Kichae

As much as I enjoy Wilhoit's Law, it always gets leveraged in a way that pointed at supporters of particular political parties.

The thing is, Wilhoit uses a fundamentally different definition of "conservstive" from what most people mean. He's not pointing out the MO of a given political party in that quote. He's criticising the very nature of the state, and of a stratified society.

Which is fair. It's just not the kind of thing you pull out to thumb your nose at political opponents.

The whole comment, for reference:

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Can I recommend organized things like an art class, cooking class, recreational sport league, etc? They have this really great benefit of having a consistent and per-arranged schedule, and interpersonal interactions with a pre-established purpose.

I joined an intro rec softball league a few years ago, and have branched into things like karate lessons. They've been surprisingly good environments to just engage as much or as little as I want/need. Plus, they help overcome my inertia and actually move around some.

My instance preemptively defederated from Threads, but I’m assuming those ads are going to be served to Threads users via API, right, and not federated out?

Things don't really federate out with ActivityPub, they federate in. To receive off-site content, you have to subscribe to it.

Who is going to subscribe to a Threads ad bot?

Imagine going to a public class on... let's say playing the electric guitar, and the instructor just keeps going on and on about tuning forks, gear maintenance, and music theory. You were just hoping to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven, despite never having touched a guitar in your life.

The telescope is actually a hurdle to most people who will ever look through one. Introducing people to amateur astronomy by talking about making the sausage doesn't whet the appetite. It's dry, it's small, and it's boring. And it's not relevant to 90% of people who will ever show up -- they're not going to race out and spend hundreds of dollars on a worthwhile telescope. It's the kind of thing you talk about once people are hooked, want to view things independently, and are actually ready to invest their time, energy, and money into the hobby.

Amateur astronomy happens first in the mind. The imagination is accessible; the nitty gritty of operating a manual telescope is actually quite exclusionary, and fails to meet people where they actually are.

No. The website you're using doesn't share them, and possibly doesn't even track them. They don't support downvotes, full stop.

There's no Platonic "Lemmy" for you to see or access. There's 1000 different Lemmys, as each Lemmy-based website on the network is it's own thing, hosting both local content and remote content that is syndicated to it. You can only see what's hosted and surfaced on the website you're using.

You may as well be asking if there's any other way of seeing Instagram posts on Twitter.

I had my 2nd karate class of the week last night, and now my everything hurts.

Kicking drills kinda suck, NGL.

Oh, cool! I hope it's still there on Sunday when I pop by my MIL's

I haven't touched Mythic rules, but from what I've heard they're more polished and balanced than 1e's, and as a result a good number of people who were hyped for them were disappointed. They sound more geared towards doing the kinds of things that capital-H Heroes did in classical mythology.

You know, shovelling horse shit, tricking mindless sea monsters, and showing aged narcissists their own reflection.

So many great things listed as negatives :(

RSS is back. Forums are back. It's brilliant. Now I just need Musk and Zuck and Bezos to be no longer relevant to anybody's lives.

I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope.

About 20 years or so, yup. Star parties, observatories, planetaria, etc.

My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc.

Don't do this. The people who are going to show up to look through a telescope at the park do not GAF about how to use a telescope. They want to look through it and be awed by what they see. The work it takes to get to that point is of zero interest to 99.999% of them. Very often, the actual visual image you see is not awe inspiring, though, so you want to spend the time while people are looking through the lens explaining to them what they are seeing, and doing so in very awe-inspiring tones and terms.

Lead them to the feelings that they want to feel. Weave the story that reflects those desires back to them. Do everything you can to make them feel the scope of what they're seeing. Use the fact that it's an unimpressive smudge to hammer home just how god damn far away it is they are seeing. Trot out the big numbers. Tell them how far away it is in in light years, and then switch to miles. Reference what was taking place on Earth at the time the light first left its source. Relate it all to the things they relate to or care about.

And treat the telescope like it's the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.

Just trying to relearn pyspark syntax at work. It's one of those things I've let slip in the last couple of years as my work volume has been a little overwhelming.