Murder is wrong.
Advocating or applauding murder is wrong.
Criticizing a person, even harshly, is not advocating or applauding murder.
There’s no inconsistency in condemning a person’s ideas and condemning his murder.
Misrepresenting a person’s ideas is not a valid way to make a point.
(more…)
There’s no hope for a near-term turnaround in the US. If there were any decency left in America, Trump, Rubio, Homan, Leavitt, and the rest of the crowd would be climbing out of the Potomac, covered with tar and feathers. I’ve done what I can, pointing out one outrageous act after another. Nothing helps. The United States is a nation of cowards with a large minority that favors thuggish central rule and controls Congress.
Concentrating only on the short term leads to despair. Avoiding tyranny in the US — or recovering from it — requires understanding its causes and changing the intellectual climate. There can be a resurgence of the liberal ideal in America, but it will take time.
(more…)
EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
(more…)
Getting back to the inappropriate use of the term “Alligator Auschwitz,” I’ve noticed several cases on Bluesky where people have argued, in effect: The facility called “Alligator Alcatraz” is a concentration camp. Auschwitz was a concentration camp. Therefore the two are morally equivalent.
This is an example of the false equivalence fallacy. It claims two things are equivalent on the basis of some similarities while ignoring significant differences. Often, as in the present case, they’re differences of degree. Wikipedia gives the example: “They are both Felidae, mammals in the order Carnivora, therefore there’s little difference between having a pet cat and a pet jaguar.” It’s most likely to turn up in emotionally loaded comparisons. “Overstaying one’s visa and armed invasion are both illegal, so overstayed immigrants are an invasion force.” “Kissing someone without prior verbal permission and rape are both impositions on a person, therefore an unrequested kiss amounts to rape.” “A 5G phone and a nuclear reactor in meltdown both emit radiation, therefore 5G phones are a severe danger to anyone in the area.”
(more…)
SciManDan has put up a video which everyone trying to debunk bad ideas should watch. Nominally he’s talking about Flat Earthers. A lot of his videos are on that subject; a friend of mine likes to watch them, so I watch them too. Really, though, the six rules he offers don’t apply just to answering people who think the world is flat. They apply to any bad ideas you’re trying to knock down: socialism, Trumpism, “greedflation” theory, Moon landing hoax claims, whatever.
Watch the video, but I’ll quote his six rules here, substituting “[bad idea]” for “flat earth” to show the generality.
(more…)
A wild theory is spreading over the Internet that if you see em dashes, you’re seeing something generated by a computer. This method of telling robots from humans is fast, simple — and worthless. I even saw the claim on a Metatron video on YouTube, and I normally consider him pretty reliable.
(more…)
Every year, advocates of an all-powerful federal government claim that June 21 is New Hampshire’s “birthday” because it ratified the Constitution on that day in 1788. Representative Chris Pappas made that absurd claim on Bluesky:
(more…)
Sometimes there is so much idiocy in the news that you have to unpack it layer by layer. This is the case with a statement which Florida governor DeSantis made and the way some people have described it.
In an interview, DeSantis said: “We also have a policy that if you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety. … You drive off and hit one of these people — that’s their fault for impinging on you. You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and parade you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”
(more…)
Social media websites are notorious for letting inaccurate information spread without correction. It’s often unintentional; someone makes a mistake that gets widely repeated, or a joke is taken as a serious claim. This morning I found I was part of this, as people boosted and favorited (terms vary with the platform) a mistake which I made.
I run a feed of news for filkers, appropriately called “Filk News” (on Bluesky and on Mastodon). On Sunday, March 9, the USA and Canada moved to Daylight Saving Time, but Europe doesn’t till later. There are several online filk gatherings with international attendance, so this could confuse people about when meetings start in their time zone. For example, Eurofilk is 6 PM Central European Time, which normally makes it noon US Eastern Time, but for three weeks it’s 1 PM Eastern Time.
(more…)
A religion’s success depends upon its having followers. A reliable technique for getting and keeping followers is the threat of divine punishment for infidels. Believe and get a great reward; don’t believe and get a horrible punishment. God can read your mind, so there’s no use faking belief.
The Gospel of John says, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:18, NIV) Only a handful of people had heard of Jesus in his time, much less believed he was God’s son, so this was a declaration of damnation for virtually the entire human race in the early first century. Whether Jesus actually said it is a separate question. Evangelical Christians place great stock in this assertion, whatever its source.
(more…)