“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift
OP, for preservation purposes, could you swap your MSN rehost link out for the original: https://kfor.com/news/local/man-who-advised-ok-gov-stitt-deported-to-guatemala/
It’s not against the rules, but MSN is notorious for link rot. That link will likely be dead within months.
Edit: Thanks, OP.
Except it categorically isn’t. If you sit two people in a laboratory – an adherent to an Abrahamic religion and a “practitioner” of “magic” – neither will be able to perform a supernatural feat. We agree that far. But unless the “witch” wants to resort to special pleading that they can’t perform it under laboratory conditions for no good reason (the woo magic system presumably isn’t sentient and has no reason to care? or maybe they have really bad performance anxiety?), then it’s provably false. Even if they say something vague like “better luck” or “better health”, well we have statistics for a reason. Are you not powerful enough? Okay, well like, we’re measuring down to the attometer at this point. If you want to drink masala chai under an amber calcite chandelier of 100 candles, listening to pagan-coded fantasy music, and you can consistently, measurably move a human hair 20 meters away, congratulations: you’ve still proven witchcraft is real.
The Abrahamic God, meanwhile, is constructed to be unfalsifiable. It’d be subject to everything I just mentioned except that there are a million bullshit but unfalsifiable rationalizations why a sentient God wouldn’t respond to these prayers to let them be observed. Literally no matter how hard you try, a sentient third-party gets the final say.
The difference between believing in a monotheistic God and believing in witchcraft is the difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing you made and placed those presents yourself. Of course neither is true and both are ridiculous: there is another entity putting those presents there, but it’s not magic, and by taking action in the real world, you can influence what those presents will be without magic. But for one of them, if you told your other little kid friends, they’d ask you to put up or shut up.
Sure. Doesn’t make them not stupid as hell; it just makes their beliefs less corrosive to society. I can imagine they’d be extremely toxic if they had widespread public support, but probably still not nearly as much as “I commune with an all-powerful sky daddy whose word is ultimate law that divides people between everlasting bliss and everlasting suffering and I can choose to believe whatever that word is” like Abrahamic religions.
That actually isn’t weird at all. People treat “politics” as an epithet for “controversial politics”, but in reality, almost everything in society is political – relating to power structures, the distribution of status and resources, and how those factors are determined. What you’re getting at, of course, is that Republicans have shifted the Overton window so disgustingly far to the right that “everyone is welcome” in a classroom is treated as a controversial ideology.
We’re constantly conditioned to think of the status quo as apolitical in nature (it’s just “normal” and the people who want to change it for better or worse are “the politicals”), but it is and always has been, and it’s why we’ve needed so desperately these past several decades to remain politically engaged to protect what we want and to change what we don’t. Now? Who knows, but we still need to try.
What I think you missed is that I’m saying there are far fewer excuses for spells than there are for prayers. If we think of a prayer or spell like a transmission, one that starts and ends in our reality but can’t be measured by science is (even) dumber than one that starts above our reality by an omnipotent, hyperdimensional trickster set on not revealing itself.
A prayer means that someone else – infinitely wiser and outside time and space – will do this for you if they so choose. From this, you have near-infinite freedom to weasel around why your prayer was or wasn’t answered. You’ve made it unfalsifiable, which is intellectual sludge, but it means you’ve insulated yourself from being provably wrong.
But for “witchcraft”? Yes, this particular brand of delusion often turns to weasel spells (whereas I used to see a lot more of “I can do concrete, measurable things that couldn’t happen otherwise”), but given they’re making the action happen or creating a conduit for that action, there ought to be some physically observable explanation behind it. But apparently magic can interface with patterns of candles and lavender and minerals and clockwise tea set up by some early 20s stoner in their parents’ basement but can’t be measured by science.
They’re not “exactly the same behavior” because 1) the locus of control is different and 2) that locus of control effectively being yourself should make this scientifically falsifiable.
