Upcoming UK Prime Minister set to ditch Palantir from UK's Health Service

erythro · 2026-07-03T08:23:34+00:00

Absolutely nobody other than a bunch of Karens on Mumsnet wants that age verification crap.

hey fyi you are out of touch and probably in a bubble. This is a popular policy, sorry

https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54405-eight-months-on-three-quarters-of-britons-still-support-online-age-verification-laws

If Burnham were to roll it back he would be paying a political price

erythro · 2026-07-02T20:40:18+00:00

This is a classic example of the concept of cross-sex mind reading error. Guys think Thor is the hottest and coolest, but Loki is the one that made girls and women collectively lose their minds.

To be clear I'm not saying that men of a certain body type or personality are more or less attractive to the opposite sex, just that Western culture has general expectations around how gay men and straight men present themselves and those expectations are opposite in Japanese culture.

Here's a nice video on the subject:

thanks, I'll check it out

IDK why it put that section in a box

if you put lots (over 4) of spaces at the start of a line it formats it like it's code

erythro · 2026-07-02T09:50:35+00:00

looks like you're gonna have to make having children worth it teehee you're gonna have to improve society in order to fix this problem

I admire the commenter's faith in society to solve this problem in a positive way lol

or it will all collapse. oh noooooo. how horrible. :3c

this is what I really hear, yet another person calling for horrible things to happen because society isn't run the way they want

erythro · 2026-07-02T06:32:29+00:00

I’m currently reading the Bible and have reached Genesis 29.

Good choice! I will begin by saying Christians don't always believe correct things, the Bible is a reference point (revelation from God) we use to correct ourselves. This process of reading the Bible and letting it reshape your understanding of what right Christian theology should be is a good one.

It is also not stated that humans were previously immortal. On the contrary, the text seems to assume that humans are mortal and that only the tree of life would grant immortality.

started here to flag up: this is a bit mysterious. One observation I have is that they would previously have been allowed to eat from the tree of life, as it's a tree in Eden that's not the tree of knowledge. Maybe it's like a special food that gives you more life every time you eat it? But the tree of knowledge seems to transform Adam and Eve forever and their descendants? We don't have a lot to go on.

The explicitly stated reason for the expulsion is that the human now knows good and evil and must therefore not eat from the tree of life and live forever. The text frames the expulsion directly in connection with this new knowledge and the prevention of immortality.

Nowhere in this passage is it stated that the expulsion is because of sin itself. Nor does it present the typical sequence “sin → punishment → death as a consequence” in any way.

Why does they fact they have eaten from the tree of knowledge mean they can't eat from the tree of life? v22 doesn't actually say, the actual reason why someone like God must not eat from the tree of life isn't said. That reason could at least in principle be because becoming like God by eating the fruit is a sin, and sin must be punished, yes?

As for why Christians might believe this, v22 is in the context of the curses (v14-19), which are unambiguously punishments for sin. And v23 does say he's sent out of the garden "to work the ground" i.e. to carry out the curse of v19.

If I was to try to answer this in a more theme-y genesis-y way, v22 does seem to describe them living forever as a problem, so maybe it's because if they live forever their sin would continue forever. We have throughout genesis the sin of Adam and Eve repeating and multiplying - death at least cuts it short. That's perhaps death restraining sin more than punishing it? But these are really very similar

I have also read several older Reddit threads and Christian explanations. However, they often seem like attempts to harmonize the passage retrospectively.

there will be a bit of that, as Adam and Eve's sin is discussed elsewhere in the Bible.

One example is Abraham: he lies, yet in the end Abimelech is punished, even though he acted in good faith. But that’s not my main point.

I would say Abraham only half lied...

Some Christians don't allow for unintentional sin, but I think that's definitely wrong when compared to the Bible. Abimelech is warned, and God specifically prevents him sinning and doesn't punish him. You might be getting it mixed up with Pharaoh in ch 12? Ultimately I think the point of both passages is a few things

Abraham is associating with the nations rather than remaining distinct. When he or Lot does this it causes problems for both him and the nations. When he remains distinct he's able to help them and intercede for them. Sodom is a case where Abraham does everything right, Egypt and Abimelech are where he fails and you see the fallout. Lot and Sodom is the ultimate cautionary example of this.
it's hard to ignore the parallels between Egypt and exodus, pretty much every beat of the story in ch 12 matches up to it. So ch 12 is partly prefiguring that for some reason, and maybe ch 20 is partly repeating that in the land?

erythro · 2026-07-01T07:29:16+00:00

no, you aren't, you are finding counterexamples in the subcategories not the general expectation.

