I watched it in person, sort of.
I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.
And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.
Occam’s Razor says that if nothing notable has changed even under Trump, then it’s likely that the simple fact of the matter is that the allegations were mostly true and it’s just that the CIA, as opposed to Trump and his minions and lackeys, won’t lie on his behalf.
And they put razor blades in Halloween candy too!
Meaning is subjective and not intrinsic, so there can be no such thing as “the” meaning of anything.
The artist can have an intended meaning, but the audience not only can but will find their own meaning in it. It might be the case that the audience gets the same meaning from it that the creator intended, but it might just as easily be the case that they get some entirely different meaning from it.
None of them are right or wrong - that’s not even a coherent concept in that context. They just are whatever they are.
Black Hole Sun.
It’s a tedious, grating and ridiculously repetitive dirge.
Setting aside the veritable TITAN-loads of shady shit Palsntir is up to, it’s also worth noting that Reddit’s policy changes have made it clear that providing a platform for the spread of disinformation is a central part of its current business model, so I’d assume that not only is Palantir using it for that purpose, but that they are far from alone.
Yeah - I realized after I posted that that was likely the case. Sorry if I came off as rude.
And yeah (again), I don’t disagree with any of that - the whole notion was pretty much doomed from the start.
I still think it’s both notable and funny though that Trump fucked it up so bad.
Mmm… I don’t disagree with that.
You can disagree all you like
WTF?
Mmm… I don’t disagree with that.
But the fact remains that by not providing any consistency upon which companies could plan, Trump destroyed any possibility of it right out of the gate.
The funniest part to me is that “revitaliz(ing) U.S. manufacturing” is one positive that could (to at least some degree) potentially have come from the tariffs IF Trump hadn’t completely fumbled it right from the start by not taking a firm position.
He and he alone did such a shitty job of it that he and he alone guaranteed that “revitaliz(ing) U.S. manufacturing” is one thing that’s NOT going to happen. At all.
No.
(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.
Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.
It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.
My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.
The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.
Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.
I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…
I think that the focus on the violation of the will of one by another defeats relativism.
The killer’s expression of his will is not simply something he is doing, but something he is doing to another, and the will of that other must have priority.
If the will of the person upon whom the act is committed isn’t held to be paramount, then the entire concept of interpersonal morality collapses. So an act that brings harm to another contrary to the will of that other must be seen to be wrong entirely regardless of one’s personal views on the matter
Note though that that’s subject to the essentially “mathematical” concept of morality I addressed elsewhere. That an act that brings harrm to another contrary to the will of that other is necessarily and without exception wrong does not preclude the possibility that it might be justified, if it serves to prevent a greater wrong or bring about a greater right - if it’s such that the negative value of the act in question is offset by a greater positive value, such that the “sum” of the specific “integers” that make up the entire course of action is positive.
That actially gets into the second thing I mentioned.
My view is that morality is best seen to function in a sort of math-like way - individual acts have a fixed moral value, and the moral value of an entire course of action is the “sum” of all of the relevant “integers” that make it up.
So, for instance taking the life of another contrary to their will has a negative moral value always. There are no exceptions - the value of that individual act is always negative.
However, protecting people from a known predator has a positive moral value, and similarly always has that value.
And depending on the severity of the threat and the severity of the response, it’s possible for the “sum” of those two acts to be positive, which is to say right, and even as the value of the individual act “taking the life of another contrary to their will” remains negative.
That’s not to say or imply that I believe that acts can be assigned actual numerical values - rather it’s just a way to conceptualize the matter - to hopefully provide the absolutism that morality needs to be even-handed while still allowing for the flexibility it needs to be useful.
So to your question - in and of itself, taking the life of another contrary to their will - even if that other is a serial killer - is wrong. However, protecting people from a known predator is in and of itself right. So the two need to be weighed against each other, and I would say that if the risk the killer poses is sufficiently great (certain or near enough to it to make no meaningful difference) and if there are no other at least equally certain methods to prevent future killing, then execution would be justifiable. Which is to say, executing him would have a positive moral vaue, in spite of the fact that taking the life of another contrary to their will always has a negative valie in and of itself.
There’s much more nuance to all of this - issues with the necessary unreliability and potential deliberate misrepresentation inherent in predicting the future, differences of opinion regarding the relative values of various acts and thus potentially the final value of the course of action as a whole, different methods for resolving disagreements on those things, and so on and on. But that’s grist for other mills.
Wrong, IMO, is defined by the violation of the will of another.
That’s the common element to all things that are broadly considered wrong.
For instance, if somebody chooses to give you something, that’s a gift and it’s fine. But if you take that same something from them against their will, that’s stealing, and wrong. In both cases, the exact same thing happened - a thing went from being their possession to being yours. The difference - the thing that separates the right act from the wrong one - is that one was done according to the will of the other person, while the other was done contrary to their will.
And the same holds true consistently - assault, kidnapping, rape, even murder - none of them are characterized by what happens, but by the fact that it happens contrary to the will of the “victim.” And in fact, that’s what defines a “victim” - whatever has been done to them was done against their will.
And it should be noted that there’s an odd sort of relative aspect to this, since the exception to the rule is the violation of the rule.
What I mean by that is that if one decides to violate the will of another, one is instantly wrong, which essentially negates the requirement that ones will not be violated. Your will to violate the will of another not only can be but should be itself violated.
I also have an idea for reconciling the need for an effectively absolute set of moral standards with the fact that morality is necessarily subjective and relative, but that’d require another, and likely even longer, essay.
Not necessarily.
Trump doing his thing 2016-2020 met with a lot of obstacles and pushback.
Then he was out of office for four years, and while he was crashing around spewing nonsense and vitriol, some very intelligent and very evil people were working behind the scenes to secure some significant Supreme Court rulings and to draw up a step-by-step plan for instituting fascism in the US.
And now Trump doing his thing is met with almost no obstacles or pushback - virtually the entire government is bending over backwards to enable him.
And it must be noted that he’s not particularly smart or sane, but he is a childishly greedy and selfish narcissist. That means he’s incredibly easy to manipulate. All anyone has to do is frame something in a way that appeals to his crippled emotions and drop a few hints to get him going in the right direction, then just stand back and let him do his thing.
Not saying that that’s certainly what is happening, but…
Yes.
Both before and after.
Yes.
The pressure is mounting. The overt harm that the billionaires do merely by their existence - merely by holding wealth that could instead have served to keep the poorest people sheltered and fed - becomes more obvious with every passing day and every newly unhoused and unfed American.
But, psychopaths that they necessarily are, the billionaires are unwilling to give up any of their wealth, and in fact are instead looking for any opportunity to increase it. Always.
So, to them, the solution is simple - we need to kill as many poor people as possible, so they won’t be around being poor and making billionaires look bad.
And to all too many of them, that much the better if most of the dead are minorities.