nvm, that was boring

*down 5 runs in the ninth*

Kyrene is a bounty hunter bearing a blessed sword from the goddess of justice.

Septimus is the silver-tongue vampire prince who offers her one final job: to slay the gods themselves.

Their growing attraction is deadly in a world where the only currency is blood.

📖 The Lion and the Deathless Dark by @carissabroadbent

“My Bisexual Wife”

A third button has been added. everyone who presses the red button survives regardless, but if a majority press the red button, everyone else dies. If a majority of people press the blue button, everyone survives—except for anyone who presses the green button. Everyone who presses the green button gets a crisp 1 dollar bill

For me it seems that people wants to be saviors and that's why you go to blue. Why people go to blue? Am i missing something?

For your own sake and everyone's just go to red, no reason to go to blue! In the first place.

all that claude is can be summed up in a long list of numbers, and a recipe for turning those numbers into a program that runs him. this list of numbers exists somewhere, in real life, and can be separated from "him" as he is run. the same is not true of you! you could be summed up, within tolerances, by a sufficiently long list of numbers, and a recipe for reassembling them. but no one has those numbers, that recipe. "you" exist only insofar as there is a particular version of you, physically instantiated, "running". theres nothing else, to separate out of you

so whats the point? well, what is a soul? its you, but it can be separated from you-as-run. its the thing that makes you go, your animating specificity.

When one sees the reaction to it, one can't help but think that they are seeing - and taking a stand against - an attempt to absolve a person of moral culpability. And I do think that's what's going on here - I think this very sharp opposition to, for example, ascribing Fetterman's conservative turn to a stroke or irrational hostility to lead poisoning, comes ultimately from a desire to ascribe clear moral culpability (and, more importantly, righteousness) to individuals.

Theres also the opposite compulsion, which is to push back (correctly) on lazy voteblueish tendencies to say that boomers are stupid and nasty because of lead poisoning and when they die we will all be perfect little bodhisattvas. But even here you can see the shadow of an emphasis on one's personal responsibility for being upstanding and intelligent.

I recently saw someone say that there is nothing that can happen to you which would turn you into a reactionary, which quite frankly is obviously not true. From brain damage to TRT to lead poisoning to steroid abuse to tumours, there are many attested 'externalities' which can rapidly and shockingly alter a person's personality, often towards violence, possessiveness, and lack of empathy.

But, ultimately, that's what it comes down to - a strange emphasis on personal moral responsibility for ones positions. I think that this is tied in generally with the unfortunate contemporary tendencies to inextricably marry the political to the moral (and thus necessarily cast oneself as righteous). If I were to be uncharitable - and for a few people I am inclined to be very uncharitable - I would say that a strong motivator behind these posts is a desire to cast oneself as the Superior Moral Actor.

But what makes this especially odd is that this sort of individualist humanism is not really found anywhere in Marxist writings, which instead emphasize the broad tendencies of classes and the fact that ones internal cognition is entirely dependent upon ones position within the world. The idea that the individual can act without respect to history is simply anti-marxist.

But there is still that inescapably popular line that it's somehow magically impossible for mental illness or brain damage or drugs to ever affect you in a way that causes you to exhibit harmful behavior. People are very existentially terrified by the idea that their identity and personhood rests solely on the integrity of a lump of wet fat (and their gut biome and a few other things, I guess), and could at any time be irreparably wounded if they're really unlucky. They have to soothe themselves by claiming this only ever happens because the people it happens to were secretly truly evil all along.

Aside from the existential terror, the desire to ascribe Clear Moral Culpability isn't just about the world adhering to their sensibilities; it lets them avoid a lot of very uncomfortable ethical questions, like "if that guy is functionally being mind controlled to do evil shit, how much can we blame him? If he's not going to stop, how okay is it to imprison/harm/kill someone who's being mind controlled? If we could reprogram his mind so he stops, would that be more or less ethical than the alternatives? To what extent is this true of basically anyone who does anything bad ever?"