The short answer is you don’t. Even in philosophy, a leading model of “truth” is something like “a statement is true if it’s true”. We humans are doomed to be confused and unsure.

Everyone assumes that Uncle Tom was a character like Sam Jackson’s Stephen from “Django Unchained” or Uncle Ruckus from “Boondocks”. The character in the book is nothing like this. In fact, Uncle Tom is an admirable character. How this man’s name became a slur is more complicated than it first appears.

The weird part about reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is that its advocacy literature, and most of us don’t need much convincing that slavery is bad. But we need this context to understand that Uncle Tom was created by a white woman to appeal to a white audience because it’s his tragedy that is supposed to persuade the reader. Uncle Tom didn’t fashion himself to please some master like Calvin Candy, he was created whole-cloth as a device to awaken empathy of white audience. It’s not his character, it’s his raison d’être.

What’s learning good for?

Do tankies really think that 10+million Americans boycotted an election in solidarity with the Palestinians? This is why they’re not taken seriously. k

Even when the plan is “do nothing” Tankies fuck it up.

Prices are falling in Florida, and inventory is stacking up.

AI is like the office worker who’s the nephew of the CEO. They’re never going to go away, but can be useful for tedious work, so long as someone checks behind them.

Ocean trash comes from plastic manufacturers. Responsible wealthy countries ship their dutiful recyclables to garbage pits in poor countries.

Most poor people don’t even have the education or resources to polymerize crude into poly-vinyl, it’s harder than you’d think.

During the early '00 flight sim fans were enjoying a Russian game called IL2. The other offerings from Microsoft and Janes just couldn’t compete with the level of detail in the flight models. Turns out, the people working on the game were all trained in aerospace engineering. The guys who went to school to work for the famous Russian aviation firms were making video games instead because it paid better.

Systems are not the sum of the individual actors who participate in them. Systems can influence and even control individuals back. Therefore, individual flaws in character or intellect are necessary, but not adequate to explain why systems are flawed.

Consider the future imagined in the movie “Idiocracy 2005”. Society is collapsing because people are dumb. This is the explanation for all problems in that society. Capitalism, Resource extraction, environmental degradation, political corruption, and a rather authoritarian government are all blameless. The implication is that capitalism an authoritarianism are good if we could just be smart about it.

This is a big difference between left and right thinking. Republicans argue problems can be solved by reforming individuals; the police are good, there are just a few bad apples. Or that the right individual, at the helm of a system, can clean up all the issues with strength and resolve. This is the central pitch for supporting Trump.

This is a Neoliberal anthem: rights are for citizens; employees need to sit down and STFU.

Why do we reject tyranny.gov, but embrace tyranny.com?

IQ does show differences between the races. However, this isn’t evidence that white supremacy is correct. It’s evidence that IQ testing measures culture when it’s supposed to be measuring biology.

Race is constructed. Genetic, evolutionary, anthropological, and archeological evidence all point to shared ancestry and kinship. All the people’s of the world aren’t separated by near enough distance or time to explain a significant biological difference. And that’s ignoring the wide interbreeding that was always a thing. Remember Rome was cosmopolitan empire. Many of those Roman soldiers who marched down the first paved roads of London were swinging black cocks.

So what can we make of a so called “objective” measure of a “biologically determined” trait that hews to culture above biology? This isn’t just a bias that needs to be tweaked, the whole concept of biologically determined intelligence is a reification fallacy and IQ as an instrument is hopelessly broken and should be abandoned.

No, because the vegans are right, eating meat isn’t justifiable. You can’t “both sides” morality. The attempt is an admission that you’ve lost the plot.

Consider the possibility that your feelings of guilt or being judged is a call coming from inside the house.

This is not because of an executive order from Biden. This is because of the murderous war perpetrated by the criminal Putin.

If the whole Linux project died out, it wouldn’t be on the top 10,000 important things that have been destroyed by Russia.

Art isn’t a progression. “Realism” isn’t necessarily a goal.

If capturing some subject in the most naturalistic way possible was the goal of art, there would be no need for paintings after the invention of the camera, and sculpture would be obsolete because of 3d scanning. Art must be something beyond capturing nature, otherwise there would be no reason for humans to do it.

I suspect that this is a smart TV being used as a monitor.

The King James Bible has the phrase those who “pissith against the wall” several times. In context it’s pejorative for the rude class or enemies of King David, but Christians who insist on the KJV struggle to read and understand it, and have taken it as God’s own description of male. and therefore pissing standing up isn’t just an aspect of masculinity, but it’s essence.

An article I read recently suggested that storing passkeys with Google, Apple, and M$ didn’t have interoperability. Like you need a Mac/iPhone or PC/Android to make it work. Is this true? Can I store a passkey in a platform agnostic way?

VR isn’t a mature technology. Every design is bad. For what little attention they’ve paid to human eyes, they completely ignore the existence of a human neck. It’s the kind of device that discourages you from playing games because it’s a pain to get out, strap on, and wear. And this is from a guy who keeps his flight sims on the slow hard drive because it takes 5min to get physically set up anyway.

It’s important not to let cynicism become conspiratorial ideation. This is not a ploy to get troops killed as a rationale for American involvement. This is a defensive anti-missile anti-drone anti-aircraft battery. The soldiers operating it may be the safest people in Israel, at least from Iranian attack.

I’d go further and speculate that Iran would avoid deliberately attacking this high value target to avoid escalation. I’d go further still and speculate that Iran is counting on her missiles being shot down so that she can attack Israel without doing enough damage to spark a wider war.

I don’t count Iran as peaceniks, their behavior so far looks like a Nation keen to save face, while avoiding a war it’s not ready for.

The real rational for sending troops is that there is no time to train up IDF soldiers to operate it.