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Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Sam & Fuzzy
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Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
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Guilded Age
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Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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The end of the world is coming, and Tove doesn't want to be a hero, but SOMEONE has to look after her little brother.
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A wayward soldier finds herself in a pacifist commune deep in the wilderness of a war-weary land. Living in isolation brings her closer to those she was sworn to kill than she could ever imagine - but also threatens to tear the place apart.
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In a world where people can wield the magic of elemental Masks, all Ashe wants to do is help. Maskless and useless, with dreams of fire and smoke on the back of his tongue, he finds himself on a strange, dangerous path to uncovering the secrets of these incredible objects, and the source of the monsters plaguing his home.
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A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
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Cog Kleinschmidt is a diligent, quiet worker at the Mercia Fortress, the world power's leading stronghold. His orderly life is thrown into chaos when an enemy kingdom sends a diplomat for peace talks. This diplomat needs something from Cog - whether he agrees to their terms or not!
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Solstoria
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Demon's Mirror
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Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
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Dina, fed-up with having made herself grumpy, being betrayed, AND now this, promptly rips through two more hats— revealing more underneath—and throws them to the ground in a huff
It blew my mind when I realized that that’s not just a silly description for flying in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it also pretty much sums up how orbits work. You’re falling, but you move forward so fast you’re constantly missing the ground.
To be fair, that is technically not flying, but only in the same way that neither does he, ” fly through the air with the greatest of ease, A daring young man on the flying Trapeze.”
What arguments are there to “debunk” that our earth is billions of years old when we got all the stuff to prove it like radioactive elements in stones showing us how long those stones have existed?
The other part is that the members of the far right are aware conspiracies exist, because they *are* part of one (at least.) As such, they *know* they exist. And they know they *fail*.
What is inconceivable to many people brought up in a conspiracy is that a conspiracy can be brought down without people actually conspiring against it.
But the truth is, all of the things that we’ve been taught to do to protect the conspiracy? All it takes is for one person to not do one of them right. Conspiracies are incredibly fragile, because they’re generally used to do things that the vast majority of people are opposed to.
There are innumerable conspiracies that work, generally because they’re small, and many of the ones that work are comprised entirely of people who’ve been brought up in conspiracies, so they know “all” the things that they need to do to protect them.
There are still a lot of small conspiracies that fail, either because the world changed such that they didn’t recognize how to apply the list, or because they included someone who disagreed with the goal or the means. But the big ones are pretty much all doomed.
It’s impressive how far the big ones can get sometimes, but the people inside them who disagree with their goals frequently don’t move to expose the conspiracy until they have enough proof, and the amount of proof they feel they need tends to be directly related to the distance the group is to completing their goals – so if they’re not on the brink, the amount of proof is challenging.
But most of the conspiracies that little kids are brought up into are a special kind of doomed, because there’s no chance that the kids will do all the things. They tend to be designed to accommodate this by being either ridiculous or harmless (frequently both). As a class of examples, every surprise birthday party ever.
And suddenly just about everyone who’s read this far realizes that they’ve been included in a conspiracy at least once in their lives.
I recently watched a 3-hour debate between Bill Nye and young-earth creationist Ken Ham who is apparently also a scientist (geneticist i think? which vaguely boggles the mind but ok) just to get a flavour of their arguments.
It turns out they’re not very good, at least if you’re not a faithful christian fundie. It’s a lot of cherry-picking and flinging “how can you know for sure?” back at everything science says and consistently ignoring Ockham’s-razor-type arguments from (overwhelming) plausibility, all that without producing any convincing evidence other than that one book.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t know about their rhetorics and thought was interesting, was the distinction they make between “observational science” and “historical science”. They argue that only the former is “proper science” while the latter is every bit as unprovable as Genesis literalism; they say that you can’t prove that the laws of physics as we observe them today worked the same in the past. So, like, maybe the half-life of radioactive elements has increased astronomically over the last 6000 years for *reasons*?? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT’S NOT THE CASE?
It’s a smart argument, I mean as smart as it gets when evidence is just so massively stacked against you. It makes a passable impression of skepticism (if you just squint a bit, ok), and as such claims to belong to the same playing field as actual science. But philosophically it’s a very different beast of course, because unlike science it provides no mechanism for falsifying its claims.
At some point an audience member asks both of them “what would it take for you to become convinced of the other side’s view?” And while Ham writhes a bit before admitting that that’s not gonna happen because “faith”, Bill Nye simply responds “one piece of evidence”.
Another thing i thought was swell about that debate is how the creationist is constantly saying things like “we know because God” and “the Bible tells us everything we need to know” and so on, Nye makes no attempt to paper over the gaps in scientific knowledge. It’s like the fundie dude thinks not knowing something is bad, that getting a scientist to admit they don’t have a neat explanation for everything is a point for their side. But Nye does a great job of making ignorance sound exciting, he’s like “oh, good question: we don’t know! we have so much more to learn!” And he just sounds like a giddy child as he says it
String theory has no method of falsifying its claims. Read some of the criticism of string theory by the quantum loop gravity guys. Maybe if we get much better at math and technology, we might be able to confirm string theory; we might give it up as a time sink that leads nowhere, but disprove it? Not so much.
So string theory makes no predictions? If it predicts things, it’s falsifiable. Such predictions might be hard to test, but that’s a different question.
The creationist argument here is qualitatively different – it exists only to counter evidence for evolution. It’s just a counter of “you could be wrong because things could have worked differently in the past”.
The problem with most quantum stuff is that it’s math predicting math. We’ve finally hit the point where that math gets translated into physical form with quantum computing and teleportation of information, but most of it is “this math suggests this about this math that suggests this about math”.
And the creationist argument (time/decay changed speeds) also fundamentally (hehe) relies on the same fallacy of thinking that something is a particular way, without providing a single piece of evidence to support that hypothesis or a mechanism to falisfy the hypothesis. Again extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Oh yeah, human/earth/solar system exceptionalism is absolutely axiomatic in their view and doesn’t seem to warrant any special explaining. Again, the book says so, and ultimately blind faith in the literal reading of the bible is the only leg they care to stand on.
It’s my impression that the issue with string theory’s “lack of falsifiability” is basically that the predictions that string theory makes are all things that happen at such a small scale that we can’t test them.
If that’s right, it’s basically only useful to the people who can’t be comfortable without feeling they know what is below the smallest subatomic particles we can detect.
We may get to the point where it’s useful for something, But all scientific hypotheses are formed before they’re proven.
My issue with “string theory” is that it’s really “string hypothesis”, as the science I was taught in school said that “theory” was for things that had passed the minimum bar of having survived at least one test. According to that definition, if we can’t falsify string theory yet, it can’t be a scientific theory yet.
I do realize it’s confusing, because most people use “theory” to mean “this idea I have that I haven’t proven yet”, but if scientists call those “hypotheses”, then they should be consistent in this regard.
Now that you have been exposed to Ken Ham the professional liar, you should be ready to experience the creationist majesty that was Duane Gish, the one who the term “the Gish gallop” was coined. He passed away in 2013, but there are plenty of recordings of him doing his spiel.
Can you imagine a chemistry teacher giving a lesson about the periodic table “because that’s what you have to write on the exams, but between you and me, we all know everything’s made from various combinations of air, fire, earth, water, and æther.”
“In conclusion, newtonian mechanics says that masses are constantly attracted to each other by a force named gravity. Off the record, we all know that stones just love sinking while helium-filled balloons enjoy floating upwards, but hey, they won’t let me teach common sense to you kids anymore.”
Oh yeah, like in hindsight, his “arguments” for young earth creationism were just as flimsy as our local chapter of our cult–I mean, church–‘s arguments. I was just deep in the “thought blocking techniques” tactic that cults will ingrain in you, where I just refused to think about how evolution would make way more sense because contradictions to my parents’ teachings were Scary, lol
At some point, I had the realization that it was a lot scarier if my parents were right.
I mean, the possibility that an all-powerful being feels an eternity of torment could possibly be considered the right way to handle one of its creations not obeying its unstated whims. Because, not only is that on its face ludicrous, it’s almost certainly the case that such a being would not be a fan of one who realized that was ludicrous on its face. And anyone who thought about that would go there.
Do I now *have* to imagine the next scene is Joyce pulling Dina to the side whispering, “~pst, it’s ok, I’m on the same side as you, now”, and winking, only for Dina to respond in confusion, “Joyce, you are now also interested in women…?”
Sure, but consider how ’empirical’ most empirical evidence is. Gravity? That’s easy to have personal experience with. Photosynthesis? Plants are pretty common, but you need a powerful microscope to watch living chloroplasts at work. Relativity? Again, expensive specialized equipment needed to accurately analyze the movement of planets. The Higgs Boson?? You need access to a particle accelerator to have any evidence at all they exist.
Empirical evidence is NOT enough for the average person to base a belief in modern science on. Most of us replace that with a firm belief in the scientific establishment, which SAYS that this stuff has been empirically observed – and they wouldn’t lie to us, right? They have NO ulterior motives for making us believe in this stuff… do they?
Not directly and not in all fields, but engineers seem to be able to build a lot of really cool stuff based on the nonsense these “scientists” made up.
Many of us still have direct experience with inventions resulting from these obscure empirical observations, though. Like, GPS and digital cameras work whether or not you “believe” in the science behind them, and a quick youtube video can explain how these rely on quantum mechanics and relativity. I guess you can just… not believe engineers either? But it’s much harder to discredit engineering than scientists, when you can see that stuff works.
GPS and digital cameras only rely on our understanding of quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics exist.
Anyone who worked on these technologies back in the day before we had applied quantum mechanics understanding to their design would be able to recognize the improvement, and, even without understanding exactly how an understanding of quantum mechanics could be applied, could appreciate that something that confusing was involved.
But most people haven’t. Most people haven’t futzed with any of the engineered things that, based on pre-quantum understanding, *should* have worked, but *didn’t*, because of quantum mechanics.
As such, direct experience with those inventions doesn’t really help them to understand that quantum mechanics exists.
I *have*, so yes, I understand that quantum mechanics exists. I’m not at all comfortable with the layperson explanations of quantum mechanics that I’ve heard, but my GPS works, my digital camera works, the rest of my phone works, and the rest of my computers mostly work, so it feels pretty convincing that somewhere someone understands this stuff.
I don’t know how to bridge that gap with other people, however.
In 1846, astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was already aware of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. So the technology didn’t need to be /that/ advanced to see the effects of relativity, even if at the time they had no idea as to *why*.
It all comes down to cognitive dissonance, doesn’t it?
When we have a thorough investment in a fallacious belief, we don’t just happily give it up when faced with inconsistent facts. We are much more likely to deny the facts to preserve the belief in question.
Child indoctrination may be powerful, but the scary part is that this kind of brainwashing could happen to anyone, at any age.
There are definitely wrong ways. There are ways that leave you easy prey to manipulation, unable to assess the validity of different sources of information or how to deal with logically invalid arguments.
There are people who may not be prepared to meet on the basis of rational discussion. They may be taught to view rational argument as a form of deception. They may even answer rational argument with their fists or their pistols.
To be fair, even outside of people having been specifically taught to counteract rational argument, it’s a lousy way of convincing the vast majority of humans. We respond better to emotional appeals than to rationality. We’re social animals and reason is a thin layer on top of deeper motivations.
We can use it, but it’s hard, especially if we’re emotionally vested in a stance.
It’s conceivable that there is really only one right way to think. But it’s inconceivable that any of us could figure out what it is, even those who happen upon it randomly.
But as thejeff pointed out, there are demonstrably incorrect ways to think.
Unfortunately, the issue lies with demonstrating to people who use one or more of those incorrect ways to think to a sufficient degree as to convince them.
I mean, even if there is nothing solidly debunking it, all science and therefore scientists must be ready to have their theories tested. Science is ever changing, science is a reaction to information not the creation of it, and being closed minded would make you a shoddy scientist. Hell, within the lifespan of Dina as a character our understanding of Dinosaurs has evolved quite a bit. At any point we could find out that entire planet is in some alien’s greenhouse and we’d have to accept that reality and explain that. Nothing’s impossible, only improbable. That being said in this instance Dina’s probably correct.
That’s what makes Dina’s explanation of why she likes dinosaurs so interesting to me. She said the are non-changing, so she will have the possibility to understand them before the game changes in front of her eyes (like social interactions), but that’s only true for the dinosaurs themselves. Our understanding of them is ever changing and will likely be throughout her lifetime.
still, it seems like she think she is given a fair shot at it.
I mean to be fair, even the dinosaurs themselves were also constantly changing. Adaptations, Evolutions, Extinctions, Rebirths, and the like until eventually they were wittled down to the reptiles and lizards of today. If anything you could say that dinosaurs aren’t just history. It’s ongoing. Who knows what shapes the earth will take. What events will take place after humanity is long since gone. Maybe they’d come back. Maybe the creatures that follow will be so incredibly miniscule that crocodiles for them will be like tyranasaurus rex.
It’s like when I fill the dishwasher and I can’t find that last piece of cutlery that needs to go in. I know that if I *start* the machine, the lost pieces will immediately become apparent. This is not magical; it’s just what happens in my experience!
Alas, the internet doesn’t (usually) have a pause button to put in that last thought or fix that typo.
But it DOES have an army of people who can’t wait to point out that you were wrong, not just wrong, but you were “WRONG ON THE INTERNET.” Thankfully, following the rolling barrage of corrective posts, we can sift through the rubble and still learn.
And also, our understanding of dinosaurs changes and evolves over time too, as our data grows and matures. F’rinstnace, I too was taught Dinosaurs were the ancestors of reptiles and lizards.
I graduated from high school in 1990. I don’t recall any dinosaur information being imparted by teachers, TAs, or professors in high school or college, but I do recall being taught that dinosaurs were the ancestors of lizards and reptiles.
Just because some scientists have figured something out doesn’t mean that information has disseminated to everywhere that’s receptive to the idea, and especially doesn’t mean it’s made it into the minds that aren’t.
To add a needless point, it may be that what Dina likes is that despite our knowledge and understanding growing, the dinosaurs themselves (excepting actively breeding birds) are not changing.
I don’t think this is a needless point. Others pointed out our understanding of dinosaurs is advancing, even in Dina’s lifetime, as if that was somehow a problem for Dina.
