WatDabney

All the billionaires are lining up to swear their fealty and get a slice of the oligarch pie.

He's cosplaying a father.

That was the plan all along.

All of the Christian Nationalist jazz was just a cover for the dual purpose of winning the support of the religious right and distracting from their real goal, which, from the start, has been to fully institutionalize a government that serves the interests of the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else.

Yes - to some notable degree, that's the system we already have, but with some important distinctions. Under the current system, there are still policies and agencies and programs to nominally limit the abuses of the wealthy and/or protect the interests of the common people. The wealthy can generally manage to get around them, but that requires exploiting loopholes and jumping through complex legal hoops and greasing palms and, if all else fails, paying fines.

The goal is to eliminate all of that so that the wealthy few are entirely unconstrained - so that they won't even have to pretend to do anything other than expand and protect their own privilege, and there will be no legal recourse at all for all of the people they will exploit along the way.

astroturfed

Ah, the irony...

We could well be heading towards something interesting in the not very distant future.

I'm not sure if Musk sincerely believes his wealth makes him untouchable or if he's too self-absorbed to even consider the matter, but it works out to the same thing either way - he's likely wrong.

He can get away with a fair bit manipulating an emotionally stunted egomaniac like Trump, but when he starts trying to butt into European politics, he's going to find himself running up against families that have been pulling political strings for centuries now, and who don't fancy crude upstarts with nothing more than money going for them, and if he proves to be too much of a problem for them, they're going to squash him like a bug.

that has been argued for ages when people say that Atheism is a religion because it's allegedly a position of faith.

And there's the straw man, right on schedule...

If you go back and read what i actually said, I never made that broad and obviously inaccurate claim.

My point, literally from the very first sentence that I wrote, concerned only those atheists, like Dawkins, who don't stop at disbelief, but instead hold to an affirmative belief that God does not exist.

Like it or not, that belief does not have sufficient evidence to prove its truth, and therefore to hold nonetheless that it is in fact true is an act of faith. That has nothing at all to do with religion either way - it's just simple epistemology. A claim of likelihood can be supported with incomplete evidence, but a claim of certain truth must and can only be supported by incontrovertible proof, and there is not incontrovertible proof for the assertion "God does not exist."

I fully recognize that that's not the position held by all atheists, and I sincerely doubt that it's even the position held by most - it's likely that most simply content themselves with disbelief in the assertion that God does exist. It is, exactly as I said, a position held by some, and most notably by Dawkins.

And more broadly, that's exactly why I never claim that it's a universal position and I never make claims about atheism broadly, and in fact, every single damned time that I try to address this topic, I go out of my way to make it clear that I'm referring only to the specific subset of atheists who do in fact hold to that belief.

And yet, just like clockwork, every single time I bring the subject up, someone like you shows up and slaps that damned strawman on me and proceeds to tediously recite all of the same tired and entirely irrelevant cant you've now recited.

So honestly, if you have some issue with having to cover all that same ground again, that's entirely and completely your problem, since none of it's relevant to what I actually said in the first place.

I think we can take it as a general pribciple that anyone who considers themselves part of a "virtuous elite" and nominally fit to "provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of the ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves" thereby proves that they are in fact neither of those things.

Wait, what?

They actually have the gall to say they stood behind Obama?

Obama's presidency was the exact point at which toxicity and hate became the overt centerpieces of Republican identity - when they stopped even pretending to be motivated by "fiscal conservatism" and instead gave themselves up entirely to just sowing division and spewing hatred.

Hell - virtually the first thing they did was co-opt the formerly libertarian Tea Party movement, which started out, under Bush, as a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts - and converted it into a traveling right- wing carnival of hate. That became the entire point of it - after the Republicans took it over, the bailouts were never even mentioned again - all it was was an opportunity for right-wingers to congratulate themselves on how much they hated the left, and especially how much they hated Obama.

It's not too much of a stretch to say that everything MAGA has become - all of the division and all of the hatred and all of the lies - traces back specifically to how the hateful bigots among the Republicans reacted to Obama's presidency and the influence they came to hold over the rest of the party.

The ICC has not in any way connected the crimes they allege to Judaism, but Netanyahu et al have. They're the ones who have asserted an inherent connection between those policies and Jewishness, and they're the ones who have assigned support for, and thus responsibility for, those policies to Jews universally.

So they are in fact, and rather obviously, antisemites.

There's a difference between something being unproven and it being reasonably impossible.

Certainly. The two don't even refer to the same thing - "unproven" is a measure of the extent of evidence for a proposition, while "reasonably impossible" is a specific position taken.

And I'd also note that "reasonably impossible" is arguably incoherent. "Impossible" is a nominal fact, so can only be supported with a deductive argument, while "reasonably" can only be relevant as part of an inductive argument. A proposition can be reasonably improbable or even reasonably likely to be impossible, but it can only be impossible in fact.

Assertive atheists simply look at the state of research and conclude there's nothing to hold one's breath for and call it early...

Right. They hold a belief in an unproven position.

Their position might well, and IMO almost certainly would, turn out to be correct, but that makes it no less unproven, nor their position any less a belief in which they've chosen to invest faith.

Also, since faith is the belief without evidence, it can't possibly encompass disbelief without evidence as well.

Right, but I pointedly wasn't talking about mere disbelief.

This is exactly, and not coincidentally, what I said:

Rather than simply withholding belief in the unproven assertion that God exists, he actively believes (or more precisely invests faith in) the unproven assertion that God does not exist.

Those are two very different positions. The first is indeed free of faith, simply because it doesn't assert a specific position, but merely withholds belief from a position advanced by others. The second though - the position that Dawkins not only takes but insists that all who do not actively believe in God must take - does assert a specific position, and a position for which there is insufficient evidence to actually prove it to be true.

And any gap between what can be proven to be true and what is nonetheless asserted to be true is and can only be filled by faith.

Dawkins' problem always has been that he can't stop at a mere lack of belief (and in fact argues that a lack of belief is impossible, and that agnostics are therefore either confused or dishonest).

So effectively, his atheism has always been an act of faith. Rather than simply withholding belief in the unproven assertion that God exists, he actively believes (or more precisely invests faith in) the unproven assertion that God does not exist.

So it stands to reason that just as with any other person with an active and self-defining faith in an unproven position, the dogma of the congregation of fellow believers of which he considers himself a part must match his personal dogma - otherwise, he's effectively betraying his faith by accepting a belief he considers heretical.

It's been too long since I read it to clearly remember the details, but yeah - I thought it was awful.

I most remember being disappointed that it deliberately and inexplicably sidelined Flynne, since her character was easily one of the best parts of The Peripheral. I have no idea what the point of that was - it seemed just as if Gibson somehow resented the fact that she was a memorable character and didn't want her to take over the story. Verity, by contrast, was a very weak character, and I remember thinking that it was ironic that she seemed to have no real agency of her own, and instead was just pulled along by the plot.

I can't really pinpoint anything beyond that though - as I say, I don't really remember the details - just my reaction.

Spook Country, to me, was just drab. It was like Gibson laid out the basic plot, which was pretty much just a standard political thriller, then filled in the blanks with whatever bits of technology and pop culture had his attention at the moment. It worked fine as a novel, but had nothing new to say really.

That entire trilogy was pretty poor IMO, and was a large part of the reason that I was so impressed by The Peripheral.

And thinking about it in that light, it's possible that my negative reaction to Agency was driven at least in part by the contrast to The Peripheral - that Spook Country (and more likely Pattern Recognition) were at least as bad, but at the time I read them, my expectations for Gibson were so low that they didn't have the same impact.