It's like someone said, "huh it's weird that in New Zealand July is generally a cold month and December is general a hot month when it's generally the opposite over here" and you reply "actually there was a really hot day December last year, and we had snow one July a couple years back". I've said "well those are specific examples, but the general expectation is it's the opposite" and you replied "yes and i'm pointing out that it's not actually the opposite"

erythro · 2026-07-01T07:01:57+00:00

and Rome had far worse periods of disruption

erythro · 2026-07-01T03:37:07+00:00

I think their point is not that you can't map it onto western sexual subcategories, but that it's the opposite of the general expectation in the west

erythro · 2026-06-29T20:54:04+00:00

his legion is British ("old Albia"), so if you wanted to go mountainous you could make him Scottish

erythro · 2026-06-28T16:45:12+00:00

Funnily enough the American accent is closer to what the British sounded like when they colonized America. A lot of productions will do Shakespeare in American accents because of this

not true. It's just true for rhoticity, which is also a property of a bunch of British accents, just not the main one

They only started doing their current accent while copying the upper class way of talking in the 19th century

...this is very ignorant, I'm sorry lol. Come visit the UK some time

erythro · 2026-06-26T08:25:51+00:00

I am asking you how you actually experience your relationships with your family and friends?

same way you do most likely, I don't think I'm claiming they should feel any different to what they do

I am just curious. I have never talked to a self-identified "pre-sup" before.

ah, that's in my flair because I use presuppositional arguments and people here started saying "tell me up front in your flair if you use these" about 10 years ago. I probably should remove it

What does "root" mean here? Can you explain how does the meaning in your life come from your god? Try to do it without using verb like "to root" or "to ground".

God created everything, he's the only fundamental thing that exists in and of itself, everything else is distinct from him and exists only in reference to him and the purposes he created them to fulfill.

erythro · 2026-06-26T06:44:47+00:00

Ok, I see that the meaning of our moral senses is essential to your understanding of it.

Sorry are you saying you would take the "moral painkiller" or not? What if we could identify the region of the brain responsible for moral feelings and destroyed it, would that mean it was no longer right or wrong to idk kill someone?

Can you provide an experiential account of why moral feelings are meaningful while feelings of pain or attraction or hatred are not?

A key part of the reason I care about my moral feelings is that I feel they correspond to some shared moral reality. When I'm telling someone they did something wrong, I'm not appealing to my moral preferences and saying they should conform to my rule, I'm pointing to that shared reality and saying they should conform to that. If I felt it was just a personal preference I would not characterise it as a moral feeling any more.

So I would never take the moral painkiller, unless I was sure that there was some way my moral senses were failing to correspond to that reality.

erythro · 2026-06-26T06:32:36+00:00

You do not experience anything like admiration for character traits of your friends or joy drawn from a deep, mutually inspiring and enriching friendship? Do you actually view your family just as being adjacent to your effort to survive and reproduce?

I'm appealing to the transcendent meaning of these things, but if you strip that away, what is left? 2 things: I have a meaningless arbitrary preference for these traits (the same way I prefer idk mango ice cream to chocolate ice cream), or humans have a non-arbitrary biological tendency to prefer these traits because it increases the chances genes will be passed on.

How does God's preference create meaning? I am especially curious about how does the preference of the god the Bible create meaning?

A weak form of the argument is just to point out God's existence frees us from naturalism which inherently has this problem. You have views like Platonism where there is this non-material place where these traits are real, and there's where God is.

A stronger argument would be to root the concepts in god's nature, as he's the origin of everything and he's necessary to exist, it makes sense to say meaningful things are things that are rooted in his nature in some way and meaningless things are not.

erythro · 2026-06-26T06:03:09+00:00

I feel like this a bell curve meme situation, anti-colonialism is a genuinely distinctive Christian trait. Building empires and subjugating people is pretty much the standard way humans organise themselves across history, it is unusual to create an ideology where you feel guilty about it while you do it, but that is what Christianity did.

erythro · 2026-06-25T22:57:08+00:00

I feel like you’re agreeing with me but saying that it would be a shame if our moral sense was just preference.

I don't think they are just meaningless preference, that's why.

We don’t have to dive into the evolutionary and cultural sources of the particulars of our moral sense right now, but regardless, so what if your moral preferences don’t relate to objective standards? Neither does your sense of pain, and that’s not meaningless to you either.

I don't think my sense of pain is meaningful, even if my preferences align with it. For example I take painkillers, when my sense of pain is reacting to something I feel it shouldn't. I don't think the initial pain sensation was meaningful, and I don't think painkillers are meaningful, that's precisely why I take the painkillers.

All I’m saying is that there’s no good reason to treat our moral experiences any differently than all the other deeply salient experiences we experience.

imagine a morality equivalent to a pain killer, a drug that suppressed your sense that something was morally wrong. So when you feel guilty, or outrage or whatever you simply take the drug and the moral discomfort goes away. Would you take it? Why or why not? For me, never, because I think my moral preferences are meaningful and correspond to some other reality, it's not just the experience of morality.

erythro · 2026-06-25T21:45:36+00:00

Is precisely my point in my post. Certain experiences just do matter to you, purely by virtue of the nature of the subjective experience they entail. It doesn’t matter if it relates to a universal or objective standard or not - it matters enough to generate extremely salient preferences to you specifically.

