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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. Kid Rock turning into a clown is one of the more surprising and disappointing developments of this era. He had such promising intellect and musical gifts. Seeing your heroes descend into the absurd is hard to take. Sad!
  2. This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach, but the Sean Feucht thing is trippy for me. I’m one step removed from some of his relatives and have performed right before him on shows. At the time, he seemed like the stereotypical worship musician — a very limited musical knowledge, put on a good enough show, not openly rude but not all that welcoming or friendly (mostly stemming for insecurity for his lack of musicianship), and also REALLY into guns. I never thought I’d see or hear about him again, yet every few months he bubbles up on MAGA circles. I have nothing to add; it’s just weird.
  3. Mole

    LBGTQ

    As a parent of a small and opinionated child, I may have considered this myself at times.
  4. Not a law dog, but wouldn’t he have to be elected NY governor to pardon himself? Or is that another insane “open legal question?”
  5. On this Holy Week, where we commemorate the savior of the world and His betrayal and resurrection, we are reminded of the words of Jesus from Mark 6:4: Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”
  6. Also back on point, I don’t carry and haven’t touched a firearm since Uncle Sam stopped asking me; there’s no interest on my part. I don’t hunt or camp and have no internet in visiting neighborhoods where the risks of carrying outweigh the risks of not carrying. I question the assumption that not carrying or not having a firearm in the home is taking on additional risk. There are certainly scenarios where guns come in handy, but also scenarios where even a responsible gun owner acting responsibly makes things more dangerous for everyone involved. The risk calculations are different clearing rooms in Fallujah vs. clearing your plate at the Plano Chuck E Cheese. It’s a bit confusing to me to read gun owners (somewhere on this thread, in the midst of the CR talk) describe scenarios where there turned out to be no threat as some sort of argument in favor of owning. Unless there is actually an intruder, skulking about your house and backyard in your boxers looking for a bad guy gets infinitely more dangerous with a gun vs. a can of wasp spray, an air horn, or just a rapier wit. A gun might make you feel safer, but unless there’s actually a bad guy, it’s way more dangerous. Even if there’s a bad guy, it still might be more dangerous to start a gun fight. The real question — and it depends on the circumstances — is what kind of interactions are more likely to occur. Comparisons to wearing a seatbelt or other basic safety precautions just don’t make sense to me. Wearing a seatbelt imposes minimal risk on the wearer and no risk to those around them. Guns do the opposite. Sometimes the good guy with the gun saves the day, but other times he escalates a situation or isn’t prepared for the stress of gunfire, or the normally responsible gun owner gets complacent and acts irresponsibly, or there’s untreated mental illness and a dark moment turns into inconsolable grief for a family, or the bad guy intruder turns out to be a family member. I’ll grant that there are certainly cases where carrying is the wise, logical choice, but those cases are far fewer than most of us think.
  7. Ask it to give a numbered list of US states in the reverse in which they joined the union and watch it break. Good luck getting to the correct answer. It’s currently an impossible task for it, but it insists it’s just about to give the correct answer. Similar lists, particularly if you go backwards break it. It gets all sorts of other basic, factual things wrong as well. I ask it medium-depth questions in my field and get the exact opposite of correct.
  8. I like my Sturm und Drang old school.
  9. Not sure if this has been pointed out, but you probably mean gamut, which means the entire range. A gambit is a kind of sacrifice, which also applies in this situation, just not for the people you mentioned. Gamut comes from medieval music theory — gamma ut, which was the bottom note in their system. They derived their music theory from a mistranslation/misunderstanding of the Ancient Greek music theory, so the entire medieval system was essentially upside down and bore little relation to the original source materials; kind of like how our values and understanding of the 2nd amendment is upside down and has lost all touch with the context in which the amendment was conceived. The medieval church felt they needed to assert control and uniformity, so they decided upon a set of common chants for church services and attributed them to Pope Gregory via inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They used this Gregorian Chant to suppress competing chant forms, so eventually, most of the other forms died out.
  10. Was Sunday some sort of racist holiday? The confederate flags were out in full force for my Deep South Sunday drive. I saw a desecraty US/Confederate hybrid. One confederate flag had lettering on it and appeared to say “Keep It White,” but I couldn’t quite make out the last word when passing down the highway.
  11. Tough D, a little out of control on offense, hopefully RT led some breathing exercises during the TO.
  12. That’s not even absurd literalism, it’s something else. A number of OT books have authorship claims pretty explicitly in the text. That’s not to mention Moses narrating his own death.
  13. It’s an issue inherent in dealing with ancient texts. If you’re dealing honestly with the scholarship, there will be ambiguity. That seems preferable to me to having one authorized version that doesn’t honestly deal with the source materials. We tend to import our modern thinking into ancient texts and then wonder about all of the problems.