The thing is, that’s the point. This advancement is happening due to people Dina probably considers fellow travelers, headed in the same direction. Dinosaurs themselves are static, which gives us all the ability to refine our understanding of them, relative to them.
I don’t believe she feels her current understanding is the final everything there is to know about them, as much as she enjoys revelling in it.
Evolution has been so thoroughly tested and examined and is corroborated by so many fields that it’s really not a good use of anyone’s time or resources to specifically aim to debunk it anymore. It’s theoretically possible that some evidence will be uncovered that will merit taking another look but it’s astronomically unlikely.
Oh for sure. But always keep an open mind. Also it’s not just evolution since Dina brought up the whole of biology. Evolution is just a weird stopgap in that.
Just because evolution is what makes the rest of biology make sense doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that could.
For example, the rest of biology would make a fair amount of sense if the world was created by a trickster god.
While I was tempted to say that the god Joyce was brought up to believe would not have created the rest of biology, there is absolutely sufficient evidence to state that either that god is a trickster god, or suffering from some pretty severe dementia. I mean, just look at the rest of biology. QED.
Isn’t debunking evolution more like ‘biologically unlikely’. If anything, despite the lunacy of the following, astronomy has a better chance of finding the alien pranksters that set it all up to fuck with us.
There’s a difference between debunking (which is destructive all around), skepticism (which can be very useful), and testing (which is extremely useful).
Einstein didn’t accept quantum mechanics. Someone pointed out that, by not accepting it, he’d invented an important paradox which actually advanced the field quite a lot as other physicists grappled with it. This was indeed valuable.
But… Imagine how much he might have advanced the field if he’d tried to!
Einstein advanced the young field of quantum mechanics enormously by stimulating advances with his creative skepticism. His attempt to show it allowed violation of conservation of mass/energy led to the concept of virtual particles for example. The fact that the original formulation was incompatible with special relativity led to Dirac’s formulation. It was almost a routine for a while. Einstein would poke a hole in the theory in the morning and the bright young QM turks would scramble to find an answer by that night or the next day. It’s hard to believe that he could have advanced the field more than he actually did by trying his best to sink it. It’s interesting that his more philisophic objections (God does not play dice with the Universe) are met by Everit’s interpretation of QM.
Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. His paper proving that light is quantised (discovery of the photon) was the seminal work in quantum electrodynamics. That (not relativity) is what he was awarded his Nobel prize for. A while ago there was a project to created a list of the most influential scientists of all time by examining what work got cited most. Einstein came first and second: first for founding relativity, second for founding quantum mechanics.
What he dissented from (“The Good Lord does not cast dice”, “spooky action at a distance”) was not quantum theory but the Copenhagen Interpretation. There are other interpretations, and Einstein’s later work involved ruling some of them out.
If you still believe that Demoted Oblivious can’t tell you “a T. Rex small enough for a terrarium wouldn’t make a badass pet” after they clearly did, you’re clearly not a scientist.
Please note that neither Demoted Oblivious nor I have attempted to convice you that a T-Rex small enough for a terrarium would make a horrible pet (I mean, it would, but this text box is too small for a decent proof, and I have better things to do with the next five years of my life), just that someone could tell you that it wouldn’t make a badass pet.
Incidentally, on that note, “a T. Rex small enough for a terrarium wouldn’t make a badass pet.” Maybe, with enough repetition, you’ll admit that someone could actually tell you that.
Double check what you mean by “theory”. A scientific theory is an explanatory and predictive framework that emerges from and is supported by multiple lines of evidence. Those in turn came from the testing of hypotheses.
Evolution, gravity, germ theory of disease, and more – they’re bedrock. If you manage to supplant one of them with something better, get your passport up to date because you’re goin’ to Stockholm.
This is not to say we don’t continuously refine our understanding of them, and that’s where continued research comes in. And no, evolution is not a ‘weird stopgap’ in biology. As Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Back in Science classes in high school I was taught a doctrine that “theory” fitted into a hierarchy in which a “conjecture” developed as evidence for it accumulated through “hypothesis” and one to “law” when it was proven.
That was complete bunk, of course. A scientific law is just a statement of some sort of regularity as a verbal formula rather than as equation. A scientific theory is a coherent body of observations, propositions, inferences, and reasoning that gives a unified explanation to diverse phenomena. And they remain what they are even if they are disproven by observation — the Geocentric Theory is still a theory, so is the Theory of the Humours.
It was bunk, but made it easy to write and mark questions on exams.
The same is true of the definition of “species” that I was taught in high school (and my teachers were careful to qualify it by teaching us about clines and ring species and the paradox involved in speciation under the definitiion that was going to be tested in the exams).
I mean, her first question is valid given Joyce’s various neuroses and demonstrated inability to accept information that contradicts her (previous) worldview. That said, chill Dina, she’s trying.
Flat Earthers are funny to me because I always ask the same question. What is there to GAIN by lying about the earth? Like seriously what’s in it for the government? This would be a HUGE and elaborate lie. That would require literally every country with the capabilities of launching a satellite or building a powerful telescope to be on the same page. A bizarre amount of cooperation that is unheard of by modern society. Who’s behind it? Big Globe? Nobody was buying globes so they had to lie about the shape of the earth?
And the weirdest part is that the whole flat earth thing is fairly recent. 2500 years ago, Greeks not only knew the world was round, they even had a surprisingly accurate idea of how big it is.
People *still* knew that the Earth was round during the “Age of Exploration” too. They just didn’t think that there was anything between Western Europe and India.
. . .Well except for the Norse who kind of explored up and down the American Coast for a bit but they didn’t stay long and I don’t really think that knowledge was ever really talked about outside of the Native Greenland population?
I actually should look that information up. I’m sure it’s interesting. Like if the Norse ever talked about those expeditions or if Norway layed claim to having “discovered” the New World first.
Even the stories that circulate about how, say, Columbus sailed “to prove that the world wasn’t flat” are based off of, at best, a misinterpretation of what actually went down: Columbus insisting like an idiot that “yes, the world is round, but it’s a lot smaller than everyone thinks it is!” while the actual science of the time knew he was wrong and having a good idea of what the actual numbers were.
If it hadn’t been for a whole ‘nother continent in his way, Columbus would have starved to death out in the ocean, probably still insisting the world was smaller than it was.
An interesting theory is that Columbus knew about the New World thanks to Portuguese navigators who may have re-discovered it in the 1420s. Columbus believed it was China, hence his erroneous calculations.
This would prove Oscar Wilde’s comment: “America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”
How can you even argue that? Isn’t the moon present in mythos dating back millenia? Or do they believe that’s all fabricated too? Or that there was holographic moon projecting technology in the earliest parts of civilization and recorded history, perhaps by some third party who just wanted to prank any sapient life that sprung forth?
But you aren’t supposed to interfere with the past when you time travel..! That, and don’t meet past versions of yourself, are the two most basic time travel laws!!
And once you do start changing things, do you remember the original past or the altered one? How do you know if you’ve actually made the changes you wanted? What if you accidentally prevent yourself from being born (and do you cause some sort of loop because you can’t not have been born and simultaneously have gone back into the past to make the changes that had that result..?)
Also, how big/dense is this space station supposed to be, coz tides etc?
I originally assumed you were joking but have concluded you were probably not and am now not sure whether or not I want to Google and risk not sleeping and Wikipedia rage-fueled spiralling tonight instead…
It’s about validation – believing in this crazy bullshit makes them feel smarter like anyone else because they think they’re “the only one s who figured it out”.
The most common explanation I hear is that it’s a way of turning people away from Christ… Somehow. I used to know the rest of this explanation, but I seem to have expunged it from my memory at some point.
That said, though, the psychology of this (and other weird conspiracy theories, like Helen Keller not being real, and “weird fun facts” that are completely wrong, like The Prince actually being satire despite how little sense that makes in context) is the emotional reward for being one of the ones “in the know”; that you’re one of the few people who know the truth, unlike all of those shallow fools out there. It’s pretty much just being a hipster, except being dedicated to weird beliefs instead of weird music.
Unfortunately, this can end up with far more serious consequences for a person’s life if their conspiracy theory ends up involving everyday life at some point (like, say, Q-Anon), since… Well, ever insult a hipster’s band by mistake? Now apply all of that anger and doubling-down to an important conversation about how baking soda doesn’t actually cure cancer.
It’s really unfortunate how much of human psychology is ultimately self-defeating… Which is why I say aliens must be responsible for the fact that human society hasn’t self-destructed yet. (Just to be clear; that last line is a joke.)
My biggest fear is that a conspiracy theory is proven right and now I feel like a jackass for calling them crazy. Luckily that hasn’t happened to me YET.
Eh, most of the time, they’d be right by pure coincidence, so I’d not feel terribly bad about it.
Like, if it turned out that Epstein was murdered (instead of just being an old guy in a downright horrible environment, surrounded by people who despise him, and with no realistic hope of ever leaving prison alive), it probably has nothing to do with all of these elaborate reasons people have dreamed up – it’d probably be at the hands of someone he ticked off in the prison, and Barr covered it up because it makes everyone look bad and nobody really cares who killed a creep like him.
Sure, the theorists would technically be right about a piece of it – but it had nothing to do with their reasoning. It’s like all of those economists who cry about “The Next Big Meltdown!!!!” – yes, they’ll be right one of these days, because the market always goes down again one day, but since it really does have nothing to do with us having gone off of the gold standard, they’re still cranks.
I’d suggest that your time is probably much better spent debunking religions with actual political power (like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc) who use it to oppress people, rather than debunking bizarre fringe conspiracy theories like flat-earth which btw tend to be mere side-effects of the former religions and the bad cognitive habits they instil, when they’re not a mere sign of mental illness.
Debunking religion is even more of a waste of time, especially if you’re focusing on broad religions rather than specific especially harmful cults – helping people break free from groups like Joyce’s is one thing, attempting to tear down Christianity as a whole is something else entirely.
And the bizarre fringe conspiracies can get really dangerous and often feed into each other. Apparently harmless things like Flat Earth still require global cabals controlling the world and deceiving everyone (NASA lies! and the world’s navies keep people from getting to Antarctica to see the Ice Wall around the edge.) This makes an easy feeder for violent conspiracies like the QAnon stuff.
I’ve had someone adamantly refuse to understand how the shared GULO pseudogene (a broken gene that in most nonprimates codes for vitamin C synthesis) in haplorhine primates is evidence of common descent.
Why MMT isn’t actually infinite free money, just an argument that we should consider the effects of inflation rather than an arbitrarily chosen debt number. Somehow, this seems lost on both proponents and opponents, which I find vaguely alarming.
And every time you think you’ve argued past a layer of misunderstanding, you end up stuck in another, and by the time you’ve clarified that one, the last one ends up all tangled up again. On a related note, I think I might scream if I hear “Think of the government budget like your household budget…” one more time, simply because the two are so far removed from one another except for sharing a word, yet somehow people still think it’s some great insight.
But it’s probably the only thing science-y (well, economics is in the same general ballpark at least?) that I’m willing to argue at length about, because at least there are fewer points where one side of the argument is so far removed from the other that discussion can’t continue.
Thanks for an interesting wikipedia crawl. I’m curious how MMT deals with large-scale multi-currency horizontal transactions. Couldn’t that cause crippling debt to be accumulated in foreign currency in a way the government couldn’t control?
Seems like MMT is a decent model for a large country with a powerful economy and a currency others want to hold. But a small country with an undesirable currency will have serious trouble trading, won’t it? The smaller the country, the more it depends on trade (assuming total isolation isn’t an option), and the easier it is for foreign interests to end up owning the country’s capital outright.
Or to put it another way, how would it work out for a small-town-USA that issued and collected local scrip according to MMT theory, while still embedded in the US$ financial system? Seems like an easy and fun experiment for a rich libertarian to try somewhere. If done correctly, would you expect that town’s unemployment to drop? Do you have any examples or counterexamples of this?
No, you’re right; it can really only be applied to a handful of countries. The US, China, and a couple of other Asian countries. The more a country is reliant on foreign currencies for their economic activity, the less relevant the theory becomes.
But, it is an important theory in understanding the consequences of our economic policies in countries where it does apply; so long as it’s to ourselves, it doesn’t particularly matter if we go a billion dollars in debt, a trillion dollars in debt, or ten trillion dollars in debt; it doesn’t meaningfully constrain our ability to spend, because we’re creating all of those dollars to begin with. What does matter is the crippling inflation that suddenly dropping ten trillion dollars into the market would normally cause. Similarly, taxing ten trillion dollars to pay off that debt isn’t a particularly meaningful action; what matters is whose dollars you’re “destroying” by taking out of circulation. If you’re taking it from a hypothetical quadrillionaire who keeps it all under their mattress, it was unlikely to have an effect at all; if you took it from hedge funds, you probably slowed the churn on the stock exchange by a noticeable amount; if you took it from business, big or small, you probably slowed job growth; and if you took it from the working class, you probably slowed demand and the economy as a whole. It’s important to keep taxes at an appropriate level to control inflation, but it’s just as important to tax the right areas to best accomplish that end.
One side effect, though, is that it also makes it easier to make mistakes on a local level. Take healthcare, for example; we have massive economy that can easily afford to cover everyone, right? Well, not exactly. We have the money, certainly; we have an absurdly high GDP. But we don’t actually have the raw resources, currently – that is to say, we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, and other assorted personnel to reach the level of care that we desire. It doesn’t matter how much money we pour into the system, since demand outstrips supply in this case; you’d just make existing doctors rich, while causing inflation to rise in the rest of the economy. And this is a mistake that could be made in any number of other areas of our economy; confusing the fact that we have a great deal of money with the idea that money makes everything possible. If the underlying economic reality isn’t healthy – if there’s a lack of resources, infrastructure, or knowledge – money can’t force something to work. We can only marshal what resources actually exist. This isn’t generally an issue with the old policy mindset; the price tag associated with even trying is normally enough to get everything tied down in talk about debt. But it’s the kind of thing that can be a problem when we realize that the only real issue is how to do something rather than how to pay for it.
(Though with the healthcare thing, let me just clarify that we absolutely can train more doctors and nurses, and institute a number of other reforms to help improve capacity – just that it’s something that will provide results a decade from now instead of a year from now.)
