Priests and funny hats, a timeless pair.

No love for radical skepticism round here I see.

I tend to think at some point that was true, that Tesla was about saving the planet and SpaceX was about making humanity multiplanetary.

It could be he was always a wretched creep and just really good at hiding it, but it seems to me that the wealth and power just ruined him. He wouldn’t be the first person to fall in that trap.

I’ll append my confession here.

I supported Ron Paul once upon a time. The non-interventionism appealed to me in the context of the Iraq war in particular, and the rights-based libertarian philosophy seemed sound. I was young.

;)

Keeeeviiiiiiin!!!

Is anyone using Veilid for anything yet? Last I checked it was more an interesting experiment.

Problematic - it’s just so lazy. Makes me doubt whether the speaker has any coherent reason for why they don’t like the given thing. Might as well say ‘yucky’. It’s the kind of word one uses when assuming everyone already agrees with you, and if they don’t, well then they’re probably problematic too. /rant

I don’t know much about Machado, but I do know that polls conducted under dictatorships are often not worth much.

Probably not stolen, but licensed. Anyway, if you like it, check out Escher’s other stuff. Can recommend.

Escher’s Puddle

Looks like Noam Chomsky embracing Steve Bannon

The rub there is that the government probably now has a record of every site you have an account on.

What we really need is a system that’s anonymized in both directions. Where the website can verify the specific claim, age, nationality, etc, but the issuer of the verification, aka the government, can’t track where that verification has been used.

I think this should be possible, but it’s different from the way standard identity providers operate, and I haven’t heard of any of these government identity providers operating this way. That may be because it’s easier, and it may be because governments like the idea of knowing everything we do.

Rage bait

Identity politics is a diversion for class politics. Can’t have class solidarity if your political position is a specialized configuration of all your various identity characteristics.

The last time I recall having engaging, thoughtful discussions on the internet was way back in the days of forums. And that was so long ago I’m skeptical of my own memory of it.

Lemmy comments may be different from Reddit comments, but they’re not better. I’ve concluded it’s structural. This format simply does not produce useful conversation.

None of the other social media formats produce it either. Perhaps it’s the result of optimizing for attention, which all social media does, whether by deliberate design or natural selection. Platforms that get attention grow. Those that don’t, languish. It may be that things which gather attention to themselves best are repellent of deeper, slower, more careful thinking.

Actually, maybe I can think of one example. I’m stretching the definition of social media, and I haven’t firsthand experience, but the way that Wikipedia operates may be a clue toward how to build a platform that produces useful dialogue.

I don’t know, and I even briefly tried looking it up.

This feels like it deserves a hi res pic.

Just in time for Grijalva to be sworn in

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5606350/adelita-grijalva-swearing-in

Sounds like an issue of joint correlation. It makes sense that homogenous communities are better at building unions. Building solidarity with people who are different from oneself is more work than with people who are similar.

And it’s been found that exposure to different people and cultures reduces racist beliefs, so it also makes sense that homogenous communities would be more racist.

So the causal feature would be homogeneity, and the correlation between racism and unions would be effects.

I know a lot of hockey fans would be mad at me, but I would ban hockey fights. I’m not really a sports guy, but I can enjoy hockey and its socially useful to follow at least one sport. But hockey fights just make my eyes roll.