#lesson 10

[yonko-sat]

haven’t seen anyone talk about this ??

love lore <3

[spiderpanic]

10. Believe in truth

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blending lights. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual -and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was 16, the following year 22. In 2020 he told on average about 27 lies a day. This figure is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path towards total fiction. Then came the Big Lie about an election, creating a fictional counterworld.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon "endless repetition," designed to make the fictional plausible. The systematic use of nicknames such as "Sleepy Joe" displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, a president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then internalized. The Big Lie about elections was also repeated over and over. Followers did not want to believe that they could be deceived on such a scale, and took comfort in the repetition. The Big Lie created its own world, where anyone who pointed to simple truths was the enemy.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. A billionaire can pay neither taxes nor debts. Liberating the wealthy from taxes will not increase the national debt. Fighting corruption means selling the presidency for favors. A disease that kills hundreds of thousands will vanish. The winner gets fewer votes. The vote is always rigged, and you should vote for me anyway. Black people are taking the vote away from white people, although American history shows that the opposite has been the case.

Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer's descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to "abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Fuhrer's greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present." 12 years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer That Hitler "has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler."

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-defying claims a President made when he said that "I alone can solve it" or "I am your retribution." When Faith descends from heaven to Earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that "understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer."

Eugene Ionesco, the great Romanian playwright, watched one friend after another slip away into the language of fascism in the 1930s. The experience became the basis for his 1959 absurdist play, 'Rhinoceros', in which those who fall prey to propaganda are transformed into giant horned beasts. Of his own personal experiences Ionesco wrote:

"University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other. At the beginning, certainly they were not Nazis. About 15 of us would get together to talk and to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy. ... From time to time, one of our friends said: "I don't agree with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example, the Jews...," etc. And this was a symptom. 3 weeks later, this person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Towards the end, only three or four of us were still resisting."

Ionesco's aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.

The rhinoceri are roaming through our neurological savannas. We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call "truth," And we tend to think that it's scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of "double think." In its philosophy, post truth restores precisely the fascist attitude to truth -and that is why nothing in our own world would startle Klemperer or Ionesco.

Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, Loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confuse faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

Post truth is pre-fascism

-On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder)

[egophiliac]

(almost) four years in, and I finally had time to draw something for the anniversary! woo! 🎉🎉🎉

[brainrot-has-overtaken-me]

MUMBO IS DOING ARMOR STANDS!!!

[cj-kenobi]

On my knees begging for anything trans!Obi-Wan :') love your work btw

your wish is my comand lovely anon, here's obi-wan having a nice peaceful moment training

[crybabyboyscout]

✨☆彡Pharaoh☆彡✨

[nenestansunsthings]

having svsss au ideas beyond my station

thinking. shang qinghua goes on a mission as a young disciple to some town in fuckoff nowhere and finds himself in the qiu household. and there he finds a young shen jiu, undergoing the plot he originally intended for him and hadn't realised had become real and he's so young oh god hes so young why is he so small what do you mean that part was real, he hadn't kept it why is it real—

and he panics and sneaks him the Fuck out of that house

and he's not sure what to do but surely sending him to cang qiong will fuck up something in the plot and he can't come under even more investigation and cang qiong tryouts dont happen for months anyway and his system would probably never allow it (it doesnt. it would interfere with yue qingyuans story) but shen jiu is refusing to stay anywhere near this place and wants to learn cultivating to protect himself make sure nothing like this ever happens again and sqh panics harder and

calls mobei jun.

okay. on second thought, maybe this was a bad idea. but he stumbles over himself and shushes baby shen jiu's very understandable freaking out and asks his king for the first thing hes ever asked for other than his own life.

is there any way this human child could learn cultivation in the demon world?

[locusfandomtime]

Doing the maths: Grian's failure at getting a mending book

lots of talk about maths and probabilities below the cut! but there's a graph and simple explanation at the end if you want to get the gist of it and are bad at maths.

(I am still young and learning maths, critique/advice always welcomed)

What are the odds of getting a mending book in Minecraft?

(I am assuming Grian has been doing all his fishing with Luck of the Sea 3)

The probability of a mending book is actually a bit annoying to estimate. The Minecraft Wiki lists fishing up an enchanted book as 1.9% chance. This is for ANY enchanted book. The Minecraft wiki talks about how the chance of an enchantment being selected is calculated. Mending has a weight of 2. Using the table, mending has a probability of 2/135.

However, Grian is looking for any book with mending, not just a pure mending book. Additional enchantments are calculated in a different way, involving RNG, which means it won't be as easy to model. Due to this reason, I'll just be using the odds for a pure mending book throughout.