In the U.S. there’s a giant sucking sound (pun intended) where the middle class used to be. Health care isn’t just suffering from lack of resources; it’s suffering from a whole constellation of rent-seeking behaviors, from keeping doctors scarce to health “insurance” adding tens of percent of inefficiency to the system. Things we used to own, we’re increasingly encouraged and sometimes almost forced to rent, from houses to books to major appliances that reliably break after five years to thousand-dollar cell phones that become almost worthless after two or three (or cheap phones you hate from day one). Mundane financial transactions lose 2-3% to Square or Visa or PayPal.
Bottom line – it looks to me like there’s a concerted effort to horizontally transfer wealth asymmetrically on a nation-sized scale, from the working class to large businesses. Some of my friends call it “end stage capitalism.”
I’m getting back to economics, really I am. My question is: Would MMT suggest that some of these problems could be alleviated by letting the money be sucked away as it is today, borrowing enough to provide a Guaranteed Basic Income, and taxing big companies according to how much wealth they extracted from the working class?
It seems like a convenient solution, and very workable in theory. But in practice, I suspect there would be trouble. Like subsidized college tuition and some kinds of health care, availability of more money would only cause prices to increase. And it would be very hard, both politically and in actual implementation, to tax the most successful big companies as much as the system needed.
By the way, I correlate “end stage capitalism” with the sabotage of education, subversion of institutions, and various Republican and conservative policies for the past half-century, and I start to think there’s a concerted anti-Enlightenment effort on many fronts. Make people poor, ignorant, and desperate, add a few morally freighted wedge issues, and they’ll vote for a populist government that will make things worse and stay in power forever. We came close to that in 2016-2020. But I don’t know if that’s outside the scope of what you want to talk about.
To answer your question; yes, and no. MMT would say that there’s no practical disadvantage to instituting UBI in an otherwise healthy economy; if taxation is increased to an appropriate level to control inflation, and if there’s no shortage of food or other basic necessities, normal market mechanics will prevent anything too terrible from happening.
MMT, however, would not say that borrowing is necessary at all; while we do this in the United States for various reasons, money is created when the government puts a dollar into circulation (generally by spending it), and destroys it when it’s taken out of circulation (generally by taxing it). We don’t actually need to worry about lenders or other such considerations that normally constrain, say, state or city budgets – rather, we only need worry about whether a policy is well designed or not. And, indeed, we can do a heck of a lot more harm if a policy isn’t designed well, since it allows us to make much bigger mistakes.
And that brings us to the other half of the “no” – MMT does indeed state that there’s no barrier to instituting a well-designed UBI policy. But MMT only talks about where the money comes from and where it ends up, not whether a policy is good or not; if we misjudge where those dollars are going to spent, and raise taxes on the wrong areas of the economy, we could still end up causing all sorts of problems. If the critics are right, and UBI would cause a ton of people to quit their jobs and watch TV all day (something I, personally, do not expect would happen; people still want to feel useful, and people will always want to earn more luxuries), then you’ll still end up with an economy in ruins. If the implementation is botched, and we end up missing a bunch of people who should have gotten money but didn’t, that still creates a big hole in our social safety net. And in all of these cases, if we botch things badly enough, UBI ends up discredited for a generation, perhaps longer.
Or to restate things, it’s like I said before; MMT lets us do big things without having to worry about an arbitrary number – but we do still have to worry about whether those big things are feasible in other respects, and have to plan things out carefully.
We’ve also had several pilot projects testing out a UBI in various places over the years, and each time it has been an unqualified success. It’s frustrating to no end that something so beneficial to so many of us that has been so thoroughly examined and tested and priced out has still not been implemented. But there’s growing support for it and even several of our main political parties (like the NDP) are now pushing for it. I’m cautiously hopeful, myself.
Personally, I think it will work; even without the experiments, similar policies have provided considerable benefit to society and the economy, and the reasoning behind it is sound.
My only concern is how its implemented, because good ideas rarely survive congress unscathed.
See this shit right here is why arguments against raising the minimum wage or, like UBI? Prices have already increased, and have steadily been increasing, without all those things.
All the fearmongering excuses that more fundamentalist/conservative people use to discourage UBI/higher minimum wage/social safety nets? Those things are already happening, and wages still haven’t gone up, even though the middle class has disappeared and the prices of everything is still increasing. I see hungry and desperate people everywhere now.
We can’t drop a trillion dollars into our debt at once but what we CAN do is give the average American a universal basic income, because the amount of money billionaires have hoarded out of our economy is destroying us, but we (meaning the average american) don’t have any money to spend to prop up our economy alone. The Rich’s money hoarding is a serious fucking issue, but until the government starts taxing them and preventing them from hiding vast amounts of money on offshore banking accounts, that money isn’t going to show up in our economy because they aren’t spending it. They’re saving it. And since we can’t spend because we have nothing, those are our choices.
They can either tax the fuck out of the rich or give *US* some money. Because either way that money needs to appear somewhere before our economy collapses utterly.
Just chiming in because we were already talking MMT to begin with…
“We can’t drop a trillion dollars into our debt at once but -”
But we totally can! If the underlying economic activity is there to sustain it, of course, which is admittedly more dubious with the current shutdowns. Conservatives fearmonger over debt, but ever since we got off the gold standard, we don’t need to take on debt to spend more – that’s a policy decision that we can change as we please. This doesn’t mean we can spend recklessly without incurring consequences, of course, but it also means that if we need to make drastic changes to protect the future of the economy that we don’t need to worry about the price tag.
“The Rich’s money hoarding is a serious fucking issue, but until the government starts taxing them and preventing them from hiding vast amounts of money on offshore banking accounts, that money isn’t going to show up in our economy because they aren’t spending it.”
(emphasis added)
Properly speaking, any money that they’re hoarding (or spending in other countries) are completely irrelevant to us – in permanently removing it from our economy, they’ve already performed the same function as government taxation; that is to say, reducing the money supply to protect the value of dollars currently in circulation.
We can (and should) still go after that money to fight inequality, and curtail the influence of the rich, but as far as it impacts our ability to spend money goes, it wouldn’t change things at all; if they’re not spending it here, they’re not affecting inflation.
—
But as to your broader point; I do agree that it would be a good policy idea to spend more on the lower classes, who have urgent needs and will turn around and spend it immediately, spurring more economic activity. Tax policies and spending priorities that favor the rich are fundamentally misguided – in a properly functioning society, companies and wealthy individuals will always benefit from a better-funded lower class, as it gives them more people to sell to and take a cut from. That is, after all, what their function is meant to be – to turn a personal profit by fulfilling the needs of others. (It also means that, left unchecked, they will eventually break the system by owning everything and destroy the lower classes who no longer have the tools to work on their own, but that’s where the importance of proper tax policy comes in)
Conservatives fearmonger over debt *when it’s not their idea.
When they’re in charge they’ll happily make it rain so all their rich buddies can stuff their mattresses. Once the tales turn, they turn into Scrooge and tut-tut over every penny.
And half the country falls for it every damn time.
As far as simple economic analogies go, I like comparing the country to a subsistence farm. You grow and make and consume most of your own products, with a bit of trade. Very unlike any regular business in a market economy. And would a farm like that tolerate idle family members? No, it would find work for them to do. Likewise, persistent high unemployment is a stupid waste.
I rarely bother trying to explain science to people bc it’s just not worth the energy, but i did have my fundie friend in 8th grade beat me with a ruler for saying evolution is real and stopped talking to me for a day bc i said it’s okay to be gay. Hm, she was also a dirty blonde with big smile. And her name also started with Jo. I think I knew Joyce irl.
On a nicer note where i did successfully explain science to someone, i got my less fundie but still super Christian friend to stop being anti-vaxx in the line at kfc by comparing being unvaccinated to sending out untrained soldiers to war. I think i also got a nother friend to be less transphobic in the kfc line
Dina definitely feels a bit more venomous when science is involved. Like I can’t really picture her starting this conversation without the intent of a “got ya” or hoping Joyce will say “ah you were right all along dina-sama!”
I wonder how IU’s biology classes are arranged. Dina has already taken one semester of bio, yet she is taking this class with newbies Joyce and Becky. (I do not wonder sufficiently to Google it, and “bio classes are scheduled in whatever way allows this plot to happen, because the author says so” is a good enough answer for me. Just a bit of idle pondering.)
My freshman bio classes didn’t build on each other or need to be taken in a specific order. I’d guess Dina took Biology 101 last semester and they’re all in Biology 102 together now.
Depends on your university. Mine had Bio 181 and 182 for intro classes, then divided into separate fields like Ecology, Genetics, etc. for everything after that.
I wish that one day I too will have a winter version of my hat to wear over my regular walking around hat…
(Also that last panel reminds me of that parody edit of that episode from Justice League where they reveal their identities and it goes “Clark Kent, Wally West, BATMAN!”)
Uhmm… my biology teacher in high school was actually a biologist, he was also presbiterian. Eventually we reached the theme of evolution, and the Darwin Theory was explained as per the text book. At the very end of the class he felt obligated to teach “the controversy”, it was very akward… He was a very very good teacher by the way and much appreciated by the alumni… he even lent me his copy of After Man:Zoology of the futere book by Dixon…so i think he tried to be “open minded” without “betraying his faith”…
Did he go into the whole “Creationism vs Evolution” Court Trial thing?
As for whether or not Religious Belief is incongruous with Believing in Science?
I don’t think so. This may change from church to church, I was raised Catholic and this seemed to be the belief of the various parishes, was that “Science is Man coming to understand God’s work. If a theory is proven wrong, that means that we should re-examine what we thought we knew and learn more.”
But as I also understand and have been told by others with other Christian Denominations in the United States that this is. . . not the common belief.
I’m also Catholic. The catechists were very consistent about “Science is another path of faith. They are studying God’s works that we may all have a deeper understanding of Creation.”
My own personal faith is that Evolution is part of the design, in that God made our world partially self-editing, rather than just laying down Perfection from the start, because the Churn of Suffering is necessary for an ineffable reason.
If we ARE God’s Sims, I live in faith that He cherishes us, and will not delete the metaphorical ladders from our pools.
I went to a catholic grade school in the 60s. One day the priest who taught the catechism got to talking about cave men and went through the whole descent of man thing and got out a chart. As he got halfway through, he waved a finger at a couple of species and said “Adam and Eve happened somewhere around here the Church thinks.” Then he went on talking about the cool things like cave painting and mammoth hunting.
I went to take both high school and college level biology intro classes and God only came up when the class had to dissect something. (Oh God, yuck!)
The 60s, When Science Ruled!
My high school biology teacher was pretty good, but there was one time when we were learning about evolution where he went, “Now would this have been possible without God? I don’t think so.” And then just carried on with the rest of the lesson. It was mostly just a jarring moment for me.
This is reminding me of my trip to the Creationist museum here in Alberta. Which we did as a family trip several years back just for the hell of it as a thing to do one weekend.
(I’ll note NONE of us are creationists, but it was honestly a really interesting visit purely from the standpoint of seeing how they structured their arguments/the “evidence” they were presenting. They start out by presenting some of the more questionable examples of evolution, eventually start hinting that a great flood could have been responsible for a lot of the phenomena that we use to geologically measure age (or, you know, it could have been an ICE AGE) and by the end they’re displaying a geneological chart tracing the British Royal Family back to King David.)
(Incidentally, we also have a really good dinosaur museum in the province. I haven’t been since I was a kid, but it’s right in the middle of a paleontology gold mine, so they have a ton of cool fossils on display.)
Back to King David?! Part of me wants to know how the heck they decided on going for him, while another doesn’t. Though I’m currently more partial to the “how?!” part.
It’s a whole thing about the Stone of Scone, and how it’s really some stone mentioned in the Bible, and how the last of the Israeli king’s daughters fled to Ireland… It’s ludicrous, frankly, to the point that it makes the Da Vinci Code seem plausible by comparison.
It’s also pretty insulting in how it claims that really, the Irish are the actual Jews, and everyone else is just, like… Lying about being Jewish. Or such is my understanding from the one time I made the mistake of asking about this whole thing.
For all that I’ve read on the various European monarchies, I don’t think I’ve heard this before. Got some good sources? I’d be interested in reading on the subject.
IIRC, the only monarchy off the top of my head to actually claim descent from David was Ethiopia with their Solomonic Dynasty, which ruled up until their overthrow in 1974.
Not sure about David but having read Le Mort D’Arthur and some of the extended Grail Cycle works, there’s ABSOLUTELY a belief in it that Joseph of Arimathea (or his son, or his brother-in-law) settle in England. And then I think their lineage eventually produces Galahad? The Grail Quest was one of those sections where you can tell Malory’s cribbing from a ton of different sources and the result is pretty odd even by his standards. (Galahad gets multiple magic swords in a very short period, including one that belonged to King David that’s in Britain because of course it is, and puts out a forest fire with the power of his virginity.)
Definitely not a CREDIBLE claim of any descent, but I could see legends trying to throw whatever they could at the wall.
Oh, yeah, obviously not. (Wouldn’t narratively work for either of them anyway, but at a certain point there’s only so far back you can make up a genealogy without anyone asking questions.)
Meant more that when you’ve got histories claiming Britain was founded by Trojan expatriates and takes its name from a descendant of Aeneas named Brutus (Historia Brittonum and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s subsequent Historia Regum Brittaniae) I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some obscure history written in 807 out there that makes an outlandish claim, but even then I’m not sure anyone would have given it real credence at the time. Certainly not once there’s the more immediate, pressing ancestor you’re trying to claim closest descent from.
I believe God created the world but if evolution exists I believe God helped it along. That’s my thinking on the whole debate. In the Christian high school, I went to, I was taught that dinosaurs existed at the same time as Noah’s ark which seemed cool, and that it takes a much shorter time to fossilize things like bones and such.
Well, that is impossible, since Noah’s ark didn’t actually exist, ie, there was no flood; and there was about a 60 million year gap between dinos being slammed with an asteroid and humans evolving.
She’s not making an argument though. She’s expressing frustration after having already experienced frustration. I do wonder if part of it is that it’s her girlfriend’s girlfriend. Not necessarily jealousy, but knowing that this is what you have to put up with all the time if you want to be around Becky.
