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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Trump has historically underperformed in poles and because of the electoral college advantage that Republicans have, Biden probably needs to be at least up four or five points on him, which is what he was last election and it came down to 20,000 votes across several battle ground states.

    yes, Trump lied during the debate. Trump is the worst candidate in the history of the United States and him being elected president would be a catastrophe for democracy. Which is exactly why many people in the Democratic Party including - if reports are to be believed - apparently Barack Obama, are trying to have Biden pushed out right now. That Biden is now taking a cavalier attitude that “he’s going to give it his best shot, and if he loses, well he tried his hardest and that’s what counts”…when his own campaign has been framing this threat from Trump as being detrimental to democracy, is the height of hubris.

    There are numerous reports that they’ve been shielding him and his mental capacity for a long time now trying to drag him across the finish line. The cat is out of the bag, and it’s a pretty big gamble to assume more things are not going to happen between now and the election. Is that a bigger gamble than switching candidates? I don’t know but I think it is.


  • I’m sure some people want him to step down because they think he is senile and can’t do the job, but I would bet that most of us want him to step down because he’s not going to win. I’d vote for a literal dead body before I vote for Trump. I honestly don’t care who it is. All I care is it needs to be someone who will beat him. Biden was already trailing Trump and many polls and after that debate and the obvious mental state that he’s in, it’s not gonna get any better. Furthermore, no arguments about Trump’s mental state or anything about him matter. Trump is a monolith. He is what he is. He has the support he has and nothing will change that short of him dropping dead. So either Biden can beat him or he can’t and most of us think he can’t.

    Biden asked for that debate because he was behind in the polls and his unfavorable rating is abysmal. No president has ever been reelected with the approval rating Biden currently has. He shouldn’t even be polling even with Trump. He needs to be polling way ahead of him to have any chance of winning because of the way the electoral college works and favors red candidates.

    Him stepping down still probably won’t matter and Trump will probably win but at this point, I think a lot of people realize Biden has no chance, so even though a replacement candidate this late in the game is dubious proposition. It’s probably better than what we have right now? What he’s doing is trying to run out the clock to prevent the possibility of somebody being able to replace him, purely because of his ego.


  • Zionism was not started by Ottoman Jews, which were a very, very small minority in Palestine. The grandfather of Zionism was an Austro-Hungarian, Theodor Herzl. Before that there was a proto Zionist movement the Hovevei Zion which was created in response to pograms in the Russian empire. The Zionist movement was entirely created as a response to the treatment of European Jews by European powers.

    Living under sharia law and being treated as a second-class citizen (which all non-Muslims were) certainly was not ideal for Palestinian Jews, but hundreds of thousands of European Jews did not start streaming into Palestine because of that.


  • While I don’t totally disagree with you, nor advocate the position you are arguing against… I wonder what is the scientific definition of sanity? Is there a consensus on it? If it is a concept that exists outside the context of our society as you claim, then is it something objectively inherent in all humans regardless of their culture or circumstances? Or can its meaning change over time; can the standard of entrance be lowered or raised depending on current trends or the whim of the majority?


  • I thought Tail recursion just gets turned into an iterative loop by the compiler? Hence why you won’t get a stack overflow. And since in procedural languages you can just use a loop in place of a tail recursive function you would never run into this problem, right? At least this is how it was taught to me when I was learning about it in lisp.





  • But by this same logic anything can be “proven”. If I see evidence of an abrhamic god, then I can prove its existence. This is not a novel or sufficient observation to meet the criteria that imperical based science is held to. The claim must also be falsifiable, just how a metaphysical God can always escape attempts to disprove it by relying on the imperical nature of science i.e. we can’t really prove or disprove anything objectively, the counter effect is that it can’t be proven under the scientific imperical framework either. I will admit I’m not well versed in the evidence for ST which you have referenced, but how would it be falsifiable? It seems any attempt can always be handwaved away as it’s simply too complex a simulation… God works in mysterious ways right. To me this puts it squarely in the metaphysical realm, which isn’t a bad thing per say, but again speaks to the intent of the meme.



  • But at that point, isn’t that no different than just saying the universe isn’t a simulation? If there is a base universe than that is the “actual” universe, and who cares about all the simulations beyond what we would care about a simulation we created? For this to be the case, I feel like there would need to be some additional features or complexities about this base universe that can’t be simulated and thus that allows those in it to prove that they are not a simulation. The issue the simulation universes have is that if they could create a simulation of their own universe they are immediately confronted with the conundrum that they themselves are probably not the first one to do this. But this theoretical base universe would have some characteristic about it that precluded them from this issue. Or maybe they don’t, maybe they think they’re simulation too but they’re not and have no way to prove otherwise, they just happen to be the base. However, if that is the case, then you can make that same argument for this universe can’t you?