Alan Dershowitz has turned into a right-wing hack, making ridiculous legal arguments to defend untenable positions.

Broadly speaking, failing to put in effort does tend to lead to worse outcomes.

…Unless your parents have the last name “Musk” or “Trump”.

Satanist.

Raised Mormon, was a Mormon missionary. Had a nervous breakdown, and religious leaders said that I must be sinning, and needed to pray more, read my scriptures more, and repent. But… What sin? And how was I supposed to pray/study more when I had already dedicated two years of my life to preaching? E.g., there’s 24 hours in the day, and I’m already spending multiple hours doing that stuff, so where am I supposed to fit that in?

That was the first crack in the foundation. Took a while, but once you realize that religious leaders are just men (and yes, it’s always men in the Mormon church), and that despite their claims they don’t have any prophetic powers, then you start questioning a lit of things, like how you can even know truth. (Spoiler: you can’t know truth without some kind of objective evidence, and all religions’ truth claims are based on subjective evidence and “see?, it says so, right here in my book!”)

Atheist is a label that says what you don’t believe. Satanist is a label that says what I do believe. So I eventually settled on Satanist.

10,000 acres of land in the northern mountains, with all associated rights (mineral, water, etc.).

I really, really, really don’t want to have neighbors. I already live in a rural area, and I still have neighbors 1/4 mile away that blast their music at 11pm loud enough to make out the lyrics. I want to be able to see the stars at night with no light pollution, and see wildlife that’s barely seen people.

2012 Indian Scout. The price was decent, the miles were low. It was my first motorcycle, and I was sure that I wanted a cruiser. It seemed perfect for me.

It had some pretty major issues. The stator failed in the rain; it got fixed under warranty. Then a coil pack failed, stranding me two hours from home. That took about a month to get fixed under warranty. It wouldn’t start in cold weather worth a damn; anything under 50F, and it was a bitch to start. To top it off, I live in the mountains, and once I got past my initial trepidation of riding without anything but skill and luck between myself and the pavement, I was out-riding the capabilities of a cruiser. It’s really unpleasant to drop into a corner and get your foot knocked off the foot peg because it’s dragging on the pavement…

It turns out that the way I ride is much more suited to a sport bike.

I did a title swap with someone that had a '12 CBR600RR that needed some work; I took about a $5000 bath on that trade, but I got a bike that I loved. I ended up putting 80,000 miles on it before I wore the engine out, and then bought a '16 Triumph Speed Triple that I rode to work today.

Mine def. was not an impulse, mostly because I had to make an appointment several month in advance. Brian Decker travels, but it ended up being easier to go to NYC rather than wait for him to come near where I lived at the time.

I have a Meta Quest 3 that i use every single day. I bought it specifically so I could use AceXR, which is a “game” that’s a dry fire practice simulator. It’s significantly improved my shooting ability, since I now get feedback, and I’ve saved tens of thousands in ammunition prices versus going to a shooting range every single day. No, it’s not perfect–there’s no recoil control in dry fire simulation–but it’s very, very good for what it is.

People saying that VR is stupid sound a lot like people that didn’t see any reason to switch to LED from CRT.

Well. No, not really. Owning a house is just stressful, period. And sometimes really expensive things happen that you couldn’t foresee.

For ants, you want to get food-safe diatomaceous earth, and a bulb-style dispenser. If you can tell where they’re coming from, blow some diatomaceous earth in there. It’s completely safe for people and pets, but will kill insects. There’s also some non-toxic treatments for wood–Nissin Boracare, for instance–that will help prevent termite, ant, and powderpost beetle infestations.

If you have a damp moldy spot on a ceiling, that’s likely leaking from the roof. Roof leaks can be very difficult to find; if you have asphalt shingles that are starting to curl at the corners, then it’s probably just time to replace them, along with flashing. Thankfully, depending on the pitch of your roof, re-roofing isn’t that awful. It gets ugly it you have a really steep roof pitch, or if you have an flat EPDM roof in a brick home.

Windows 11 LTSC

I’m using Window 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC; the biggest issue I’ve had was that I couldn’t get my video card installed. I had to wait until there was an updated driver, a few weeks after I assembled my computer. Every time I tried to install the driver that was supposed to be the correct one, I got a BSOD.

