Fats and oils aren’t bad for you, that’s prapaganda pushed by the sugar industry for decades.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat

Eat whataver food you like that makes you feel good after you’ve finished eating, your body knows what’s good for it for the most part.

You can make cheese sauce with any hard cheese and sodium citrate. For the liquid you can use water, milk, beer or really any beverage you want. Obviously also chillis and hot sauce can be added at any point in the process.

You can also tune the recipe to be thicker or runnier depending on what you use it for.

This is the recipe that I use, they have a specific jalapeno one: https://www.cheeseprofessor.com/blog/sodium-citrate-cheese-sauce

The important part is the ratio of cheese:liquid:sodium citrate.

Yup, Behind the Bastards did an excellent two parter on forensic science in general:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-bastards-of-forensic-170035753/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-bastards-of-forensic-170702749/

They make a good point that real science is involved, but by the time it makes it into the police’s hands it’s mutated into essentially a mechanism to manufacture convictions. Grifters get hold of the science, and cops are like the perfect marks, because they’re just primed for anything that will confirm their existing biases, plus they’ve got massive state budgets to play with, and they’ll happily give the grifters legitimacy.

It would be nice if you could post something where we can examine the source. (EDIT: the link has been changed since I wrote this)

I found this article: https://www.techspot.com/news/108720-hidden-fingerprints-inside-3d-printed-ghost-guns.html

There they say that it’s not yet ready to be used in evidence, but the problem with that is that most forensic “science” is generally misapplied and nowhere near as conclusive as the police want us to think. They can usually massage the results to tell a jury what they want to be true. That would be my concern with this kind of technique.

Also, if you’re going to the trouble of making a 3d printed ghost gun that will be used in a crime, you could always hide the toolmarks with a sander. You could also treat the surface with resin which would make the markings practically unrecoverable. I’ve started doing both of these for my prints and I love the results just for the aesthetics, so it’s not such a stretch to imagine a gunsmith doing the same.

Sorry for the short novel but this topic is fascinating to me.

Okay, so it looks like “existence ex-nihilo” is a phrase I cooked up from “creation ex-nihilo”, and the accepted term is more like “first cause”, but it explains the problem I have with a purely material universe. Either our entire universe with all its complexity and scale spontaneously exists from nothing - “ex-nihilo”, or no first cause - or it has infinite regress, an infinite age, which doesn’t fit with what we know of thermodynamics. We would need an infinite source of useful energy to maintain a universe for infinite time.

The pure materialists have all sorts of rebuttals. I’ve heard of quantum spontaneity as a first cause, but like… for quantum spontaneity to exist, there has to be a substrate of physical laws that cause quantum effects to happen in the first place. That can’t be the baseline of existence.

And if they say that cause & effect breaks down at the boundaries of the universe, well, that’s just another way of saying that it gives way to a supernatural reality. Because ultimately science is about cause & effect, it is about the laws of nature, so anything that goes outside of that schema is, by definition, supernatural. That’s all supernatural means, beyond the natural. You can also talk abut physical laws vs the metaphysical, it’s just different words for the same thing.

And science is fundamentally only capable of interrogating the natural, the physical. The analogy I’ve used to explain this to materialistic atheists is of a simulation. Imagine we exist entirely within a simulation. Well, if we wanted to use the science that exists within this simulation to interrogate the world outside the the computer we’re in, we couldn’t. You could not design an experiment that would give repeatable results because whatever existed in the physical world beyond the simulation would be entirely unaffected by it. The creators could walk away or change the external environment at any moment, they could turn off the simulation, unplug it, move it to another continent, wait 20 years and plug it back in and we would have no way of even knowing it had happened. They would be outside of our space and time entirely. They could edit out our attempts to understand. The simulation idea is just spirituality with a veneer of sciencey-sounding language. It’s functionally no different.

