Ham radio operator, mainframe geek, small-town politician, Mercedes aficionado, SF fan, budding author. Unapologetically MAGA. Yes, I really am the Tron Guy.
Fairmont, Minnesota, USA
Joined December 2008
- Tweets8.7K
- Following51
- Followers623
- Likes121K
I drove up to the Twin Cities yesterday for a meeting. Imagine my surprise when my car's trip computer calculated I was getting 40.7 MPG on the drive up. Didn't hold up, though; dropped to its more usual 36 or so when I got back home.
Shame we don't know who this particular HR "professional" works for so we know not to apply there.
A professional never wastes anyone's time. For any reason at all.
Jay Maynard retweeted
Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, it’s usually only a few tens of thousands in key swing states.
The only car you can get airsick in.
Well, more than once.
ELON MUSK: “It's going to be pretty wild that you can have a rocket car. The car has attitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket. It could do rolls. It could do crazy gymnastics. Whatever you want, really.
This is not necessarily a safety-optimized car, but it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10.
This will be an actual car that’s on the roads. I’m not sure it’s necessarily legal in all jurisdictions.
The car can recharge its air tank, so it’s not like you need special propellant or anything like that. It literally is just going to pop itself up and be able to do these maneuvers whenever you’d like.”
Eric nails it once more.
For what it's worth, I don't view the concept of a divine soul as meaningful, because I don't view the existence of a Creator as anywhere near proven, and by Occam's razor, I don't believe one exists. With that said, I definitely have a self-image and a self-concept, and have a consciousness as it's generally understood. I don't have to know or care why it arises; nothing about that will change the fact of its existence.
There is a "me" who is happy when some thigns happen, and unhappy when others happen. That's enough.
In a recent post I alleged that there is a cla,ss of people whose souls are dead. Somebody replied wondering what I was doing talking about souls when I'm an atheist.
There's a deep confusion of ideas here, and I intend to address it. In part because I think it hinders peoples' ability to think clearly about currently important topics like: what is the moral status of an artificial intelligence?
Everything I can perceive and learn about the universe tells me it is a vast, intentionless machine and I am a meat robot. There is no supernatural, just natural law. Humans are apes that have learned to dream a little. Nothing cares about us but us. That's the outside view.
And yet. From the inside, I can be moved almost to tears by a beautiful sunset, or a friendly kitten, or a particularly elegant theorem. I have the capacity to feel wonder and awe, and moments in which the entire universe seems luminous with meaning.
The scientist part of me assures me there must be some reason for this that is a mechanism in the meat robot. We might speak of evolved capacity for compressive learning, and of response to superstimuli, and the brain rewarding itself for adaptive learning.
I believe that, but having some grasp of the mechanisms does not make the beauty of a sunset go away.
There's a weird neurosis afflicting a lot of allegedly thinking people that denies this. A pervasive belief that if everything reduces to mechanism in your thinking you must necessarily deny that the interior experience of being human has meaning or value. According to them, I'm expected to deny love and beauty and morality.
This is nonsense. I know why my cat purrs at me and why I like to pet it. That knowledge doesn't make the experience any less pleasant and meaningful for either of us. The inside view matters, whatever the outside view is.
When I speak of "soul", I mean the part of us - the mechanism in the meat robot, if you will - that is capable of feeling wonder and awe and love and aesthetic delight; all the emotions that call us to be better than we are. When I speak of people with dead souls, I mean people who have starved and crippled that part of themselves. Why people do this sad thing is a whole 'nother essay.
It doesn't take any belief in supernatural vital essence poured into people by a sky daddy for "soul" to be a meaningful concept. All it takes is noticing what the inside experience of being human is actually like.
One of the things I want out of life is not just to know more, but to refine and expand my soul. To feel more beauty and awe and love. To engage passionately with the universe.
This is why, though I have vast respect for Buddhist discipline and Buddhist meditative systems and have dived into both, I will never be a Buddhist. Nothingness is the opposite of the direction I want to go in.
