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Everything posted by Mole
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Also back on point, I donāt carry and havenāt touched a firearm since Uncle Sam stopped asking me; thereās no interest on my part. I donāt hunt or camp and have no internet in visiting neighborhoods where the risks of carrying outweigh the risks of not carrying. I question the assumption that not carrying or not having a firearm in the home is taking on additional risk. There are certainly scenarios where guns come in handy, but also scenarios where even a responsible gun owner acting responsibly makes things more dangerous for everyone involved. The risk calculations are different clearing rooms in Fallujah vs. clearing your plate at the Plano Chuck E Cheese. Itās a bit confusing to me to read gun owners (somewhere on this thread, in the midst of the CR talk) describe scenarios where there turned out to be no threat as some sort of argument in favor of owning. Unless there is actually an intruder, skulking about your house and backyard in your boxers looking for a bad guy gets infinitely more dangerous with a gun vs. a can of wasp spray, an air horn, or just a rapier wit. A gun might make you feel safer, but unless thereās actually a bad guy, itās way more dangerous. Even if thereās a bad guy, it still might be more dangerous to start a gun fight. The real question ā and it depends on the circumstances ā is what kind of interactions are more likely to occur. Comparisons to wearing a seatbelt or other basic safety precautions just donāt make sense to me. Wearing a seatbelt imposes minimal risk on the wearer and no risk to those around them. Guns do the opposite. Sometimes the good guy with the gun saves the day, but other times he escalates a situation or isnāt prepared for the stress of gunfire, or the normally responsible gun owner gets complacent and acts irresponsibly, or thereās untreated mental illness and a dark moment turns into inconsolable grief for a family, or the bad guy intruder turns out to be a family member. Iāll grant that there are certainly cases where carrying is the wise, logical choice, but those cases are far fewer than most of us think.
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Ask it to give a numbered list of US states in the reverse in which they joined the union and watch it break. Good luck getting to the correct answer. Itās currently an impossible task for it, but it insists itās just about to give the correct answer. Similar lists, particularly if you go backwards break it. It gets all sorts of other basic, factual things wrong as well. I ask it medium-depth questions in my field and get the exact opposite of correct.
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Not sure if this has been pointed out, but you probably mean gamut, which means the entire range. A gambit is a kind of sacrifice, which also applies in this situation, just not for the people you mentioned. Gamut comes from medieval music theory ā gamma ut, which was the bottom note in their system. They derived their music theory from a mistranslation/misunderstanding of the Ancient Greek music theory, so the entire medieval system was essentially upside down and bore little relation to the original source materials; kind of like how our values and understanding of the 2nd amendment is upside down and has lost all touch with the context in which the amendment was conceived. The medieval church felt they needed to assert control and uniformity, so they decided upon a set of common chants for church services and attributed them to Pope Gregory via inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They used this Gregorian Chant to suppress competing chant forms, so eventually, most of the other forms died out.
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Was Sunday some sort of racist holiday? The confederate flags were out in full force for my Deep South Sunday drive. I saw a desecraty US/Confederate hybrid. One confederate flag had lettering on it and appeared to say āKeep It White,ā but I couldnāt quite make out the last word when passing down the highway.
