@romanhelmetguy Dante put Judas and Brutus in the lowest circle of Hell.
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Nick Longrich
4.1K posts
Nick Longrich
@NickLongrich
Paleontologist, biologist, sometimes archaeologist from Alaska. Dinosaurs, evolution in deep time and writing. Nature is the only authority that is never wrong.
Kodiak, Alaska Katılım Mart 2020
1.2K Takip Edilen2.8K Takipçiler
You wouldn’t believe how many people who betrayed their country were later killed by the people they’d helped. Even those who love the treason hate the traitor.
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@eigenrobot Having seen how academia operates, I think you could make a strong case that no one who has gotten a PhD should be allowed to vote. Extensive formal education does not correlate with or confer morality, wisdom, or an understanding of how the world works. Arguably the opposite.
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ive known too many educated people to give this even the slightest credence. the chud veto is essential to our nation's survival
American Philosophy@AmerPhilo2025
"Allowing virtually every citizen to vote has been a catastrophic disaster for the United States. We have allowed illiterate, uneducated citizens to hold hostage the world’s largest economy, most powerful military, and a robust intellectual culture. It has decimated the concept of civitas and allowed powerful actors with bad intentions to influence those who cannot think for themselves. To restore the United States, we must seriously consider ending universal suffrage." Read more below.
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@codemup @Robotbeat Hinterlands by William Gibson is probably the most unnervingly dark, space-is-a-terrifying-place-of-horrors piece of science fiction I've ever read. It might make a good short film but it's more atmosphere than action so it wouldn't make a good horror movie.
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@NickLongrich @Robotbeat This brings to mind the sci-fi story 'Construction Shack' by Clifford Simak
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Can you imagine a NASA that leaned into "space is a horrifying void that makes you go insane"? No, obviously, it'd be immediately defunded because why would you fund that. Think about it. Yet somehow a ton of scifi is just edgecore or just straight horror.
Robotbeat🗽 ➐@Robotbeat
BTW, NASA itself is hopecore (it HAS to be). Think about it.
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@Robotbeat Every time a NASA project came in behind schedule and overbudget was the noble effort of scientists desperately trying to protect us from things we should never be made to know, and now SpaceX is going to open that Pandora's box.
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@Robotbeat Crazy conspiracy theorists claim the moon landings were faked but the real conspiracy is that they were all too successful, and we found something we were never meant to find. Thats why we never went back, and why NASA kept building shuttles that don’t work. All by design.
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@DavidDeutschOxf In the past, leadership was justified as being divinely ordained, the gods themselves blessed the king of a Sumerian city-state. The modern idea that power flows from the consent of the people is so powerful that even dictatorships pretend they have the support of the people.
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@DavidDeutschOxf And sham elections. And many modern dictators even dress like Western politicians, suit and tie. Putin, Xi, Assad, Maduro. Maybe in the past it was easier to just be a king, a tyrant, a military strongman, now democracy's pull is so strong you have to pretend to be one.
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Have you ever wondered why virtually all the world's dictatorships, caliphates, tyrannies, kleptocracies, absolute monarchies etc pretend to have elected parliaments?
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@eigenrobot Paul can destroy the spice and uses the threat to coerce the emperor but he prefers to control the spice flow to force the Emperor to do what he wants. In an economy based around extracting one resource, whoever controls that resource has the power.
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@eigenrobot Taking out Iran’s ability to export oil would cripple the regime. Controlling the flow of oil, being able to turn the taps on and off, creates a stick and carrot that can be used to coerce and bribe the current government or any government that might appear.
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what i dont understand is why occupy the island instead of simply knocking out port infrastructure to prevent loading if that's the objective. my context is thin and i imagine there are good reasons but i am curious what could justify the cost
Faytuks News@Faytuks
An interesting article on the prospect of capturing Kharg Island "U.S. troops may well take Kharg Island, only to endure ballistic-missile strikes, drone attacks, and petrochemical smoke, all without a reliable means of obtaining logistical support" theatlantic.com/international/…
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@R_H_Ebright @Bryce_Nickels It’s actually possible to test experimentally. We start engineering a furin cleavage site into a bat virus at BSL2 levels in a lab with a faulty air filter, and see if the result is a global pandemic. So possible, yes, but not exactly ethical.
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@Bryce_Nickels Can there really be people so stupid that they think questions about historical events are answered by performing experiments or that verdicts of criminal guilt are made by performing experiments?
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In this clip taken from Team Fraud's livestream, an audience member asks Matt Ridley to "describe in detail the experiments that you personally performed to support your lab leak theory"
Bryce Nickels@Bryce_Nickels
meanwhile...