Wait I’m actually curious:
Do they learn a bunch of Stuff and then how to debunk it and the test for the course is just a bunch of “what do the scientists say that This is and what is it Really?”
(Sorry, I’ve never had any first hand experience with homeschooling so I have no idea how it works)
I can’t say for what they do now but in the ’80s I had a fundy employer who homeschooled his kids where we worked (so he could better control who they talked to) and this was exactly how they did it back then.
And funny thing he went out of business owing everybody a ton of money including the last month of payroll to the employees. Seems alternate facts don’t apply to accounting.
There are many different ways of doing homeschooling, and many reasons for doing it.
But yeah, the Christian fundamentalist version of homeschool — or even public schooling, with the wrong teacher — will oten teach “this is what you have to say to pass the state exam and get into college”.
Yeah, I was homeschooled for 3 years, because we were traveling under odd circumstances. My parents were both smart and well educated and it didn’t seem to do me any harm scholastically – though I wasn’t really prepared socially to drop back into middle school.
No religious motivation there though.
I only know one family now doing home schooling – again not for religious reasons. They seem to be doing fine.
There are also some private religious schools run along the same lines as the home schooling we’re talking about here and those can be quite bad as well – though they often get some oversight at least. (Other religious schools can be quite good academically, even if you also have to study a bit of the religion.)
This is giving me stressful flashbacks to my college-era debates with creationists online (I was really into learning about evolution/a biology nerd). Them armed with answers in genesis links, and me exasperatingly returning fire with talkorigins links (which is basically a website with a well-organized takedown of the absurdities on AiG).
It’s exhausting just thinking about it. I know Dina’s frustration all too well.
Really, completely here for Joyce’s first “on-screen” science class since beginning to tangibly lose her faith. An excellent point to make that deprogramming is unfortunately not as simple as “I’ve been betrayed by my cult”, she’s going through the slow and painful process of questioning everything she knows.
No wonder glasses are anathema, she has little sense of stability in herself right now and having to have physical reminders of her change is something we’ve seen her struggle with even before the glasses storyline.
tsh yeah. it’s sick.
How do you call a faith-based community that teaches you to mistrust everyone who varies from their own authorized interpretation of their holy text?
I think it should be stressed that fundamentalism is interpretation, same as any other. A “literal” reading is not a more faithful reading than a “metaphorical” one, certainly not in a world where evolution and old earth have been widely accepted facts for 2 centuries. Metaphors are everywhere, they are a very basic and obvious framework for understanding texts. So why do many of the most bigoted cults insist on counter-intuitive readings of scriptures? my guess is to produce an unbridgeable “us and them” divide, where membership in the church is an all-or-nothing deal. Once you’ve willingly cut yourself off from the rest of society, that gives the group (and especially its leaders) so much more power over its members.
oops kinda showed my hand when i said “cults”. (not that i was hiding it too hard ^^) i meant to write “some of the most bigoted denominations” or something, but whatever
Yeah, that’s an important point. The Bible is a complicated layered text, written by multiple hands for an audience with a radically different perspective than our modern one.
It is not possible to read literally, whatever so called literalists claim.
Meh, any text with the poetic grandeur to be the bedrock of a world religion is gonna be read in any number of ways based on how each and every preacher wants to spin it. Also, you trust the Vatican to do less harm than good??!
So this is more related to Booster and yesterday’s strip but I thought of something while talking to Regalli and wanted to see what y’all thought.
Booster’s assessment of Joyce (which they really shouldn’t *have*, but I think the intent of that scene was that they were dead-on with the entire room) was that it was easier to change than admit that the person she was becoming was who she was all along. This confused me because I read it as “Joyce isn’t overcoming her fundie bullshit and becoming a better and more aware person, she was always just naturally good and just had to get away from her upbringing to let her inherent goodness shine.” I thought this was incongruous with Joyce’s character and specifically Becky’s statement to Joyce when she fled to IU, that Joyce *had* changed and Becky was so glad and the obvious implication is that pre-character development Joyce would have turned her away.
So I ran with that for a while but I thought about it yesterday. What if the person Joyce doesn’t want to admit she always has been is that she is a good person, and doesn’t need God to be one? Not specifically “Joyce was always a very good person and if it weren’t for her upbringing she’d already be that way” but rather that Joyce based her self-identity on the idea that she was a sinner who was loved by a God whose voice she gradually realized she never actually heard when praying, and now that she’s an atheist considers herself a sinner but without a God to pray to. Now her struggle is in finding out how to believe that she inherently has value as a person even without God, rather than what I read as “Joyce already started at max level and her character development is just wiping off the detritus.”
hmm! interesting. I had to read your comments a few times to get what you’re saying. (And i’m still not sure i do, but i’ll let you be judge of that)
I think “becoming” an atheist is so scary for Joyce because she was brainwashed to think atheism equals amorality; and at a deeper level she was taught that human psychology is essentially corrupt, so that without religious faith people would be doing vile things all the time, because that’s what humans want to be doing by default and religion is the only thing that protects society from chaos, and checks individuals against giving in to their destructive impulses which would otherwise go unchallenged.
Realizing she can be stop believing in god without that necessarily changing anything about who she is, and in particular without her wanting to do “sinful” things any more (or less ^^) than before, and leaving her sense of right and wrong basically intact, is pretty distressing because that goes against her entire education up to this point. And she isn’t a rebellious person. She has a loyal, conservative personality. She doesn’t give up long-held beliefs lightly.
Ooh, yeah, I can see that! Also ties into both Joyce’s talk with Dorothy after the Jacobplosion (her envy of people who didn’t fear damnation because without God they could do whatever they want, but realizing that nope, people still have feelings: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/freeing/ ) and that longrunning thread that Joyce doesn’t take comfort in ‘no one is perfect except Jesus’ anymore, it just makes her sad and sometimes triggers her depending on its use.
I took it as Booster saying Joyce never believed in God, just the incredibly strict culture that she appreciates as a autistic person (I’m on the spectrum). Joyce doesn’t care about God, she cared about strict rules on everything and the structure.
Becky believes in God, Joyce believed in the church.
Personally I have taken it more as, Joyce has never felt a true connection to God but thought she did because everyone around her told her she must for so long. And it is easier to say you lost faith because of cruelty changing what you perceive. Than to say that you never truly had any, but were convinced by all the voices around you that you must or you will suffer horrible consequences.
1. Joyce loos super cute here
2. No booster today but i wanna address the person who asked yesterday about non booster positivity in the booster love thread bc i didn’t get a chance yesterday: the thread is specifically to balance out the (imo disproportionately) intense booster hate, so I’d like to keep it booster centric. But if you wanna say something nice about other characters or whomever you like with a booster comment, go right ahead!
When you finally accept the realization that there probably is no god, it doesn’t happen all at once. It takes time to filter down to the rest of your intellectual framework. It’s a super-uncomfortable process.
I’unno, I can sympathize. Joyce is well-meaning, but she’s been taught a certain way that doesn’t contradict the Bible. That means creationism, a refusal to accept scientific research and evidence into evolution because that isn’t part of God’s Plan. And when you’ve spent years studying a subject (in Dina’s case, dinosaurs and the science behind their discovery), having someone come up and say “no this is wrong” with religious teaching as a counter-argument is very likely to be frustrating, since it invalidates years, decades, even centuries of research for a squeaky-clean interpretation that gets a lot of aspects incorrect.
I know I’ve ended up having to take breaks from my computer whenever some new “math trend” is going around on Twitter, but it’s just a poorly-wrought formula that has no proper notation, usually on purpose. So it ends up with two or more solutions based on how you choose to approach it, be it with axioms, proofs, BODMAS/PEMDAS/BIDMAS etc, or by just hammering the numbers into a calculator and seeing what comes out. I feel like they’re made to “stir the pot” and give mathematicians ulcers, as they’re told they’re wrong by people who maybe got a passing grade in GCSEs but are deathly certain in their singular approach to the question.
I liked Dina’s obsession with dinosaurs, but this goes beyond loving your field: this is just being an asshole. Sorry, but that’s not friendly, funny, endearing, or anything positive- it’s b orderline assault and at worst it’s bullying.
You don’t have to like how she was taught, but you don’t have the right to go after he because you don’t agree with her. It works both ways, you’d scream bloody murder if she went after you for not believing in Jesus or God.
The Fuck are you talkin’ about? It’s not bullying to say “I wouldn’t have expected this from you based on what I know about your background”, or to get agitated when someone implies you can “debunk” biology. And assault? Fucking really? Joyce is under no threat here, explicit or implicit. A raised voice is unpleasant, but it’s not automatically problematic violence.
Dina could chill out a little bit, sure, but that’s as far as this goes.
Take the fictional character quiz and post the first four you know: openpsychometrics.org/tests/charac...
What this should tell you is that I'm always down to cause chaos and good trouble
Would you like to take a survey? Do you like to eat beans? Do you like George Wendt? Would you like to eat beans with George Wendt? Would you like to watch a movie about George Wendt eating beans?
so i'm thinking, okay, i took some extra photos of this set of doors this year so i could draw some other angles, it's an important set of doors, so let's pull up my new reference photos...
....and do you see a problem, do you see an issue
Well, Lizard is here, and I've been telling myself for... years that I'd take down my Endgame shelf and put up Spider-Man:No Way Home once the final villain was out.
So.
That's a thing I gotta do.
okay okay -- spider-man reboot idea
the lizard is still dr connors, but he's dr PHIL connors, and he wakes up every day and it's groundhog day and he's a lizard
is this anything
Alina Pete @alinapete.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Sean Thomason @seanthomason.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com ⋅ 1d
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Barb O. Saur 
⚧️
Dina getting ready in the morning, apparently
It’s dino hats, all the way down.
The 500 Dino Hats of Dina Sarazu! (Sorry, Bartholomew Cubbins, you’ve been replaced)
Came looking for the Bartholomew Cubbins reference. Was not disappointed.
It’s Dina Saruyama (in this Universe)
Dinasaurs all the way down.
Dina takes off her snow cap to reveal her normal hat underneath, 2021 Colorized
Am I the only one confused by what’s happening in the last panel visually?
Not at all, I’m not sure what I’m looking at either.
Dina removes her outside dinosaur hat to reveal her inside dinosaur hat.
Dina takes off her beanie to reveal another dino hat beneath.
She was wearing a wooly warm dino beanie over her normal inside dino cap.
She took off her warm dino beanie to reveal her normal, non-ear-covering dino hat. It’s cold. Gotta layer.
She’s molting.
+1
++1
+2
+= 1
++
±1
I’ve had a long day, I’m feeling ambivalent. xP
+i
for those feeling creative
That’s unreal!
ahahahaha best explanation
Dina, fed-up with having made herself grumpy, being betrayed, AND now this, promptly rips through two more hats— revealing more underneath—and throws them to the ground in a huff
“Ever get so mad that you throw your hat at the ground–and MISS?”–The Balladeer on The Dukes of Hazzard
If you throw yourself at the ground and miss, you can fly.
It blew my mind when I realized that that’s not just a silly description for flying in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it also pretty much sums up how orbits work. You’re falling, but you move forward so fast you’re constantly missing the ground.
You have my upvote because, while I knew how orbiting works, I have never before considered it as HG flying!
That was the genius of Douglas Adams.
It also is how I described orbits to little kids.
To be fair, that is technically not flying, but only in the same way that neither does he, ” fly through the air with the greatest of ease, A daring young man on the flying Trapeze.”
Come on oooouuut, Bongo~
Oh man Becky must be blushing redder than her hair at that.
Fight fight fight!
I had a biology teacher in a public high school do exactly what Joyce is talking about. Gotta LOVE that Bible belt… -_-‘
That should absolutely be illegal.
It absolutely is illegal.
Yes, but that only matters if somebody actually enforces that.
Exactly.
It’s the chin-diapering of education. “FINE, I’ll [wear your stupid mAsK] [teach your stupid ScIeNcE]”.
tbf, that’s true of everything that’s illegal
What arguments are there to “debunk” that our earth is billions of years old when we got all the stuff to prove it like radioactive elements in stones showing us how long those stones have existed?
Planted to lead you astray.
Who are you going to believe, your faith or all of this perfectly faked evidence?
It makes you understand why the far right is so into paranoid conspiracy theories. It’s the way they’re taught to think.
Gaslighting all the way down (or up).
That’s *part* of it.
The other part is that the members of the far right are aware conspiracies exist, because they *are* part of one (at least.) As such, they *know* they exist. And they know they *fail*.
What is inconceivable to many people brought up in a conspiracy is that a conspiracy can be brought down without people actually conspiring against it.
But the truth is, all of the things that we’ve been taught to do to protect the conspiracy? All it takes is for one person to not do one of them right. Conspiracies are incredibly fragile, because they’re generally used to do things that the vast majority of people are opposed to.
There are innumerable conspiracies that work, generally because they’re small, and many of the ones that work are comprised entirely of people who’ve been brought up in conspiracies, so they know “all” the things that they need to do to protect them.
There are still a lot of small conspiracies that fail, either because the world changed such that they didn’t recognize how to apply the list, or because they included someone who disagreed with the goal or the means. But the big ones are pretty much all doomed.
It’s impressive how far the big ones can get sometimes, but the people inside them who disagree with their goals frequently don’t move to expose the conspiracy until they have enough proof, and the amount of proof they feel they need tends to be directly related to the distance the group is to completing their goals – so if they’re not on the brink, the amount of proof is challenging.
But most of the conspiracies that little kids are brought up into are a special kind of doomed, because there’s no chance that the kids will do all the things. They tend to be designed to accommodate this by being either ridiculous or harmless (frequently both). As a class of examples, every surprise birthday party ever.
And suddenly just about everyone who’s read this far realizes that they’ve been included in a conspiracy at least once in their lives.
I recently watched a 3-hour debate between Bill Nye and young-earth creationist Ken Ham who is apparently also a scientist (geneticist i think? which vaguely boggles the mind but ok) just to get a flavour of their arguments.