So any evidence of anything beyond the physical is going to necessarily be anecdotal. You can do surveys and such things, but you can’t get a systematic data set. It could easily be that non-physical phenomena are shy of direct inspection, who knows.

My partner back when we were both gradually leaving the faith took an online philosophy course from some university, and I sort of took it in over their shoulder. The 101 course started with a discussion about the existence of god, which is the classical way of discussing spirituality. It probably helps that “god” is one syllable whereas “metaphysical reality” is seven. The basic takeaway was, we’ve been discussing this for thousands of years and nobody has yet come up with a slam-dunk answer either way. This is entry-level stuff in philosophy.

The reddit atheist bros are doing philosophy, but they don’t realise it, so they just keep tripping over their own balls. They want to use a “null hypothesis” and shift the “burden of proof” but there is nothing more or less natural or “null” about assuming no first cause as there is about assuming a cause that exists beyond the boundaries of cause and effect. They refuse to learn any philosophy, instead assuming that the tools of science can answer everything, but that in itself is a purely materialist assumption, so it’s downstream from philosophy. They are literally begging the question. They’re right that science cannot disprove spirituality, but it can’t prove it either, regardless of what is real. In my experience it’s very hard to get them to see this point.

Their arguments in my experience are always geared towards attacking evangelical christianity, which is actually an easy target. Evangelicals are fucking ridiculous when you strip away their respectability and institutional support. But then when they’re done with that target they turn the same weapons on the whole notion of spirituality and it just blows up in their faces. This is why these kinds of atheists are also called “christian atheists”. They just don’t want to admit that’s what they are; it’s purely reactionary. Their thought leaders seem to be mainly intellectually lazy grifters who have long since drifted back into an alliance with christianity and started attacking islam instead. Almost like they were always just attacking easy targets and the audience for anti-christian stuff turned out to be smaller than the one for anti-muslim stuff, at least after 9/11.

As for what I personally believe, I’m actually fine with the existence of an afterlife, and with its nonexistence. I found The Good Place ending amazing in this regard. They handled the notion of death so well, and they hit on something fascinating, which is that even if you’ve seen a thousand afterlives and been alive for billions of Jeremy Bearimy’s and seen and done all that you’re curious about in the universe you still have no idea what awaits beyond death. Oblivion is not a thing that you can grasp.

So yeah, I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter either way.

Not by itself no, but it was a vector to be indoctrinated into a strong belief in a christian afterlife at a very young age.

I no longer hold any of those beliefs. I now think that existence ex-nihilo and creation by something outside of the natural universe are two equally absurd possibilities, and science is fundamentally incapable of resolving that question.

I have certainly had odd, even otherworldly experiences, but I couldn’t say what any of them meant or if they mean anything at all. I am deeply suspicious of anyone that claims to have the answers.

Yeah, this seems like a case of “it’s not my job to interperet my boss’s incomprehensible behaviour on their behalf”.

Gonna have to tune in to Knowledge Fight to hear their take on this. I hope those boys are doing okay.

Oh I do know about that, I’ve had a near death experience myself, your body/brain has an uncanny sense that says “you are dangling over the precipice right now.”

I just mean that until it actually happens, there is no true confirmation, and after, you can’t report back, that’s why it’s called a mystery.

In fact from the way that person is talking it sounds like they may have had such an experience, and maybe now they’re doubting that it’s real.

Every single person who ever lived could use this logic and they’d never see it disproven.

It’s a bit like learning that Russian cargo ships don’t get boarded by pirates because they’ll just start fucking shooting.

Say what you want about Russians, but that kind of rules.

“We’ll take our ball and go home, and you’ll all miss out on our fabulous AI products!”

“No. Wait. Don’t.”

Yeah, that scans for me. It breaks up “getting ready…for a night out”, but I think it works.

I think honestly it’s just a reality that, if brevity is the soul of wit, then a punchy sentence needs to be compact and that means you need to get a bit funky with the grammar, so maybe the audience has to do a little work.