  14. There are some passages that have some debate about whether or not they were actually in the original manuscripts. Depending on the source material the translation uses can impact whether or not they will include this. Sometimes they’ll include it with a note at the bottom explaining the issue or sometimes they’ll include it just in the footnotes. Someone that has King James as their default mental version will find some missing notable passages in other versions. Wikipedia has a list with explanations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_verses_not_included_in_modern_English_translations
  15. I used NIV above with “God-breathed.“ Other versions I find use “inspired by,” “breathed life into,” “divinely inspired,” “given by inspiration,” and “breathed out by God.” I’m not personally inclined to come up with any meaningful difference in meaning. There may be some pastor somewhere that thinks I’m a heathen because I find “God-breathed” most compelling and memorable. Churches have split over more pedantic reasons. I’m not going to pretend that I can explain or even know the nuances of whatever Greek phrase that was used.
  16. 1. That “Word” isn’t typically understood to be the Bible or scripture but rather Jesus. It’s a beautifully poetic passage. This Word gets conflated with the Bible as the word of God idea all the time. 2. The closest that I can come up with for the Bible claiming to be the word of God is 2 Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Whether “God-breathed” is the same thing as “word of God” and what that means for different interpretations and degrees of in inerrancy is a good question I guess. “God-breathed” doesn’t have to mean literally and historically accurate, since 21st century people interpret the idea accuracy differently than ancient people would have.
  17. Yes, it’s quite plainly cheating to cut and paste your writing prompt into Chat GPT, ask it to make a few edits — mostly to hide your cheating — and then turn it in with your name on it. It’s not that different than copying some article you found on the internet, running it through some thesaurus machine — rendering it both incomprehensible but also making it much harder to track down the source material — and turning it in with your name on it. You didn’t write it and those aren’t your ideas. I have played with the oral defense of all term papers idea precisely because I know that the students using these tools don’t understand the papers they are turning in. Grammarly is essentially a nosy editor looking over your shoulder, giving style and grammar recommendations. The Microsoft/Google autocomplete tool is trying to guess the next words you are writing. ChatGPT writes your entire paper, then rewrites it based on your suggestions. You sometimes have to fight it to incorporate your ideas. It will sometimes stubbornly stick to its plan and perspective. A board full of lawyers would treat this like some open question, but it’s not. The kids know they’re cheating and taking steps to avoid detection. You’ll start seeing class policies explicitly prohibiting this kind of stuff anyway.
  18. The AI writes something original. It’ll even cite sources. There’s no original paper or collage of link-filled Wikipedia and Buzzfeed articles to present as evidence. The only evidence is the telltale signs of AI writing, which is obvious, but hard to articulate. TurnItIn is developing a tool that claims to detect AI writing, and there are already lots of them out there, but it’s a bit of a black box. With normal plagiarism detectors, it finds the sources so you can track it down and determine whether or not plagiarism actually occurred. The detector is just a tool to gather the evidence. The new AI detectors just tell you the likelihood that something was written by a bot. They don’t present evidence; it’s more of a, “trust us, that kid is 92.5% cheating, but we won’t tell you why we determined that” type thing.
  19. I get that this is a take down of conservative, R, America first Christianity, and I have no disagreement with the assessment. It’s worth pointing out that there’s a fair amount of biblical precedent and support for the idea that such an ungodly person could lead God’s people astray. The Christian believer should be on the lookout for such movements. It’s the main theme of about half of the Old Testament and the New Testament is full of warnings about such a type of person. The Trump era has been a real challenge to my faith. That seems to be a common theme in this thread. Watching people I love and respect turn to cruelty and selfishness — and calling it the Gospel — has been a lot to take in. The change from apolitical people tirelessly serving marginalized groups to ungodly political tribalism hurting the same people they once served has been wild. As my wife said a few years ago, “how did all of our old friends turn into assholes?” These weren’t the people we knew.
  20. I’m on my college’s academic appeals committee. We’ve had our first batch of AI-based violations. Those AI-assisted papers are pretty easy to spot, even without the tools. They’re impeccably written, sound exceptionally smart on the surface yet never really get to the point (talking about the question rather than actually answering the question), and are riddled with made up stuff. Getting a committee to agree to sanction the student is a bit trickier than spotting the obvious cheater, at least so far on my campus. Policies and paper procedures will be radically changing over the next few years. So far, most of my colleagues have talked about returning to hand-written, blue book essays, or using North Korean styled proctoring services even for term papers. I’ve been playing with the idea of all or nothing, public, oral defenses of all term papers the last week of class. I may not be able to get the cheater past the appeals committee, but I can still wring out a zero on the paper and a little bit of public shame.
  21. That would be my interpretation as well, but “paying an undercover detective to have sex with a 14 year old child” leaves things pretty ambiguous.
  22. Obviously a terrible crime, but can we take a moment to acknowledge the abomination that is the tweet? Who was going to have sex with the child? The filmmaker or the cop? Why would you give money to a cop and tell them, “buy you something nice and also commit a sex crime?”
  23. Theist or not, if you find yourself posting long cats that aren’t in plain text, it might be time to reexamine your worldview and consider who or what is leading you to make these terrible lifestyle choices. Posts read in dark mode and I comprehended it not.
  24. Everyone. I’m not saying the “American is a Christian nation” nonsense, but biblical illiteracy is cultural and historical illiteracy. We’re in a weird time where ignorance is somehow proclaimed honorable and in some cases a perverted shibboleth for the educated.
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