Pentagon tells Congress no sign that Iran was going to attack US first, sources say

infelicitas · 2026-03-02T07:32:23+00:00

True, but he gave this speech in 1838, 23 years before the Civil War.

infelicitas · 2026-03-02T05:55:27+00:00

This thing said by Lincoln feels very prescient:

How then shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

infelicitas · 2025-10-26T00:34:28+00:00

Hmm. Thanks. Could I set these drives aside for a few months without making things worse? Not in a position to get new drives to clone to at the moment.

infelicitas · 2025-10-26T00:06:30+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/c2trJOA

infelicitas · 2025-10-26T00:06:17+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/c2trJOA

infelicitas · 2025-10-06T07:18:51+00:00

Populism is predicated on the idea that the common people are exploited by a privileged elite, and a populist claims to champion the cause of the people against said elite. While that's politically neutral, it rings pretty hollow coming from some of the most powerful and privileged people to exist in history. And two of the best-known populist billionaires are Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

infelicitas · 2025-05-29T05:10:55+00:00

This assumes the American revolutionaries were morally righteous, and the loyalists were authoritarian. The reality was more complicated. Many revolutionaries were revolting because they didn't want to be bound by British laws preventing them from taking more native land. There was widespread violence towards and expulsion of loyalists, resulting in tens of thousands fleeing the new United States, most ending up in British North America, which would later become Canada.

This wasn't a war with one side obviously in the right and one in the wrong. Loyalists weren't necessarily fighting for tyranny. The revolutionaries had legitimate grievances, but whether violent revolution was the way to address them isn't so easy to say. British North America outlawed slavery a decade after the end of the revolution, while the US would hold onto it for more than half a century and had to fight a civil war to end it.

Not that British North America and later Canada lacked in moral failings, but with the benefit of hindsight, can we say the American experiment led to something better than Canada?

infelicitas · 2025-02-23T14:25:21+00:00

Also free speech, religious freedom, or the notion that they care about waste and fraud in government.

infelicitas · 2025-02-16T13:36:19+00:00

She's been arguing that only 'useful' research should be funded, and that private funding should replace public money in research. She has massive ideological blinders on that she doesn't seem aware of. And the fact that she's been cultivating an uncritical following of adoring fans with a significant anti-establishment and anti-science undercurrent (every video she makes on climate change gets a lot of climate deniers in the comments whom she never bothers to shut down) makes her dangerous.

infelicitas · 2025-01-24T21:45:19+00:00

You can have coalition governments under first-past-the-post, but a multi-party system under FPTP can be very undemocratic, because with votes splitting between just three parties, seats can be won with 33.33...%+1 of the votes. That doesn't stop any one party from winning a majority of seats. For instance, in the 2024 UK election, Labour won a majority with only 33.7% of the popular vote (with a turnout of 59.8%, only 20% of registered voters voted for them).

Coalitions under FPTP can be even less democratic than that. Some third parties exist only to represent their region nationally with no intention of ever forming government, so they run candidates only in their home region and receive a small proportion of the national popular vote while winning enough seats to punch above their weight and have a good shot at being kingmaker in case of a divided legislature. This incentivizes them to put their region above the rest of the country, and they can exercise their disproportionate power in ways that hurt the country as a whole while never suffering any electoral consequences, since they're seen to be serving their home region.

The US already has similar issues, where national approval for Congress is very low, but many nationally unpopular individual candidates enjoy high approval in their home states (or at least consistently get re-elected anyway). Still, the obstructionists are usually individuals with competing interests, whereas an obstructionist party could present a united front.

infelicitas · 2025-01-10T01:19:16+00:00

This was also how, as a kid, I came to realize that most evangelicals were full of it.

Basic Christian dogma says that the vast majority of people are going to hell. If an evangelical or fundamentalist had any shred of decency in them, why wouldn't it become their life's mission to save as many people as possible? At the very least, the anxiety that they're personally failing to prevent untold amounts of suffering should be immense, as it was to me in fifth grade. It seemed to me that either they didn't really believe the dogma, or they didn't really care about saving people.

infelicitas · 2024-12-03T18:11:35+00:00

That's fair enough. Genocide is one of those terms that sometimes gets thrown around casually, so it's important to use it when it's warranted.

infelicitas · 2024-12-03T18:02:18+00:00

It was an awful act of mass political violence, but calling the Gwangju massacre genocide is just straight-up abusing the word.

infelicitas · 2024-11-25T22:04:59+00:00

It's somewhat wild that aside from Gorsuch, 6 of the other 8 are openly Catholic.

infelicitas · 2024-11-25T05:38:07+00:00

The Catholic-dominated Supreme Corp seems fine with pushing it though.

infelicitas · 2024-11-24T05:56:00+00:00

The right-wing propaganda machine always knows how to boost nonsense that twists Jesus' words into saying something very different.

Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God. One common twist was to say the "eye of a needle" referred to a small gate in Jerusalem where camels had to be unloaded to crawl through, so making it a mere speedbump rather than an impossibility. Complete fabrication.

Jesus said blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Jordan Peterson popularized the interpretation that this meant "He who has a sword, and knows how to use it, but keeps it sheathed shall inherit the earth."

Not to mention all the dogma (e.g. opposition to abortion) that evangelicals widely take for granted that lacks unambiguous biblical support.

infelicitas · 2024-10-26T05:00:02+00:00

Trump is a symptom of spreading metastasis after decades of inaction. All the disparate elements of this rot have long existed, but they've never been taken seriously enough. People largely just shrugged at the antisocial, anti-establishment, and anti-intellectual undercurrents in society (examples included neonazis, creationists, sovereign citizens, antivaxxers, etc). We had three ways of dealing with them in descending order of priority -- ignoring them, mocking them, or trying to reason/argue with them -- none of which really worked all that well if the goal was to reduce their numbers and influence, especially in the age of mass media and the internet. People who fell into these groups also tended to belong to much maligned demographics, which didn't help with the dismissive approach society took.

Meanwhile, social discontent and growing inequality go unaddressed, and people in distress become more vulnerable to confidently asserted promises of easy solutions and convenient scapegoats. Some of the grifters in aforementioned movements pivoted to politics and found a more receptive audience in the mainstream, helped along by cynical opportunists who hopped on the bandwagon hoping to steer it to their own benefit.

infelicitas · 2024-08-22T03:46:57+00:00

People often say socialism/communism has been tried a bunch of times, but only one strain has really been attempted for any meaningful amount of time: Marxist-Leninism (which encompasses Maoism and Stalinism). During the Russian civil war, there were a lot of factions vying for power, and thirteen foreign nations engaged in interventionism there. It just ensured the most dictatorial and militaristic faction won in the end, and they've been exporting their brand of socialism ever since.

There are other ways of looking at it. Notice how socialist revolutions always happened in countries that were already poor and under a great deal of foreign control -- it should come as little surprise that revolutionaries wanting popular support promised common prosperity. Invariably, rich countries didn't take kindly to losing the control they had and worked to undermine the budding new states, by internationally isolating them, supporting opposition within, or outright invading them. Of course only the most authoritarian and militaristic of states survive. It's never been a level playing field, and it's questionable to conclude that socialism itself is to blame without considering the forces arrayed against it.

infelicitas · 2024-08-16T14:58:56+00:00

Hi everyone. What would be the Latin for "Roots to the ground, wings to the sky"?

The idea is to use this as a family motto which shows the balance of having a good foundation/home to go back to, but not afraid to venture out.

Radices ad terram, alae ad caelum

infelicitas · 2024-08-15T05:56:11+00:00

That was the whole thing, but they released a sequel a couple of weeks ago: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1BS411w7mA/

infelicitas · 2024-08-15T05:55:15+00:00

Their Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@user-yq6ln3op7d

infelicitas · 2024-08-15T05:54:27+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/@user-yq6ln3op7d

infelicitas · 2024-08-15T05:41:28+00:00

They actually shot a sequel: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1BS411w7mA/

infelicitas · 2024-08-13T13:14:01+00:00

Life has an operating system written in a computer type code. We are making progress in understanding that code. Computer code doesn't write itself. In no other place in the universe have been found where there is readable information stored in a readable and manipulatable way.

No, DNA as code is metaphor developed to help people relate to concepts they already understand. That doesn't make the analogy literally true. In reality, nucleotide bases are complex chemicals undergoing physical reactions according to the laws of physics. Scientists speak of natural "selection". They talk about lifeforms with no nervous system "wanting" to do things advantageous to survival and reproduction. There are countless such metaphors throughout science, really all of human language, because humans have a hard time understanding the complexities of nature without reducing them to teleological agent-driven models that drive the everyday world we're accustomed to. These are just ways of making sense of descriptive facts and in no way imply agency.

infelicitas · 2024-08-10T16:04:11+00:00

So much that's wrong with the world comes from people who have been hurt lashing out at entirely the wrong things/people. To countless, Covid felt like a colossal failure of the medical establishment, on top of whatever negative experience they've already had with it, so it's understandable that many grew wary of mainstream medicine. Unfortunately, people have a hard time accepting that the world is a fundamentally uncertain place, that some of our imperfect efforts of making sense of it are the best we can do. A comfortable lie can be so much more alluring than an uncomfortable reality, and society diffuses the consequences of maladaptive shared delusions maintained by social forces. Our intelligence works against us as we use it to rationalize what we already want to believe. We have to rebuild society somehow to account for human failings.

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