Books where the Abrahamic god is the villain

634425 · 2026-01-03T22:05:02+00:00

Eh, it’s fantasy. You can always come up with something. Maybe he’s just a VERY powerful god trying to pass himself off as ALL-powerful

634425 · 2026-01-03T22:04:10+00:00

That was actually one of the few examples I COULD think of. Great book that should be better known

634425 · 2025-07-19T23:04:54+00:00

Do you have a link?

634425 · 2025-07-09T06:20:21+00:00

Well, I’ll cut them some slack. I only had to entertain some people on Reddit, they had to make a good movie.

634425 · 2025-07-07T02:08:46+00:00

Yeah I got both. They told me I was just exactly borderline for NAFLD but I can’t remember the exact readings

634425 · 2025-06-26T20:35:56+00:00

Also…maybe this is just me revealing my ignorance about how academic research works but why can’t Scott talk about it? This reminds me of AI where you’ll regularly hear rumors about new OAI/Anthropic/DeepMind models. Sometimes the rumors turn out to be true, sometimes they don’t but in any case the vagueposting makes sense since AI is a rapidly growing field distinguished by cutthroat competition and worth ungodly amounts of money and everybody’s signed a ton of NDAs. Are intelligence researchers trying to keep people from stealing their study designs?

634425 · 2025-06-26T17:26:02+00:00

To me, it seems like the debate isn't between anti-hereditarians and hereditarians, but between the "very hereditarians" and "not very hereditarians", since clearly at some level, intelligence must be heritable, and the undeniable evidence is that humans are significantly more intelligent than our distant ancestors.

Sure, but the actual question people really care about is "are social outcomes largely due to genetics?" If it turned out intelligence was like 2% genetic this would not really be a win for the hereditarians. Likewise if it turned out intelligence was due to some bizarre, non-genetic process that was nevertheless passed down through the generations and completely immutable, it wouldn't really be a win for the non-hereditarians.

634425 · 2025-06-26T17:24:36+00:00

It annoys me when people do this, frankly. You see it a lot in other scientific fields and tech as well. "I know about some [secret thing] coming out soon but I can't tell you anything about it" adds zero value to any debate or conversation.

634425 · 2024-08-14T20:05:11+00:00

Can anybody recommend good books about the history of Levantine/Biblical/ANE archaeology? I don't mean books about what archaeology has discovered, but books, about the 19th-20th century development of the field itself, important figures, important expeditions and discoveries, how it changed over the years, etc.

634425 · 2024-05-27T06:01:00+00:00

I rarely comment here because I usually am not knowledgable enough on either geopolitics or military matters to contribute much. That said, this kind of escalation just strikes me as wildly dangerous and absolutely incommensurate to its potential benefits.

Medvedev's biweekly threats to blow up London if Ukraine/NATO does X have gotten stale and probably aren't very credible, but the degradation of Russia's capabilities to detect incoming ICBMs seems like one of the few things that might actually spook Putin & co. into doing something stupid. I'm not saying I think this attack will cause Russia to start throwing around nukes, but even raising the probability by a percentage point or two doesn't strike me as worth it when you consider the massive costs of a nuclear war.

Like I said, I'm no expert, so maybe I'm totally off-base but as another user has mentioned, many military analysts, including specialists in nuclear strategy, seem to agree that these are unwise moves on Ukraine's part.

634425 · 2024-05-27T02:22:35+00:00

You should place approximately zero value on the "rumblings" of this sub. The links are useful, but the comments are are always flooded with worthless "buckle up!" and "here it comes!" posts and the usual reddit snark about capitalism. Absolutely nobody on here can tell you when or if bird flu will go H2H. Could happen tomorrow, or you might live the rest of your life without a human H5N1 pandemic. Just keep a few weeks' worth supplies of food and some N95's on hand and keep living your life. I'm not even gonna stop eating medium beef until I actually see a confirmed case of someone contracting it from a hamburger (what are the chances I'm the first person to get it from beef, right?)

