My understanding is that it means going, loosely, to the opposite side of the state of the major metropolitan area in that state. Upstate NY is the northwest part, upstate MA is the west part, upstate PA is the northeast part. I’m looking around, and it seems to also 1) only be used on a few states, 2) usually is on the north half (but not always), and 3) is somewhat interchangable with “rural”.

this comment is school shooter coded

“Flags”, red or green, are usually the latter, but both are certainly good for this thread!

you might not be offended, but you’re definitely insufferable

I have tried arguing with the people I would categorise as ‘anti-intellectual’ more than 99% of people to ever have lived trying to understand them

this betrays a lot about your attitudes towards 99% of people and how you interact with them

Consider that the ones who aren’t as enlightened as you just haven’t had the privilege to get the free time, financial flexibility, and education to spend a lot of time and effort self-reflecting on their own intellectual purity. Consider also that there are many in that group who count you as anti-intellectual for your prioritization of the ideals of a squeaky clean intellectual platform over the material realities of living in the world and having to engage in conflict and contradictions.

Alright, from the very words of your own comment:

At some point, does it matter?

in direct response to my comment

Who decides what is stupid and what isn’t?

Yes, it does matter. If you want to “Give people the resources to educate themselves”, you have to have a definition of stupid and not stupid that guides your choice of what is and isn’t good education; in order to “Give them the benefit of the doubt, once”, you have to have a criteria for when they’ve stopped being stupid.

Exactly. So we can’t just “Treat stupidity as a type of malice”, because nobody can agree on what is and isn’t stupidity.

they them is basically always safe! If someone specifically requests against it then don’t but they/them is what I always use if I don’t know or have multiple options. All I might add is that a lot of queer people get tired of being only called their AGAB’s pronouns, so maybe don’t exclusively use those.

Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl. The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?

I think it does matter what you define as being stupid, yes. Let’s say that I want to call being transgender, not having enough money to buy food, and being an immigrant all stupid. I should treat those things as malice because they’re stupid, right?

Who decides what is stupid and what isn’t? There better be a good, clear, obvious, and universal objective method of identifying stupidity if you’re going to treat it as malicious.

but from the left ✊

This is called “technocracy”, and while it’s cool on paper, it leads to a disconnect between the people in charge and the actual problems of the people.

I can respect that y’all kind of hate my kind here and I’m going to use this comment to share only the most unobjectionable works that even the most anticommunist liberal should find completely and utterly appealing

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book about how we have all of the tools at our disposal right now to automate at least 50% of the work that we have to do to stay alive, and thus get rid of that work as a tool of coercion and exertion of power.

How Capitalism Ends is about how the power got to the concentrations it has today, where we can expect it to go by extrapolating that tendency, why there was no other way it could have gone, and what we can do now to start building the next thing.

These are two very good and easy starts to starting to think about this problem. I’m happy to field questions about the works or anything else related.

You might be right, but regardless of the origin, the belief was popularized in the West because of Christianity. Unless you’re suggesting that Nietzsche is merely pointing out an intrinsic feature of all human morality, but I don’t know his work well enough to decide either way on that.

I was born and raised atheist/agnostic, never set foot in a church before 18 besides weddings. Still am, never doubted it. Maybe I believe in like Spinoza’s god or something but definitely no Abrahamic God.

Something I’ve learned is that among many other things, a certain holy quality to persecution has definitely permeated the western consciousness and it 100% has me second guessing myself often. The christliness of being persecuted, made a martyr, and suffering for your cause carries a moral quality that I have absolutely not freed myself from, even though there’s nothing automatically morally good or bad in suffering and being made a victim for fighting for a cause.

kinda deranged that you want to put a family through the loss of having their pet executed because you are minorly inconvenienced but I guess you’ll probably reap what you sow

fwiw LN superconductors that operate at much higher temperatures are already being built https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/01/superconducting-maglev-train-unveiled-in-china/

Also, China manages to charge only $8/ticket for the shanghai maglev, so evidently it can be done cost effectively.

Cobalt is very toxic. Far worse than lead. But yet bound up in this one molecule, that looks like this:

it becomes biologically necessary for all animals. How does it get there? Is all the vitamin B12 made already and it stays in circulation, or is there some plant that selectively fetches cobalt from the ground and builds this thing that keeps us all alive?

Similar metal in the human body one, Vitamin B12 has cobalt in it. Absolutely wild. I guess that’s not really commonly known but it’s still worth mentioning