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Game Thread Texas vs Xavier- Sweet 16- tonight, 8:45 on CBS
Mole replied to shadow_operative's topic in Basketball
Tough D, a little out of control on offense, hopefully RT led some breathing exercises during the TO. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
Thatās not even absurd literalism, itās something else. A number of OT books have authorship claims pretty explicitly in the text. Thatās not to mention Moses narrating his own death. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
Itās an issue inherent in dealing with ancient texts. If youāre dealing honestly with the scholarship, there will be ambiguity. That seems preferable to me to having one authorized version that doesnāt honestly deal with the source materials. We tend to import our modern thinking into ancient texts and then wonder about all of the problems. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
There are some passages that have some debate about whether or not they were actually in the original manuscripts. Depending on the source material the translation uses can impact whether or not they will include this. Sometimes theyāll include it with a note at the bottom explaining the issue or sometimes theyāll include it just in the footnotes. Someone that has King James as their default mental version will find some missing notable passages in other versions. Wikipedia has a list with explanations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_verses_not_included_in_modern_English_translations -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
I used NIV above with āGod-breathed.ā Other versions I find use āinspired by,ā ābreathed life into,ā ādivinely inspired,ā āgiven by inspiration,ā and ābreathed out by God.ā Iām not personally inclined to come up with any meaningful difference in meaning. There may be some pastor somewhere that thinks Iām a heathen because I find āGod-breathedā most compelling and memorable. Churches have split over more pedantic reasons. Iām not going to pretend that I can explain or even know the nuances of whatever Greek phrase that was used. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
1. That āWordā isnāt typically understood to be the Bible or scripture but rather Jesus. Itās a beautifully poetic passage. This Word gets conflated with the Bible as the word of God idea all the time. 2. The closest that I can come up with for the Bible claiming to be the word of God is 2 Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Whether āGod-breathedā is the same thing as āword of Godā and what that means for different interpretations and degrees of in inerrancy is a good question I guess. āGod-breathedā doesnāt have to mean literally and historically accurate, since 21st century people interpret the idea accuracy differently than ancient people would have. -
Yes, itās quite plainly cheating to cut and paste your writing prompt into Chat GPT, ask it to make a few edits ā mostly to hide your cheating ā and then turn it in with your name on it. Itās not that different than copying some article you found on the internet, running it through some thesaurus machine ā rendering it both incomprehensible but also making it much harder to track down the source material ā and turning it in with your name on it. You didnāt write it and those arenāt your ideas. I have played with the oral defense of all term papers idea precisely because I know that the students using these tools donāt understand the papers they are turning in. Grammarly is essentially a nosy editor looking over your shoulder, giving style and grammar recommendations. The Microsoft/Google autocomplete tool is trying to guess the next words you are writing. ChatGPT writes your entire paper, then rewrites it based on your suggestions. You sometimes have to fight it to incorporate your ideas. It will sometimes stubbornly stick to its plan and perspective. A board full of lawyers would treat this like some open question, but itās not. The kids know theyāre cheating and taking steps to avoid detection. Youāll start seeing class policies explicitly prohibiting this kind of stuff anyway.
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The AI writes something original. Itāll even cite sources. Thereās no original paper or collage of link-filled Wikipedia and Buzzfeed articles to present as evidence. The only evidence is the telltale signs of AI writing, which is obvious, but hard to articulate. TurnItIn is developing a tool that claims to detect AI writing, and there are already lots of them out there, but itās a bit of a black box. With normal plagiarism detectors, it finds the sources so you can track it down and determine whether or not plagiarism actually occurred. The detector is just a tool to gather the evidence. The new AI detectors just tell you the likelihood that something was written by a bot. They donāt present evidence; itās more of a, ātrust us, that kid is 92.5% cheating, but we wonāt tell you why we determined thatā type thing.
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Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
I get that this is a take down of conservative, R, America first Christianity, and I have no disagreement with the assessment. Itās worth pointing out that thereās a fair amount of biblical precedent and support for the idea that such an ungodly person could lead Godās people astray. The Christian believer should be on the lookout for such movements. Itās the main theme of about half of the Old Testament and the New Testament is full of warnings about such a type of person. The Trump era has been a real challenge to my faith. That seems to be a common theme in this thread. Watching people I love and respect turn to cruelty and selfishness ā and calling it the Gospel ā has been a lot to take in. The change from apolitical people tirelessly serving marginalized groups to ungodly political tribalism hurting the same people they once served has been wild. As my wife said a few years ago, āhow did all of our old friends turn into assholes?ā These werenāt the people we knew.- 629 replies
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Iām on my collegeās academic appeals committee. Weāve had our first batch of AI-based violations. Those AI-assisted papers are pretty easy to spot, even without the tools. Theyāre impeccably written, sound exceptionally smart on the surface yet never really get to the point (talking about the question rather than actually answering the question), and are riddled with made up stuff. Getting a committee to agree to sanction the student is a bit trickier than spotting the obvious cheater, at least so far on my campus. Policies and paper procedures will be radically changing over the next few years. So far, most of my colleagues have talked about returning to hand-written, blue book essays, or using North Korean styled proctoring services even for term papers. Iāve been playing with the idea of all or nothing, public, oral defenses of all term papers the last week of class. I may not be able to get the cheater past the appeals committee, but I can still wring out a zero on the paper and a little bit of public shame.
