Since we have been getting so many anonymous comments lately, I thought I should repost the comments policy. It's very old: in 2015 it was nine, so it must now be a teenager. Anonymous comments are allowed, but must be signed with some kind of pseudonym that you'll stick by so that we can keep everybody straight. It's hard to carry on a conversation with three different "Anonymous" at once, not being sure which one said what or if they're all the same guy.Anyway, here it is.Please be welcome, so long as you will adhere to this form.I adopted [this policy] from the sadly-defunct Texas Mercury, a fringe publication but one whose bold assertion of well considered and unusual ideas I always enjoyed:As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.Comments failing to uphold those principles run the risk of being deleted without warning. In the year and some months since I adopted that as the policy here, I've added one additional point: hit-and-run comments, as well as anonymous comments, will generally be deleted. If you're a regular here, and willing to stand up and fight for what you believe, you can say pretty much anything that isn't a personal attack on a fellow reader. If you're just wandering through, or unwilling to leave your name (even a false name you'll stand by will do, e.g., "Grim"), pass on. This is a hall, and regular readers are honored guests not to be troubled by cowards.Fair enough? Well, fair or unfair, those are the rules.
The only thing that's been added since is that off-topic comments may be marked as SPAM, which will cause them to disappear from user's experience. I don't delete them, but I do sometimes so mark them because we've had some people over the years who proved it necessary.Try not to do anything that will make me add to this list. I liked it better when it was simpler.
donkey's mistake left 51 deadAccording to foreign media, worshippers inside a mosque in #Afghanistan were performing their prayers when a frightened donkey bolted and entered the mosque. Some angry worshippers opened fire on the donkey, killing it.The news reached the donkey's owner, who, enraged, rushed to the mosque, opened fire on the worshippers with a hail of bullets, and fled.Thirteen worshippers were killed inside the mosque.The remaining worshippers, enraged, launched an attack on the donkey owner's village using light and heavy weapons, killing 38 people, including 33 women.Ultimately, a donkey going to a mosque resulted in the deaths of 51 people.
Having said that, I'd like to correct something I said on a Spaces where I commented that organizing with a foreign power to overthrow our government is "the very definition of treason."I did some legal research and that's not quite true.The federal law governing this is 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which reads as follows:"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."The question then becomes, what is an "enemy" that must be "adhere[d]" to in order for it to be treason?Like with most complex issues of law, there is not a 100% straightforward answer, but an 1863 SCOTUS case, U.S. v. Greathouse, suggests that an "enemy" in this context must be in an open state of armed conflict with the U.S. for a nation to be an "enemy."So, technically, the Color Revolution plotters are likely not legally committing "treason" unless they are coordinating with Iran, the only nation we are currently in armed conflict with. (And they may well be, who knows!)
To the contrary, both the statute and the Constitution's text on the subject contain the "or" operator. No foreign government and no foreign enemy is necessary for a behavior to constitute treason. Treason can be fully constituted by waging war against the United States.
Attempting any sort of revolution against the government is a species of warfighting, 'color' revolution or not. The attempt to supplant the government by revolution, however often they proclaim that they are devoted to nonviolent means, is a species of warfighting. There is no way the nonviolence will prove to be more than rhetorical, but even supposing it were possible -- say, perhaps, by enlisting an AI swarm that effectively but nonviolently disabled the existing government so you could swoop in and impose another -- you would have destroyed a government without the consent of the governed, and replaced it with one to which they did not consent.
Treason can be the right thing to do, and sometimes -- often! -- has been. It is a wager of battle, however, and losers of that wager pay with their lives. It should be undertaken only by those who honestly believe in it and are willing to gamble their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
Though there are seven archangels altogether, St. Raphael, also known as Azarias, is one of the three Archangels named in Sacred Scripture; the other two are St. Michael (the warrior angel) and St. Gabriel (the messenger angel). St. Raphael is the healer angel; his very name in Hebrew means "God has healed."We meet him first in the Book of Tobias -- a small book, consisting only of fourteen chapters.
Every AI you use right now has a massive blind spot. At its core, it is just a giant autocomplete engine.It is brilliant at language, but fundamentally terrible at rigorous logic.When you ask an AI to solve a complex math problem, execute a multi-step coding workflow, or map out a business strategy, it doesn't actually "think."It guesses what the next word should be based on probability.That is why your AI hallucinates. It uses vibes to do math.Now, a new paper called "Hybrid Reasoning Agents" just completely changed the paradigm.Researchers realized you can't fix this by just making the model bigger. You have to change how it processes reality.They took the creative, language-generating power of a standard LLM (System 1) and wired it directly into a deterministic, symbolic logic engine (System 2).Instead of predicting the next word and hoping it's right, the AI drafts a solution and instantly runs it through a strict logical solver to prove it works.If the logic fails, the AI catches it, rewrites it, and tests it again. All in the background. All before you ever see the output.It perfectly bridges the gap between neural networks (which guess) and symbolic logic (which proves).And the results are staggering.Complex reasoning and planning tasks that completely break traditional models are now being solved with near-perfect accuracy.Because the AI is no longer relying on probability to verify its own logic.
This is NOT the great idea that they think it is. All of you who followed the Nicomachean Ethics discussion last year know why: this is precisely the error that Aristotle warns against in EN I.3.
Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.
By treating analogical reasoning that can apply to people or physical objects as if it should be strict logic with proofs, you open the door to a host of errors.
