ArbitraryValue @ ArbitraryValue @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Yes, and I'm certainly unhappy about Adams' performance (as are most New Yorkers). However, I think you're wrong about his status as a former cop - it was not something he hid or downplayed when he was campaigning, and many people voted for him because he was the law and order candidate.

There are no serious GOP candidates for mayor in New York - that's why the Democratic primary rather than the general election is such a big deal. And the local Overton window is moving so far left that a man who supported Defund the Police back when it was cool (he says he doesn't anymore) is probably going to be the next mayor.

I'd say that Adams ran as a centrist candidate. Bloomberg too.

What does vote splitting have to do with a Democratic primary?

Not the mayor I want, but then again I didn't particularly want Cuomo either. I wish there had been a viable centrist candidate who hadn't resigned in shame from his last position.

I'm not expecting prominent muscles. I just don't want my stomach protruding like an inflated balloon even when the rest of me is bony.

I think posture does have something to do with it, because when I stand up straight and tense my stomach muscles, I look a lot better. I suspect that the problem isn't so much that I have excess fat on my stomach (although I do have some) but rather that my stomach muscles aren't preventing my stomach from bulging out unless I'm deliberately focusing on keeping them tense. I think better posture can be made subconscious (or else why have adults always told children to stand up straight) but I don't think there's a way to keep the muscles tense subconsciously. Or is there?

Speaking of posture, my new office chair has a significant forward curve at my lower back which I find uncomfortable. (I used to sit in an old-timey banker's chair with a back that sloped smoothly backwards.) Is that because my posture is bad? Am I supposed to be sitting in a way that conforms to that curve? I know some people who strap cushions to their car seats in order to add that curve. I find those cushions really uncomfortable too, but are those people actually on to something or are their backs just different from mine?

I'm skinny everywhere except on my stomach. My body thinks that when I diet to lose weight it's because I want to look like Skeletor, so the first place I lose fat from is my face and it becomes gaunt and looks unhealthy.

I thought I could see piles of debris at the bottoms of some slopes in the after pictures which weren't there in the before pictures, but now that I'm looking at them again, I'm no longer sure that what I'm seeing isn't just a difference in the shadows. (Presumably the pictures were taken at different times of the day.) I'm going to edit my original statement.

No. First, even enriched uranium is not particularly radioactive without human intervention (with a half-life of 704 million years). Second, the uranium stockpile may be buried under a mountain of rubble, rather than dispersed by the explosion. Third, who knows if the Iranian government is telling the truth; they have good reason to claim that their stockpile is intact even if it isn't.

The landslides at Fordow look extensive. The whole mountain must have shaken.

Edit: Maybe what I'm seeing is just shadows rather than new debris at the bottoms of some slopes.

Here's an incident that is only tangentially related to what we're talking about, but it's one that I found memorable. My grandmother was reading a tabloid newspaper (which she tends to believe) and it apparently had an article about UFOs. She turned to me and told me that, according to the newspaper, space aliens were real and visiting Earth. Then she went about her ordinary business - the thing about the aliens was simply an interesting bit of trivia for her.

I think her reaction was not in fact particularly unusual, but I found it baffling. The arrival of space aliens would be perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened to humanity. The entire future of the species would hang in the balance, and everything would hinge on what the aliens want. I know my grandmother very well but I still don't really understand how she thinks about things like this. The best I can come up with is that she believes in many fantastical things and therefore just one more fantastical thing changes little for her.

This isn't a direct response to what you're describing but I think it's relevant as an illustration of one way how the fantastical can be less important than the mundane for people.

The idea that Trump can start wars as he sees fit is a frightening one, but I'm not sure that in practice Congress is capable of making these decisions (especially with regard to unconventional military actions as opposed to traditional wars). It is simply too dysfunctional an institution, although I suppose institutional paralysis would lead to the outcome that isolationists and pacifists want.

I think people's behavior is determined much more by social conventions and the expectations of their community (in addition to pragmatic self-interest) than it is by logical reasoning. I'll risk being the preachy vegetarian by discussing people's attitudes towards eating meat. Most people sincerely believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, and also that factory farming (if not all killing) is cruel. Yet they eat meat. I even know some people who started eating meat again after being ethical vegetarians. Did they change their minds about whether or not harming animals is bad? No. If pressed, they feel guilty but they don't like to talk about it. The reason they're eating meat is because it's convenient and almost everyone expects them to, not because they reasoned from first principles. Likewise with religion - if no one else is giving everything away to the poor and everyone will think you're crazy if you do rather than praising you, you're not going to give everything away to the poor even if it would make sense to do so given what you believe.