It turns out they’re not very good, at least if you’re not a faithful christian fundie. It’s a lot of cherry-picking and flinging “how can you know for sure?” back at everything science says and consistently ignoring Ockham’s-razor-type arguments from (overwhelming) plausibility, all that without producing any convincing evidence other than that one book.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t know about their rhetorics and thought was interesting, was the distinction they make between “observational science” and “historical science”. They argue that only the former is “proper science” while the latter is every bit as unprovable as Genesis literalism; they say that you can’t prove that the laws of physics as we observe them today worked the same in the past. So, like, maybe the half-life of radioactive elements has increased astronomically over the last 6000 years for *reasons*?? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT’S NOT THE CASE?
It’s a smart argument, I mean as smart as it gets when evidence is just so massively stacked against you. It makes a passable impression of skepticism (if you just squint a bit, ok), and as such claims to belong to the same playing field as actual science. But philosophically it’s a very different beast of course, because unlike science it provides no mechanism for falsifying its claims.
At some point an audience member asks both of them “what would it take for you to become convinced of the other side’s view?” And while Ham writhes a bit before admitting that that’s not gonna happen because “faith”, Bill Nye simply responds “one piece of evidence”.
Another thing i thought was swell about that debate is how the creationist is constantly saying things like “we know because God” and “the Bible tells us everything we need to know” and so on, Nye makes no attempt to paper over the gaps in scientific knowledge. It’s like the fundie dude thinks not knowing something is bad, that getting a scientist to admit they don’t have a neat explanation for everything is a point for their side. But Nye does a great job of making ignorance sound exciting, he’s like “oh, good question: we don’t know! we have so much more to learn!” And he just sounds like a giddy child as he says it
String theory has no method of falsifying its claims. Read some of the criticism of string theory by the quantum loop gravity guys. Maybe if we get much better at math and technology, we might be able to confirm string theory; we might give it up as a time sink that leads nowhere, but disprove it? Not so much.
So string theory makes no predictions? If it predicts things, it’s falsifiable. Such predictions might be hard to test, but that’s a different question.
The creationist argument here is qualitatively different – it exists only to counter evidence for evolution. It’s just a counter of “you could be wrong because things could have worked differently in the past”.
The problem with most quantum stuff is that it’s math predicting math. We’ve finally hit the point where that math gets translated into physical form with quantum computing and teleportation of information, but most of it is “this math suggests this about this math that suggests this about math”.
I’m sorry, could you expand on that? I don’t really get what you mean
And the creationist argument (time/decay changed speeds) also fundamentally (hehe) relies on the same fallacy of thinking that something is a particular way, without providing a single piece of evidence to support that hypothesis or a mechanism to falisfy the hypothesis. Again extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Oh yeah, human/earth/solar system exceptionalism is absolutely axiomatic in their view and doesn’t seem to warrant any special explaining. Again, the book says so, and ultimately blind faith in the literal reading of the bible is the only leg they care to stand on.
So? String theory is on the fringe of science, theorizing beyond current experimental data. It doesn’t disprove the rest of science.
It’s my impression that the issue with string theory’s “lack of falsifiability” is basically that the predictions that string theory makes are all things that happen at such a small scale that we can’t test them.
If that’s right, it’s basically only useful to the people who can’t be comfortable without feeling they know what is below the smallest subatomic particles we can detect.
We may get to the point where it’s useful for something, But all scientific hypotheses are formed before they’re proven.
My issue with “string theory” is that it’s really “string hypothesis”, as the science I was taught in school said that “theory” was for things that had passed the minimum bar of having survived at least one test. According to that definition, if we can’t falsify string theory yet, it can’t be a scientific theory yet.
I do realize it’s confusing, because most people use “theory” to mean “this idea I have that I haven’t proven yet”, but if scientists call those “hypotheses”, then they should be consistent in this regard.
Now that you have been exposed to Ken Ham the professional liar, you should be ready to experience the creationist majesty that was Duane Gish, the one who the term “the Gish gallop” was coined. He passed away in 2013, but there are plenty of recordings of him doing his spiel.
Can you imagine a chemistry teacher giving a lesson about the periodic table “because that’s what you have to write on the exams, but between you and me, we all know everything’s made from various combinations of air, fire, earth, water, and æther.”
“In conclusion, newtonian mechanics says that masses are constantly attracted to each other by a force named gravity. Off the record, we all know that stones just love sinking while helium-filled balloons enjoy floating upwards, but hey, they won’t let me teach common sense to you kids anymore.”
Oh yeah, like in hindsight, his “arguments” for young earth creationism were just as flimsy as our local chapter of our cult–I mean, church–‘s arguments. I was just deep in the “thought blocking techniques” tactic that cults will ingrain in you, where I just refused to think about how evolution would make way more sense because contradictions to my parents’ teachings were Scary, lol
How did you circumvent the thought blocking techniques? I’m curious to see if they’d be useful in combatting the negative innerlogue of my depression.
At some point, I had the realization that it was a lot scarier if my parents were right.
I mean, the possibility that an all-powerful being feels an eternity of torment could possibly be considered the right way to handle one of its creations not obeying its unstated whims. Because, not only is that on its face ludicrous, it’s almost certainly the case that such a being would not be a fan of one who realized that was ludicrous on its face. And anyone who thought about that would go there.
Everyone thinking this will be hard for Joyce didn’t consider Dina having to deal with Joyce
Haha, I forgot I was Sarah. Appropriate
Do I now *have* to imagine the next scene is Joyce pulling Dina to the side whispering, “~pst, it’s ok, I’m on the same side as you, now”, and winking, only for Dina to respond in confusion, “Joyce, you are now also interested in women…?”
And then Becky overhears Dina’s question and had a mental breakdown ruining her first day in her new favorite class.
She’s not on Dina’s side on evolution though. No longer believing in God does not equal having all the bad science knocked out of her head.
To be fair the bad data in Joyce’s head isn’t science.
Does she now believe that the universe and everything in it was created 6000 years ago by… nobody?
Holy shit, Sarah just had an orgasm!
Damnit, and think, me without my omnipotent 4th wall camera.
Don’t worry, there will be a Slipshine about it.
Probably.
(There won’t be.)
Yoto doesn’t need Slipshine. Amber is to fan fiction as Yoto is to fan art.
I haven’t drawn any in a WHILE though. I have so much I wanna draw but I’m just waaaaay too lazy. Lots of DOAs left unlewded..for shame.
I like how the last panel makes Dina look like she has claws.
Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it sounds like you are under the impression that Dina does not have claws.
Trust me. Dina has claws. Any comics which suggest otherwise are artistic imperfections.
Two words: Empirical Evidence.
I wonder if there’s enough contradictions in the world that can beat this conversation.
Sure, but consider how ’empirical’ most empirical evidence is. Gravity? That’s easy to have personal experience with. Photosynthesis? Plants are pretty common, but you need a powerful microscope to watch living chloroplasts at work. Relativity? Again, expensive specialized equipment needed to accurately analyze the movement of planets. The Higgs Boson?? You need access to a particle accelerator to have any evidence at all they exist.
Empirical evidence is NOT enough for the average person to base a belief in modern science on. Most of us replace that with a firm belief in the scientific establishment, which SAYS that this stuff has been empirically observed – and they wouldn’t lie to us, right? They have NO ulterior motives for making us believe in this stuff… do they?
Not directly and not in all fields, but engineers seem to be able to build a lot of really cool stuff based on the nonsense these “scientists” made up.
It’s like Moses and Pharaoh’s priests having a miracle battle, but with engineers and doctors providing the miracles.
Checkmate, Creationists!
Many of us still have direct experience with inventions resulting from these obscure empirical observations, though. Like, GPS and digital cameras work whether or not you “believe” in the science behind them, and a quick youtube video can explain how these rely on quantum mechanics and relativity. I guess you can just… not believe engineers either? But it’s much harder to discredit engineering than scientists, when you can see that stuff works.
GPS and digital cameras only rely on our understanding of quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics exist.
Anyone who worked on these technologies back in the day before we had applied quantum mechanics understanding to their design would be able to recognize the improvement, and, even without understanding exactly how an understanding of quantum mechanics could be applied, could appreciate that something that confusing was involved.
But most people haven’t. Most people haven’t futzed with any of the engineered things that, based on pre-quantum understanding, *should* have worked, but *didn’t*, because of quantum mechanics.
As such, direct experience with those inventions doesn’t really help them to understand that quantum mechanics exists.
I *have*, so yes, I understand that quantum mechanics exists. I’m not at all comfortable with the layperson explanations of quantum mechanics that I’ve heard, but my GPS works, my digital camera works, the rest of my phone works, and the rest of my computers mostly work, so it feels pretty convincing that somewhere someone understands this stuff.
I don’t know how to bridge that gap with other people, however.
In 1846, astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was already aware of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. So the technology didn’t need to be /that/ advanced to see the effects of relativity, even if at the time they had no idea as to *why*.
*plays Warren Zevon’s “Leave My Monkey Alone” on the hacked Muzak*
It all comes down to cognitive dissonance, doesn’t it?
When we have a thorough investment in a fallacious belief, we don’t just happily give it up when faced with inconsistent facts. We are much more likely to deny the facts to preserve the belief in question.
Child indoctrination may be powerful, but the scary part is that this kind of brainwashing could happen to anyone, at any age.
It’s worse than cognitive dissonance. People are being mis-taught how to think.
Pssht… like there’s only ONE right way…
There are definitely wrong ways. There are ways that leave you easy prey to manipulation, unable to assess the validity of different sources of information or how to deal with logically invalid arguments.
Yes indeed.
There are people who may not be prepared to meet on the basis of rational discussion. They may be taught to view rational argument as a form of deception. They may even answer rational argument with their fists or their pistols.
To be fair, even outside of people having been specifically taught to counteract rational argument, it’s a lousy way of convincing the vast majority of humans. We respond better to emotional appeals than to rationality. We’re social animals and reason is a thin layer on top of deeper motivations.
We can use it, but it’s hard, especially if we’re emotionally vested in a stance.
It’s conceivable that there is really only one right way to think. But it’s inconceivable that any of us could figure out what it is, even those who happen upon it randomly.
But as thejeff pointed out, there are demonstrably incorrect ways to think.
Unfortunately, the issue lies with demonstrating to people who use one or more of those incorrect ways to think to a sufficient degree as to convince them.
Ohhhhhh this is going to be amazing.
I mean, even if there is nothing solidly debunking it, all science and therefore scientists must be ready to have their theories tested. Science is ever changing, science is a reaction to information not the creation of it, and being closed minded would make you a shoddy scientist. Hell, within the lifespan of Dina as a character our understanding of Dinosaurs has evolved quite a bit. At any point we could find out that entire planet is in some alien’s greenhouse and we’d have to accept that reality and explain that. Nothing’s impossible, only improbable. That being said in this instance Dina’s probably correct.
That’s what makes Dina’s explanation of why she likes dinosaurs so interesting to me. She said the are non-changing, so she will have the possibility to understand them before the game changes in front of her eyes (like social interactions), but that’s only true for the dinosaurs themselves. Our understanding of them is ever changing and will likely be throughout her lifetime.
still, it seems like she think she is given a fair shot at it.
I mean to be fair, even the dinosaurs themselves were also constantly changing. Adaptations, Evolutions, Extinctions, Rebirths, and the like until eventually they were wittled down to the reptiles and lizards of today. If anything you could say that dinosaurs aren’t just history. It’s ongoing. Who knows what shapes the earth will take. What events will take place after humanity is long since gone. Maybe they’d come back. Maybe the creatures that follow will be so incredibly miniscule that crocodiles for them will be like tyranasaurus rex.
Birds are dinosaurs. Reptiles and lizards aren’t.
Y’know I knew something was wrong as I was typing it but I just posted it anyway.
I think that’s how the Internet works.
Your avatar is very fitting for that comment.
Well known fact.
It’s like when I fill the dishwasher and I can’t find that last piece of cutlery that needs to go in. I know that if I *start* the machine, the lost pieces will immediately become apparent. This is not magical; it’s just what happens in my experience!
Alas, the internet doesn’t (usually) have a pause button to put in that last thought or fix that typo.
But it DOES have an army of people who can’t wait to point out that you were wrong, not just wrong, but you were “WRONG ON THE INTERNET.” Thankfully, following the rolling barrage of corrective posts, we can sift through the rubble and still learn.
And also, our understanding of dinosaurs changes and evolves over time too, as our data grows and matures. F’rinstnace, I too was taught Dinosaurs were the ancestors of reptiles and lizards.
How long ago was that? I graduated high school in ’68 and they certainly knew it wasn’t true by then.
I graduated from high school in 1990. I don’t recall any dinosaur information being imparted by teachers, TAs, or professors in high school or college, but I do recall being taught that dinosaurs were the ancestors of lizards and reptiles.
Just because some scientists have figured something out doesn’t mean that information has disseminated to everywhere that’s receptive to the idea, and especially doesn’t mean it’s made it into the minds that aren’t.
For what it’s worth, I went to school in Indiana.
To add a needless point, it may be that what Dina likes is that despite our knowledge and understanding growing, the dinosaurs themselves (excepting actively breeding birds) are not changing.
I don’t think this is a needless point. Others pointed out our understanding of dinosaurs is advancing, even in Dina’s lifetime, as if that was somehow a problem for Dina.
The thing is, that’s the point. This advancement is happening due to people Dina probably considers fellow travelers, headed in the same direction. Dinosaurs themselves are static, which gives us all the ability to refine our understanding of them, relative to them.
I don’t believe she feels her current understanding is the final everything there is to know about them, as much as she enjoys revelling in it.
Evolution has been so thoroughly tested and examined and is corroborated by so many fields that it’s really not a good use of anyone’s time or resources to specifically aim to debunk it anymore. It’s theoretically possible that some evidence will be uncovered that will merit taking another look but it’s astronomically unlikely.
Oh for sure. But always keep an open mind. Also it’s not just evolution since Dina brought up the whole of biology. Evolution is just a weird stopgap in that.
Evolution is why Dina thinks she’s a science denier though. That belief derives from her young earth creationism.
Evolution is not a “weird stopgap”. Evolution by means of natural selection is what makes the rest of biology make sense.
Just because evolution is what makes the rest of biology make sense doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that could.
For example, the rest of biology would make a fair amount of sense if the world was created by a trickster god.
