He believes something incredibly toxic and nuts, but I’m not sure it’s exactly that Christianity is “true,” but rather that it’s just so incredibly useful that it might as well be, and therefore it’s not hypocritical to espouse it with gusto, regardless of what you personally think about the supernatural.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
I don’t recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you’re better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.
Society’s movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it’s okay to fall back on older “tribal” religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It’s better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it’s not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It’s like Pascal’s wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.
Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you’re allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.
JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.
EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he’s sometimes portrayed.
Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.
Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.
This is interesting to consider. One of the reasons car centric countries make their peace with fatalities is that there is a regime and cultural expectations in place for assigning blame and imposing punishment, both criminal and civil. We know that other drivers are assholes and idiots, but there is the grim solace that if something happens they (or their insurers) will compensate us and that if it’s bad enough they may even go to jail. Furthermore, we presume that the assholes and idiots know that as well, and they will at least try not to do something stupid, especially since they could get hurt/killed too.
Given the available tech, a system relying on driverless cars is pretty much guaranteed to be safer overall, but people will resist it if there is a sense that no identifiable human is incentivized to minimize harm. If somebody gets killed in an accident and you just have Waymo (or whoever) stonewalling any efforts at compensation or justice, it becomes further dehumanizing and people will continue to prefer to take their chances with the assholes and idiots who might actually be held to account.
You come up with a regulatory regime that ensures proper insurance coverage with equal or preferably lesser friction (lord knows the American system has its issues), and also meaningful punishments to actual humans for reckless code/maintenance/routing/etc, then cultural acceptance will come.
TWSBIs for everybody!
Filled fountain pens might make parents madder than Vapes would, though.
Me: Why are they talking about cartridges? Those look like piston-fill demonstrator fountain pens to me!
Kit Secord from the one-season Rocketeer reboot for little kids.
Kipo (And her dad) from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.
Nemona from Pokémon Violet (and Friede from Horizons), plus a talking Pokédex that ended up too clunky to bring anyway.
Various levels of authenticity versus ease of assembly/comfort, and I’m proud of them regardless, but I’m tired, boss. Thank fuckin’ Christ that Nene Kusanagi from Project Sekai actually has a factory-made costume.
Sounds like he’s made peace with its living on in forks as well. Nice to see he’s doing okay.
lol, I didn’t want to presume, especially based on my experience with weak-ass European clothes dryers.
American dishwashers run very hot and use harsh detergents. Some dishes and cookware will state on their packing or even on themselves that they are not dishwasher safe.
Despite this, the sheer convenience of the dishwasher will make people ignore the warnings, and the objects retain their basic functionality just often enough that the meme can be an open-ended YOLO-like joke, phrased like parental encouragement, instead of merely mocking people who try it.
American Pie by Don McLean
Radio version or album version?
HTC had quite a run there. I still miss my HTC One X, back when it was actually interesting to get a new phone. These days I routinely forget which iPhone it is that I have.
Can’t contaminate the motor oil, soot, rubber, broken glass, microplastics, litter, and accidentally-spilled coffee with purposely-spilled coffee! I hope the enforcement officers didn’t damage their pearls, or let them slip into the drain, from all that clutching.
More seriously, this smacks of citation quotas to me.
Also amusing is that Mel there was born in New York State.
To be fair, we were much earlier for WW2 than for WW1, and it looks like we’re just going to go ahead and start WW3 ourselves!
I wonder if this is just because it was made cheaply in Asia and not designed for the average heft of a trumpet.
I’m sure it’s this. Everything about this, down to the variable delays that different customers endure, screams out that this is a shady, shoestring operation stalling until they finally hit minimum order quantity with their drop-shipper in China.
That is certainly the highest “setup complexity to punchline payoff” ratio I’ve seen in a while. I’m not laughing exactly, but I am impressed.
I absolutely adore my kiddo and find meaning in my role as a dad that I did in very few other things I’ve done in life.
That said, it definitely does change your life in a way where you will not be able to prioritize the things that are just for you anymore. I am both deeply happy to have become a parent and simultaneously very glad that my wife and I waited and got our finances in order and traveled and lived our life as a couple for almost a decade before we decided to be parents. For parents whose story wasn’t quite as deliberate, I can imagine a lot of conflicting feelings.
Dear Jordan Catalano, Angela is not as into you as she thought.
Also, for Tron Ares specifically, I know that I am instantly turned off the moment a franchise that mostly exists in another world/dimension/etc. decides it’s going to do something in “the real world.” I know Tron isn’t as bright-line as other IPs, but the appeal is still largely in seeing how the inside of computers and networks is anthropomorphized and analogized into an alternate universe that comments on contemporary anxieties about technology. Nobody was asking to see light cycles and recognizers in LA.
Certainly possible, but I tend to think something else, assuming the quote is real. I think it’s literally about bad poetry. In the collective grief after the sinking, undoubtedly many people who were not and would never be professional poets attempted to write something in memoriam. Some of these were undoubtedly published in various papers. This blurb has the feel of a Twain or Bierce or especially a Mencken, where an educated cynic is calling out the earnest-but-unskilled for their lack of self-awareness in thinking they had a quality contribution to the public discussion.