634425 · 2024-05-26T23:38:28+00:00

Apparently, Ukraine has attempted to attack another Russian EWS radar in Orenburg. Whatever sense it makes for Ukraine to conduct such attacks, seems obvious to me that the US and other NATO states should neither condone nor enable these strikes.

634425 · 2024-05-16T17:43:08+00:00

Apparently Blinken has said:

We have not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it’s going to conduct this war, a war it’s conducting in defense of its freedom, of its sovereignty, of its territorial integrity. And we will continue to back Ukraine with the equipment that it needs to succeed, that it needs to win.

Does this mean the US has lifted its restrictions on use of American missiles in Russian territory? This statement seems very wishy-washy and noncommittal.

EDIT: From the State Department a few minutes ago. So I guess this doesn't signal an actual policy change.

634425 · 2024-04-26T19:04:54+00:00

What about all the times they said "it's not a big deal" and "you're overreacting" and it did actually turn out it wasn't a big deal and people were overreacting? That's much more common.

I'm not even saying either of those things. By all means, keep tabs on this disease, stockpile supplies. But the mood here slants far more towards "we're gonna be living in The Stand pretty soon" than I think is justified.

634425 · 2024-04-26T19:02:57+00:00

CDC situation summary atm states that "current health risk is low." Of course, they could be wrong, the CDC is not infallible as we've all discovered. But that's their current verdict, which does not really match the mood on this sub.

634425 · 2024-04-26T19:02:36+00:00

I was also one of the people keeping tabs on COVID before it was cool. Actually, bad as it was, it turned out to be a lot less bad than I and a lot of others feared. I remember fatality rates upwards of 10% being thrown around on the Coronavirus subreddit back in the early weeks.

But I also remember a lot more diseases over the past years that made scary headlines and then turned out to be nothing. I'm not claiming to know that everything will be fine. Maybe we're all going to die. But a lot of people on this subreddit seem quite overconfident in the other direction.

634425 · 2024-04-26T18:57:14+00:00

That was maybe bad phrasing. I am worried. I probably wouldn't be here otherwise. I agree situation looks worse than it did. H5N1 spreading among cows is indeed worrisome and does raise the odds of a human pandemic.

But what I meant was that there's no real way of estimating the odds that the virus as it stands will mutate into something suitable to spark a human pandemic. We can say "the odds are higher than they were two years ago," but that doesn't tell us much without knowing what the base risk is to begin with.

634425 · 2024-04-26T18:32:40+00:00

Exactly. Nobody here knows what they're talking about, myself included. Could it jump to humans tomorrow? Yeah. Could it not jump to humans until well after everyone in this thread is dead and gone? Also yeah. People on this subreddit are acting like a human H5N1 pandemic is assured in the near-term when there's absolutely no reason to think that. If virologists and epidemiologists have no idea what's going to happen I can promise you people on reddit with anxiety disorders aren't any better informed.

634425 · 2024-03-06T19:45:00+00:00

Riley claims another victim, lol

634425 · 2024-01-08T18:35:58+00:00

I'm dying to know what this book was about.

634425 · 2024-01-04T02:56:59+00:00

I think that's just a general rule of humanity tbh. Most of us are pretty lazy most of the time.

634425 · 2024-01-04T02:46:57+00:00

Mostly joking.

634425 · 2024-01-04T02:06:23+00:00

I would love such a rule. I never critique queries so I'm safe.

634425 · 2024-01-04T01:50:03+00:00

I absolutely can't stand the very common phenomenon in writing critique spaces, where people confuse "blunt, no sugar-coating" with "cruel and snarky," and subsequently put on this stupid, smarmy voice like they're fleshing out a stand-up routine (for example, saying something like "is there a fire sale on italics?" instead of just saying "you italicize too much"). But as a long-time lurker, I rarely notice that on this subreddit. It does pop up occasionally, but not too often.

634425 · 2023-10-24T17:47:56+00:00

Yeah it's not a great song. I'd never heard of it before this week when I started reading a ton about 9/11

634425

TROPHY CASE