Rusty Shackleford

I’m not racist if I say I hate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religion is not a race, it’s fundamentally an assertion of an ontology based upon the primacy of the god of Abraham/Ibrahim, Yahweh/Jehovah.

The belief in the existence, omnipresence, and infallibility of such a being as described by their texts is a detriment to our species and may ultimately catastrophically destroy civilization.

One chooses to believe or continue believing this. One can’t choose their ethnicity. If I say I hate those religions, I’m saying I hate their ideas on how reality works, not where they’re from or what they look like.

The CCP, the RNC, and the DNC are not your friends.

Vote your conscience. Always remember to see who’s funding who, who will gain, and who will lose. There are better choices than others, even when confronted by only bad choices.

Gun nerds deserve being laughed at for getting upset over it and so do tech nerds.

People are allowed to ridicule me for nerding out my passion pompously, or any sort of perceived sincerity, for that matter.

I’ve always held that sincerity alone shouldn’t implicitly justify immunity from ridicule, but the ridicule tends to work if isn’t sincere in its own right.

What’s better is using it as a handy way to temper my own zealotry.

Complaining about people complaining does get old fast, however.

Your are assailed by many threats: the religious, the nihilists, the corporatists, the fascists, and the alleged “collectivists”. Extreme authoritarian “leftists”, A.K.A. “tankies” (i.e., apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Xi Jingping, etc.), are threats to a free, egalitarian, and open society, are just as violently authoritarian as their religious, corporatist, and fascist competitors, and should be treated with the contempt, distrust, and ridicule they deserve.

They claim to speak and fight for the proletariat, promising a new utopia, never before seen, once their revolution executes the last “class-traitor”. In practice, once they’re finished with “seizing the means of production”, they’ll never relinquish control and become the new ruling class.

They’ll assume the mantle of an enlightened elite post-revolutionary administration to guide the proletariat to their promised utopia of “each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. In practice, "the party leadership needs the most, because they’re obviously the most able” in reorganizing the economic and political structure of society. The utopia of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will never exist, only the dictatorship of the “revolutionary party”. Repression and execution await those who question their claims and decisions.

These supposed champions of labor are really harbingers of death - of the mind and the body. They claim to be the true authoritative “voice of the people”. Understand what they really are; power over everything and everyone, forever, is what they seek. They want you either as a true believer (a willing pawn) or dead, just like all of the other supposedly benevolent dictators who promised utopias throughout history.

They’re akin to the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the loudest voices in the revolution, usurpers of a righteous cause, but a bit “more equal” than everyone else after the farmer is done away with. Fortunately, the pigs, like the farmer, got their comeuppance in the end of the story. Make these pigs squeal.

very LOUD minority

self-anointed gatekeepers

top posts are continually about shaming other users

Crabs in a bucket. No one’s allowed to succeed, unless everyone™ does.

I propose that we treat AI as ancillas, companions, muses, or partners in creation and understanding our place in the cosmos.

While there are pitfalls in treating the current generation of LLMs and GANs as sentient, or any AI for that matter, there will be one day where we must admit that an artificial intelligence is self-aware and sentient, practically speaking.

To me, the fundamental question about AI, that will reveal much about humanity, is philosophical as much as it is technical: if a being that is artificially created, has intelligence, and is functionally self-aware and sentient, does it have natural rights?