You have the same beliefs as your great uncle. That’s great. Does everyone have the same beliefs as their family members from 80 years ago?

Are you your ancestors? Am I mine?

Me: Just because MAGA’s ancestors fought Nazi Germans doesn’t mean MAGA aren’t fascists.

You: By that logic you are a fascist.

OK buddy.

I’ve heard (debated) etymology that “man” is gender neutral because in older English, “male” would have been “wereman” and “female” would have been “wifman,” so the “man” morpheme just designated “human” and the prefix designated the gender.

Which does imply that "were"wolves are exclusively male, and a female wolf person really should be called a wifwolf.

“Gee I’m so grateful for all this trauma.”

For me it was the natural conclusion from coming to accept a no-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics. Before that, the ghost in the machine seemed to me like maybe it could be hiding somewhere in the spooky apparent randomness of wavefunction collapse, but if the universal wavefunction fully and deterministically describes the evolution in time of all particles everywhere, and there are no terms for “thoughts and feelings and free will” in that equation, then they are epiphenomena.

Political violence ≠ fascism. Violence is what people turn to when they can’t achieve what they need by merely talking and voting. Cf. every revolution, ever. Including the American one.

The election chances have just shot up.

And if we were talking about whether it were real, or whether people believed it in those specific terms, you’d have a point. But since we’re talking about your assertion that major earth religions are “directly excluded” by that definition of “higher beings,” i still fail to see the exclusion.

No one, I think, is in my tree.

I mean, it must be high or low.

Turns out that one was actually universal.

Run command: “Fiat Lux”

Warning: it will take 7 days to complete operation. Continue?

“This had better be good.”

“Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting, I’ll come back on the 8th day.”

“Oh, this IS good.”

“What are these stupid apes doing? Fine, I’ll educate them myself.”

Instantiate avatar: “Jesus_Nazareth”

Which part is directly excluded?

“What? This group of fascists has absolutely nothing to do with that group of fascists. This group’s ancestors fought that group.”

If we had the technological power, would humans run simulations of universes with Planck length precision? Obviously yes. So extrapolating from our one and only example of intelligent life (us), it seems like intelligent life enjoys stimulating universes. If our reality were the result of that kind of project, and the engineers lived outside the laws of physics, I would call them higher beings. And they could be as hands-off or as interventionist as they pleased.

Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

https://youtu.be/OOCdIY_HKM4?feature=shared

You remind me of God in this classic:

A holocaust survivor dies of old age and goes to heaven. When he gets there, he meets God and tells him a holocaust joke.

God says, “That’s not funny.”

And the man says, “I guess you had to be there.”

Aw, come on.

“Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.”

“Where’s the best place to hide after committing murder? Behind a badge.”

“Did you know today is the anniversary of the Jonestown massacre? I’d tell you a joke about it, but the punch line is too long.”

Yeah, robots looking at photos of kids that their parents voluntarily posted on the internet is no laughing matter. Way more serious than, say, violent crime. And nobody makes jokes about that, do they?

While I personally wouldn’t want AI inserting trains into photos of my kids without my consent, many kids like trains, and they could add some whimsy to an otherwise uninteresting picture.

This, but unironically.