the distinction of sex and gender gets muddied because as scientific evidence mounted about how blurry the lines between the sexes actually were “gender” ( not as we understand it in a modern queer context) started out as a construct that played fast and loose with phenotype and form to create a scientific construct of sex. It’s in part why gender is sometimes a synonym for sex because it was aiming to preserve a biological binary which was really falling apart.

    However philosophy looked at that construct and elaborated on what they were seeing and realizing that we draw arbitrary cultural lines around these things so “gender performativity” theory tends to group gender as something you do.

    However gender performativity theory doesn’t really cover what trans people experience. Basically, a lot of gender dysphoria is actually closer to the original use of gender. It involves people reacting to their physical bodies sex characteristics not falling in line with a sort of internal compulsion…so for a severely compressed example if I feel like everytime I am reminded through language that I do not conform to the physical features typical of the male phenotype I feel depressed, anxious and like essentially life has denied me something essential to me then I can backwards engineer that series of reactions to “I am a man / male”… Man might be a cultural category but the lack of the cultural category isn’t what is upsetting, it’s the social construct of woman drawing attention to the real problem of existing in my own body.

    So where this gets culturally sticky is if someone insisting I am “female” it really is no different then misgendering. What’s often culturally happening is they are just trying to do it in a pseudo scientific way which is why people will call you out on it… Here’s where it gets complicated. Trans people are a group of people who are lay masters with personal experience of the malleable nature of physical sex and the science of sex. Since the people often trying to categorize us as “male and female” alone are not actually giving any kind of scientific specificity it’s not actually correct in a scientific biology based context so when we say you are wrong we usually don’t mean it on a strictly metaphysical axis. We mean, * that’s not how science uses those words*.

    If I have been on testosterone a while and a couple of surgeries / or if I never went through a feminizing puberty at all I am going to fit more aspects of the male phenotype than female. I might have female chromasomal make up… but chromasomal makeup is only one facet of sex. If you wanted to be actually scientifically correct in regard to the “biological sex” of a trans person then you are going to have to take us on as individuals and that answer is going to be a lot more complicated than just rendering it down to “male” or “female”. From a strictly taxonomic perspective a lot of us have become intersex. We biologically fit a category that is beyond the male/ female binary… We just did so as a matter of using technology to achieve that end.


  • That is calculated I think… Having been stuck in forced proximity to Conservatives for awhile the party line is that Russia isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, Putin is a good guy, the left is constructing Russia as a boogey man when they do “so much right”.

    Kamala I think is pretty adept at code switching. When dealing with Conservative audiences you pick your battles because if you trip too hard on one of their landmines where you have to go on a long fight to up end one of their propaganda efforts then chances are they stop listening to everything.



  • I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…

    But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.

    … Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…

    Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.


  • “The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…

    Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.

    Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…

    Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?

    First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.







  • I am sorry, but this take is founded on a lack of knowledge about the spoiler effect in first past the post voting systems. Until more representative forms of voting are introduced this is an idealistic but ultimately misinformed take.

    The spoiler effect is a system powerful encumbant politicians use to manipulate populaces at large in part by taking advantage of your better nature and belief in a flawed system. Voting your heart will just not be enough and it’s got hidden dangers. Pressure needs to be applied after this election to change the voting structure to a more stable and open system.

    https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE?si=qCvPLnk4u6FJ0ec2

    Here’s a video that explains fairly susinctly what the spoiler effect is and how alternative voting systems disrupt it.