Peregry

A wandering shadow

[Peregry @Peregry]

@AtheistTakes @Dutch_Agent It doesn't even matter. The argument presumes that Jesus meant "Earth the planet" rather than "earth/soil". If you interpret it to be referencing soil, that there are smaller seeds on the planet is entirely irrelevant.

[Peregry @Peregry]

No? You're simply reading the text wrong. "Earth" in this context does not mean "Earth the planet" it means "earth the soil". You know, literally the first definition in the dictionary: https://t.co/KAXoL6m8PF

Which at that time and place makes the statement true, as the mustard seed was the smallest seed commonly planted by farmers...

[Peregry @Peregry]

@justbrowsi7116 @MAGA_X_Times Not just French, I've had to exchange with an Australian. Europeans generally brush over the American Revolution so quickly they miss its dates, but meanwhile do in depth studies of the French Revolution.

[Peregry @Peregry]

@ChrisExpTheNews The Bible also calls bats birds. Ancient peoples didn't categorize plants and animals the same way we do, and their language reflected that, and so when translated into modern English that nuance has to be recognized.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Firstly, your definition of Envy is wrong, envy is not the desire to be that person, its not even just the desire to have what the other person has, but rather, its the desire to see the other person no longer have what they do because you think they should not.

Further, as to envy being a motivator for progressives, research says otherwise. Social scientists have found there's a significant number of progressives that are motivated by Malicious Envy, perhaps not all, but enough that it is clearly an underlying motive force for a large percent of the Progressives.

Also, it should be noted that there's a philosophical case that all redistribution policies, especially Marxism, are fundimentally founded on envy.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Got rid of columns and tables early on. I'd been using an LLM for some stuff and realized early on it hated good formatting (which is actually annoying as a great way to show competence as a technical writer / editor is just in having a well formatted resume that showcases you know how do things).

The second one I haven't proactively done, but generally has been true naturally since I have that title in my heading.

Problem with the third is that in my field, metrics like that aren't a thing. Technical writer / editing generally doesn't generate such systemic improvements and so it's not something I can legitimately put in. It's frustrating because I've seen that a lot, but my field is one of the few areas where that kind of metric is nonsense.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Thing with those is that you're explicitly hired to try and take them in nonlethally. It's not a moral judgement, and the Fixer doesn't condemn you if you do kill them, you just don't get paid as much (which, uhh, yeah, no duh, you didn't fullfill the contract) and don't get the best ending for that series of missions (which again, makes sense).

[Peregry @Peregry]

No, Galileo didn't threaten that, and that wasn't why he was persecuted. He was persecuted for being an asshole towards the Pope, his patron, and mocking him pretty much directly in his works.

Secondly, he was unscientific. Galileo's model of the Solar System did not match observation data nor could it accurately predict future positions of the planets. Meanwhile the Church's favored model at the time, a hybrid model that was partially geocentric and partially heliocentric, COULD more accurately predict the motion of the planets and matched to historical data.

It took Kepler and the realization that orbits were not circular to enable the pure heliocentric model to match the data and make accurate predictions. And when that happened, the Church didn't push back at all.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Thing is, the deep vetting didn't really become clearly necessary until PP v Casey. You'll note that even the squishiest Republicans appointed since, like Chief Justice Roberts, are STILL more reliable than any of the ones you mentioned. Meaning that W did learn from Reagan and his father's squishy appointments.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Look into eastern Tennessee sometime. You have a bit of everything. Knoxville is a big enough city to act as an anchor. For touristy shopping and theme park you have Sevierville, there's a bunch of interesting historical locations from the colonial period to WW2, and then there's the Smokey Mountains.

[Peregry @Peregry]

@tibfulv @ProfChocCaXe @reddit_lies Kinsey based his behavioral data on surveys made disproportionately up of criminals... many of whom were in jail for sex related crimes. He did not have a neutral, randomly selected representative sample of the population to be able to draw the conclusions he did.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Yes they would, they set up the very foundation this is laid on.

Let's go back, Disparate Impact was based on Griggs vs Duke Power company, a decision that was decided UNIANIMOUSLY by the US Supreme Court. This majority was dominate all through Nixon and Ford's Presidencies and through a good chunk of Reagan's.

It wasn't arguably until HW Bush appointed Justice Thomas that Republicans thought they had shifted the Court enough to begin to roll back the Warren Era Liberal Court decisions, and they did try to start to, you might remember Planned Parenthood vs Casey and how that turned out? That burned Republicans from pushing back on many of these decisions, as it showed that despite being appointed by Republicans many Justices wouldn't support such major decisions.

Then Clinton. W. Bush reenforced the Court's conservative wing but mostly just replaced Republican appointees with new ones, he didn't manage to shift the majority throughout W Bush's term the USSC was a narrow 5-4 conservative lean where seriously controversial rollback of Progressive policies wasn't viable.

Then Obama, and again, fresh Dem appointed blood... but Ginsburg chose not to retire under Obama, wanting to have her successor appointed by the first woman president. When Hillary lost and Trump won though that's when the makeup of the court finally shifted enough, with Ginsburg's death and replacement, the court's ideological shift was strong enough that the progressive Warren era decisions could finally be challenged, and that's systemically what has been being done under Trump. In some ways Biden, ironically, made it easier, as Brown has turned into an albatross around the Liberal wing of the court's neck, making it harder for the Liberals to divide the conservative side.