While I was tempted to say that the god Joyce was brought up to believe would not have created the rest of biology, there is absolutely sufficient evidence to state that either that god is a trickster god, or suffering from some pretty severe dementia. I mean, just look at the rest of biology. QED.
Isn’t debunking evolution more like ‘biologically unlikely’. If anything, despite the lunacy of the following, astronomy has a better chance of finding the alien pranksters that set it all up to fuck with us.
There’s a difference between debunking (which is destructive all around), skepticism (which can be very useful), and testing (which is extremely useful).
Einstein didn’t accept quantum mechanics. Someone pointed out that, by not accepting it, he’d invented an important paradox which actually advanced the field quite a lot as other physicists grappled with it. This was indeed valuable.
But… Imagine how much he might have advanced the field if he’d tried to!
Einstein advanced the young field of quantum mechanics enormously by stimulating advances with his creative skepticism. His attempt to show it allowed violation of conservation of mass/energy led to the concept of virtual particles for example. The fact that the original formulation was incompatible with special relativity led to Dirac’s formulation. It was almost a routine for a while. Einstein would poke a hole in the theory in the morning and the bright young QM turks would scramble to find an answer by that night or the next day. It’s hard to believe that he could have advanced the field more than he actually did by trying his best to sink it. It’s interesting that his more philisophic objections (God does not play dice with the Universe) are met by Everit’s interpretation of QM.
Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. His paper proving that light is quantised (discovery of the photon) was the seminal work in quantum electrodynamics. That (not relativity) is what he was awarded his Nobel prize for. A while ago there was a project to created a list of the most influential scientists of all time by examining what work got cited most. Einstein came first and second: first for founding relativity, second for founding quantum mechanics.
What he dissented from (“The Good Lord does not cast dice”, “spooky action at a distance”) was not quantum theory but the Copenhagen Interpretation. There are other interpretations, and Einstein’s later work involved ruling some of them out.
Hell people are even trying to breed dinosaurs as we speak. They’ve made birds with quills so far. Bc jurassic park taught us nothing
Yes, but pet dinosaur.
They just need to figure out how to keep them fun-size. You can’t tell me a T. Rex small enough for a terrarium wouldn’t make a badass pet.
“a T. Rex small enough for a terrarium wouldn’t make a badass pet.”
Copy and paste made it really easy to proove you wrong. Sorry, Im going to put my phone down as I’m clearly in a mood.
Sorry, your creatively redacted copy/paste job has not changed my opinion. A terrarium-size T. Rex would be a badass pet.
If you still believe that Demoted Oblivious can’t tell you “a T. Rex small enough for a terrarium wouldn’t make a badass pet” after they clearly did, you’re clearly not a scientist.
Please note that neither Demoted Oblivious nor I have attempted to convice you that a T-Rex small enough for a terrarium would make a horrible pet (I mean, it would, but this text box is too small for a decent proof, and I have better things to do with the next five years of my life), just that someone could tell you that it wouldn’t make a badass pet.
Incidentally, on that note, “a T. Rex small enough for a terrarium wouldn’t make a badass pet.” Maybe, with enough repetition, you’ll admit that someone could actually tell you that.
Why would a novel and movie teach us anything. Thrillers by Michael Crichton are not evidence.
Double check what you mean by “theory”. A scientific theory is an explanatory and predictive framework that emerges from and is supported by multiple lines of evidence. Those in turn came from the testing of hypotheses.
Evolution, gravity, germ theory of disease, and more – they’re bedrock. If you manage to supplant one of them with something better, get your passport up to date because you’re goin’ to Stockholm.
This is not to say we don’t continuously refine our understanding of them, and that’s where continued research comes in. And no, evolution is not a ‘weird stopgap’ in biology. As Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Back in Science classes in high school I was taught a doctrine that “theory” fitted into a hierarchy in which a “conjecture” developed as evidence for it accumulated through “hypothesis” and one to “law” when it was proven.
That was complete bunk, of course. A scientific law is just a statement of some sort of regularity as a verbal formula rather than as equation. A scientific theory is a coherent body of observations, propositions, inferences, and reasoning that gives a unified explanation to diverse phenomena. And they remain what they are even if they are disproven by observation — the Geocentric Theory is still a theory, so is the Theory of the Humours.
It was bunk, but made it easy to write and mark questions on exams.
The same is true of the definition of “species” that I was taught in high school (and my teachers were careful to qualify it by teaching us about clines and ring species and the paradox involved in speciation under the definitiion that was going to be tested in the exams).
I feel more for Dina in this moment, having people who try to deny/selectively choose science irks me more than I can express.
On that topic, what is the worst time you’ve had explaining something like science to someone?
Dina started it.
I mean, her first question is valid given Joyce’s various neuroses and demonstrated inability to accept information that contradicts her (previous) worldview. That said, chill Dina, she’s trying.
o3o can’t remember anything. Or at the very least anything where I can say, with the upmost confidence, that there’s a chance I wasn’t wrong.
I have had 5 hour fights with Flat Earthers. . . .fun to start with but the longer it goes on the longer it becomes enraging.
Flat Earthers are funny to me because I always ask the same question. What is there to GAIN by lying about the earth? Like seriously what’s in it for the government? This would be a HUGE and elaborate lie. That would require literally every country with the capabilities of launching a satellite or building a powerful telescope to be on the same page. A bizarre amount of cooperation that is unheard of by modern society. Who’s behind it? Big Globe? Nobody was buying globes so they had to lie about the shape of the earth?
And the weirdest part is that the whole flat earth thing is fairly recent. 2500 years ago, Greeks not only knew the world was round, they even had a surprisingly accurate idea of how big it is.
People *still* knew that the Earth was round during the “Age of Exploration” too. They just didn’t think that there was anything between Western Europe and India.
. . .Well except for the Norse who kind of explored up and down the American Coast for a bit but they didn’t stay long and I don’t really think that knowledge was ever really talked about outside of the Native Greenland population?
I actually should look that information up. I’m sure it’s interesting. Like if the Norse ever talked about those expeditions or if Norway layed claim to having “discovered” the New World first.
Even the stories that circulate about how, say, Columbus sailed “to prove that the world wasn’t flat” are based off of, at best, a misinterpretation of what actually went down: Columbus insisting like an idiot that “yes, the world is round, but it’s a lot smaller than everyone thinks it is!” while the actual science of the time knew he was wrong and having a good idea of what the actual numbers were.
If it hadn’t been for a whole ‘nother continent in his way, Columbus would have starved to death out in the ocean, probably still insisting the world was smaller than it was.
An interesting theory is that Columbus knew about the New World thanks to Portuguese navigators who may have re-discovered it in the 1420s. Columbus believed it was China, hence his erroneous calculations.
This would prove Oscar Wilde’s comment: “America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”
I’ve at least found it easier to argue with the Flat Earthers then the “The Moon is a hologram” people.
. . . There are so many similar dumb conspiracies out there that I think I may have fought with most of them.
You’ve never wanted a bucket of popcorn more then a Moon Hologramer and a Hollow Moon believer start arguing conspiracies.
Have yet to see a Hollow Earther and Flat Earther fight though. That feels like it could be bemusing, if just as angering, to watch.
How can you even argue that? Isn’t the moon present in mythos dating back millenia? Or do they believe that’s all fabricated too? Or that there was holographic moon projecting technology in the earliest parts of civilization and recorded history, perhaps by some third party who just wanted to prank any sapient life that sprung forth?
The Conspiracy Theory goes that the Moon is a Hologram projected around a Future Space Station built in the past by Time Travellers.
And that this Space Station Hologram and it’s past inhabitants from the future have been controlling and guiding the World governments.
No that is not a joke and I hated ever learning this dumb dumb conspiracy.
God I hope the moon is a hologram now! I want time travel to be fucking possible.
… I feel more concerned about the environment these people grew up in, for them to feel it necessary to believe that kind of stuff. Like… good grief.
But you aren’t supposed to interfere with the past when you time travel..! That, and don’t meet past versions of yourself, are the two most basic time travel laws!!
And once you do start changing things, do you remember the original past or the altered one? How do you know if you’ve actually made the changes you wanted? What if you accidentally prevent yourself from being born (and do you cause some sort of loop because you can’t not have been born and simultaneously have gone back into the past to make the changes that had that result..?)
Also, how big/dense is this space station supposed to be, coz tides etc?
I originally assumed you were joking but have concluded you were probably not and am now not sure whether or not I want to Google and risk not sleeping and Wikipedia rage-fueled spiralling tonight instead…
It’s about validation – believing in this crazy bullshit makes them feel smarter like anyone else because they think they’re “the only one s who figured it out”.
The most common explanation I hear is that it’s a way of turning people away from Christ… Somehow. I used to know the rest of this explanation, but I seem to have expunged it from my memory at some point.
That said, though, the psychology of this (and other weird conspiracy theories, like Helen Keller not being real, and “weird fun facts” that are completely wrong, like The Prince actually being satire despite how little sense that makes in context) is the emotional reward for being one of the ones “in the know”; that you’re one of the few people who know the truth, unlike all of those shallow fools out there. It’s pretty much just being a hipster, except being dedicated to weird beliefs instead of weird music.
Unfortunately, this can end up with far more serious consequences for a person’s life if their conspiracy theory ends up involving everyday life at some point (like, say, Q-Anon), since… Well, ever insult a hipster’s band by mistake? Now apply all of that anger and doubling-down to an important conversation about how baking soda doesn’t actually cure cancer.
It’s really unfortunate how much of human psychology is ultimately self-defeating… Which is why I say aliens must be responsible for the fact that human society hasn’t self-destructed yet. (Just to be clear; that last line is a joke.)
My biggest fear is that a conspiracy theory is proven right and now I feel like a jackass for calling them crazy.
Luckily that hasn’t happened to me YET.
Eh, most of the time, they’d be right by pure coincidence, so I’d not feel terribly bad about it.
Like, if it turned out that Epstein was murdered (instead of just being an old guy in a downright horrible environment, surrounded by people who despise him, and with no realistic hope of ever leaving prison alive), it probably has nothing to do with all of these elaborate reasons people have dreamed up – it’d probably be at the hands of someone he ticked off in the prison, and Barr covered it up because it makes everyone look bad and nobody really cares who killed a creep like him.
Sure, the theorists would technically be right about a piece of it – but it had nothing to do with their reasoning. It’s like all of those economists who cry about “The Next Big Meltdown!!!!” – yes, they’ll be right one of these days, because the market always goes down again one day, but since it really does have nothing to do with us having gone off of the gold standard, they’re still cranks.
“Correctly predicted 7 of the last 2 economic collapses”
But yeah, it’s like the goldbugs don’t even know that panics were common back when we were still on the gold standard.
But fiat currency bad, for reasons they can’t adequately explain without contradicting the way the entire economic system works.
Not just governments, but every navigator and [amateur] astronomer. Everyone who ever makes an international call and checks the time difference.
I’d suggest that your time is probably much better spent debunking religions with actual political power (like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc) who use it to oppress people, rather than debunking bizarre fringe conspiracy theories like flat-earth which btw tend to be mere side-effects of the former religions and the bad cognitive habits they instil, when they’re not a mere sign of mental illness.
Debunking religion is even more of a waste of time, especially if you’re focusing on broad religions rather than specific especially harmful cults – helping people break free from groups like Joyce’s is one thing, attempting to tear down Christianity as a whole is something else entirely.
And the bizarre fringe conspiracies can get really dangerous and often feed into each other. Apparently harmless things like Flat Earth still require global cabals controlling the world and deceiving everyone (NASA lies! and the world’s navies keep people from getting to Antarctica to see the Ice Wall around the edge.) This makes an easy feeder for violent conspiracies like the QAnon stuff.
I’ve had someone adamantly refuse to understand how the shared GULO pseudogene (a broken gene that in most nonprimates codes for vitamin C synthesis) in haplorhine primates is evidence of common descent.
Why MMT isn’t actually infinite free money, just an argument that we should consider the effects of inflation rather than an arbitrarily chosen debt number. Somehow, this seems lost on both proponents and opponents, which I find vaguely alarming.
And every time you think you’ve argued past a layer of misunderstanding, you end up stuck in another, and by the time you’ve clarified that one, the last one ends up all tangled up again. On a related note, I think I might scream if I hear “Think of the government budget like your household budget…” one more time, simply because the two are so far removed from one another except for sharing a word, yet somehow people still think it’s some great insight.
But it’s probably the only thing science-y (well, economics is in the same general ballpark at least?) that I’m willing to argue at length about, because at least there are fewer points where one side of the argument is so far removed from the other that discussion can’t continue.
Thanks for an interesting wikipedia crawl. I’m curious how MMT deals with large-scale multi-currency horizontal transactions. Couldn’t that cause crippling debt to be accumulated in foreign currency in a way the government couldn’t control?
Seems like MMT is a decent model for a large country with a powerful economy and a currency others want to hold. But a small country with an undesirable currency will have serious trouble trading, won’t it? The smaller the country, the more it depends on trade (assuming total isolation isn’t an option), and the easier it is for foreign interests to end up owning the country’s capital outright.
Or am I missing something?
Or to put it another way, how would it work out for a small-town-USA that issued and collected local scrip according to MMT theory, while still embedded in the US$ financial system? Seems like an easy and fun experiment for a rich libertarian to try somewhere. If done correctly, would you expect that town’s unemployment to drop? Do you have any examples or counterexamples of this?
No, you’re right; it can really only be applied to a handful of countries. The US, China, and a couple of other Asian countries. The more a country is reliant on foreign currencies for their economic activity, the less relevant the theory becomes.
But, it is an important theory in understanding the consequences of our economic policies in countries where it does apply; so long as it’s to ourselves, it doesn’t particularly matter if we go a billion dollars in debt, a trillion dollars in debt, or ten trillion dollars in debt; it doesn’t meaningfully constrain our ability to spend, because we’re creating all of those dollars to begin with. What does matter is the crippling inflation that suddenly dropping ten trillion dollars into the market would normally cause. Similarly, taxing ten trillion dollars to pay off that debt isn’t a particularly meaningful action; what matters is whose dollars you’re “destroying” by taking out of circulation. If you’re taking it from a hypothetical quadrillionaire who keeps it all under their mattress, it was unlikely to have an effect at all; if you took it from hedge funds, you probably slowed the churn on the stock exchange by a noticeable amount; if you took it from business, big or small, you probably slowed job growth; and if you took it from the working class, you probably slowed demand and the economy as a whole. It’s important to keep taxes at an appropriate level to control inflation, but it’s just as important to tax the right areas to best accomplish that end.