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That would be my interpretation as well, but āpaying an undercover detective to have sex with a 14 year old childā leaves things pretty ambiguous.
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Obviously a terrible crime, but can we take a moment to acknowledge the abomination that is the tweet? Who was going to have sex with the child? The filmmaker or the cop? Why would you give money to a cop and tell them, ābuy you something nice and also commit a sex crime?ā
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Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
Theist or not, if you find yourself posting long cats that arenāt in plain text, it might be time to reexamine your worldview and consider who or what is leading you to make these terrible lifestyle choices. Posts read in dark mode and I comprehended it not. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
Everyone. Iām not saying the āAmerican is a Christian nationā nonsense, but biblical illiteracy is cultural and historical illiteracy. Weāre in a weird time where ignorance is somehow proclaimed honorable and in some cases a perverted shibboleth for the educated. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
The issue of the proper response of the non-fascist part of America Christianity has been brought up. Since this so much of this board claimed to be reformed Bush republicans, I presume that a good number of this board was saying the same stuff about moderate Muslims during the height of the War on Terror. It can be a fair question to ask, but as we saw during the anti-Muslim fervor, itās a short walk from fair questions to naked bigotry. Regarding the core issue raised, I deeply resent what this movement has done to both my country and the church. Iām pretty conservative theologically, and in my view, this false gospel is damaging the mission of the church even more than the country. Mixing religion and government damages both. Iām not sure how it can be fixed. Thereās a social phenomenon that can happens in certain churches. I call it faith chicken, where the more extreme view, the view in need of more faith to believe, becomes the default view by virtue of the social need to appear faithful. I havenāt witnessed this in every church, or even most churches, but I think this plays a role in whatās happening in certain groups. Itās self-reinforcing madness. Regarding the role of religion in our society, weāre largely biblically illiterate these days ā believer and non-believer alike. Even those that can drop a timely verse are often filtering it through a very narrow theological background. Thatās a shame not only for the church, but also everyoneās ability to engage with our history and culture. The non-believer is missing out on the richness of so much of the important works of our culture; the believer misses out on the same richness of the world but has also replaced their faith with a caricature. Everyone would be well-served with at least one good, deep pass through the Bible ā not to find something to dunk on your political enemies, engage in the culture war, or even come to faith, but to just understand whatās in it. Itās an amazing peek into the thinking of our ancient past as well as the framework for so much that came after it. -
UT's next basketball coach - discussion/debate [Sean Miller Hired]
Mole replied to alphahorn's topic in Basketball
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I kept waiting for the gotcha with the pudding incident and was left wanting. I see nothing wrong with commitment to the snack pack. For me at least, it goes on the pro side of the pro/con ledger.
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Duke, Auburn, TCU, NC State, Providence, USC, VCU, Boise St.
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I nominate ROFL BOX to keep the 20k safe.
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The destruction of America's public education system
Mole replied to Captainant's topic in Cloak Room
We homeschool our kid. Some families that homeschool love to talk curriculum. One family that we are close with has used ABEKA at least in part, so they showed us some of the materials. I looked through them with great care and interest and an open mind. The thought of educating my child with that nonsense broke my heart. It was horrifying ā not because of its religious-based worldview ā but because it was preposterously dumbed down. It is whatever you call the opposite of education. Itās easy to get wrapped up in what facts are taught and miss the bigger picture of what an education is. Education should of course get the basic facts right, but there are more important issues. ABEKA sucks because it condescends to the child. Whether itās worldview is grounded in reality or a modern fundamentalist fantasy is mostly irrelevant. Even if the particular biblical interpretation behind their materials were 100% accurate to reality, ABEKA would still be the worst.
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