Brian

"I may be wrong and you may be right and by an effort we may get nearer to the truth." —Karl Popper

@KanekoaTheGreat @SarahTheHaider Well, the trend may be that way but at the moment it's still largely a right-wing phenomenon.

A September 2025 YouGov poll found that 26% of liberals under 45 say political violence is acceptable. 7% of conservatives under 45 said the same. The U.S. has a growing problem with violent left-wing extremism that corporate media largely ignores. Recent examples include assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla facilities, and the murder of Charlie Kirk. It needs to stop, but it's only getting worse.

Noa Marciano was only 19 when she was murdered — not in the chaos of battle, but in cold blood inside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. A civilian medic — someone whose calling is supposed to be to heal and protect life — deliberately injected air into her veins. He watched as the embolism tore through her body, bringing waves of crushing chest pain, dizziness, confusion, weakness, failing vision, and finally the fatal stroke or heart failure that stole her last breath. Her torturous final moments were filmed by Gazans with glee. In the video, Noa — a young woman who should have had her whole life ahead of her — is heard desperately begging for her life. The clip ends on her sweat-soaked, lifeless body. That unbearable footage was deliberately sent via Telegram to her father, Avi. Noa was one of seven female soldiers taken captive alive from the Nahal Oz military base on October 7, 2023. One, Ori Megidish, was heroically rescued by IDF forces later that month. Five others — Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa, and Naama Levy — were eventually released in a ceasefire deal in January 2025. Noa’s body was recovered by IDF forces in mid-November 2023, found outside the very hospital where she had been murdered. Fifteen other young women from her unit were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists in the initial assault on the base. In total, Nahal Oz lost 53 soldiers and officers out of the 162 stationed there that terrible day. Avi Marciano has said that what he endured is “the greatest nightmare any person could ever go through.” The video of his daughter’s final moments — her pleas, her suffering, her death at the hands of a so-called healer — is seared into his soul. Some mornings he still wakes up with those images replaying in his mind. Let Noa’s story be seared into yours as well. She was murdered by a medical worker. A civilian. In a hospital. In the heart of Gaza. We owe it to Noa and to her shattered family to remember not only how she died, but how she lived. Noa was the beloved eldest daughter of Adi and Avi Marciano, and the cherished big sister to Yuval, Hadar, and Itay. Born on October 12, 2004, in Modi’in, she carried an infectious optimism and a deep love for people, for her country, and for the beauty of the world around her. She was full of life, music, and light — the kind of young woman whose smile could brighten any room. Her murder was not only an act of barbaric cruelty; it was a profound betrayal of everything a hospital and a healer are meant to represent. May her memory be a blessing, and may her story never be forgotten. Read the full article: aish.com/parents-greate…

@StevenJosephR @TheCinesthetic Yes! And I personally would go so far as to say it's the greatest movie of all time.

@TheCinesthetic The best of the three spaghetti westerns

Trilogies where the 3rd movie is the best

Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!: quillette.com/2026/04/17/inf…

@SarahTheHaider @G_S_Bhogal I use it everyday! Each morning it will send me some passage in a book I've highlighted. And you can then create these nice little cards (like below) if you want to post them or whatever.

@G_S_Bhogal Can’t remember if I ever tried this app… Checking it out again.

A big problem I have with notetaking: Even the best of notes disappear into the void. No matter where I write notebook or doc or app), eventually I’ll just forget about them. Has anyone figured out a solution?

A new milestone for humankind: The crew of Artemis II are now the farthest any human has ever travelled, reaching a maximum distance of 252,752 miles from Earth. This surpasses the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 by about 4,102 miles.

"Welcome to my old neighborhood." Our @NASAArtemis II astronauts woke up on the sixth day of their mission to a special message recorded in 2025 by astronaut Jim Lovell, the pilot of Apollo 8.

NASA has launched a website where you can follow the Artemis II mission to the Moon in real time 👩‍🚀 Absolutely amazing. Link 🔗👇

🚨 This was the Artemis II crew's view this morning from 41,756 miles (67,200 km) up No human has seen a crescent Earth in full since 1972

@marcportermagee Seems like the kind of thing @verybadwizards would be interested in!

Education research the least likely to replicate according to a huge new paper published by Nature

Crazy to think just how long it has been since we have gone to the moon. But finally we're going again. What an amazing achievement. Human spaceflight is one of mankind's finest endeavors.

@ToKTeacher This sounds like it's potentially just semantics. I doubt that Harris actually wants to entrench dogma in that sense. He's not looking to have people shot if they espouse the wrong belief. But there is a reasonable expectation that errors are corrected and progress is made.

@Atom2384 Yes: we want to converge on reality. My point is *entrenching* a claim is far worse than the alternative. And claims to have achieved “ground truth” are just that: entrenching dogma, and hence error. That’s worse than any mundane trivial error (like “belief” in a flat Earth).

There is no “mechanism to get to ground truth”. It is that very misconception that can leads to dogmatism - because if one thinks they’ve found the mechanism and then reached ground truth, well: “The doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny” - Karl Popper.

@ToKTeacher No, we should not all expect to agree on everything. But because there is objective truth, one would hope we'd converge to some extent. How much value does humanity get from the fact that some people still believe the earth is flat? I'd guess close to zero.

So, yes: we can “agree” to continue talking. But that isn’t a foundation either. We could also walk away. But what we shouldn’t do is agree with the enemies of civilization that we must insist “we know the (ground) truth”. Let’s defend our ideas as the best known. Not the final.

Perhaps more specifically, it took knowledge from creative creators such as us!

The books you love are a window into your personality. •Mystery & self-improvement attract conscientious people •Sci-fi, psychology, philosophy draw open-minded people •Memoir & horror appeal to neurotic people Reading doesn't just shape our views. It reveals what we're like.

I guess I follow a pretty diverse group of people because I've seen wildly different reactions to this tweet, particularly regarding the value of memorization.

I can certainly appreciate this sentiment. Maybe a slightly better way to think of it is that we need more responsive and adaptive systems that allow for quick removal of bad politicians.

Philosophy is so critically important, worthy of consideration by just about everyone, because it guides—nay, demands—that we live our lives in particular manners. And there's hardly any area in which it doesn't have some import.

Fascinating. Once "online" gets going it really takes off. Just another great benefit of the internet.

Just amazing. Truly heroic.