The person who wondered what I'm doing talking about souls when I'm in atheist is probably religious. And this brings me to one of my major gripes about conventional religions. They hijack our natural wonder at what it's like to be human from the inside for their gain; they erect untestable pseudo-explanations for that wonder in order to suck us into believing absurd and crazy things.
Which matters a lot, because as Voltaire famously pointed out, if you believe absurdities you will commit atrocities.
Ultimately, the reason I wrote this essay is because I'm anti-atrocity. Which means I want to stop parasitic belief systems from making people crazy. Which means I want them to be able to reconcile the outside mechanistic truth of how the universe actually is with their inside experience of being human.
I hope this helped. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pet my cat.
Donate there so ActBlue has another identity to hang on foreign contributions...
We will NOT be intimidated by the fascist occupant of the White House.
Donate here: secure.actblue.com/donate/ap…
Jay Maynard retweeted
I just voted in my first midterm election ever. I tried to choose the candidates who I thought were in favor of not murdering children and want to protect Western Civilization. It wasn't easy.
Some of you may be asking "But Dort, what do you mean you barely voted in your life, you talk about this shit all the time." Good question. And for my entire career I took the George C. Marshall approach. He famously didn't vote.
Many officers who mentored me did the same. I figured it was best to stay out of such messy business.
But now I feel like our backs are against the wall. And that the civilization itself that we love, hangs in the balance. It isn't hyperbole. I really do believe that.
So yes, I vote now. Because my conscience has to be clear if God forbid things get worse for our country. I will not leave an empty ballot sitting on the table when someone who wants to literally kill me and destroy my country fills out theirs.
Fuck that.
Sadly, this article is satire.
Me? I'd do it for gas money.
Texas Man Charged Migrants $200 Each for a Ride to Apply for Asylum and Drove Them Straight to ICE Detention.
Authorities say a Texas man was arrested after charging illegal migrants $200 apiece while telling them he would take them to places where they could apply for asylum. Instead, he drove them to ICE detention centers.
Officials claim he presented himself as someone offering help and then handed the migrants over to federal immigration authorities.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The mugshot is of John C. Hefte from his 2017 arrest in Wisconsin for a sixth offense of operating while intoxicated. The described Texas events involving migrants paying $200 have not been reported by any news outlets and do not match this case.
channel3000.com/news/crime/74-… hngnews.com/mcfarland_this…
Da-yum.
Somali fraud. It's baked into the culture.
Enough is enough. Deport them all and let USCIS sort them out.
Just one more reason I won't use Claude, despite having enterprise-level access to it through my employer.
Non sequitur much? How would releasing the Epstein files bring down prices?
Me and Ilhan Omar are far apart policy wise. I’m pro life, she’s pro abortion. I’m pro 2A, she’s pro gun control. And on and on.
But can someone tell me how pretending to get ready to deport Ilhan Omar is going to bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war???
People are so sick and tired of the bullshit.
When you dumb mf’ers at the WH actually release the Epstein files and lock up the pedophiles and rapists you all hang out with, then we will start paying attention.
Until then 🖕.
Jay Maynard retweeted
I am getting lots of incoming questions about the public execution of Nidal Hasan, mostly because I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.
My position is simple: Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized. They are the ultimate example of the state's monopoly on violence, and the only way to keep that from running out of control is to confront voters with the trade they have made every single time, that they might have appropiate confidence or revulsion in the institution.
This is not new thinking. George Washington thought the same. The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms. It makes needless executions more likely, not less so. People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point. It doesn't somehow become torture or inhumane (as the UN is suddenly claiming) just because we decline to hide the act behind a curtain.
And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself.
And that is without even getting into the fact that men were not hung for stealing horse, but that horses may not be stolen.
"I would to God that one of the most attrocious in each State was hung in Gibbets, up on a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build his greatness upon his Country’s ruin."
- George Washington, 1778
