He’s more like a ten year old boy who fucks three-year-old girls who don’t yet have the language to say what happened to them…and when they get snitchy, he threatens them with violence to shut them up, often demonstrating on a small animal.
I think I’m trying to say he’s not just a precocious kid with anger issues, but a precocious kid with a cruelty streak and symptoms of physical neurological effects and poses a danger to himself and others.
There are problems with policing that are pretty universal, some of which are acknowledged in Peel’s Principles of Policing way back with the Bow Street Runners. But while those principles are taught to every cadet, here in the states we otherwise ignore them.
There’s absolutely problems with drift, away from participation of the community and toward control, and while I can’t speak for which part of the Americas you’re in (the RCM have enough annual incidents to fall neatly into the ACAB category) I can say there are problems with giving one group of people authority over the rest that we’ve yet to fully solve.
Still, it’s especially bad in the states, and when black US tourists find themselves in conversation with law enforcement in Europe, the extreme level of contrition they sometimes show is an embarrassment to everyone, but a shame of the United States.
Your province is not in the US.
All Cops Are Bastards, a sentiment that arises from the blue code of silence, so that even the well-meaning ones are obligated to lie in court to defend the violent ones, what allowed the loyalty-over-principle sector to rise into power, which is why there is such staunch resistance against publication of disciplinary hearings against police who misbehaved or broke laws, even though such documents are supposed to be public as per FOIA statutes.
When California passed a law reinforcing the notion that such files would be made accessible to the public, the precincts literally shredded or burned their files.
The institutions are corrupt through and through. It was especially evident during the Ferguson unrest, when the blue lines showed they had no trigger discipline for the military hardware they were wielding. It was laughable, except for the danger they were posing to the demonstrators.
Officers who seek to serve their communities quit. Some of them have publicly denounce police services and have become staunch police abolitionists. The only officers that remain are either violent killers, or the ones willing to cover for violent killers.
All cops are bastards.
I keep trying to formulate a plan in my head:
On one hand ACAB: They all promote the national security culture within the law enforcement sector that we civilians are the enemy. The departments are all corrupt through and through
On the other hand the non ICE officers hate being used as S𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑡 or Einsatzgruppen (German SD, or Death Squads, respectively) to pick on innocent civilians to be shuttled away to concentration camps. And I wonder if there was a way for the public to tell them we’re sorry they are being abused by being repurposed as general goon squads, and if that might encourage them to resist more than they do.
Also, ICE agents, either pre-Trump used to sometimes engage in action that at least had the appearance of legitimacy, e.g. tracking people with violent records. New recruits (post OBBBA Budget) were told they’ll be hunting the worst of the worst and then are picking up day laborers and ice-cream vendors, which is soul crushing for even MAGAs who wanted to be the hero.
We need to be able to take these sentiments and weaponize them against the system, and the policy-makers that are forcing them to be evil fucks for The Man.
I don’t know the specifics, but there’s a schematic in there somewhere.
I already suffer from psychosis
To be fair, I’ve already done something similar. In the aughts, thinking Miskatonic U’s Library restricted vault can’t harm me: I’m already crazy. Then thanks to Bush Administration efforts to consolidate power and persecute minorities, I went and studied the Holocaust, and the process within the German Reich that brought it forth.
And that figures into my current psychotic break, as of November 2024.
🏴☠️ I live to ride the ocean
The mighty world around
To take a little plunder
And to hear the cannon sound 🦜
Not to be confused with epistemology, which also poses a grave risk to the MAGA cult.
I call it geeking out which is usually instead about anime plots or TTRPG characters and worlds. And it’s a habit of us neurospicy folk that often scares those who aren’t.
My whole point was that while Trump’s memo was meant to enable Christian proselytizers, there is a whole demographic of thinkers (mad, free or otherwise) who will also be enabled, so this may well be a Chesterton’s Fence issue, especially if those thinkers are the office clerks who are super good at data crunching and making sure the LAN doesn’t fall apart.
That argument wouldn’t persuade someone who is willing to rely on faith, because they have given up reason for loyalty, much the way MAGAs assert the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; it’s a statement of fidis (faith, or fidelity; loyalty) rather than an assertion of truth.
But for those of us trying to understand what is, the silent void is evidence of a silent void in a world where events are not only detectable but also have effects that can be detected through side channel attacks. It’s how the science we depend on to fight plagues and land airplanes and determine evolutionary links is not based merely on a handful of observations but an abundance of data that consistently points towards our mathematical models.
