I’d say more the latter, but people are multifaceted, so it’s likely not quite the case that it’s people being their true inner selves as just indulging a part of their true inner selves.

Let’s not kid ourselves - Israel will target whatever and whoever the fuck it wants to, entirely regardless of possible consequences, and the US won’t do anything meaningful about it, ever.

Identity in general doesn’t matter much on forums (as opposed to microblogs, like Twitter or Mastodon). Forums are focused on topics rather than people, and what is said is generally more important than who says it.

I keep wondering why we don’t see more of this.

IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.

They’re not going to solve the problem alone, but they’re such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.

Ah… yes. A lot of things just clicked into place for me, and not just regarding Vance.

Most notably really - trying to grasp the idea of “TheoBros” broadly - I wondered how such a thing is even possible. How can any even moderately intelligent person spend a great deal of time online and cling to a Christian belief at all, and much less a conservative one? There’s just far too much information out there that contradicts that view. Granted, there is of course content tailored to affirm it, but it’s essentially a specialist thing - not just a bubble, but a very specific and limited bubble, surrounded by a sea of contrary views and contradicting facts.

And then it clicked - the way to maintain a conservative Christian viewpoint on the internet is to be an aggressively censorious conspiracy theorist.

The only way they can face the sea of contradictory information is to ascribe it to some sort of ridiculously massive conspiracy by the forces of evil - such that the vast majority of what exists on the internet is the lies of Satan’s minions - and to establish little, aggressively monitored and censored enclaves in which their views and only their views are allowed, and everything else is condemned and preferably censored.

Their whole cognitively dissonant view on “free speech” - in which they somehow simultaneously cry about being “censored” generally simply for being massively downvoted and even as they, in their own bubbles, overtly censor any and all contrary views - suddenly makes sense. They explain away the fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them and even condemn them as a conspiracy to silence them, and create the illusion that they’re not merely a noxious and irrational few by aggressively monitoring and controlling their walled gardens, so that opposition is at least underrepresented if not silenced entirely.

It also explains their slippery relationship with truth, and specifically things like Vance clinging to the Haitians eating pets myth even after it’s been proven false. For them, coming across information that proves them wrong has to be an essentially daily occurrence, so they undoubtedly work out an approach to it, such that they, exactly as he’s doing, just flatly ignore the necessary ramifications of the truth and instead just blithely cling to whatever myth affirms their beliefs.

Yeah… suddenly a whole lot of previously inexplicable behavior and beliefs are making sense to me…

And frankly, while it’s notably pathetic and cringily willfully ignorant, it’s also scary. More on that later maybe…

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

The BitGenerations games on the GBA, and especially Orbital. They’re stylish but graphically simple arcade style games - generally some combination of puzzle-solving and action.

It’s the state of mind caused by simultaneously believing two (or more) things that conflict with each other.

And while they’re arguing about who’s causing the most chaos, the rest of us are left wondering—how did it get this bad?

Actually, that’s easy.

It got this bad because our system is so warped and corrupt that most politicians can no longer even pretend to run on policies and principles. If they get elected, they’re going to do one and only one thing - they’re going to serve the interests of the wealthy individuals and corporations that pay them the fattest bribes. They obviously can’t run on a promise to do that, but they can’t promise to do anything else because they’re not going to do anything else. So they run on hatred and fear - they run on things like “ELECT US BECAUSE THE IMMIGRANTS ARE EATING YOUR PETS!!”

It really is just that simple.

And those are the people this whole thing is intended for.

You’ll note that none of the people involved responded to attempts to get further statements or clarifications from them. That’s because they know it’s indefensible bullshit. They said it just so that it would get out there so that the faithful would see it and add it to their credo, and now they’re going to ignore it.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

It’s become obvious over time that one of Trump’s primary strategies in life is assigning his failures and faults to other people. He lives in a sort of permanent fog of projection.

I wonder who he’s trying to fool though. It’s so constant and seemingly effortless that I suspect that it’s really mostly for his own benefit - that it’s not just the story he’s telling other people, but the story he’s telling himself.

These groups understand the Republican voters, many of whom are not inclined to rank candidates. Ranked-choice voting favors the more malleable Democrat voters who will do so.

Or in other words, Democrats are more likely to actually think about their votes and find things to appreciate in multiple candidates, while Republicans are more likely to just slavishly vote for whoever has an [R] after their name and disregard everything and everyone else.

And arguably more to the point, Republican politicians count on that.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

Yes - they will sacrifice public lands to the oil industry. And the mining industry And the lumber industry. And any other industry that pays them sufficient bribes.

And when the people can’t take it anymore and finally try to stand against the wanton destruction, we’re going to learn first-hand why all those Cop Cities are being built.

Once they’re in it, I don’t think there’s a way to get them out, or at least not effectively and productively.

It’s a fundamental psychological need. For whatever reason, they can’t cope with an existence that isn’t anchored in some kind of supposedly absolute truth, so even if one could successfully break through to them and get them to see that their absolute truth is certainly not absolute and likely not even truth, all one would be doing would be tearing the props out from under their lives and leaving them with nothing.

And it’s far more likely that one would fail to get through to them, and just end up alienating them. And, ironically enough, potentially leading them to cling to their make-believe absolute truth just that much more determinedly.

I think it’s just one of those things that’s going to have to be left up to philosophical and sociological evolution. If humanity can survive long enough, I would expect it to become less of an issue over successive generations. And that’s likely about the best we can hope for.

To some degree religion encourages that mindset, but it doesn’t create it. In fact, to a notable degree, it’s exactly the opposite - the desire to believe in some absolute truth is a lot of the reason that religion came to exist in the first place. It provides the absolute (nominal) truths that reality does not.

In a way, your friend is right - the lack of absolute truth is at the heart of a lot of the world’s problems. But that’s not it by itself - it’s actually the lack of absolute truth in concert with the desperate need so many people have for it. There are a great many people for whom absolute truth is not necessary - who are perfectly content with the simple fact that reality is murky and complex and largely inexplicable and that our perceptions of it are necessarily subjective. They - we - don’t feel the compelling need your friend obviously has for absolute truth - we get by fine without it.

But for the many who can’t cope with that - who can’t or won’t accept nuance and complexity and inexplicability and subjectivity - yes, the lack of absolute truth is certainly a problem.

The thing is though that the universe isn’t going to change. Absolute truth isn’t going to suddenly make itself manifest because a bunch of conscious animals desperately yearn for it. The universe is going to keep on being unimaginably complex and largely inexplicable, so it’s up to people to come to terms with that.

So as far as that goes, your friend is terribly, terribly wrong.

And in fact, I think that the way in which he’s wrong is actually one of the biggest sources of misery in the world. It’s not just the absence of absolute truth, but the fact that a great many people, in the face of the absence of absolute truth, just go ahead and pick something and pretend that it’s absolute truth anyway, even though it’s self-evidently not.

That does two things immediately - it distances people from sound reason, and it sets them against all of the people who doubt their make-believe absolute truth, and especially those who have chosen to believe some other make-believe absolute truth.

I would say that if one were to dissect virtually any overtly destructive belief system - the sorts of things over which people will and do kill each other - one would find that basic error lurking at its heart.

So yeah - in a way, the lack of absolute truth is a problem. But your friend’s way of approaching that fact is entirely and completely wrong, and is the real problem.

The first time through, I read them in publishing order, starting with The Colour of Magic. That way, I got to see how it all unfolded in real time, and got to watch Pratchett’s skill grow (and eventually decline).

Since then, I’ve either followed specific characters (Vimes or Granny or Tiffany or Death) or just read whatever caught my attention at the moment.

Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.