Edit: Kidney donation is another example. I met a woman once who donated a kidney to a friend of her mother's. This person wasn't someone particularly dear to her, but she found out that he needed a kidney to live and she gave him hers. I think that what she did is commendable, but I still have both my kidneys. This is despite the fact that I sincerely believe that if, for example, I saw a drowning child then I would risk my life to save him. People would think I was a hero if I saved the child, or that I was a coward if I didn't try. Meanwhile almost everyone I know would think I went crazy if I donated a kidney to a stranger. My relatives would be extremely worried, and they would try to talk me out of it. I'm not going to do something difficult, painful, and (to an extent) dangerous when everyone I know would disapprove, even if in principle I think risking my life to save another's is a good thing to do.

I'm upset by many things going on in the world but I'm not overwhelmed because there are no relevant decisions for me to make. Look at it this way: what's the difference between reading a book that says Genghis Khan killed a hundred more people than you thought he did centuries ago and reading a newspaper that says a hundred people died in some catastrophe yesterday? In both cases, you've learned that total strangers died in the past, there was nothing you could have done, and there will be no direct effect on your own life. It's natural to be more upset by the more recent deaths (and I admit that I would be) but I think it isn't logical.

The exception to that is AI. I think I do need to change my own life in order to increase my chance of thriving in an AI-dominated future, at least because if some jobs will still exist then I'll need to be able to do one of them.

(I suppose "Do I flee the country?" is another decision I technically need to consider, but the answer is "No unless things get dramatically worse." Thus there isn't much to think about on a daily basis.)

The intent is presumably to force Iran to accept that it cannot be safe, and that the best it can do is to appease its enemies. That is, as a matter of fact, currently true if the USA decides to see things through. It's a situation that many countries have been forced to accept over the course of history (and one that Iran has been eager to impose on is neighbors).

I know that there are religious scientists and I think humans often compartmentalize beliefs in such a way that their belief about the supernatural doesn't affect their assessment of real-world situations. I'll even go further and say that often it seems like their belief affects their behavior much less than it logically ought to, with some (but not all) people who apparently sincerely believe in an all-seeing God and an afterlife still acting just like atheists in relevant situations. In this context, the fanatics are sometimes technically the more rational ones - I disagree with their premises, but their actions make sense if those premises are considered true.

I'm an atheist. I dated a woman once who believed in spirits. I think she experienced night terrors among other things and interpreted them as supernatural phenomena. It didn't cause problems then but I was a lot younger and I think now I'm less tolerant of that sort of thing. But who knows - I was crazy about her so maybe if I meet a woman I'm crazy about like that again then I'll tolerate anything.

More recently I've dated people who believe in a vague sort of life after death but never someone who practiced any religion. I think I would immediately rule out practicing religious people if I were going through a list (as when dating online) but if I met someone in person, really liked her, and then found out she was religious then I'm not sure what I would do. It would definitely be off-putting.

The problem for me isn't the lifestyle differences but rather my impression that religious people are missing the point about the basic nature of existence, when it really should be obvious. It makes me feel like I'm patronizing them, because to be frank I don't tend to think of them as my intellectual equals. (And I know that makes me sound like a pompous jerk.)

I completely quit reddit in protest after using it for over ten years when it threatened to replace the moderators of a small subreddit I participated in after that subreddit shut down during the API protests. I don't actually care about the API myself (I never used anything other than old reddit) but I thought that reddit had no moral (as opposed to merely legal) right to take over something the mods had built and it merely hosted.

Lemmy is worse, but at least I'm following my principles.

I don't think that Iran is going to get much useful sympathy from any country not already on its side (and of those, Russia has other priorities). Iran's ambitions have put it at odds with both Western countries and the Arab world and international law (even if it is on Iran's side - I don't know) is never going to lead countries to act against the dictates of realpolitik.

I also don't think that failing to destroy these facilities necessarily makes a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable, given that Israel and the USA apparently have total air dominance. The infrastructure needed to deploy nuclear ICBMs can't all be kept deep underground and Iran's dependence on oil exports makes its economy particularly vulnerable to strategic bombing. I just don't trust Trump to see things through if his initial attempts fail - he's too impulsive. (And I'm not sure the moral calculus remains the same either - it's one thing to blow up a few underground weapons labs and quite another to engage in a strategic bombing campaign against the entire country.)