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I found great satisfaction in playing Ash because he was so amazingly flawed - so mortal.
dreadcentral.com/editorials/561…
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@mattwridley The most recent common ancestor of the sarbecoviruses existed over a thousand years ago. That's a thousand years for the sarbecoviruses to evolve a furin cleavage site, and yet there's no evidence that any sarbecovirus ever evolved an FCS in the millennium before 2019.
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Even quite intelligent and well informed scientists repeated this line.
Plenty of coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites. No sarbecovirus has one out of many hundred.
Except sars cov 2.
Why don’t people think before they tweet?
Matthew D@DopplerEffect93
@Rebecca21951651 @hkakeya That literally tells you nothing. When they looked at the virus, there was nothing unusual about the furin cleavage site. Many coronaviruses have one.
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@SurelyBuirley @TheCinesthetic There are great characters, written in such a compelling way that many actors can play them- Sherlock Holmes, Batman, James Bond. I don't think Kirk and Spock are great characters like that, rather they're defined by their performances by Shatner and Nimoy.
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@NickLongrich @TheCinesthetic Only one who really crushed it in all 3 movies was Karl Urban as McCoy, he was the only one who absolutely nailed his part
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Before J.J. Abrams took over, Paramount reviewed over a dozen scripts for a new Star Trek. Some focused on young Kirk and Spock, others on events after Nemesis. Abrams was chosen to reinvent the saga, not just resurrect it, and he absolutely succeeded.
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@adamcarolla It's deeply ironic and darkly hilarious that a former host of a silly call-in talk show called Loveline gets it right on a major political issue where so many supposedly sophisticated intellectuals got it so badly wrong.
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Communism can’t work because of human nature
Gad Saad@GadSaad
True Communism has yet to be tried. The Degenerate Schmuck @BernieSanders will soon usher a Communist Unicornia.
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@CompellingDNA Those are modern (crown) H. sapiens, but archaic (stem) H. sapiens who don't directly contribute to modern populations. They are part of an earlier migration out of Africa that presumably went through the Sinai and the Levant.
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@NickLongrich They were also on the Mediterranean where seas were also lower. They were at Manot Cave and Ksar Akil, Haua Fteah Libya, Grotte Mandrin France, Qafzeh Cave before 50ka
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Humans likely left Africa 100,000 ya and arrived in Australia 65,000 ya but don't show up in the Levant, Europe or Central Asia until around 50,000 years ago(?!). Where were the Eurasians? Maybe here. The sea levels were down and the whole Persian Gulf was dry land.
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@VectorsOfMind I would guess that Neanderthals and Denisovans were good fighters, and humans struggled to displace them until the bow and arrow made its way out of Africa.
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@NickLongrich Why would it make sense that they were only there?
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@pmddomingos I've noticed some people who get stuck just take themselves wayyy too seriously. You look very foolish when you fail, but if you won't fail or make mistakes, you'll never learn. A certain tolerance for looking foolish is necessary to do anything well.
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Be irreverent. According to Einstein, that was his greatest asset.
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@peterrhague I don't know why. Partly might be that competence signals certain virtues (hard work, persistence, agency). Part of it might be that competent characters bring value to society, but, say, Hans Gruber, Darth Vader and Ubaba are highly competent and it makes them weirdly admirable.
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Competence makes protagonists likeable. One of the reasons for the enduring popularity of characters like Sherlock Holmes, Conan the Barbarian, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Batman, Iron Man, even Arnold's Terminator is that they do their jobs very well. Optimism is distinct, but also good.
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I prefer “hopecore” to people calling it “competence p*rn” - these are family friendly films after all!
IGN@IGN
Project Hail Mary is the latest in a line of 'hopecore' space movies that also includes The Martian and Interstellar. bit.ly/4uC96Wp
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@mauddweeb It doesn't have the classic 3-act, single-arc structure of a movie. It's sorta Canterbury Tales in Space. Lots of arcs.
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I think any translation of this has to be a television series right
Zapato Veloz Eurovision@BerzasVerdes
Ahora que DUNE está de moda, aprovecho para recomendar mi saga de ciencia ficción favorita de todos los tiempos.
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@shinboson "Oh no my villa is on fire, should I grab my copy of Aristotle or the collected writings of Stupidus Maximus??" But it's maybe more an issue of good writers are copied more often, outreproducing bad ones... almost a sort of natural selection of the classics?
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@NickLongrich and only the good ones tend to get preserved
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if you go back and closely examine the artifacts of the internet of the early 90s, without exaggeration the IQ of the average user was probably 30 IQ points higher.
it's like discovering atlantis or númenor, where all men are fair and noble and do not age.
Pizza@number_pizza111
Mass culture was definitely more intellectual until the invention of the radio or WWII or thereabouts. Just read a chapter of Gulliver's Travels dedicated to mocking Leibniz’s work in symbolic logic, and I find that alien enough that I can’t think of a workable modern analogy.
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