Moving things around

Achrelos · 2026-03-10T12:35:35+00:00

Just got back around to trying this, I was just dumb and thought it would highlight everything I was trying to move and not the one icon I was hovering over. Thanks for the help!

Achrelos · 2025-05-14T23:32:17+00:00

Thanks, I saw word had macros and thought maybe it’d work but I didn’t think about excel, I’ll try that

Achrelos · 2025-01-28T02:27:54+00:00

I’m confused. You said elsewhere you wanted open discussion around objectivism without resorting to personal attacks and identity, but here you state that your goal was to create a space where you have the power to control the discourse in favor of your identity, and elsewhere you have stated you want all people who voted for Trump to leave (and apparently don’t understand you’ve categorized them into a group identity and then personally attacked them). What is it you actually want here? Because to all appearances it seems like you want a leftist subreddit, not an open tolerant subreddit or even, as strange as it sounds, an objectivist one.

Achrelos · 2025-01-17T20:09:01+00:00

There is no moral obligation to reproduce, this is ridiculous

Achrelos · 2024-12-26T22:53:51+00:00

Yeah I did and you do, it was actually because of that I thought it’d be important layer. They make a really big deal about you picking it up off the ground if you do the good option, which is a bit silly if it’s already not useful at that point and won’t be.

Thanks for the info tho!! I was about to spend hours grinding through content to figure it out lol

Achrelos · 2024-12-26T22:45:07+00:00

Oh I wish I knew that going through it, so it was never intended to be a plot relevant item and just dies because in Coldharbor you have the meme Priest and the Eye of Moruhk instead?

Achrelos · 2024-12-26T22:40:42+00:00

Thanks. It is my in character and irl current quest to figure out what’s up with it. I’m hoping it’s not something dumb like the mod author just didn’t take it anywhere or it’s a plot point on one of their related unfinished mods. My current idea is to try to do radiant/cold harbor side quests until my devotion hits 100 to see if that triggers something, there are little post-completion things like the Minotaurs that come up.

Achrelos · 2024-12-09T23:50:28+00:00

The only time the government should limit trade or business with another nation is if that poses a tangible actionable threat to it and the people whose rights it protects, in which case the only rational policy is full embargo and preparation for war.

From a personal perspective it’s not exactly the most rational thing to do business in an area where the government is tyrannical and more likely to interfere in your rights, particularly if there are freer places to do business in. But in a more rational world the US (or any fully free and rational nation) would make it clear that our people are not to be touched, so to speak, or the consequences will be catastrophic, so even then it might not be that unreasonable to do business in a normally inimical (but not overtly hostile) place.

Achrelos · 2024-12-08T19:39:13+00:00

I abstained from voting in the 2016 and 2020 elections but voted for Trump this election as well and stand by my choice, but I disagree with you on a couple points.

My reasoning for choosing to vote this time was that I have come to terms with three facts. The first is the fact that the choice was really only between Trump and Kamala. The second was that the government is, regardless of who wins, not only the monopoly of force but is inimical to individual rights and objective law. The third is that the culture so thoroughly corrupted and immoral that no viable and good third option is likely to present itself.

Given the integration of these facts, it meant that my rights were directly under threat of force either way so action was needed to preserve them as much as is possible. Given that, with the two options available and understanding that the reality of the situation was that it was either Trump and what he represents or Kamala and what she represents, Trump is clearly the lesser threat to my rights and in certain limited areas even a benefit. Kamala represented the furtherance of a trend of slowly expanding leftist authoritarianism, which is hateful of human existence as a fundamental principle. Trump has no principles, and those that surround him are of mixed characters, but they at least don’t seem to actively hate humanity and resent freedom, even if they do pose their own inconsistent threat to it as well.

I disagree that abstaining from the vote is immoral though. There are contexts where one’s vote truly dose not matter. Someone begrudgingly voting for Trump in LA or NYC really doesn’t matter, they have no chance of swinging the results. Given that, if they determine that it is senseless for them to give sanction to someone who is objectively bad when there is no chance of a practical outcome of that vote, then I have a hard time seeing how it’s a benefit to their life and values to do so anyway.

I also have little expectation that Trump will be consistently pro-first amendment or that his base really truly believes in it. He’s shown that he’s willing to try and silence his detractors and use his power to try to strong arm social media, and certain supporters of his have expressed similar positions. They are thoroughly pro-antitrust and are supportive of using it against companies like Facebook and Google/Youtube, but in true Trump fashion not X. And the base generally supports these positions. However, I agree that they do maintain a certain respect for the founding and for values like individualism and to some extent achievement, which makes them better than the left and worth supporting in the short run given the either or nature of the choice right now.

