Quite the opposite, as it suggests that human societies behave to natural things as if they were supernatural. We’re superstitious. It implies that all those things we might call god, are merely lightning in a thunderstorm behaving according to electrostatic mechanics.

I don’t fear the Almighty, but I do fear militants who are determined to insist I do.

I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we’re not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they’re uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it’s a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

My plug on Satisfactory is you come for playing around with and making sculptures with conveyor belts, and then stay to play with jump-pads, pneumatic hypertubes and later, trains (that actually carry freight and have a purpose). Also the planet is pretty (and you’re going to ruin it all by turning it into factories).

As with other automation games, it’s coding in disguise, and if you get a buzz from configuring logistics to distribute parts and fluids from sources to processing machines, then this game can take over your life. The two principle schools of players are make it efficient and make it pretty. In the end, you have a giant playground to zoom around in and watch all the parts zip this way and that down conveyors, each with actual purpose behind them.

This is part of that austerity plan isn’t it?

Not good optics for EU as a sane government when they decide to force march the Greek public for the failures of odious policy.

Sounds like EU Oligarchs are endlessly greedy and cruel as well.

I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.

There’s a Pacific Drive + Techtonica bundle I’m looking at and might grab.

Part of the problem is I’m obsessed with Satisfactory which scratches a lot of the itches Terraria did but in 3D.

Do you work for an employer?

Here in the States we are forced to work to eat and survive (we’re not allowed to go off into the woods and trap animals and pick vert and live as a hermit.)

You may not personally worship money, but your captives certainly do.

The Lady makes me think of the unnamed god in American Gods who is never identified but seems to be associated with gambling.

Wikipedia describes him thus:

The Forgettable God – An unknown god whom Mr. Wednesday meets in Las Vegas along with Shadow, whose name slipped from Shadow’s mind whenever Mr. Wednesday said it. He has a liking for Soma, a Vedic ritual drink. Gaiman has never confirmed the identity of this god.

More that we exhibit the same behaviors around some things that we exhibit around gods, even to the point of sacrificing life and limb to them.

Gridiron Football is quite godlike in the US. We lose only a few teen and college lives every year on the field itself (Twelve a year, according to NBC news), but the injuries and concussions are plentiful and life-defining. And it’s normal for us to erect vast stadiums for pro-ball with taxpayer dollars while children go hungry and workers are without medical care.

The immersion problem in grain silos fits right into American Gods in which small private farms don’t keep their grain silos adequately arrid (dehumidified) and so it sticks in chunks and has to be prodded down leading to twenty or so worker deaths by immersion, Sacrifices to Ceres or Demeter. The level of moisture also increases the mold growth in the grain, though I don’t know if it’s to dangerous levels.

My own favorite natural god is the sun which shines life giving energy on us every day for eons. Yet we have to avoid looking at it and without the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field would quickly be fried in its presence (at eight light seconds away). Without the sun, we’d freeze and die. And if we were to imagine the sun a human body, the rest of the solar system (mostly Jupiter) would be a blood draw, and the earth would be a drop of blood smeared on a slide.

Are we absolutely sure it’s real Bill Gates and not Robot Bill Gates? I mean he’s had bad takes before but maybe it’s best to be sure?

I think you are misrepresenting the take. I’m only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.

I’m skeptical of just doing something even if it’s useless, but that’s not to say there is nothing to be done.

When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don’t know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don’t affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn’t been done before.

In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement’s takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).

In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.

Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it’s the sort of death we don’t wish on our worst enemies… unless we’re Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.

I don’t indulge in opinions, except to say I’m afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I’m afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that’s a habit we will have to break. I don’t yet know how.

It’s not to say we’re doomed. Rather it’s to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we’re going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.

I’d me the kid pointing out the scholarly consensus is the bible is not inerrant, not divinely inspired, not univocal. This worked well in poli-sci / government, but not in American History or Alternative Health.

We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

The Wiccan Rede is one line and can be trimmed to two words.

It’s also a chief principle of preschool and kindergarten classes.

Okay.

The answer is it’s all up in the air.

I expect there’s a massive GOP movement to suppress votes and gerrymander other votes. I suspect there are efforts to defraud the election in some counties or even in some whole states. But I don’t know how successful they will be.

I expect there will be an attempted coup d’etat if Biden wins the election, but I don’t presume it’s going to overthrow the US. We may break out into civil war, but then if the Republican party takes power, the US is going to be really hazardous anyway. I’m no expert, but by my understanding civil war is going to be inevitable so long as we can’t get relief from the mass precarity and enough election reform to empower the public. And since the Democratic party still treats its progressive wing as red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table, we can expect only table scraps.

Biden staying in the White House means I probably have longer before I’m collected to be processed as an undesirable. It could make a difference of months or decades.

That said, I’m pissed off, too, the degree to which the US is responsible for the Palestinian genocide, though the way I’ve been following it, Biden has been doing a lot more than the neo-liberal norm to quietly slow down Netanyahu’s offensive into Gaza. Not as much as I’d like, by far, but more than I’d expect from an establishment Democrat. Biden’s been slow-walking aid to Israel, whereas we expect the Republican party is glad to facilitate massacring Palestinians while simultaneously cutting off support to Ukraine so Russia can take over.

Assuming you are a voter, it’s up to you, and maybe it’s more important to you to symbolically support Palestine by not voting against the Republican party. But doing so might have material effects that make things worse in Gaza, hence I’m going to vote tactically.