Honestly, I like 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC better than I liked the 10 Pro version that I had. And–compared to the only Linux distro I’ve used, Tails–it’s fairly straightforward. And yes, I know the Tails is kind of a pain in the ass, and it’s not fair to judge all of Linux against that. But i’m old, and cranky, and just want Win 3.11 back.

Hello, fellow exmo.

I probably would have been ordained by now, but I left when the new CoC came out (2000, I think?) that–among other things–forbade members from speaking publicly as members about their own experiences within TST. The summary and capricious expulsion of numerous ministers that were agitating for change within the org confirmed to me that if congregations had autonomy, it was only because Doug and Cevin allowed it.

I was raised Mormon.

The first things that’s very important to know about the Mormon church is that they believe that they are led by direct revelation from god, and that god will never allow the ‘prophet’ of the church to lead the church astray. The ‘prophet’ is the head of the whole church, and Mormons believe he (and the prophet is always a man, because women are always subordinate to men in the Mormon church) receives revelation for the entire church and world. As you go down the chain of authority, each person is supposed to be receiving revelation for the people that are under them. So it is believed that if your bishop–who is a local congregation leader, not at all like a Catholic bishop–asks you to do something in his capacity as bishop, then that’s coming directly from god.

The second thing that’s critical to know about the Mormon church is that every member is very strongly encouraged to pray and ask god to confirm the truth of things. Members are told to read their scriptures (esp. the Book of Mormon) and study the words of Mormon ‘prophets’, and then pray about it. A warm, fuzzy feeling is believed to be the confirmation of the holy spirit that those things are correct; a lack of confirmation means that you need to pray harder, because those things are self evidently (</s>) the word of god.

Got it? Good, continuing on.

I didn’t particularly want to be a missionary, but it was expected that I would become one, so I did. I did not enjoy being a missionary; I absolutely hated it. The mission president–a man that presided over a specific geographical area and group of missionaries–largely did not believe in mental health, and told me to put on a happy face. I ended up having a nervous breakdown and became suicidal. I remember being told that “the light of the holy spirit has left your eyes”, and that the reason that I was suicidal was because I had sinned an allowed Satan into my heart. The solution that was prescribed by religious leaders was to pray more, study my scriptures more, bear my testimony more often, etc., and that I would be fine.

…But I knew that I had not sinned. How could it be that my religious leaders, people that were supposed to have the power from god to receive revelation for me, people that I had been promised would never lead me wrong when they were acting in their religious capacity, would be insisting that I must have sinned? What sin did they think that I had committed? (Spoiler: I’m actually high-functioning autistic, and the lifestyle demanded of missionaries was extremely stressful. That stress was what led to the nervous breakdown.) I was eventually sent to the LDS Social Services, which is a counseling org in the Mormon church; the church as a whole is very skeptical of therapists because they take a science-based approach rather than a religion-centric approach. The therapist decided that I was too preoccupied with sexual matters (which, fucking duh, I was 20, and was cut off from social interactions with people of my preferred gender while I was a missionary), and also counseled repentance, etc., along with some aversion therapy to make me feel even more shame about all things sexual.

Meanwhile, I had a psychiatrist for medication. The psychiatrist had a strictly science-based approach. He said that there wasn’t any clear reason why some people would become suicidal and others wouldn’t, but some medications might help.

It all eventually got me thinking: I knew that I wasn’t sinning, but my church leaders–the people that were supposed to be receiving revelation for me, on my behalf–were insisting that I must be. If I’ve been praying about the truth claims of the Mormon church, and had believed that the holy spirit has been told me that it’s all true, but the people that I believe have the gift of prophecy are completely wrong, what does this mean?

For me, the inescapable conclusion was that feelings were not a reliable indication of ‘truth’.

If feelings aren’t a way to know truth, then what is? Once you start studying the history of the Mormon church, the whole enterprise starts looking like a very sketchy con, and is certainly not something you would take at face value. Moreover, it turns out that all religions are relying on feelings that the religions say are from god in order to confirm that their religion is the One True Religion. Not only is there nothing that’s falsifiable about belief in Mormonism, there’s nothing falsifiable in religion in general.

