He believes something incredibly toxic and nuts, but I’m not sure it’s exactly that Christianity is “true,” but rather that it’s just so incredibly useful that it might as well be, and therefore it’s not hypocritical to espouse it with gusto, regardless of what you personally think about the supernatural.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
I don’t recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you’re better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.
Society’s movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it’s okay to fall back on older “tribal” religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It’s better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it’s not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It’s like Pascal’s wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.
Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you’re allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.
JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.
EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he’s sometimes portrayed.
Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.
Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.
My summary of MCAD suites is getting pretty long in the tooth these days, and IIRC one or two of the niche ones are simply not available anymore, but it still might be useful.
For what it’s worth, I use Alibre Design in Windows, and do STEP touchups and smaller projects in Linux (where I spend most of my time) on FreeCAD. I just really like the timeline and workflow in Alibre, and it very rarely crashes.
I like that, though I might consider that rhyme, alliteration, and especially repetition also aid retention by requiring less data to be committed to memory as-is. References to other works are also very much a shorthand for cramming pre-existing memes (in the Dawkins sense) into less “word-doing.”
I dunno. The whole thing breaks down pretty quickly, as most analogies between mental and computational process do, but it’s fun to think about.
Adults also make a face with how much it’s a copy of Frozen’s premise.
Definitely very similar, but it’s different enough, I’d say. It sort of makes explicit that there are cultural repercussions to imposing Elsa’s burden on everyone, that embracing individuality can ironically create a stronger sense of community, and then, in splitting Elsa into Rumi and Jinu, it allows for parallel redemptive tracks, one who never had a “Let it Go” first act moment at all and suffered because of it, and one who really thoroughly bought into the anti-social aspects of it but is then gaslit into thinking they can never be anything better.
If we can do the Hero’s Journey a thousand times, we can do Elsa’s every few years, especially when the rest of it is changed up and fun. I do think there’s a world where K-Pop Demon Hunters comes and goes without making any waves, but the songs are all earworms and it hit at just the right moment, apparently.
Holy shit. Sicko bowl champs! Go Jags!
Trevor Lawrence’s legs: Fuck you, arm, We’ll do it ourselves.
Like two pimply cheeks on one ass.
I am, unfortunately, a north Florida native and OG Jags fan.
I am still fairly optimistic about the arc of the new regime, but the quick start was a bit of fool’s gold.
Or maybe the Jags are MORE ass than LV. Who knows.
Jags @ Raiders
Duval might be slightly less ass than Vegas. I do still think there’s hope for TLaw, but he’s got basically this season and next, and he’s got to make it easier for his apparently mid-or-below receiving corps.
It’s still out there. For one that’s specifically what you describe try Keep the Wolves at Bay by Uncle Lucius.
Yeah, I admit it’s a pretty big leap to suggest any one person in the SLC area is connected, but what goes on down there is CRAZY and evil.
The article says that the outbreak actually started near the Utah-Arizona border, specifically the western half of that border. Due to a little thing called the Grand Canyon, the Arizona side of that has terrible road links and no population center comparable even to southwestern Utah, which is already isolated from the center of power by simple distance and sparse population. This has made it prime territory for the polygamist fundamentalist Mormons. If this person is connected to that community, they may have interesting reasons, good or bad, for not wanting to be traced.
This is interesting to consider. One of the reasons car centric countries make their peace with fatalities is that there is a regime and cultural expectations in place for assigning blame and imposing punishment, both criminal and civil. We know that other drivers are assholes and idiots, but there is the grim solace that if something happens they (or their insurers) will compensate us and that if it’s bad enough they may even go to jail. Furthermore, we presume that the assholes and idiots know that as well, and they will at least try not to do something stupid, especially since they could get hurt/killed too.
Given the available tech, a system relying on driverless cars is pretty much guaranteed to be safer overall, but people will resist it if there is a sense that no identifiable human is incentivized to minimize harm. If somebody gets killed in an accident and you just have Waymo (or whoever) stonewalling any efforts at compensation or justice, it becomes further dehumanizing and people will continue to prefer to take their chances with the assholes and idiots who might actually be held to account.
You come up with a regulatory regime that ensures proper insurance coverage with equal or preferably lesser friction (lord knows the American system has its issues), and also meaningful punishments to actual humans for reckless code/maintenance/routing/etc, then cultural acceptance will come.
Still. Something like this could go viral.
LOL, are you trying to keep me from derailing a shitpost thread where I’m rehashing the boring online debate that inspired it! How dare you!!! What are you? Some kind of Michael?
That’s his major value-add. With any luck he’ll sputter in the primary versus someone with actual charisma and decent ideas.