But again, the reason I posted it here (as opposed to athiest communities or philosophical communities) is I know its an oversized pill. Even those who live their lives as naturalists don’t want to acknowledge the gravity of what that means. And I’ve thought about it more than all the proselytizing evangelists I’ve encountered have thought about their belief, combined. I doubt Ned Flanders is going to have much luck with me (or those like me who love thinking about these things) at the water cooler.
And to be fair, my exploration and coming to terms with insignificance was a rough climb down into the abyss and back out again and maybe about a third up the other side. The common problem in Miskatonic University of professors going mad from revelations of forbidden truths is one I’ve experience myself. (Studying the German Reich and the Holocaust in the aughts when the US started feeling fashy did not help matters). We humans want to be special. We want to be God’s chosen. We want to be more than social hominids polluting ourselves to death with industrial exhaust. We want to, at least, be colonizing space and one of the elite species that escaped their terrestrial prison. And we’re not.
Camus’ absurdism is about coming to terms with the reality of death, of a meaningless chaotic world that (considering his time and experience in the Résistance) might not actually be worth experiencing, as a lot of it sucks and is suffering.
Religion, as Camus called it philosophical suicide but others call it a leap of faith is the most common response to the realization that we live our lives to no divine purpose. Most choose to veer away and pretend that reality is different. And that is the nature of faith.
Put simply, there are no embarrassments to materialism, and this is even the consensus of religious scholars.
To be fair we’ve seen dozens of CEOs and boards of directors get prematurely thrilled about the idea of replacing high-paid jobs with AI (or at least with AI and some lower paying jobs to curate the good slop from the eldritch horrors and hallucinations).
This guy is being semi-self-aware at least, and they all need to be reminded the economy despairs for good jobs
Also, I bet a nickel if we looked at his clerical staff we can find bullshit jobs there to keep clerks running around so he feels important while he walks through the office. Take those guys and let them work at home as part of the LLM team. I bet they’d appreciate doing real work (and skipping the commute).
Right now it takes specialists with a solid LORA game to make generative AI produce functional results. If we acknowledged this, then we’d either integrate AI as a new tool for doing stuff or we’d ditch it and keep our artists and experts. (And, with newfound appreciation for them, give them a raise?)
Also I still stand by the notion that well-treated, well-paid workers are productive workers. It was recently affirmed by a farm expert noting that prison inmates are outperformed by low-paid undocumented laborers who are outperformed (in turn) by well paid workers (documented or otherwise.)
We could make capitalism work if our bourgeoisie wasn’t so busy trying to be aristocrats and hyper-bigots.
Or we could nationalize AI development like China in a step towards post scarcity, but that would likely require violent revolution.
I didn’t say the soul pulls energy from the person, but there has to be interaction between material and spirit (I don’t need spirit to be its own manifold in this model so I didn’t presume it)
If the soul doesn’t interact with the material then there’s no connection between the two and theyre not associated.
So we should be able to detect that interaction. It should have enough of a footprint that were able to notice something even if only side channel effects (which is how we discovered radiation and the heating properties of microwaves).
And we haven’t.
As I said, it doesn’t rule out spirit, but like many apologetic arguments, it takes a lot of weird presumptions to assert that spirit does exist, does interact with material, yet cannot be detected with the scientific means we have in the twenty first century. It can happen but then it requires stark changes in the models of mechanics we have (such as possibly the simulated-universe hypothesis). In this case our scopes are good enough to see the proverbial teapot. 🫖
But I appreciate that it’s difficult to comprehend what the issues are, and why this is a failing not merely of Christianity but any narrative that involves spirit or afterlife. It rules out most models of ghost and fairy phenomena as well.
And don’t worry. If you don’t get it today, we’ll have many (hypothetical, thankfully) days together in the break room so that I can assure you do.
To date there is zero evidence for interaction between material nature and the spirit. And not for want of looking, as scientists and clergymen alike have been searching for centuries now, anomalous exceptions are extremely rare. Even the standard model of particle physics is transparent to any spiritual factor.
So why should we look at it? Because the human mind, to perceive and process sensory stimulus into situation awareness, to remember, to read and speak and understand facial expression, to compute, and to engage in reason — for all these capacities — it requires power.
While LLM generative systems power demand is calling for the re-commissioning of nuclear power plants, the human brain eats up (according to anatomists) about 20% of our caloric intake, when we are awake, at rest. Less when we’re at full run, more when we’re computing the integral of the acceleration of rocket thrust as fuel is spent, or landing an airliner by yoke.
But it means, if we have a soul, and that soul remembers its sins, can reason why such behaviors were sinful; if that soul can feel the fires of Hell, this processing takes energy, and an energy source. That means interaction between the physical and spirit, which means there should be something to detect. There should even be side channels.