TLDR: a mending book has a 0.028..% chance (2/135*0.019*100)

Grian's Data

According to this screenshot, Grian has used a fishing rod 5679 times. This number may not be fully accurate, as it includes the times he's fished other players, rather than just fished for items, but it is a good estimate.

To help visualise this data, with a median waiting time between catches of 17.5 seconds, Grian has spent over 20 hours fishing so far! He may have a problem.

Is this statistically significant?

Hypothesis testing (p-value approach):

H0: p = 19/67500 (the null hypothesis - he has no mending books because of chance)

H1: p < 19/67500 (the alternate hypothesis - he has no mending books due to different odds)

5679 trials, 0 mending books

X ~ B(5679, 19/67500) (binomial distribution, 5679 tries with a probability of a mending book being 19/67500, where X is the number of mending books)

p(X=0) (what is the probability the number of mending books being 0)

p = 0.2021473392

Now, the point at which data becomes significant is subjective. For instance, you *could* get a million heads in a row flipping a coin, it's not impossible, but at a certain point, you can begin to say "okay there's something not normal about this". For this approach, the closer the p-value is to 0, the more evidence there is against the null hypothesis . The p-value here is far above a significance level of 0.01, or 0.05, or 0.1. There isn't a clear line between significant/non-significant, but this is answer is quite a bit far from 0

With this, I cannot reject the null hypothesis.

Personal conclusion: this is not statistically significant, Grian is just unlucky.

Are other values statistically significant?

Gem's proposed 9000: results in a p-value of 0.079... more significant than Grian's number but I don't imagine Mojang would be too concerned. As said though, it's all subjective.

I am bad at maths, what does all this mean?

Here is a graph, showing what number of mending books you might have after 5679 tries. The height of the bar represents the probability of getting that amount. The numbers at the top are the (rounded) numbers I used in my calculation

The pink column is 0 mending books - like what Grian has! As you can see, it is less likely than getting 1 or 2 books, but not too uncommon to happen.

End conclusion: Grian has bad luck. Like, not as hilariously bad as he thinks, but still bad. If he keeps going, chances are he will get a mending book, but I think he should probably stop fishing because at this point he has a problem.

[voiceofthesilly]

Bhaalists have the dumbest fucking problems, or What if you were so similar, looking to show your devotion most wholly, because your father and god is all you have left. What if with the little heart you had left you wanted to spare your only sister the rejection of god, make sure she was perfect the entire time, and if it means you make her hate you so be it. What if she saw the compassion as your faith wavering and she was right . Still she should've bathed the streets in red and not thought about it any more than what the arm needs to drive the knife through a heart .

[itsallaboutbl]

👀😏🥵

+ arm bonus (not the character)

[toximblee]

Dear Sir, I am Maple Prince Etho from Canada Land. Your help would be very appreciated. I want to.. REFERENCES !!!! :

ALL CREDS FOR MEZALEAN JOEL GO TO @justtrashperson !!!<3 LINK TO THEIR POST WITH THE ART : Sigh I miss esmp s1 joel – @justtrashperson on Tumblr GO CHECK THEM OUT THEIR ART IS SO YUMMY.

pov au universe where maple prince etho is real and he jus t wants to transfer his maple syrup but everyone thinks hes a scam . also i think hed be friends with mezalean joel thanks !!

[iirulancorrino]

The Green brothers are doing effective altruism better than maybe 95% of people who identify online as effective altruists.

[muffinlance]

Other child: *reaches for legos at the library’s play table*

Toddler: NO DO NOT DESTROY MY PANOPTICON

[rainintheevening]

Growing up is a good thing.

I repeat: Growing up is a good thing.

We are MEANT to grow up, and MEANT to mature. Our bodies don't stay small and immature, our minds and spirits aren't meant to either.

All those shows and stories and whatnot that say "Don't grow up!" "Growing up is bad and boring!" They are lying, and they are wrong. Of course being grown up can get twisted and distorted from what it should be, usually by a LACK of maturity, not an excess.

It's supposed to be a process, of course. It shouldn't be rushed, as far as you can help it. But I think real maturity remembers and learns from and keeps good things from every stage of life. While embracing the current stage completely.

Growing up is a good thing. Don't be afraid of it. This is what you were made for.

This is what I am learning.

[every-sanji]

[itz-pandora]

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For the first 3 pages, Infinite is supposed to be rapidly decaying (in the uncensored version, you'd be able to see his skeleton)

[UNCENSORED (gorey) VERSION BELOW CUT]