One side effect, though, is that it also makes it easier to make mistakes on a local level. Take healthcare, for example; we have massive economy that can easily afford to cover everyone, right? Well, not exactly. We have the money, certainly; we have an absurdly high GDP. But we don’t actually have the raw resources, currently – that is to say, we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, and other assorted personnel to reach the level of care that we desire. It doesn’t matter how much money we pour into the system, since demand outstrips supply in this case; you’d just make existing doctors rich, while causing inflation to rise in the rest of the economy. And this is a mistake that could be made in any number of other areas of our economy; confusing the fact that we have a great deal of money with the idea that money makes everything possible. If the underlying economic reality isn’t healthy – if there’s a lack of resources, infrastructure, or knowledge – money can’t force something to work. We can only marshal what resources actually exist. This isn’t generally an issue with the old policy mindset; the price tag associated with even trying is normally enough to get everything tied down in talk about debt. But it’s the kind of thing that can be a problem when we realize that the only real issue is how to do something rather than how to pay for it.
(Though with the healthcare thing, let me just clarify that we absolutely can train more doctors and nurses, and institute a number of other reforms to help improve capacity – just that it’s something that will provide results a decade from now instead of a year from now.)
Interestinger and interestinger!
In the U.S. there’s a giant sucking sound (pun intended) where the middle class used to be. Health care isn’t just suffering from lack of resources; it’s suffering from a whole constellation of rent-seeking behaviors, from keeping doctors scarce to health “insurance” adding tens of percent of inefficiency to the system. Things we used to own, we’re increasingly encouraged and sometimes almost forced to rent, from houses to books to major appliances that reliably break after five years to thousand-dollar cell phones that become almost worthless after two or three (or cheap phones you hate from day one). Mundane financial transactions lose 2-3% to Square or Visa or PayPal.
Bottom line – it looks to me like there’s a concerted effort to horizontally transfer wealth asymmetrically on a nation-sized scale, from the working class to large businesses. Some of my friends call it “end stage capitalism.”
I’m getting back to economics, really I am. My question is: Would MMT suggest that some of these problems could be alleviated by letting the money be sucked away as it is today, borrowing enough to provide a Guaranteed Basic Income, and taxing big companies according to how much wealth they extracted from the working class?
It seems like a convenient solution, and very workable in theory. But in practice, I suspect there would be trouble. Like subsidized college tuition and some kinds of health care, availability of more money would only cause prices to increase. And it would be very hard, both politically and in actual implementation, to tax the most successful big companies as much as the system needed.
By the way, I correlate “end stage capitalism” with the sabotage of education, subversion of institutions, and various Republican and conservative policies for the past half-century, and I start to think there’s a concerted anti-Enlightenment effort on many fronts. Make people poor, ignorant, and desperate, add a few morally freighted wedge issues, and they’ll vote for a populist government that will make things worse and stay in power forever. We came close to that in 2016-2020. But I don’t know if that’s outside the scope of what you want to talk about.
To answer your question; yes, and no. MMT would say that there’s no practical disadvantage to instituting UBI in an otherwise healthy economy; if taxation is increased to an appropriate level to control inflation, and if there’s no shortage of food or other basic necessities, normal market mechanics will prevent anything too terrible from happening.
MMT, however, would not say that borrowing is necessary at all; while we do this in the United States for various reasons, money is created when the government puts a dollar into circulation (generally by spending it), and destroys it when it’s taken out of circulation (generally by taxing it). We don’t actually need to worry about lenders or other such considerations that normally constrain, say, state or city budgets – rather, we only need worry about whether a policy is well designed or not. And, indeed, we can do a heck of a lot more harm if a policy isn’t designed well, since it allows us to make much bigger mistakes.
And that brings us to the other half of the “no” – MMT does indeed state that there’s no barrier to instituting a well-designed UBI policy. But MMT only talks about where the money comes from and where it ends up, not whether a policy is good or not; if we misjudge where those dollars are going to spent, and raise taxes on the wrong areas of the economy, we could still end up causing all sorts of problems. If the critics are right, and UBI would cause a ton of people to quit their jobs and watch TV all day (something I, personally, do not expect would happen; people still want to feel useful, and people will always want to earn more luxuries), then you’ll still end up with an economy in ruins. If the implementation is botched, and we end up missing a bunch of people who should have gotten money but didn’t, that still creates a big hole in our social safety net. And in all of these cases, if we botch things badly enough, UBI ends up discredited for a generation, perhaps longer.
Or to restate things, it’s like I said before; MMT lets us do big things without having to worry about an arbitrary number – but we do still have to worry about whether those big things are feasible in other respects, and have to plan things out carefully.
A group up here in Canada, UBIWorks, commissioned an in-depth report; here’s a link to their findings:
http://www.ubiworks.ca/groweconomy
We’ve also had several pilot projects testing out a UBI in various places over the years, and each time it has been an unqualified success. It’s frustrating to no end that something so beneficial to so many of us that has been so thoroughly examined and tested and priced out has still not been implemented. But there’s growing support for it and even several of our main political parties (like the NDP) are now pushing for it. I’m cautiously hopeful, myself.
Personally, I think it will work; even without the experiments, similar policies have provided considerable benefit to society and the economy, and the reasoning behind it is sound.
My only concern is how its implemented, because good ideas rarely survive congress unscathed.
See this shit right here is why arguments against raising the minimum wage or, like UBI? Prices have already increased, and have steadily been increasing, without all those things.
All the fearmongering excuses that more fundamentalist/conservative people use to discourage UBI/higher minimum wage/social safety nets? Those things are already happening, and wages still haven’t gone up, even though the middle class has disappeared and the prices of everything is still increasing. I see hungry and desperate people everywhere now.
We can’t drop a trillion dollars into our debt at once but what we CAN do is give the average American a universal basic income, because the amount of money billionaires have hoarded out of our economy is destroying us, but we (meaning the average american) don’t have any money to spend to prop up our economy alone. The Rich’s money hoarding is a serious fucking issue, but until the government starts taxing them and preventing them from hiding vast amounts of money on offshore banking accounts, that money isn’t going to show up in our economy because they aren’t spending it. They’re saving it. And since we can’t spend because we have nothing, those are our choices.
They can either tax the fuck out of the rich or give *US* some money. Because either way that money needs to appear somewhere before our economy collapses utterly.
Just chiming in because we were already talking MMT to begin with…
“We can’t drop a trillion dollars into our debt at once but -”
But we totally can! If the underlying economic activity is there to sustain it, of course, which is admittedly more dubious with the current shutdowns. Conservatives fearmonger over debt, but ever since we got off the gold standard, we don’t need to take on debt to spend more – that’s a policy decision that we can change as we please. This doesn’t mean we can spend recklessly without incurring consequences, of course, but it also means that if we need to make drastic changes to protect the future of the economy that we don’t need to worry about the price tag.
“The Rich’s money hoarding is a serious fucking issue, but until the government starts taxing them and preventing them from hiding vast amounts of money on offshore banking accounts, that money isn’t going to show up in our economy because they aren’t spending it.”
(emphasis added)
Properly speaking, any money that they’re hoarding (or spending in other countries) are completely irrelevant to us – in permanently removing it from our economy, they’ve already performed the same function as government taxation; that is to say, reducing the money supply to protect the value of dollars currently in circulation.
We can (and should) still go after that money to fight inequality, and curtail the influence of the rich, but as far as it impacts our ability to spend money goes, it wouldn’t change things at all; if they’re not spending it here, they’re not affecting inflation.
—
But as to your broader point; I do agree that it would be a good policy idea to spend more on the lower classes, who have urgent needs and will turn around and spend it immediately, spurring more economic activity. Tax policies and spending priorities that favor the rich are fundamentally misguided – in a properly functioning society, companies and wealthy individuals will always benefit from a better-funded lower class, as it gives them more people to sell to and take a cut from. That is, after all, what their function is meant to be – to turn a personal profit by fulfilling the needs of others. (It also means that, left unchecked, they will eventually break the system by owning everything and destroy the lower classes who no longer have the tools to work on their own, but that’s where the importance of proper tax policy comes in)
Conservatives fearmonger over debt *when it’s not their idea.
When they’re in charge they’ll happily make it rain so all their rich buddies can stuff their mattresses. Once the tales turn, they turn into Scrooge and tut-tut over every penny.
And half the country falls for it every damn time.
Thanks, Jane – lots to think about.
As far as simple economic analogies go, I like comparing the country to a subsistence farm. You grow and make and consume most of your own products, with a bit of trade. Very unlike any regular business in a market economy. And would a farm like that tolerate idle family members? No, it would find work for them to do. Likewise, persistent high unemployment is a stupid waste.
I rarely bother trying to explain science to people bc it’s just not worth the energy, but i did have my fundie friend in 8th grade beat me with a ruler for saying evolution is real and stopped talking to me for a day bc i said it’s okay to be gay. Hm, she was also a dirty blonde with big smile. And her name also started with Jo. I think I knew Joyce irl.
On a nicer note where i did successfully explain science to someone, i got my less fundie but still super Christian friend to stop being anti-vaxx in the line at kfc by comparing being unvaccinated to sending out untrained soldiers to war. I think i also got a nother friend to be less transphobic in the kfc line
More experimentation may be needed, but my current hypothesis is that it’s the kfc line that’s the key.
How long was that line?
holy fuck dinah.
a new layer – ahem – to your personality.
Heh
Dina definitely feels a bit more venomous when science is involved. Like I can’t really picture her starting this conversation without the intent of a “got ya” or hoping Joyce will say “ah you were right all along dina-sama!”
Piltdown man was an insider job
Chromic acid can’t not mark old bones
Chromium is just Sulfer with a dinosaur hat.
Next you’re gonna tell me the Cardiff Giant was a fake?
The sculpture on the side of a mountain, or a faked skeleton?
7/11 was a part-time job.
Holy shit you can’t be this funny what the fuck
I had a buddy who spilled a jerry can of gas all over the front of his VW. The paint peeled but the headlights were fine.
Jetta fuel can’t melt sealed beams.
My hat has a hat, your argument is invalid!
To take spots off this bed
will be hard, said the cat.
I can’t do it alone,
said the Cat in the Hat.
Good thing i have someone
to help me, he said.
Right here in my hat
on the top of my head!
I wonder how IU’s biology classes are arranged. Dina has already taken one semester of bio, yet she is taking this class with newbies Joyce and Becky. (I do not wonder sufficiently to Google it, and “bio classes are scheduled in whatever way allows this plot to happen, because the author says so” is a good enough answer for me. Just a bit of idle pondering.)
My freshman bio classes didn’t build on each other or need to be taken in a specific order. I’d guess Dina took Biology 101 last semester and they’re all in Biology 102 together now.
Biology, like math, is divided up by subjects.
Depends on your university. Mine had Bio 181 and 182 for intro classes, then divided into separate fields like Ecology, Genetics, etc. for everything after that.
I’ll admit, I didn’t know what she was doing in that last panel at first…
I wish that one day I too will have a winter version of my hat to wear over my regular walking around hat…
(Also that last panel reminds me of that parody edit of that episode from Justice League where they reveal their identities and it goes “Clark Kent, Wally West, BATMAN!”)
I thought of Robert Stack in Airplane! whipping off his glasses, revealing the pair of glasses beneath.
Yes! I was going to make the same comment.
Uhmm… my biology teacher in high school was actually a biologist, he was also presbiterian. Eventually we reached the theme of evolution, and the Darwin Theory was explained as per the text book. At the very end of the class he felt obligated to teach “the controversy”, it was very akward… He was a very very good teacher by the way and much appreciated by the alumni… he even lent me his copy of After Man:Zoology of the futere book by Dixon…so i think he tried to be “open minded” without “betraying his faith”…
Did he go into the whole “Creationism vs Evolution” Court Trial thing?
As for whether or not Religious Belief is incongruous with Believing in Science?
I don’t think so. This may change from church to church, I was raised Catholic and this seemed to be the belief of the various parishes, was that “Science is Man coming to understand God’s work. If a theory is proven wrong, that means that we should re-examine what we thought we knew and learn more.”
But as I also understand and have been told by others with other Christian Denominations in the United States that this is. . . not the common belief.
I’m also Catholic. The catechists were very consistent about “Science is another path of faith. They are studying God’s works that we may all have a deeper understanding of Creation.”
My own personal faith is that Evolution is part of the design, in that God made our world partially self-editing, rather than just laying down Perfection from the start, because the Churn of Suffering is necessary for an ineffable reason.
If we ARE God’s Sims, I live in faith that He cherishes us, and will not delete the metaphorical ladders from our pools.
It’s the common belief. People like Joyce’s church are not the standard.
I went to a catholic grade school in the 60s. One day the priest who taught the catechism got to talking about cave men and went through the whole descent of man thing and got out a chart. As he got halfway through, he waved a finger at a couple of species and said “Adam and Eve happened somewhere around here the Church thinks.” Then he went on talking about the cool things like cave painting and mammoth hunting.
I went to take both high school and college level biology intro classes and God only came up when the class had to dissect something. (Oh God, yuck!)
The 60s, When Science Ruled!
My high school biology teacher was pretty good, but there was one time when we were learning about evolution where he went, “Now would this have been possible without God? I don’t think so.” And then just carried on with the rest of the lesson. It was mostly just a jarring moment for me.
Yes, only crazy fundamentalist churches don’t believe in evolution. It’s just shy of flat earthers.
This is reminding me of my trip to the Creationist museum here in Alberta. Which we did as a family trip several years back just for the hell of it as a thing to do one weekend.
(I’ll note NONE of us are creationists, but it was honestly a really interesting visit purely from the standpoint of seeing how they structured their arguments/the “evidence” they were presenting. They start out by presenting some of the more questionable examples of evolution, eventually start hinting that a great flood could have been responsible for a lot of the phenomena that we use to geologically measure age (or, you know, it could have been an ICE AGE) and by the end they’re displaying a geneological chart tracing the British Royal Family back to King David.)