No evidence of energy exchange, no side channel heat or sound, it strongly (not absolutely) implies there’s no spirit to detect. Or if there is, it might be so delicate that interference from natural phenomena (lightning strikes and CME emps come to mind) would shatter it.
The exception is the simulated-universe hypothesis: If the universe is a simulation in a computer program (or Azathoth’s dream; Ia! 🦑🌊🌌) then all our recorded observations are of simulated events, and souls can simply be simulated. But some of us object to the notion we’re an object in a program or a figment in a dream.
If there’s no detectable energy powering our souls, then they could be in the core of the sun and not feel a thing, nor have an eff to give. No regrets, no memories, no pain, no misery.
Most likely, by far, we are thinking meat.
Heck I who am awake today can be a different iteration than me, who was awake yesterday. The separation of time when cerebral cortex activity is shut down for maintenance (non REM sleep) may indicate separate beings, like an AGI powered down and rebooted, with its past memories front-loaded. We’re the same for day-to-day quotidian purposes, but our breaks in continuity raise philosophical questions.
And all this is before we get into the incomprehensible vastness of our galaxy, in which earth is barely a mote, or the universe featuring immense strings of galaxies, in which our Milky Way is a dot.
And all this is before we discuss the multiple great filters that are imminent before us, and as a species we are ill prepared to navigate. When we go extinct in the next century or too, it will be part of the Holicene dying, and none of our gods, myths and cultures will survive. All of our operas and symphonies, all of our paintings and sculpture, all of our cinematic thrillers and cozy mysteries and Ghibli animations and fine cuisine will evaporate into geographical layers, and the universe won’t even notice.
All this is to say, I’ve thought about this and confronted my personal insignificance. I’ve come to terms with mortality and the end of society and species. I get why people cling to notions that we are something special, even though all indications from nature imply we are not.
I say, bring it.
Still sore about the upper management sex predator ring Ubi did nothing about. Won’t buy Ubi ever again. Don’t play the Ubi games I own.
They trashed the series (plural) I liked anyway.
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche !
Maͣy iͥtͭ speͤeͤdͩ Oz’ waͣy tͭoͦ tͭhͪeͤ guͧiͥlloͦtͭiͥneͤ faͣstͭeͤrͬ tͭhͪaͣn iͥtͭ dͩiͥdͩ, dͩeͤaͣrͬ Maͣrͬiͥeͤ Antͭoͦiͥneͤtͭtͭeͤ
For decades now, I’m been warning about the era of this regime, and got a lot of oh yeah? Where are the death camps?
Dachau was operative in 1933. The Wannsee Conference was in 1942, after which the Auschwitz model was replicated at other camps, and the final solution to the Jewish question was applied to the general contained population, rather than just disabled, mentally ill and gays.
So in the timeline of the German Reich, the death camps appeared rather late, and I tend to err on the side of understatement, even though officer involved killings, and punitive fatalities in US prisons have been routine for decades at a rate of ~1000/year
Well, the signs are ideological, in that they conflict with the state-enforced ideology. Curiously, churches are getting in trouble discussing the beatitudes, since they (yes, Jesus’ own words) are in conflict with the state-enforced ideology.
What is scary is when there’s insufficient resistance to the state-enforced ideology that runs contrary to classic virtues / traditions of compassion, hospitality, mercy, etc. This is the banal evil that lets abductions, renderings, concentration camps and eventually genocide happen.
If you don’t fight with banners today, you’ll have to fight with guns tomorrow.
France revolted violently for less… and again after Charlie X started stripping away the Napoleonic rights.
Is that her face?
Is that the sound of fast-approaching leopards?
Is it face-eating season?
As in precocious puberty. Kids who are sexually activated (by premature hormone reactions which can be triggered – not always – by sexual abuse) so they get sexually interested before their peers, and ruin recess for everyone else.
When I was growing up (mind you, I was a late, late bloomer) precocious puberty in girls was punished brutally (say being grounded for life). Precocious puberty in boys was rewarded with early sports careers, unless you sucked, in which case you were punished for being a sex pest. This was a source of bullies that preyed on the rest of us.
This is to say, the US really doesn’t know how to parent or teach or otherwise administrate children. This is also to say I am way, way bitter about it.
ETA This is one of the purposes of puberty blockers, when it’s not used to let questioning trans kids decide to deliberate on what they want to be for a while, so I hope things are generally better. But then, considering how puberty blockers are now politicized, precocious puberty is also politicized, which ruins everyone’s Sunday brunch.