Once you accept that, then the most reasonable answer is to say to say that either the existence of a god is unknowable with what we have right now, or that there is no god at all. I settled on the latter, although extraordinary evidence might be able to convince me.

Sure, I’m completely okay with that too. Although I was thinking of tackling fraud more of an ex post facto audit system, rather than adding in compliance paperwork.

I’m very much not opposed to taxation, including taxing me, if that means that people have stable jobs or get the help they need. And as long as billionaires also get guillotined.

Sure! It creates real jobs, while also discouraging people from fucking over the system. Even if there’s zero fraud happening, auditing the system to make sure isn’t going to hurt. (Well, it won’t hurt as long as they don’t remove people that are entitled to the benefits.)

In some ways, sure. I’m not religious, and I don’t have children. In terms of finances, no.

I def. agree with the issues in re: Dunbar’s number. Anarchism can, and does, work pretty well in small groups and communes. But scaling it to the size of a country… Well, that’s the hard part. But if you don’t, then authoritarian countries will eat you alive.

Those who want the role are also those you REALLY don’t want with that power.

That unfortunately seems to be the case with most cops as well; the ones that want to do it out of a sense of civic responsibility seem to get pushed out pretty quickly by the ones that should never have been cops in the first place. And–looping back around to anarchism–cops are a necessary evil because otherwise you quickly end up with vigilante groups that enforce a capricious set of morality and ethics.

I’ll give it a read.

I’m mostly an anarchist. But.

I think that there needs to be some degree of authoritarian, arbitrary power. Mostly because I’ve been in anarchist groups in the past, and when everyone has input into a decision, shit gets bogged down really fast. Not everyone understands a given issue and will be able to make an informed choice, and letting opinionated-and-ignorant people make choices that affect the whole group is… Not good.

The problem is, I don’t know how to balance these competing interests, or exactly where authoritarian power should stop. It’s easy to say, well, I should get to make choices about myself, but what about when those individual choices end up impacting other people? For instance, I eat meat, and yet I’m also aware that the cattle industry is a significant source of CO2; my choice, in that case, contributes to climate change, which affects everyone. …And once you start going down that path, it’s really easy to arrive at totalitarianism as the solution.

I also don’t know how to handle the issue of trade and commerce, and at what point it crosses the line into capitalism.

It’s all good. Firearms in general are an autistic special interest. (No, seriously. I’m high-functioning autistic, and guns have been a special interest for, um, a very long time.) I don’t expect anyone outside of policy wonks to have hard numbers memorized.

When looking at firearm homicides specifically, in terms of raw numbers (not rate), the low point was 2014, during Obama’s second term. It started to move upwards in '15 and '16, prior to Trump taking office, and continued increasing at the same pace through '17. We see the first real sharp jump in '18, but then an equally sharp decline in '19, back to levels on par with Obama’s last year in office, followed the next year by another sharp increase. Interestingly, Biden’s 2nd year as president (2022) had the most number of firearm homicides in, I dunno, 30-odd years?

We’d been on a long, downward trend in homicides since '92. It’s not clear to me what caused the rate to begin to head back up. I don’t think that Obama, Trump, or Biden can realistically be directly blamed for the bulk of it, although a small number of homicides at the margins might be more directly related to them (e.g., Trump encourages racial violence, and so a small number of homicide might be due to his tacit support). I don’t think that it’s directly related to economics either, because the economy that Obama inherited when he took office in 2009 had been wrecked by the housing bubble crash; it it was directly related to economics, then I would have thought that gun violence would be peaking around '09 or '10. I guess it could be a lagging indicator though? (…But there is a sharp increase in '20, when the pandemic gets really bad and unemployment hits record highs.)

Again, keep in mind that these are homicides, and not suicides. firearm suicides still make up the majority of deaths caused by firearms in the US.

OTOH, I understand what you mean about feeling less safe under Trump, even if there wasn’t an immediate spike in gun homicides. I know a lot of people–esp. LGBTQ+ people–are feeling very unsafe with Trump in the White House right now, and I believe that they’re right to feel unsafe and at-risk.