I'm trying to compile some beach reads for when that time comes, but also just plugging along. I've started two of these (Living Hell and Salvation), the rest are on deck.

Nonfiction

- Living Hell. Seeks to de-glorify the Civil War by showing how horrible it was for all involved.

- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. This was recommended by my new academic advisor as a good general history of the period.

Fiction

- The Algebraist by Iain Banks

- Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

figure out what you love

I'm continually surprised by people's ability to actually do this. I've never loved doing something for more than about a week, if that, so the idea of having a passion like you describe seems like fiction. I know it happens to other people, but nothing in my own experience leads me to think anything like this is out there for me. Thus I'm left with coping/mitigating, neither of which are particularly satisfying ways to spend your time.

I'm here, but mostly lurking like once a week. I've found a discord server that I hang out on more regularly; I like the real-time nature, don't like the chat page here (for technical/logistical reasons, not personal), and don't really care about politics these days. I'm also trying to make peace with just plain not being that interesting, something that real-time chat is more compatible with than commenting on specific stories.

Exactly. The idea that there is anything unique about the Mormons in this case seems bogus.

If truth is your goal, why are you choosing to ignore things that are true in favor of the narrative you've chosen?

You can choose to blind yourself, but don't except anyone to praise you for it.

I know hating religion is like your thing right now, but the bigger question is why did anyone make tons of money during the pandemic? Singling out one organization is a pretty convenient way to have to discuss any systemic issues with the way our economy works.

The Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, etc., could quickly pivot to a consumer model....

Why on Earth would they do that, when they could be held liable for every site they host?

Congrats on the progress, and I hope it works out!

It's strange that all the focus is on whether this is a good decision, but no one is looking at why it happened. PornHub did this solely because they were set to lose a lot of money, and so they are not heroes.

But it also raises major questions about how much power payment processors hold. It's always unpopular speech that is targeted first.

That's the no-brainer first step in stemming the tide of illegal content: make an individual responsible for every account, and what that account uploads.

But that's the point -- this is always the argument used to justify actual censorship. Just look at the paramedic in NYC who was having to do an OnlyFans to make ends meet, only to shut it down out of fear of backlash from her employer once her identity was made public. And if you think the information PornHub stores is going to remain private, a website called Ashley Madison would like a word. It's basically kink-shaming on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, it may stop some jilted boyfriend from uploading revenge porn (and even that remains to be seen), but it's not going to do anything to stop anyone with some resources at their disposal.

A Japanese bioethicist named Masahiro Morioka has done some interesting writing on this (one example). One of his arguments is what he calls "the fundamental sense of security," which is the inherent belief that we are loved and welcomed into the world unconditionally. He questions eugenicist practices to the extent that they demean existing disabled people by saying that, in essence, they shouldn't have been born. But the fundamental sense of security goes beyond that, in that he suggests that this kind of screening makes us all feel like our being welcomed into the world is conditional, and wouldn't have happened if we were too far out of some window of acceptability. In a society that regularly practices this kind of screening, he writes, "people talk about unconditional love; yet they know that they themselves were allowed to be born because they satisfied certain »explicit« conditions imposed by their parents."

I don't know to what extent this is right (and I don't know how firm on it Morioka is for that matter), but I think it's worth thinking about. In particular, the effect on those already-living people with congenital conditions seems much likelier to me. I also think, and this is another thing Morioka touches on in some of his writings, that we have to be careful in boxing ourselves in in terms of defining what "happiness" can and does look like.

Self-righteousness is a hell of a drug.

So your defense is that you're being a bigot, but it's okay, because you're not as bigoted as some of the people you're bigoted towards?

Funny, they'd probably say the same thing about a gay person. But that's ok because you're doing it for a good reason, right?

People said the same thing about Roberts and Gorsuch too.

You really need to climb off your high horse. Or did you forget your using a full-on slur regarding your straw religious people in a private message to me recently?

How exactly is she enforcing anything via a case that hasn't even been heard yet, much less ruled upon?

It's strange, it feels alternately like this election is both hugely momentous and completely meaningless. In truth I'm not sure which outcome will be worse in the long term. Biden will put the mask back on and eat around the edges, but he's not going to do shit for most people; the systemic issues predate Trump by a long time. While I do think a Biden administration will be less harmful overall, I am concerned that it will put the populace to sleep. We're tired, we want a break, and a Biden presidency seems like a good excuse to do that. I have zero hope of anyone being able to push Biden to the left, but Trump's incompetence and just general terribleness has opened up the Overton Window some. In other words, I think a Biden victory will allow short-term improvement, even if that's just un-doing some of the damage Trump has done, but the long-term effects are far less certain.

Trump gave us a chance to actually confront some of our deeper issues as a country, but we've instead spent our time hand-wringing about how he's uncouth in public. As long as the gun is shiny, we don't really care where it's pointed.

I couldn't have said it better. I've been spending time on leftist Discord, which has helped me learn a lot of things from a new perspective, but also to help commiserate about how ugly things have gotten.

Yes, he definitely managed to clear those very low bars.

The ACA was a compromise that didn't need to be made - the Democrats had complete control of the government for two years and squandered it. The Paris Accord was symbolic, and hasn't led to any meaningful action. I think giving them credit for influencing Obergefell is a stretch.

Meanwhile, you have significant problems that continue: racial injustice in the legal system, police brutality, climate change, and immigration, about which they did nothing or even set us back. Let us also not forget that they set the precedent of saying it's totally fine to execute American citizens abroad without due process (to say nothing of all the foreign civilians they killed via the drone program).

Democrats have no problem putting out policies, but a terrible record on actually getting anything done. On climate change, we need drastic action, and I don't think that a Biden administration will do more than eat around the edges (especially since the Green New Deal was specifically excluded from the Democratic platform earlier this year). The Democrats have fucked around for too many years for me to have any real faith that they'll do anything real.

Haha yes, although I'd replace that with "the audacity to think they can control a language." Spain does still technically have a king, after all, and the RAE has a long enough history as such I can't really blame them for not giving it up.