(Incidentally, we also have a really good dinosaur museum in the province. I haven’t been since I was a kid, but it’s right in the middle of a paleontology gold mine, so they have a ton of cool fossils on display.)
Back to King David?! Part of me wants to know how the heck they decided on going for him, while another doesn’t. Though I’m currently more partial to the “how?!” part.
It’s a whole thing about the Stone of Scone, and how it’s really some stone mentioned in the Bible, and how the last of the Israeli king’s daughters fled to Ireland… It’s ludicrous, frankly, to the point that it makes the Da Vinci Code seem plausible by comparison.
It’s also pretty insulting in how it claims that really, the Irish are the actual Jews, and everyone else is just, like… Lying about being Jewish. Or such is my understanding from the one time I made the mistake of asking about this whole thing.
The midevil biblical basis for royalty and why they should rule was direct descent from King David.
For all that I’ve read on the various European monarchies, I don’t think I’ve heard this before. Got some good sources? I’d be interested in reading on the subject.
IIRC, the only monarchy off the top of my head to actually claim descent from David was Ethiopia with their Solomonic Dynasty, which ruled up until their overthrow in 1974.
Not sure about David but having read Le Mort D’Arthur and some of the extended Grail Cycle works, there’s ABSOLUTELY a belief in it that Joseph of Arimathea (or his son, or his brother-in-law) settle in England. And then I think their lineage eventually produces Galahad? The Grail Quest was one of those sections where you can tell Malory’s cribbing from a ton of different sources and the result is pretty odd even by his standards. (Galahad gets multiple magic swords in a very short period, including one that belonged to King David that’s in Britain because of course it is, and puts out a forest fire with the power of his virginity.)
Definitely not a CREDIBLE claim of any descent, but I could see legends trying to throw whatever they could at the wall.
Yeah, but again least so far as I remember, none of the various medieval monarchies themselves claimed descent from Galahad or even King Arthur.
Oh, yeah, obviously not. (Wouldn’t narratively work for either of them anyway, but at a certain point there’s only so far back you can make up a genealogy without anyone asking questions.)
Meant more that when you’ve got histories claiming Britain was founded by Trojan expatriates and takes its name from a descendant of Aeneas named Brutus (Historia Brittonum and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s subsequent Historia Regum Brittaniae) I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some obscure history written in 807 out there that makes an outlandish claim, but even then I’m not sure anyone would have given it real credence at the time. Certainly not once there’s the more immediate, pressing ancestor you’re trying to claim closest descent from.
There is a creationist museum in Alberta? Where? I have lived most of my life in Alberta, and I have never heard of this.
I believe God created the world but if evolution exists I believe God helped it along. That’s my thinking on the whole debate. In the Christian high school, I went to, I was taught that dinosaurs existed at the same time as Noah’s ark which seemed cool, and that it takes a much shorter time to fossilize things like bones and such.
You’re entitled to your own beliefs but not your own facts. And you are absolutely not entitled to teach wrong facts to my kids.
Evolution exists. We can *watch it happening*.
I’m sorry that your high school taught you lies.
Well, that is impossible, since Noah’s ark didn’t actually exist, ie, there was no flood; and there was about a 60 million year gap between dinos being slammed with an asteroid and humans evolving.
Take it down a notch Dina, no one likes a zealot (of any type)
Nah, Dina is pretty much completely correct here. The stuff “debunking” biology doesn’t really debunk it and is just utter nonsense.
In my experience shouting louder over someone never changes a persons opinion, it’ll more likely reinforce whatever it is you’re trying to change
She’s not making an argument though. She’s expressing frustration after having already experienced frustration. I do wonder if part of it is that it’s her girlfriend’s girlfriend. Not necessarily jealousy, but knowing that this is what you have to put up with all the time if you want to be around Becky.
So Joyce is a secret atheist, presenting as a young earth creationist, in a college biology class. That’s a lot of layers to have to present at.
But she likely hasn’t shaken a lot of the young earth creationist beliefs, even if she’s lost her faith in God.
The Russian nesting doll dinosaur hats are the most Dina thing ever.
Uh-oh. Don’t let Dina go t-rex on you, Joyce.
Wait I’m actually curious:
Do they learn a bunch of Stuff and then how to debunk it and the test for the course is just a bunch of “what do the scientists say that This is and what is it Really?”
(Sorry, I’ve never had any first hand experience with homeschooling so I have no idea how it works)
I can’t say for what they do now but in the ’80s I had a fundy employer who homeschooled his kids where we worked (so he could better control who they talked to) and this was exactly how they did it back then.
And funny thing he went out of business owing everybody a ton of money including the last month of payroll to the employees. Seems alternate facts don’t apply to accounting.
There are many different ways of doing homeschooling, and many reasons for doing it.
But yeah, the Christian fundamentalist version of homeschool — or even public schooling, with the wrong teacher — will oten teach “this is what you have to say to pass the state exam and get into college”.
Yeah, I was homeschooled for 3 years, because we were traveling under odd circumstances. My parents were both smart and well educated and it didn’t seem to do me any harm scholastically – though I wasn’t really prepared socially to drop back into middle school.
No religious motivation there though.
I only know one family now doing home schooling – again not for religious reasons. They seem to be doing fine.
There are also some private religious schools run along the same lines as the home schooling we’re talking about here and those can be quite bad as well – though they often get some oversight at least. (Other religious schools can be quite good academically, even if you also have to study a bit of the religion.)
First panel Becky. FOR SCIENCE!!!
Ah, the intersection of two favorite redheads!
This is giving me stressful flashbacks to my college-era debates with creationists online (I was really into learning about evolution/a biology nerd). Them armed with answers in genesis links, and me exasperatingly returning fire with talkorigins links (which is basically a website with a well-organized takedown of the absurdities on AiG).
It’s exhausting just thinking about it. I know Dina’s frustration all too well.
I did not expect Dina to be wearing multiple dinosaur hats at once.
They were visible in some of the previous comics IIRC.
It was both unexpected and yet entirely predictable.
don’t be silly. dina loves her dinosaur hat. so she bought IT a dinosaur hat.
as one does.
Really, completely here for Joyce’s first “on-screen” science class since beginning to tangibly lose her faith. An excellent point to make that deprogramming is unfortunately not as simple as “I’ve been betrayed by my cult”, she’s going through the slow and painful process of questioning everything she knows.
No wonder glasses are anathema, she has little sense of stability in herself right now and having to have physical reminders of her change is something we’ve seen her struggle with even before the glasses storyline.
oh Dina..never change.
oooooh so that’s how they do it
So sad for who has to pass through Joyce and Becky situation. It’s so wrong, so wrong. A religion that do this, is sad.
tsh yeah. it’s sick.
How do you call a faith-based community that teaches you to mistrust everyone who varies from their own authorized interpretation of their holy text?
I think it should be stressed that fundamentalism is interpretation, same as any other. A “literal” reading is not a more faithful reading than a “metaphorical” one, certainly not in a world where evolution and old earth have been widely accepted facts for 2 centuries. Metaphors are everywhere, they are a very basic and obvious framework for understanding texts. So why do many of the most bigoted cults insist on counter-intuitive readings of scriptures? my guess is to produce an unbridgeable “us and them” divide, where membership in the church is an all-or-nothing deal. Once you’ve willingly cut yourself off from the rest of society, that gives the group (and especially its leaders) so much more power over its members.
oops kinda showed my hand when i said “cults”. (not that i was hiding it too hard ^^) i meant to write “some of the most bigoted denominations” or something, but whatever
Yeah, that’s an important point. The Bible is a complicated layered text, written by multiple hands for an audience with a radically different perspective than our modern one.
It is not possible to read literally, whatever so called literalists claim.
vatican really gotta start writing bible 2.0, there’s a lot of rules to update
oh wow, that’s a really bad idea XD
The idea is good. But I don’t think situations similar to Joyce’s old community could be interested in anything done by the Vatican.
Meh, any text with the poetic grandeur to be the bedrock of a world religion is gonna be read in any number of ways based on how each and every preacher wants to spin it. Also, you trust the Vatican to do less harm than good??!
So this is more related to Booster and yesterday’s strip but I thought of something while talking to Regalli and wanted to see what y’all thought.
Booster’s assessment of Joyce (which they really shouldn’t *have*, but I think the intent of that scene was that they were dead-on with the entire room) was that it was easier to change than admit that the person she was becoming was who she was all along. This confused me because I read it as “Joyce isn’t overcoming her fundie bullshit and becoming a better and more aware person, she was always just naturally good and just had to get away from her upbringing to let her inherent goodness shine.” I thought this was incongruous with Joyce’s character and specifically Becky’s statement to Joyce when she fled to IU, that Joyce *had* changed and Becky was so glad and the obvious implication is that pre-character development Joyce would have turned her away.
So I ran with that for a while but I thought about it yesterday. What if the person Joyce doesn’t want to admit she always has been is that she is a good person, and doesn’t need God to be one? Not specifically “Joyce was always a very good person and if it weren’t for her upbringing she’d already be that way” but rather that Joyce based her self-identity on the idea that she was a sinner who was loved by a God whose voice she gradually realized she never actually heard when praying, and now that she’s an atheist considers herself a sinner but without a God to pray to. Now her struggle is in finding out how to believe that she inherently has value as a person even without God, rather than what I read as “Joyce already started at max level and her character development is just wiping off the detritus.”
hmm! interesting. I had to read your comments a few times to get what you’re saying. (And i’m still not sure i do, but i’ll let you be judge of that)
I think “becoming” an atheist is so scary for Joyce because she was brainwashed to think atheism equals amorality; and at a deeper level she was taught that human psychology is essentially corrupt, so that without religious faith people would be doing vile things all the time, because that’s what humans want to be doing by default and religion is the only thing that protects society from chaos, and checks individuals against giving in to their destructive impulses which would otherwise go unchallenged.
Realizing she can be stop believing in god without that necessarily changing anything about who she is, and in particular without her wanting to do “sinful” things any more (or less ^^) than before, and leaving her sense of right and wrong basically intact, is pretty distressing because that goes against her entire education up to this point. And she isn’t a rebellious person. She has a loyal, conservative personality. She doesn’t give up long-held beliefs lightly.
Ooh, yeah, I can see that! Also ties into both Joyce’s talk with Dorothy after the Jacobplosion (her envy of people who didn’t fear damnation because without God they could do whatever they want, but realizing that nope, people still have feelings: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/freeing/ ) and that longrunning thread that Joyce doesn’t take comfort in ‘no one is perfect except Jesus’ anymore, it just makes her sad and sometimes triggers her depending on its use.
I took it as Booster saying Joyce never believed in God, just the incredibly strict culture that she appreciates as a autistic person (I’m on the spectrum). Joyce doesn’t care about God, she cared about strict rules on everything and the structure.
Becky believes in God, Joyce believed in the church.
Personally I have taken it more as, Joyce has never felt a true connection to God but thought she did because everyone around her told her she must for so long. And it is easier to say you lost faith because of cruelty changing what you perceive. Than to say that you never truly had any, but were convinced by all the voices around you that you must or you will suffer horrible consequences.
if Dina “Two Hats” Saruyama meets Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, will hi-jinks ensue?
Relevant.
1. Joyce loos super cute here
2. No booster today but i wanna address the person who asked yesterday about non booster positivity in the booster love thread bc i didn’t get a chance yesterday: the thread is specifically to balance out the (imo disproportionately) intense booster hate, so I’d like to keep it booster centric. But if you wanna say something nice about other characters or whomever you like with a booster comment, go right ahead!
When you finally accept the realization that there probably is no god, it doesn’t happen all at once. It takes time to filter down to the rest of your intellectual framework. It’s a super-uncomfortable process.
And speaking of super-uncomfortable, I wonder if this will be Dina’s first experience with Creation Science. Sooner or later, BOOM!
The idea is that Dina’s underhat has the teeth bared.
YES
…Dina is having a bad day
yeah, i’m no doctor but i recognize vitamin O deficiency when i see it.
Dina needs to chill the fuck out.
I’unno, I can sympathize. Joyce is well-meaning, but she’s been taught a certain way that doesn’t contradict the Bible. That means creationism, a refusal to accept scientific research and evidence into evolution because that isn’t part of God’s Plan. And when you’ve spent years studying a subject (in Dina’s case, dinosaurs and the science behind their discovery), having someone come up and say “no this is wrong” with religious teaching as a counter-argument is very likely to be frustrating, since it invalidates years, decades, even centuries of research for a squeaky-clean interpretation that gets a lot of aspects incorrect.
I know I’ve ended up having to take breaks from my computer whenever some new “math trend” is going around on Twitter, but it’s just a poorly-wrought formula that has no proper notation, usually on purpose. So it ends up with two or more solutions based on how you choose to approach it, be it with axioms, proofs, BODMAS/PEMDAS/BIDMAS etc, or by just hammering the numbers into a calculator and seeing what comes out. I feel like they’re made to “stir the pot” and give mathematicians ulcers, as they’re told they’re wrong by people who maybe got a passing grade in GCSEs but are deathly certain in their singular approach to the question.
I liked Dina’s obsession with dinosaurs, but this goes beyond loving your field: this is just being an asshole. Sorry, but that’s not friendly, funny, endearing, or anything positive- it’s b orderline assault and at worst it’s bullying.
You don’t have to like how she was taught, but you don’t have the right to go after he because you don’t agree with her. It works both ways, you’d scream bloody murder if she went after you for not believing in Jesus or God.
Assault???? Where????
I think Dina removing her overhat is being read as slapping Joyce?
The Fuck are you talkin’ about? It’s not bullying to say “I wouldn’t have expected this from you based on what I know about your background”, or to get agitated when someone implies you can “debunk” biology. And assault? Fucking really? Joyce is under no threat here, explicit or implicit. A raised voice is unpleasant, but it’s not automatically problematic violence.
Dina could chill out a little bit, sure, but that’s as far as this goes.
She has a wool version of her hat
That she wears
On top of her hat
Yeah that makes sense
you expect us to not acknowledge the hat on a hat, but we also get to make fun of creationists, so this whole THING is a hat on a hat!
Dina: “The only thing that can debunk science is BETTER science!”