#credulity

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"God gave birds wings, but he didn't forbid them from flying. He blessed cheetahs with speed, but he never forbad them from outrunning their prey. He did, however, give humans a brain and insisted that they not use it."

Proverbs 3:5-6

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

2 Corinthians 10:5

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ

[bishopcraig]

Look What They Done to My Song, Ma!

If you recognize the title of this post as the title of a song, congratulations! You, too, are officially old – or you have a sibling who is. You will also know the significance of a brand new pair of roller skates, but I digress. After all, what good are the roller skates without a key? If you were raised in or around the Church, have you ever listened to the words of the hymns? I mean really…

[j-august]

LUCY: Lord, madam, what should you do with a fool to your husband? You intend to be honest, don't you? Then that husbandly virtue, credulity, is thrown away upon you.

William Wycherley, The Country Wife

[danlous]

You're going to break it off with him, aren't you? Well, it had to happen. Doomed, always doomed.

[sexhaver]

question 5 in MA (raising minimum wage for tipped workers to $15/hr pre-tips) exemplifies one of my biggest rules of thumbs for deciding whether or not to support a ballot initiative: if you only see highway billboards and paid TV ad spots supporting one side of the argument, you should pick the opposing side 100% of the time, because that means you are siding against the people who 1. have millions of dollars to throw at ads and 2. calculate that the ballot initiative in question will still cost them more than that if it doesn't go how they want

[mayasaura]

One of the biggest unanswered questions—to me—coming out of Nona the Ninth is..... Did Kiriona really think John would make her his cavalier if she opened the Tomb and dispatched Alecto?

It seems highly unlikely. I don't doubt she would want it, if she thought the offer was both genuine and possible to achieve, but those are some big ifs.

She was present for the fight that revealed Alecto as John's cavalier. She was there when John broke his amiable facade to say don't call her a monster. She knows first-hand what it is to share a part of your soul with someone. And we're meant to accept she believed John wanted Alecto dead? Doubt.jpg

But let's say she did believe that. John told a super convincing story, and she wanted so badly to believe someone loved her more than that slab of freezer meat. Whatever. The "possible to achieve" hurdle still looms large. Kiriona saw her father survive being reduced to atoms, she knows his cavalier is the source of that power, and she heard him say that what sleeps in the Tomb is "as dead as [he] could make her" and that she's "not the dying kind." And Kiriona was going to kill her with.... what? A rapier? Her knuckle knives? Because John said her blood was so super special, it would work just for her? Come on.

Kiriona—Gideon—is not that gullible. She grew up at war with Harrow. She grew up literally hunted for sport by the House Marshall. She considers angles, she tests motives, and she looks before she leaps. She expects to be betrayed, used, and discarded, and John made a hell of a first impression in the betrayal category. I believe she loves her father. I believe she'd do just about anything if she thought it would make her father love her. But blind trust? No way. She may or may not be a good judge of character, but she's definitely a skittish son of bitch.

And that's not even touching all the logical holes in her story—she stowed away to New Rho so she could open the Tomb? Girl what?—and the way she dropped the idea as soon as Ianthe pushed her to admit she was really there for Harrow.

Actually, you know what. I take it back. My biggest unanswered question isn't if Gideon believed any of it. There's no way. What I want to know now is whether John ever really asked her in the first place, or if it was all just a load of hot garbage she ad libbed to avoid mentioning Harrow to Ianthe. The implications either way are voluminous for the shape of the story to come, and I honestly can't rule either option out with the information we have.

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

I'm instinctively a little wary of anyone who's a little too insistent that the artificial aging is 100% above board and basically the same as aliens with different life cycles. I get that the clone wars did not explore the effect growing up at twice the normal rate might have on a human being, so following that canon is fine, but that doesn't change the fact that the clones are humans, not aliens with a naturally shorter lifespan. The accelerated aging was unequivocally a violence done to them. At best it just means they missed out on having a child hood. At best. If anyone wants to explore other effects it could have had, or play with the fucked up worldbuilding that is right there, good for them.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason." -- James Randi

"Faith" is the antithesis of reason.

[countessrivers]

I really, truly think that they should have kept Spider in the show, grievously injuring/potentially killing him each and every season, only for him to be back, perfectly fine in the next one, with minimal , if any, explanation. A running joke that he cannot be killed.

[transmutationisms]

anti vaxx arguments are not based in a defence of bodily autonomy btw and one clear indication of this is how much anti vaxx discourse hinges on the figure of The Child whom these people intend to 'protect' from vaccination and often other public health interventions---which is to say, a person they view as totally lacking autonomy, bodily and otherwise, and whose medical decisions they intend to make unilaterally. anti vaxx arguments are complicated but if i had to say they're 'about' just one thing i would argue it's ableism. that it sometimes wears the rhetoric of bodily autonomy, religious freedom, &c doesn't change the fact that these positions are fuelled by a disregard for disabled, elderly, and young people's safety in society, and by continually stoked fears that vaccines are a kind of black-box technology threatening to give The Child autism or other disabilities

[laurelnose]

everyone is arguing about the ethics of de-extinction and whether or not Colossal Biosciences’ GMO puppies count as ~real~ dire wolves, and tbh I don’t give a shit about either of those things, I’m stuck on this quote from the USA Today article: “From those two specimens, Shapiro and the team at Colossal recovered enough DNA to create two dire wolf genomes to compare with other canid species including coyotes, jackals, dholes and, of course, other wolves.” I just straight up don’t believe you. You did not get two complete dire wolf genomes from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 70,000-year-old skull. i thought this might be a reporter getting the difference between a genome and a genetic sequence wrong, but no, Colossal themselves are saying they got whole genome sequences from both samples. this company has been in existence for 4 years and they claim to have developed a novel sequencing technique that provides 500-fold improvement on the extraction of ancient DNA over previous methods? the company who, when confronted about the lack of evidence for their “complete” thylacine genome back in October, said their “sole focus is de-extinction, not writing scientific papers”? these guys got TWO whole genome sequences of the dire wolf?? pull the fucking other one, it has bells on

[lights-all-askew]

the OceansGate coverage is fascinating in part because it lets you see the bullshit world of billionaires so clearly. like, take this forbes article about the submarine. they include this photo of the British billionaire tourist Hamish Harding who's on the sub. look at the caption!

a reasonable person reading this without additional context might see "astronaut" and "mission specialist" and think: oh, this guy is a dedicated researcher. someone who goes to space and the ocean floor out of curiosity and wonder, to contribute to human knowledge, to gather information and bring it back for the collective good

and like..,..... yeah he's been to space. technically. but the important context is that this photo is from when the billionaire went on jeff bezos's weird space tourism thing

this photo! is him getting a participation trophy! after spending 200,000-300,000 USD on an 11 minute plane ride that technically reaches space (as in, they go above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, 62 miles above earth. for like a couple minutes.)

is "astronaut" really the best term for someone who's done that?? when "space tourist" is right there???? "leech who exploits workers to amass a fortune and then spends it on elaborate astronaut cosplay"???

[andromedacarriesaxes]

An arugement.

Creed (the blond) belongs to @themantheguytheloser

[tanadrin]

I don’t pay for it but everything I see about Nate silver’s model makes me think it’s kinda cooked. Rasmussen gets a B rating? Really??

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[andiover]

The most unrealistic part of Dead Boy Detectives is easily that Jenny and Crystal not only got Niko a same day doctor’s appointment, but an actual house call.