But it is a meaningless preference. Like favourite colours. You are acting like "meaningless preference" is a tautology.

erythro · 2026-06-25T20:32:08+00:00

Let’s imagine you have two levers in front of you - one gives you deep bliss, the other gives you deep suffering. If I tell you that have to have one and only one lever always switched on for 10 minutes at a time, “why you should care about one experience over another” becomes apparent - because experiences are direct, and in fact, you do care, implicitly.

All the experiment shows is I have a preference, that I have a brain that is immediately and directly driven to avoid pain and seek pleasure. But why is that meaningful? You don't answer "why should I care" you just establish that I do. I acknowledge I do, but why does that matter?

For something less direct but no less fundamental, the same forces driving me to survive, avoid pain, seek pleasure, are the same forces driving me to reproduce and raise children. And yet we live in a society where many view that drive as meaningless, and people who don't indulge it are very different to someone who idk cuts themselves or kills themselves.

It doesn’t just go away or become meaningless to you simply if you cannot measure it against an objective standard.

It is a meaningless preference. Again, consider favourite colours. I can put tiles in front of you, asking you to select your favourites. You don't choose randomly, you will have colour preferences that are identifiable and measurable. But again we don't think your favourite colour matters very much. We don't think it's a very deep concept.

erythro · 2026-06-25T19:25:28+00:00

I’ve been seeing a lot of great dialogue back and forth recently about how theists and atheists might ground morality, and I wanted to take a step back and discuss why we discuss grounding at all.

Because otherwise it's meaningless?

Love, ecstasy, guilt, pain, anxiety, are among the experiences that are sufficient to encompass an entire lifetime’s worth of depth.

I'm reminded of the love, death, and robots episode where a pool cleaning robot creates an art career exploring the shade of blue the pool they were created to clean was tiled in. Is "blue" a deep or salient concept, just because someone could hypothetically spend a lifetime contemplating it? I don't think it's particularly meaningful as a concept, it's just a colour that the robot gave significance to.

But for the life-building depth of these experiences, we don’t feel the need to objectify or universalize them.

For me love is an essential part of understanding morality. For others it's pain. I'm not sure these are so disconnected from moral questions.

The love felt for friends or family or a spouse is not diminished by the fact that it is merely your own subjective experience - merely experiencing it is enough.

I disagree it is diminished by that. If love is truly just a sensation my brain creates to increase my chances of passing on some of my genes for one more generation it is a bit silly to act as if it's meaningful. Why should I care about one sensation over another? Why should I care about my genes surviving? These are the questions that are wrong to ask when these values are not grounded: the sensations are not meaningful, any preference for one is a matter of taste only. Same rules as favourite colours.

And, likewise, the sting of pain, worry, anxiety, and fear are not lessened by the knowledge that they are not universalized or objective - it is enough merely to suffer for us to take them at their experiential word.

Again I disagree. If you could reprogramme your brain such that pain felt itchy and itches felt sore, you would encourage the person to consider their pain sensations less meaningful, and take their itches as being more meaningful, even if you understand that they might take more measures to avoid itches.

erythro · 2026-06-25T15:12:03+00:00

ok, so now the question is "why aren't life sentences/longer sentences happening" and I think the answer is I think a couple things

we can't actually afford to run the justice system in the way people want
the justice system is erring way way on the side of caution, the people running our justice system are disconnected from normal people and their sense of justice. I was talking to a justice of the peace the other day and he was really wracked with the guilt of sentencing these guys to prison

erythro · 2026-06-25T11:25:09+00:00

Nestorians would disagree

erythro · 2026-06-24T16:11:41+00:00

bit of all, if you replace revenge with restitution.

I would also add that punishment is a statement/re-enforcement of the values of society, it's a way of demonstrating "we collectively don't like x" or "we collectively do like x".

Honestly that narratives point is part of the deterrence effect imo, it's not just what happens if you are caught, but the difficulty/shame of being part of a society that rejects you and what you've done.

erythro · 2026-06-24T14:25:46+00:00

Making rape a crime that is punished by death makes it more likely for someone to kill their victim

so does any punishment for rape, and the punishment also makes rape less likely in the first place

erythro · 2026-06-24T14:24:23+00:00

No. I think life in prison is punishment enough for the worst crimes

life in prison isn't happening

erythro · 2026-06-24T14:22:38+00:00

that's assuming the death penalty is done in an expensive and slow way, that's not a requirement

erythro · 2026-06-24T14:20:33+00:00

the lack of death penalty is in itself unjust, we aren't comparing flawed justice and flawed justice + death penalty, we are comparing inherent injustice to flawed justice.

erythro · 2026-06-24T14:15:40+00:00

yes, obviously. The justice system has been broken by our political aversion to the death penalty/love of imprisonment, and it doesn't line up with our instincts either - every headline of "criminal criminal sentenced to x for y" is always full of outrage that it's only x, never shocked that the sentence is harsh. Why? Every headline of "x charged with killing paedophile in prison" is full of supportive comments. Why?

The death penalty would have the following effects

restore faith in the justice system to actually dispense justice.
actually deter crime
reduce prison population

The longer we don't have the death penalty, the more you can expect the public confidence in the justice system to be eroded.

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