A curious trend I noticed on other social media hellsites:
Apparently it is now popular among the alt-right crowd to claim that if something doesn't adhere to Mussolini's original definition of #fascism, it's not real fascism.
(Which then seems to lead to claims that the Left are the real fascists somehow, because what else did I expect?)
Post-World War II, there have been several attempts on defining what fascist ideology consists of, e.g., separately by John McNeill, Robert Paxton and Jason Stanley:
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.
McCarthy now says that some his own GOP House members want to "burn the place down." With nine days before a government shutdown, yesterday he said he'd keep members in town all weekend to solve this GOP-created problem -- they can't pass anything to fix it. Today he sent them all home for the weekend. These clowns aren't committing treason in a legal sense, but damn they're getting close.
'The reason It's a Wonderful Life (1946) holds up so well is that George's line, "You know how long is takes a working man to save $5000?" has somehow not aged even slightly.'
The alkaline diet is a diet fad that started gaining popularity in around 2010, based on the notion that it's possible to alter your blood pH through a change in diet to make it more alkaline, receiving numerous health benefits. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for the alkaline diet and there is no connection between the foods the proponents recommend and the actual pH of those foods. This craze is fueled by the fact that acidity and alkalinity are chemical concepts that people are likely to remember from school. In practice, the diet follows mainstream dietary advice mixed with high amounts of nature woo. Once someone has been convinced consuming alkaline substances is beneficial, that opens the door to selling them the hard stuff: coral.
Two suggestions for interacting with ChapGPT and other LLMs:
Don’t speak to it as if it were a person. It will answer as though it is, which can lead to confusion.
Whatever question you ask, mentally preface it with the phrase, “Generate some text that sounds like a plausible answer to the following, even if you have to make stuff up.” (Because that’s what it’s going to do.)
I get kind of worked up about attempts to rob young people of the few interesting things that we really know about nature and the universe. This anti-evolution content is designed as a kind of inoculation against gaining further knowledge on the topic.
It contains neat little counter arguments that prompt kids to stop listening before they hear anything really interesting.
"[Darwin] avoided discussing his views on religion in public, but his private writings (from the Beagle era onwards) show that he was increasingly critical of theology and Biblical literalism, and had many doubts about God, including concerns about the problem of evil. In a letter of 1879, he described himself as an #agnostic rather than an atheist, but stated that belief in evolution is not incompatible with #theism."
Citation: Letter to John Fordyce, 7 May 1879, transcribed at the Darwin Correspondence Project
I’m constantly struck by parallels between slaveholders trying to force people in non-slavery states to participate in maintaining slavery (e.g. Fugitive Slave Acts) and this sort of behavior. #Alabama senator #Tuberville is holding up promotions to force the military to stop covering travel for medical care that includes #abortion. Gift access at https://wapo.st/3qlP6Ln#misogyny#ReproductiveRights