Araucaria Araucana retweeted
The libertarian line on guns is that they protect you from an oppressive government. Maybe, but I think the more important element is that guns allow individuals to veto riots. Call it the Rittenhouse principle.
Libertarians are right on guns. Ready gun access isn't a free lunch but it does distribute power broadly in society and limits the powers of the government. From Australia to Venezuela, nothing good happens politically after the government takes away the guns.
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Araucaria Araucana retweeted
Im sure that they were all socialist matriarchies before Western Colonialists showed up and introduced sin.
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Me: what does your documentation say about this?
Claude: the documentation is fairly specific, and several of my problems came from ignoring it.
🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
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Araucaria Araucana retweeted
One good thing that Soviet upbringing gave me that Americans tend to lack is understanding that material things are embodied labor. By destroying or damaging material things, one is saying "Fuck you!" to the people who built them.
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The thing about remote work is that on any given day it's clearly preferable to work from home, but if you do it every day, it sucks. Probably 2 or 3 days per week in office is ideal.
My strongest “vibes not evidence” belief is that remote work is a cancer that’s making (most) people miserable even though it seems better in the short term.
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Real
Autistic women are never treated as subhuman. Autistic women never experience social ostracization.
Autistic women don't face higher appearance standards than men could ever dream of, to the point behaving like a man gets you accused of your mental health being off.
You know how autistic men sometimes get told to shower?
Autistic women have to maintain long hair, remove body hair, wear makeup (not too much, not too little), wear cute yet professional outfits, wear jewelry, etc.
And if we don't do that, people have QUESTIONS.
We also aren't allowed to have a very basic autistic trait: lacking in appropriate emotional expression.
Guys can be blank-faced & it's fine. Guys can say "not now" & it's fine.
Women are expected to be 24/7 not only open but happy to others speaking to us, and we're a "bitch" if we don't.
This goes beyond sex, mind you, which certain autistic men never think about.
Be an autistic POC & you WILL be told you're full of yourself & off-putting.
I relate cuz it's the same for women, but I also recognize the giant pass being white gives me.
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Araucaria Araucana retweeted
Ironically, they are right that as a society, a lot of young people confuse being uncomfortable with being unsafe. Curiously, they never apply that to when people claim they feel unsafe when discussing politics. Only about bus interactions with schizos
Pious statements like this ignore a basic reality, which is that most normal people don’t feel obligated to be “uncomfortable” when they have alternatives. If you want public transit to thrive, you need to address both comfort and safety. Lectures don’t work.
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The "government giving taxpayers' money to orgs that act against their opposition" aspect does seem pretty bad.
While these spies are notionally independent, they are indirectly funded by the state, can trust the state not to prosecute them for the crimes they commit while spying, and collaborate with state broadcasters to publish their efforts.
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Araucaria Araucana retweeted
The level of retardation happening in Canada rn almost surpasses belief. Let me try and explain:
Canada has race-based sentencing guidelines. Native criminals are supposed to get shorter sentences than white criminals because the courts are required to consider racism, colonialism, etc.
But at the same time, people who kill or assault native women are supposed to get longer sentences than people who kill or assault white women. Because, again, racism, colonialism, etc,
The problem?
It’s mostly native men killing and assaulting native women.
And liberal judges have been caught in the legislative middle, wobbling stupidly on this comically high tightrope from which a fall to either side is a snake-filled pit of inevitable racism accusations.
If they start cracking down on the killers and abusers of native women, the native male prison population will explode (racist).
If they don’t, they are making it effectively legal for native women to be killed and abused (also racist).
It’s like shitlib zugzwang.
And no one in this entire country seems to have an IQ high enough to figure out how to deal with this.
Supreme Court split over sentencing when the offender and the victim are both Indigenous nationalpost.com/news/suprem…
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The main reason Western countries are complicit in honour killings is that the kind of people who talk about 'decolonisation' don't want to admit these crimes are specific to certain cultures, and prefer to cover up problems rather than face them.
A Dutch NGO has called for the decolonisation of honour killings in Western countries.
"Responses should centre ...complicity of the State in upholding patriarchal standards, rather than focusing on cultural essentialism or reductive beliefs about religion and culture."
ghrd.org/decolonising-honour…
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Happened to me. ☹️ Screens are more addictive than books.
I saw of video of Ethan Hawke lamenting how he's not reading half as much as he once did. This is a much deeper and darker pattern. Some of the most avid readers I know, lifelong readers, have basically stopped. They hate it and can't even explain it, the fire's just gone out
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Araucaria Araucana retweeted
While everything is blowing up about the proposed BBC licence fee changes, there's been a really interesting piece of research published this week about misperceptions about crime.