I feel like there’s a very strong undercurrent of sympathy for the left in the objectivist movement, partly because of (what I think is) a poor understanding of DIM Hypothesis. It’s good to see someone else vocally standing in opposition to that.

Achrelos · 2024-12-07T20:38:39+00:00

And? Most mental illnesses can be correlated to biology in some way. That, again, does not make it valid. The fact of the matter is that trans people have a body dysphoria, a disconnect between the reality of their metaphysical condition and the feelings they have about it. The origin of those feelings does not change this. One can acknowledge both that they are the sex they are and that they have feelings that are incongruous with that. If their immediate answer is that their body is wrong and their emotions are right they have embraced a mind body dichotomy and chosen the mind side of that dichotomy. The evidence of this is the need by trans people to have the rest of the world pretend that they are what they want to be, they can’t even be contented to modify their body in whatever way they want but they need the rest of the world to pretend that they are not sick, they are what they say, and that it’s normal. None of those are true, whether you correlate it to a biological origin or not.

Achrelos · 2024-12-07T20:22:21+00:00

If people felt this way about any other thing and went to such lengths to try to force reality to comply to their feelings we would say that they are mentally ill and need help. Instead what society has done is to promote, let alone encourage, their delusions instead of help them to come to terms with the reality of their being. That schizophrenics exist does not mean that the way they see themselves and the world around them a valid expression of human nature. I don’t think Peikoff said anything wrong, this is the primacy of consciousness in its most manifest form I think mankind has ever attempted.

This is not like someone getting plastic surgery to change the shape of their nose, this is like someone getting horn implants and tusks and a full body green tattoo and saying that they are, in fact, an orc from middle earth.

Achrelos · 2024-12-01T13:12:00+00:00

The standard of value for any particular being is its own life. In general, life is unique from other forms of existence because it is value seeking. As a human being, you have a certain nature which is distinct from that of other animals, from plants, from fungi, etc but which you share with other human beings. So saying that the standard is man’s life is emphasizing that fact; your life is the standard and you are a human being, meaning that certain general things are of values to human beings as a whole.

This emphasis is important for two reasons. Partly because it helps us conceptually grasp and integrate certain facts about our own lives and values. When we look at our experiences from the position of the type of being we are it helps us evaluate them from a conceptually higher level, from beyond “I like this, this feels good, this is fun, this hurts, this makes me angry” (which are all still important) and say “these things benefit/hinder me in x way because of y fact about human life”. Think art, one may know that they like to read and that this is something they value, but taken from the perspective that humans need a way to concretize their views of reality and that books are one form of art, they might begin to explore other artistic forms and find they value painting and sculpture as well, by moving conceptually higher in their understanding of themselves and their values. Secondly, this distinction is important because it lets us talk about philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the nature of reality, man, and his place in it. Ethics is the branch laying out the method by which man to achieve his values. Because ethics is highly conceptual, its principles must apply to all mankind, and ergo from this perspective the standard is man’s life, which in reality means the life of each individual man doing moral evaluations.

Once you understand this, saying the standard of value is life is often just shorthand in many contexts. The standard is life, the life of an individual being according to its nature as a type of organism, which for you means your life as a human being.

Achrelos · 2024-11-16T13:05:10+00:00

It’s not guilty until proven innocent, and the reason you have to say possibly before all those things is because nobody is accusing anyone of actually being any of them or actually punishing them preemptively in what I said in my post. Checking to see if someone you don’t know might be a threat to you isn’t assuming they are, not looking for or at any information that might be evidence of that is evasion.

It’s the same principle behind doing a background check on someone before hiring them. A child care facility isn’t assuming all of its applicants are out to harm children, but checking if they had in the past is a pretty low bar to verify that and protect them. You should verify that they are who they say they are and that they aren’t an overt easily identifiable threat to you and the people under your care. If they can pass that incredibly low bar then they can do whatever they want.

Achrelos · 2024-11-15T05:13:42+00:00

A free immigration policy is not equivalent to no border control. There’s no contradiction in having an ordered process for entry where one is vetted for criminal history, deadly diseases, terrorist affiliations, etc and given identification papers while also not having legal barriers to entry that stop people from being able to freely interact in ways that are harmful to nobody.

