689 karma · joined November 10, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
So much for freedom in the US.
https://mastodon.social/@codinghorror@infosec.exchange/11400...
TLDR version: Jeff Atwood who become rich selling stackoverflow donated a million dollars to archive.org a few days ago.
After 50 years he asks Lucifer to let him go back to the corner bar of his mansion in New York for a whiskey, because he feels nostalgic and wants to see how things are going.
The devil accepts his pleas, but changes his appearance so that no one will recognize him. Trump enters the bar, orders the whiskey and tells the bartender that he was in a coma and wants to see how everything is.
-Perfectly! The economy has never been so good!
-Oh, yeah? And what happened with Iraq, Afghanistan, the gulf?
-It's all ours.
-And Europe, and Africa?
-Everything and all ours. After the covid19 pandemic, there was a leap in history, all the countries united, and they are all under our command.
-But what a good management! It's the best thing I've heard in 50 years! How happy I am! Well, I'm leaving for good with this gratifying news. How much is it?
-That's 170 yuan, comrade.
Actual, but too long, title of the article is:
"Evangelical education nearly ruined me. Now the Christian right is coming for public schools"
https://www.history.com/news/slave-bible-redacted-old-testam...
"The Slave Bible doesn’t include Moses leading the Israelites to freedom, but it does include Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt. In the U.S., some sermons aimed at enslaved people portrayed Joseph as someone who “accepts his lot in life, keeps his faith in God and in the end is rewarded for it,” Schmidt says. The Slave Bible may have wanted to impart a similar lesson to its audience.
Passages that emphasized equality between groups of people were also excised. This included: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Slave Bible also doesn’t contain the Book of Revelation, which tells of a new heaven and Earth in which evil will be punished.
In contrast, one of the passages that remained was one that proponents of slavery loved to cite: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (Ephesians 6:5)."
America is not exclusive to the US but a whole continent, for the much larger part comprising many more spanish/portuguese speaking countries and also Canada.
The US basically is only the increasingly annoying bully in the middle.
"There are various models of the universe which men have used from time to time, and the model that lies behind the Judeo-Christian tradition, if there really is such a thing, is a political model. It borrows the metaphor of the relation of an ancient Near Eastern monarch to his subjects, and he imposes his authority and his will upon his subjects from above by power, whether it be physical power or spiritual power. [...]"
Source: https://medium.com/the-agoge/the-religions-of-no-religion-a6...
"In sum, none of the three dominant schools of Chinese philosophical thinking place human beings in a supreme position within the universe, nor do they view human beings and nature as being in a mutually independent or competitive relationship. Placed in the context of developing frontier technologies, artificial intelligence is not a “natural” development, so from a viewpoint of unity between humans and nature, AI should be guided and sometimes suppressed by a respect for the natural ways of life. Indeed, this is precisely what many philosophers in China have been advocating for."
"However, it is also true that probably because of the strong influence of non-anthropocentrism in Chinese traditional belief systems, there has been much less panic in the East than in the West about the existential risk of AI. For one thing, many Chinese philosophers are simply not convinced by the prospect of machine intelligence exceeding that of humans. Also, human beings have always lived with other forms of existence that may be more capable in some ways than we are. In Daoist teaching, where immortals abound, AI or digital beings could be just another form of super-being. Some Confucian and Daoist scholars have started thinking about incorporating AI into the ethical order of the ecosystem by potentially viewing AIs as companions or friends."
"No scripture is as old as mathematics is. All the other sciences are younger, most by thousands of years. More than history, mathematics is the record that humanity is keeping of itself. History can be revised or manipulated or erased or lost. Mathematics is permanent. A² + B² = C² was true before Pythagoras had his name attached to it, and will be true when the sun goes out and no one is left to think of it. It is true for any alien life that might think of it, and true whether they think of it or not. It cannot be changed. So long as there is a world with a horizontal and a vertical axis, a sky and a horizon, it is inviolable and as true as anything that can be thought."