That will be quite a sight -- seeing the videos of people on the ground, filming future drone laser battles
306 karma · joined September 16, 2017
The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.
Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.
If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.
If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.
Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.
If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.
This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.
That's probably true, but a lot of hospitals try to push this dynamic onto doctors/psychiatrists. When my dad (was psychiatrist for 43 years) took a job as medical director at a hospital in Wyoming, they told him when he first got there that they only wanted his role to be prescribing medication, and that they would have psychologists evaluate the patient first, and then determine what medication is needed and then his job would be to write them. I assume the previous psychiatrist was fine with this (he was an unusual guy in general but that's another story), but my dad told them he would not operate this way.
But at the end of the day, the "roles" usually end up being the therapists and psychologists doing the more therapy-focused work, while the psychiatrist makes diagnoses and determinations of which medications may work, and prescribes them because of his M.D.
My brother has been bipolar his whole life, major depressive for large parts of it as well, and generally has had a rough time with mental health. It's taken both medication and life-long therapy to get him to a sort of manageable/live-able baseline.
Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.
"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
If there are separate parts of a system -- but all part of the same underlying system -- do you really see them as completely different things? For example, I've heard cops, while arresting someone for marijuana, just "pass the buck" and say, "We don't write the laws, we are just enforcing them."
If you are part of maintaining, propagating, and continuing a system, are you not an equal part of that system and the things done in its name?
Now, is China doing something America has not done? Absolutely not. Is it crazy for a country to want to become more powerful? Absolutely not. Is it wrong for a country to do so? I would argue not, since their first responsibility should be to their people, and usually -- not always -- a more powerful country on the world stage is better for the people of that country.
I believe in a globalized world, I am not a nationalist, and think if the world could truly come together, it would obviously be better for all of mankind. However, I am also an American, and although I don't love everything about my country by any means, I am going to pick and favor my country over a foreign one when that country is clearly an adversary. Does that mean I want harm to come to China? No. Does that mean I wish ill-will of the Chinese people? No.
And for what it's worth, I don't think anyone is unbiased and believe it is unrealistic to expect people to be. I think biases are as fundamental (in good and bad ways) to being human as walking on two legs is. Biases are critical to how our brain/memory works -- we have something like 180+ known cognitive biases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). I think the best thing we can do is recognize and acknowledge when we have bias, and factor that knowledge in to how we are thinking about a topic. For example, because of what I do for a living, if I see a positive story about the benefits of marijuana or crypto, I will initially be inclined to believe it may be true; the good ol' confirmation bias at work. But, I also usually try to stop myself, and think more critically of the information being presented, since I know that I am going to be inclined to have that bias towards the two topics. I feel as humans, that is the best we can do. Anyone who pretends to not be biased in any way whatsoever is lying. My father was a psychiatrist for 43 years, and I talked to him about this many times over the course of my life, and he agreed that he's never seen someone who did not have bias.
That's why I wonder if it wouldn't be a good, "broad spectrum" attack. I imagine aides to key Senators, Congressmen, White House staffers, C-suite people at defense contractors etc. buy all sorts of devices off Amazon, which they plug in without a second thought like the vast majority of us do. Obviously, 98% of the people plugging in the devices aren't valuable from a military/intelligence perspective, but even if only 1 in 10,000 targets was worthwhile, I imagine there would be a few that were goldmines of information.
On the other hand, I imagine if it was that sophisticated of an attack, the more devices you have randomly "in the wild" increases the chances it is discovered potentially, which could then nuke your whole operation. I remember in the Snowden docs, the NSA's TAO was sometimes intercepting orders for laptops etc people placed online, carefully placing backdoors in it, then sealing it all perfectly back up and putting it back on track for delivery. It arrives and you think it's safe since it's factory sealed and you got it brand new from a reputable retailer. That's a more targeted example of the same concept
I've always assumed that we just had a way to 'check' each chip used in critical industries, such as defense, if they came from another country. It kind of feels the same way it did the first time I learned how to pick pin and tumbler locks, and realized locks are purely an illusion of security.