The really fun bits are that people who read print newspapers, watch TV news and listen to the radio are most likely to get things wrong. Similarly people who use Facebook, TikTok and those who don't use social media are more likely to get things wrong.
Those who use @X , Reddit and LinkedIn fare much better.
(Blue-movie-Sky doesn't even feature 🤭)
kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/a…
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This sounds so extreme it can't possibly be true, but requirements for development in Britain are so onerous that something has to give.
We pay more than £200 million to this organisation to make our lives worse.
They have blocked homes, kite festivals, put millions onto the cost of our infrastructure, and found loopholes in laws to block new homes & make life even harder for young people.
We are talking about "Natural" England.
They are completely unelected and completely unaccountable
We’ve prepared some of their most rational moments for you to enjoy.
1️⃣ Made Hinkley Point C even more expensive by forcing a £700 MILLION "fish disco". This will save... one salmon... every decade.
➡️ If we don't have secure energy, Britain is at risk of blackouts.
2️⃣ Blocked a kite festival for charity because some grass might need to be mowed. The event had to be shut down after more than 30 years.
➡️ The only other government organisation to ban kite flying… The Taliban.
3️⃣ Shut down a paintballing centre because of "ground compaction". In other words, people walked on the land.
➡️ This was so despicable that Natural England deemed it acceptable to take this family-run business to court. The owners have spent more than £50,000 on their legal defence.
4️⃣ Designated part of the M25 as an "area of outstanding natural beauty".
➡️ Natural England has the power to designate land as an area of outstanding natural beauty. They’ve chosen the M25. Maybe the yellow emergency area looks stunning in summer.
5️⃣ Found loopholes to laws passed by our democratically elected government.
➡️ New planning rules mean that houses within 500 metres of a train station are more likely to be approved. So Natural England is designating areas just outside train stations as of "outstanding" natural beauty. No homes can be built here.
6️⃣ Blocked 27,000 jobs at a London theme park to protect… spiders.
➡️ Plans included what would have been the largest indoor water park in Europe.
We could continue.
Natural England is a very odd organisation, but one thing is clear. We do not need to deal with this. The Government can and must ABOLISH them. It has gone on for too long.
NO more Natural England.
Now, we need your help. Write to your local MP and tell them to ABOLISH NATURAL ENGLAND ⬇️
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Araucaria Araucana retweeted
This is a valid question. Why care, why now? What do we even do when AI is progressing so quickly?
I care about education for the same reason as ever: I want humans to excel. I do not want the world of WALL-E, in which we outsource all our thought and retreat to mindless consumption. I want institutions that align our short-term interests with our long-term goals, institutions that push us towards our limits and push the boundary of what humans can do. I have always wanted that. I want it now, and I will want it even as AI progresses.
AI is progressing, but there are still millions of kids in real schools, caught up in a turbulent moment, not disappearing just because the world is changing. AI is progressing, and there are institutions that need to seriously address the questions of how to adapt to it, of what we want out of education when we can no longer look kids in the eyes and say "This will help you get a good job." AI is progressing, and that means that people should find where to use it and where not to use it.
It is possible we are all like that beaver in a house, making dams out of stuffed animals because that is what beavers do. It's possible, even likely, that machines will eclipse all my contributions to the things I care about, the same way it is now overwhelming and annihilating the fields of many mathematicians.
I don't know what that means, not really. Humans weren't built for this rapid of change, and I'm still finding my footing as we're all swept along. I am one person, and I am not so in love with my own capacity as to think myself above spending my time on thinking about the direction of a field that millions spend their careers maintaining, even as I expect it to be rocked by the same turbulence that is rocking everything else.
But as the tempest sweeps through and the world changes, I still want humans who care about knowledge and expertise, and who are willing to build and maintain institutions that cultivate it.
why do you see value in fighting for education when, in the previous tweet, you noted that "AI eclipses everything" including education
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This is the norm in ethnically Balkanised countries. This is what people like the OP risk bringing to Western countries with unselected mass immigration, because they don't understand that the culture and practices and politics they grew up with are not universal or the default.
I genuinely despise Indian politics. The fundamental political issues are not things like "should we raise or lower taxes?" or "how shall we encourage manufacturing?", it's literally all "does my caste or your caste get the government jobs?". It's all so futile.
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Related issue: most of the people calling for more empathy seem to believe that understanding and even sympathising with someone's motivations must mean supporting them. But this is not true! You can sympathise with someone, but think it would be too big a burden,
Discernible difference I've noticed is some people believe that understanding the motivation or background dampens harsh judgment. That seems to be the case for a certain type of person but for me, it tends to just more clearly articulate or further my moral judgment
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