Maybe also “at which” is fine too, and I was just overthinking it.

One thing I won’t bend on is that “to be starting to get ready” is objectively worse in every respect and is the main thing that throws people about the sentence.

This is a slightly wacky sentence. It’s not wrong - it does make sense and communicates the idea, it just forces you to do a bit of work to straighten it out in your head.

I think the biggest issue is the way they unnecessarily used present continuous tense with “be starting to get”.

It’s convoluted and adds syllables. You could eliminate the “be” and “to” entirely and change it to “start getting”. That starts with an active verb which feels stronger and more natural.

So then it would be:

“This can’t possibly be the same 9pm I used to start getting ready for a night out at”.

That preserves the flow & punch of the delivery but shortens & simplifies it a lot without losing anything imo.

Also ending a sentence with a preposition can be awkward. You read “at” and you need to refer it back to 9pm near the start of the sentence. Plus it comes after another preposition, which itself is not acting as a preposition but as part of the nouned phrase “night out”, so you end up with “out at”. Again, not wrong, but it can be awkward. I think using “at which” can move it closer to the noun it’s referring to but it’s not necessarily better that way.

Make that change and it’s, “This can’t possibly be the same 9pm at which I used to start getting ready for a night out”.

It’s a little easier to parse, but honestly I think it loses something, because it doesn’t have a casual delivery. “At which” is evidence that the sentence was very deliberately constructed. It adds a syllable and loses some punch. I’d stick with just the first change personally.

I didn’t say you should try or expect to convince them of anything. Just pointing out the error is enough to let anyone curious enough follow up for themselves. I say that about this post because the person seems to have a genuine intuition about the vague idea of collective ownership.

You can’t expect to convince someone in a single argument.

For myself, when I was still in a liberal mindset, I had someone on reddit say “down with democracy!”, and I called them a fascist, because that sounded pretty fashy to me and it was during trump term 1 when those guys were really stretching their assholes and letting the shit flow.

They said actually no, they were a communist, so I just dropped it. I could tell they were being sincere but also I didn’t really want to take the time to unpack their point.

It did flip a switch for me though, that someone was openly declaring to be a communist. It was definitely part of my walk away from vaguely status quo liberalism towards full anarcho communism.

I still think the way they said “down with democracy!” was bad rhetoric, and I understand they probably meant “down with liberal democracy”, or maybe “down with representative democracy”, or maybe they were some sort of weird nazbol and they really did think democracy as a concept was bad. Doesn’t matter, it moved the needle for me.

Anyway, point being a sincere answer whether it’s very well articulated or even correct, is usually better than making up some bullshit in some misguided machiavelian manipulation.

They let fascist propaganda trick them into believing that corporations are socialist because they flew the wrong flags. They would let those same fascists tell them the corporations are their friends now because they fly the right flags. That’s what they’re paying attention to.

The correct response is, “You are describing worker ownership, which is socialist.” They have to learn they’re on the wrong side before they’ll stop listening to the fascists. They have to be educated, and agree to change the flag in their head, because the right is fundamentally domineering. They won’t accidentally make socialism happen, they’ll just smash our shit because they hate our flags.

Sorry for the rant but I see this “joke” take people are making in this thread all the time and there’s a reason it’s a joke.

Maxwell immediately adopting an unexplained and unflappable admiration for Wealwell is such a Murph thing to do and I love it.

Well the point here is not that China is cool and based actually, but that people definitely did some lying on this point and those same people definitely think it means that any and all forms of communism are authoritarian and there is no alternative to capitalism.

There has to be some percentage of people who let this be the thing that radicalises them, and I don’t want to hear any doomer takes about how these people are impossible to reach. I’ve heard loads of stories over the years of this or that particular moment being the moment that snapped someone out of their fascist sympathies.

“Samwell, Blanewell, Roywell, Hatwell, Wealwell, Johnwell”

https://youtu.be/Odo3F1WqO4A