Friday, March 29, 2024

Prosperity Gospel For Atheists

It is a shame the the political donation side of SBF's activities won't go to court. The corruption of politics by SBF, crypto weirdos, and the EA cult (overlapping but not identical) has been brushed under the rug and quite a few of your faves should be implicated in all of that.

"Effective Altruism" has gone underground a bit now, but it's worth going through that scam/belief system.  It starts out with a cult pitch aimed at people who really want to believe they're both smarter and better than everyone else: we want to do good in the world, but we want to do it SMARTER than everyone else.

They start with some very obvious basics: why do we waste so much money on [X] when it's obvious that the ROI on mosquito nets is absurdly high. Big Charity is too stupid/corrupt, and we, smart people, know better. This is not always wrong, of course!

Then it moves onto Atheist Prosperity Gospel: since WE (YOU) know better than those dumdums, the best thing you can do for the world is get as rich as possible and then spend it on smart things. They call it "earning to give."

Then they add in longtermism. AKSHUALLY, we shouldn't be worried about the problems of today - like malaria - when the real issue is the survival of the species! It's WRONG to discount the future at all. A person 10 million years from now is just as important as a person today. Perhaps even moreso!

If we don't discount the future at all, and WE (smart people) have almost perfect foresight into the problems facing the future, which include some form of armageddon - likely the activation of Skynet - then what we really need to do is hoard all of our wealth to ensure our weirdo cult survives in order to reintroduce civilization, post-apocalypse. Probably with lots of sex slaves. 

It ultimately all leads to eugenics (we are the big brains who need to survive) and sex slaves (to let us breed to propagate our big brain genes). Rapey Hari Seldons.

As I said, they're a bit underground, now, but they'll be back!


Morning

Friday.

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Thursday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy

America's Worst Corporation

Boeing

But He Is The Son Of A Leading Consequentialist Moral Theorist.

Bye Sam.
Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for masterminding the $8bn fraud that led to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. He was found guilty on seven charges of wire fraud and conspiracy in November 2023.

Lunch

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Busy With Some Stuff

Bad blogging day

Eastman Disbarred

 I guess it does happen!

Joe Lieberman Is Dead

I make exceptions for the young, usually, but if you make it to 80+ you got the full trip and had plenty of chances to express regrets, or not, so I feel no problem with assessing the life of people who were quite proud of themselves. 

He was a bad and dishonest person who delighted in making other people suffer for petty or grotesque reasons, all while basking the glow of praise from a political press who treated him as The Last Good Man In Washington.

Embrace being bad, don't wrap it in sanctimonious smug and demand people you deserve it.

The reaction of Official Washington to someone daring to offer a primary challenge to him was extremely telling.  They loved their Joe.

Morning

Go

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Wednesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

get happy

Depends On The Pressure

But he's likely correct!

Popularism!

Remember when that was important?





Independent voters can be anywhere on the political spectrum, though to pundits they're usually coded as the sainted centrist swing voters.

Lunch

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We're All Experts In Bridge Engineering Now

"We" joke that everyone in social media becomes an insta-expert on the latest breaking news subject, but I don't think it's appreciated enough that this is largely what (certain types of) journalists do! Something happens, they acquaint themselves with the issue, phone around to a few "experts," learn enough to write it up for tomorrow's paper (back when news publishing fit that schedule, anway).

You can do that well or poorly, of course, and trusted journalists at trusted news outlets should do that well! Hopefully better than Anynamebunchanumbers on Twitter, at least.
 
But one problem with everything being subsumed into politics news coverage is that "call the local civil engineer" quickly gets supplanted with "on one hand this seems like an accident, on the other hand some critics suggest that DEI hiring practices led to this tragedy."

Who is to say what's right? Not so different than what Anynamebunchanumbers is peddling.  If unresolvable competing opinions from nonexperts (or, even worse, an expert versus a right winger as if they are equivalent) dominate the coverage of almost everything, it isn't clear what journalists offer other than  "rolodex" with the same 30 assholes.

I haven't yet seen this in "respectable" outlets, but it's early!!!

;)

Need a bit more to not believe this is all kayfabe.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urged Israel to abandon military plans for a ground offensive in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where the majority of Palestinians have crowded to evade the conflict. “The number of civilian casualties is far too high and the amount of humanitarian aid is far too low,” Austin told Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Washington, stressing that the protection of civilian lives was a “moral necessity and a strategic imperative.”
That would also require the US stop pretending that Israel's purpose is anything other than slaughter.

Run On It

One of my core views is that many basic "Democrat positions" are popular, have long been popular, and blurring the differences have hurt them and not been the genius MODERATE CENTRISM ELECTORAL GOLD that they pay dipshit consultants millions of dollar for.

Sure you can always point to a particularly conservative district here and there where running loud and proud on reproductive rights, for example, might not be helpful, but to a great degree the voters who are reachable are kind of dumbasses who don't actually know which party is which in the way that political junkies do. And elevating all those "I'm a Democrat, but I'm not like all those other Democrats who love killing babies" candidates election cycle after election cycle to national audiences has been a great exercise in brand tarnishing.

Obviously Dobbs has served to clarify the stakes, and hopefully results like help clarify the strategy.
Marilyn Lands, a Democrat who made reproductive rights a central part of her campaign, will win a special election Tuesday for an Alabama state House seat, CNN projects.

...

 Lands, a licensed professional counselor who lost her 2022 bid for the Huntsville-area seat by nearly 7 points, opposes the state’s near-total ban on abortion and openly discussed the abortion she had more than 20 years ago after her fetus tested positive for a rare genetic condition.

 Winning 62-38. 

Morning

An exciting new day.