(I meant it as a compliment.)
illegal
Dystopian.
In the UK, former Prime Minister Liz “crash the economy within 40 days off taking office” Truss proposed criminalising giving homeless people a tent.
I was appalled.
It didn’t get passed, partly because her party got rid of her faster than you can say “unpopular economic mismanagement”, thank goodness.
The more people that treat homeless people as valuable human beings the better the world is.
Excellent. Thanks for answering. This was really worth asking and I think that there’s ocean of good in you. I’m intrigued by “likely to become a crime pretty soon” but don’t feel you have to elaborate.
Yeah, I get that, but you’re avoiding the question: what are you proud of, for yourself?
See, this stuff with putting other people down, it just makes me wonder if there’s not anything in your own life to feel positive about? Like, what are you proud of, for yourself?
What kind of inferiority complex makes people claim they “own” others that they disagree with?
Uh, the politics was an example of similar debating techniques, I made no assertion about your political viewpoint at all, that’s entirely opaque to me.
I also made no assertion about your personality, just that your viewpoint is atheist, and I made no ad hominem about you unless you have contempt for atheists and you consider that me asserting that you believe in atheism is offensive.
I did assert that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” is condescending and dismissive and that if you don’t believe that, you need to improve your social awareness, and I absolutely stand by that.
The words logical, irrational, and unintelligent are used because that is literally the topic of the post.
You say that as if it’s an external environment that didn’t come from your own beliefs about religion. You’re the OP! You set the topic yourself! You yourself framed it this way! The self dissociation and lack of awareness of your own beliefs is even more striking than normal here.
I don’t believe that you’re wrong about lack of scientific evidence on the issue of theism vs atheism at all. I do think you’re wrong about whether you’re at all neutral on the subject.
Would it help you if we called it anti-theistic rather than atheistic? Regarding your overwhelmingly anti-theistic perspective, there’s a difference between belief and proof that you’re ignoring - you can’t prove your atheism and you disrespect people who believe things without proof, so you deny your atheism.
But you believe lots of things without proof. It’s how we go about our daily lives. It’s normal. You don’t get your spectrometer out so that you don’t inadvertently believe without proof that the skirt is blue despite knowing full well that you are vulnerable to optical illusions, and you don’t have to have proof that the creepy guy is a creep to avoid him. This is normal. This is how we evolved to learn about the world.
I think the reason that I’ve upset you is that I’ve caused you cognitive dissonance, because I assert that you believe atheism without proof and it seriously challenges your self image because the one argument you used against religion all the time was that believing things without proof is illogical, irrational and unintelligent, and whilst you’re happy to claim that you mean that in the nicest, most neutral, inoffensive and non-insulting way, you don’t half react badly when I put you at the receiving end of your own criticism.
If you really in your heart truly believed that atheism and religious belief both have equal merit and there’s no rational way to decide between them, you wouldn’t spend the whole day inviting religious folk to explain to you why they’re so irrational, illogical and unintelligent when it comes to religion. You have an opinion, and it’s very strongly held, but you never admit it, because it’s not as logical as claiming there’s no answer and you so very strongly want to believe that you’re logical and rational. But I want you to accept yourself as you really are, a bunch of flesh and blood, leaping to conclusions every day on everything based on flimsy evidence and little logical deduction, controlled by emotions and flooded with hormones all day long. We all are. It’s ok. We evolved to have gut feelings for our own protection. You believe atheism but you assert agnostism intellectually. You dismiss the evidence of your own behaviour and attitudes to keep up the self pretence that you drew beliefs are exclusively deduced logically from cast iron evidence, but that’s just not how humans decide things that they care about at all. It’s how they solve maths problems, not how they decide how to treat each other on social media.
I think you really need to come to terms with the fact that you’re fundamentally human and accept that you have some beliefs you can’t prove, like everyone does.
Remember that you believe in the supremacy of science because your parents and teachers taught you to and told you stories of the empirical method’s victory over philosophy for making accurate predictions, not because you preformed some grand comparative experimental study of different philosophies yourself. We believe what we believe because it seems right to us, and we so very very very rarely get out the tape measure and national statistics when we think someone is unusually tall. It’s ok to have things you believe that you didn’t prove, it’s not ok to believe that you prove everything that you think is true; you wouldn’t even be able to have breakfast before it was too late if you did.
No, I don’t know you at all, all I’ve got to go on is the way you’re behaving in this thread.
If you think that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” isn’t condescending and dismissive, your social awareness is extremely low, and I also think your self awareness about your own beliefs is rather low.
You like to assert that you are balanced, but you also like to spend all day calling religious folk unintelligent, illogical and irrational.
Your “have a good night buddy” is as utterly unconvincing as your neutrality.
Sure, and Trump claims to respect women equally and has no qualms promoting women, but his contempt for them leaks out and the overall picture is starkly clear.
Maybe you don’t realise that normal people consider words like “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” pejorative.
Your behaviour is very like the people on here before the election spending at their time explaining why the Democrats are terrible and people shouldn’t vote for them, but when challenged, claimed that they didn’t support Trump at all. It was never clear whether they were lying to others or themselves
You’re being condescendingly dismissive about other people’s beliefs, overwhelmingly about religious beliefs, and I begin to think that you yourself believe that agnostism is the most defensible intellectual position, so you adopt it in theory, but you use it mainly to belittle religious viewpoints. I think emotionally and in behaviour you’re an atheist, but you’re not prepared to admit it to yourself because your intellectual heroes are agnostic and you look down on staunchly atheistic people, despite behaving like one online.
Give in. It’s 2025. Be yourself.
You present yourself as an agnostic but are very one sided in the debate, and you only have criticism for religious people. If you’re going to use words like irrational and illogical for religious beliefs, at least have the intellectual honesty that your position is far more atheist than you’re admitting to us or yourself. It’s not nuanced or balanced at all.
Every time you’re challenged on your beliefs, you claim to not know, but when you’re challenging other people’s beliefs you use words like “irrational” and “illogical”.
You don’t behave like someone who is calmly on the fence at all.
I worry that your debating position and your actual beliefs are out of alignment and I’m not sure whether you’re misleading us or yourself.
I’ve addressed both popularity (waned - rust is the cool new difficult-to-learn principled language now) and bitrottenness (rock solid). I’m not sure what else you were meaning if it wasn’t either of these.
Absolutely. It’s just that less fuss is being made about it on hacker news because the cool kids say you’ll be a better programmer in other languages if you learn rust when they used to say that you’ll be a better programmer in other languages if you learn haskell.
With stack (consistent package version snapshot database based project starter and build tool) instead of cabal, you get the transferable and repeatable build benefits of docker with none of the hassle. Just stack new at the start and stack build or stack repl during development. Nothing gets bitrotten any more.
I don’t think that’s how it works.
Have you come to 2025 in a time machine? Can I borrow it?
I am not in this chart because my favourite programming languages are too nerdy for the cool programming nerds to include in their nerd chart.
As a haskell nerd, I feel that I have the moral authority to declare you king of the nerds.
“Ha! You think your language has macros? You call that a macro?! This list processing code is a list of tokens, why wouldn’t it be able to edit itself?”
It breaks my brain.
Very true.
It’s been genuinely good to talk. All the best for next week.