So what were they doing? Building the foundation and setting the stage for this. Had they tried earlier instead of having a slam dunk destruction of Disparate Impact once a good case gets to the court, it likely would have reenforced it, much like how Casey reenforced abortion rights until Trump finished the long countermarch through the Supreme Court that began under Nixon.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Go look into the methodological issues in the Kinsey Report as well as his motivated reasoning and personal history. While there was nothing as explicitly vile as what Money did, as a whole the Kinsey reports were bad science meant to push a specific agenda and not actually factual.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Building the foundation for the ability to do this.

Let's go back, Disparate Impact was based on Griggs vs Duke Power company, a decision that was decided UNIANIMOUSLY by the US Supreme Court. This majority was dominate all through Nixon and Ford's Presidencies and through a good chunk of Reagan's.

It wasn't arguably until HW Bush appointed Justice Thomas that Republicans thought they had shifted the Court enough to begin to roll back the Warren Era Liberal Court decisions, and they did try to start to, you might remember Planned Parenthood vs Casey and how that turned out? That burned Republicans from pushing back on many of these decisions, as it showed that despite being appointed by Republicans many Justices wouldn't support such major decisions.

Then Clinton. W. Bush reenforced the Court's conservative wing but mostly just replaced Republican appointees with new ones, he didn't manage to shift the majority throughout W Bush's term the USSC was a narrow 5-4 conservative lean where seriously controversial rollback of Progressive policies wasn't viable.

Then Obama, and again, fresh Dem appointed blood... but Ginsburg chose not to retire under Obama, wanting to have her successor appointed by the first woman president. When Hillary lost and Trump won though that's when the makeup of the court finally shifted enough, with Ginsburg's death and replacement, the court's ideological shift was strong enough that the progressive Warren era decisions could finally be challenged, and that's systemically what has been being done under Trump. In some ways Biden, ironically, made it easier, as Brown has turned into an albatross around the Liberal wing of the court's neck, making it harder for the Liberals to divide the conservative side.

So what were they doing? Building the foundation and setting the stage for this. Had they tried earlier instead of having a slam dunk destruction of Disparate Impact once a good case gets to the court, it likely would have reenforced it, much like how Casey reenforced abortion rights until Trump finished the long countermarch through the Supreme Court that began under Nixon.

[Peregry @Peregry]

@johnkonrad And this is why everyone who thinks Term Limits for Congress will fix things are utter and complete fools. All Term Limits would do is make Staffers stronger and MORE Important than they already are... they're the ones who need limits.

[Peregry @Peregry]

I'm not for a few reasons.

1. Lack of systemic police and prosecutor corruption. While the US has issues, due to our decentralized system the corruption tends to remain more contained.

2. The Central Government is doing something to push back on illegal immigration and crime. It might not be as fast as people want, it might not be as much as people want, but it is SOMETHING. That takes the edge off things and reduces support for vigilante action.

3. Population density and scale: in the US people still have options other than violence. There's a lot of places where the negative externalities of these things are greatly reduced (rural red states) and people will choose to move to them over violence, as seen by internal migration patterns.

[Peregry @Peregry]

@CTWesleyan @EWess92 @TheJusticeDept Disparate Impact standards were implemented without enaction by Congress... and can be undone without one as well.

[Peregry @Peregry]

Boomers didn't cause the Sexual Revolution, they were the first victims of it. Note the years, it began in the late 1950s, the OLDEST Boomers were barely teens at that point and many had yet to even be born. The cause of the Sexual Revolution lays at the feet of the GI Generation and Silent Generation, who accepted the Kinsey Reports at face value, trusted the experts, legalized the Pill, and overthrew the prior understanding of sexual ethics. The Boomers were taught poorly and acted on what they were taught, thus, the first victims.

[Peregry @Peregry]

OK, yes, but there's three core reason this works in China and doesn't in the US:

Geography, Population spread, and Population Density.

Chinese Geography is coastal centric, the east of China is highly populated, highly developed, and geographically mostly on the same plateau. The farther west you go in China, the less developed, less population dense, and more mountainous it becomes. This is excellent geography for train development. You can easily make north-south lines that run high speed, and then send the optimal tendrils west you need to aid in industrialization and to hit the major population centers.

In comparison the US has FOUR major population cores: the East Coast, the West Coast, around the Great Lakes, and along the Mississippi River. Between the East Coast and the Great Lakes+Mississippi regions lays the Appalachian Mountains. Between the West Coast and the GL+M lay the Rocky mountains, and the West Coast it should be noted has mountains almost up to the coast itself, and while the East coast has a large north-south running plateau, only in one small subregion (Roughly Washington DC to Boston) is the population dense enough with enough reason to travel good enough to be able to economically support High Speed Rail. But this region has a different problem: the cost of building HSR is by far the highest in the country due to the cost of buying the land to BUILD the rail, as well as being the region most dense with States thus making such a project involve dozens of governments and all the complications that entails.

E-W HSR is just impractically due to the mountains, and the distances involved. It's faster to take a plane between Chicago and New York, to say anything of New York and Los Angeles just due to the speeds and physics involved (you just cannot get to the speed needed to compete with HSR vs a plane, plus planes just fly OVER mountains).

Even in Europe, with all its rail build out, doesn't have an HSR connection between Berlin and Rome (which is about the distance between NYC and Chicago), because of the Alps, and just like in the US its faster to just take a plane between those two cities than even a hypothetic one that somehow goes THROUGH the Alps.