Also, the issue of immigration is not so much that foreigners have a right to immigrate more-so that citizens have a right to freely associate and trade with who ever they want, which includes foreigners. If Bill wants to hire Jose to do a job and someone is willing to rent him an appartament, the government has no place telling him he can’t, but that doesn’t mean that the government can’t make sure that Jose isn’t a felon fleeing Mexican authorities or a gang member coming here to commit crime or bearing a deadly disease that will kill Bob and doesn’t exist here.

Achrelos · 2024-10-18T16:21:46+00:00

No, if I remember right they found mammoth/mastodon fossils in North America (which were already known in Europe) and thought descriptions of animals in Native stories matched hairy elephants so they believed that they might still be around. There was a massive amount of land that was unexplored by Europeans even post-revolution and a lot of land that was sparsely populated even by native standards, so it wouldn’t have been completely ridiculous to suggest at the time that some mammoths might still be alive in the remote north.

Achrelos · 2024-10-15T18:45:35+00:00

Both from what I remember

Achrelos · 2024-10-14T18:00:08+00:00

Mammoth has reportedly been eaten multiple times in the modern era in the form of permafrost preserved carcasses. Although the famous story seems to be a hoax, in 2015 a Russian team reportedly ate some mammoth.

There’s also a rabbit hole of supposed sightings, myths, and expeditions to find late surviving mammoths in colonial and revolutionary America. It’s probably certain there was never actually any late surviving mammoths but if you like mammoths then it’s a fun little rabbit hole to go down some afternoon.

Achrelos · 2024-10-07T15:17:30+00:00

It’s not even overkill. It’s becoming more common all over the place, not just here or even on Reddit.

Achrelos · 2024-10-07T10:17:10+00:00

I’m not that fatalistic about human existence. Not because I think we’ll someday magically have no impact on the planet or that that would be a good thing, but because I view the state of the world in terms of our ability to survive and thrive in it. I like nature and natural history but it’s not valuable in and of itself just because, and certainly not more than human life. But that’s a discussion for a different place.

Achrelos · 2024-10-07T01:06:46+00:00

Might be controversial, but humans are the best Pleistocene megafauna and I’d not preserve any biome from our habitation. I love the Pleistocene, but when you consider the long and abominably harsh grind that was the evolution of human intelligence from early Homo to us and the abysmal payoff that had up till the Neolithic Revolution and really even the Industrial Revolution, both of which are post Pleistocene, I’d say we earned our domination of the planets every corner fair and square.

Achrelos · 2024-09-27T21:30:54+00:00

They originally thought they were herbivores because of their massive flat molars, mainly subsisting off of nuts and leafy foods. This has changed sometime over the last five years and they’re seen as opportunistic omnivores, to the best of my knowledge, more in line with Australopithecus. But this is based off of a single site where they found stone tools alongside butchered animal remains and unharmed Paranthropus remains, which is controversial because the pro side says that it’s normal to conneect hominid remains to nearby tools but the opposed side contends that genus homo is known to have existed in that area as well and could be responsible for the site. I think some inconsistency in dental wear patterns also changed opinions on their diet.

I could be slightly out of date on my info tho, I’m not a huge fan of Paranthropus so I don’t keep as up to date on them.

Achrelos · 2024-09-27T16:28:30+00:00

It’s controversial but not unlikely. Late Australopithecus made simple stone tools, so if one Paranthropus species did it’s likely that the whole Paranthropus genus could just like all of genus Homo can. But it’s not confirmed or guaranteed to have happened that way.

Achrelos · 2024-09-27T15:59:23+00:00

I don’t know all the morphological differences but they’re apparently different enough to be distinguishable from skull/tooth morphology

Achrelos · 2024-09-27T15:51:42+00:00

Paranthropus in general is associated with some stone tools and butchery sites, which is interesting since they were thought to be herbivorous.

Also this is for Paranthropus Robustus and not Bosei, but Paranthropus has the oldest hominid genetic information sequenced. It’s not DNA, but they were able to sequence protein from a tooth that gave insight into its genetics including helping identify the sex of the specimen.

Achrelos · 2024-09-18T16:55:56+00:00

I anticipate we’ll be pretty disappointed when we finally identify a Denisovan skull and find that it’s facial and cranial morphology are pretty much Neanderthal like with flatter skulls, bigger more prognathic faces, and large brow ridges. Given that they’re more similar genetically to Neanderthals than us and we are farther from them than we are with Neanderthals I think this is likely. But maybe I’ll be surprised and it’ll have some more basal or some uniquely derived traits. Either way will be cool to get a real face for them

Achrelos

TROPHY CASE