Is it though…? As stupid as the Abrahamic God is, at least you have a “God of the Gaps” thing going on where all God really has to be is someone with their own agency to grant you what you ask for and to determine where to place you in an untestable “afterlife”. Of course there’s an obvious cocktail of inherent contradictions when you choose “omniscient”, “omnipotent”, and “omnibenevolent” at the same time, but then you can appeal to the idea we wouldn’t possibly understand the whims of such a god outside of time and space. Again, stupid as fuck, but you can weasel your way out of anything.
But witchcraft? Okay, you’re transferring the agency to yourself, a human that exists here, and you’re saying you can perform magic, but now you have no evidence you’re capable of jack shit and you have no excuse to pawn it off onto. You’ll never be able to do magic your entire life because it categorically isn’t real, so is the excuse that witches are real but you personally really suck as one? Is the idea that you do what “God” does and take credit for anything that vaguely “works” by sheer coincidence and ignore everything else? Do you only cast “spells” that function as placebos like easing someone’s pain or making them feel happy – similar to many prayers?
And of course with God you don’t have any way to test where this magic is coming from; it was there before time and is all-powerful, and there’s any number of ways with that setup to weasel your way out. But what’s the scientifically measurable phenomenon behind witchcraft? There is none, and unlike God where there also is none, this should be easily testable if it exists since it allegedly interacts with the physical world on your command.
So now you’ve gone from untestable woo like the afterlife and testable but weaselable woo like prayers to woo that you should absolutely be able to test empirically because you’re in control of it.
I didn’t know so much “no contact” could exist in such a small space.
This is why sex ed is so important in our schools. Puritanical Republicans are why so many poor American kids who grow up in red states don’t know about basic things like periods, contraception, and vaginal spas.
Was going to get around to it, but I’ll quickly add the 2025 position since you think it’s pressing.
OP, I would seriously consider trying the Arch Wiki for this. I really hope you had a backup, but you probably need expert-level advice here (at least below “paid data recovery specialist”) if you have any hope of unfucking this. Obviously you’ve learned your lesson about running random commands you don’t understand in response to an error message, so I don’t think people should be scolding you for that.
You’re so lucky to be able to have yours be portable. 😞 The only penile spas I’ve ever seen are permanently installed in a wall. No clue how they work either.
Oh, dude, trust me, after spending the last six years with the most easygoing digestive system I’ve ever had, I know going carnivore without a transition period would be throwing sodium in water.
And don’t worry about the gravy. I know all about making substitutes from omnivorous recipes.
Are the people who put hot sauce on their eggs using napalm?
OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.
Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?
“That is no longer the position of the academy” is only true in the most pedantic sense that every position they release has a hard, unchangeable deadline (this one’s was December 2021). It doesn’t invalidate any of those positions. Unfortunately, the January 2025 position only covers adults, with children and pregnant/lactating people outside of the position’s scope, so 2016’s is the most recent position we have for “all stages of life”. From the current summary:
It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that, in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate and can offer long-term health benefits such as improving several health outcomes associated with cardiometabolic diseases. […] As leaders in evidence-based nutrition care, RDNs and NDTRs should aim to support the development and facilitation of vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns and access to nutrient-dense plant-based meals. Promoting a nutrient-balanced vegetarian dietary pattern on both individual and community scales may be an effective tool for preventing and managing many diet-related conditions.
What a scathing disavowal of the Academy’s position in 2016: “Plant-based diets can provide all the nutrients you need and can offer long-term benefits including improving health outcomes associated with the number one killer in the developed world. We should work to support these diets, and promoting them to individuals and communities may help prevent and manage problems associated with our current health crisis.”
Fuck this, I’m going carnivore. Pull up the griddle and get me a bacon, egg, gravy, and cheese muffin where the muffins are sausage patties. The AND has no current positions on that diet, so it means I’m in the clear.
As for the “spam list”, I’m sorry, but “Because it’s devastating to my case!” doesn’t make it spam. And a crucial element of a Gish gallop (presuming that’s what you mean by “spam”) is that the arguments are individually low-quality and just exist to exhaust the rebutter. But, uh… Yeah, 90% of those are systemic reviews and meta-analyses. The other 10% are robust discussions published in peer-reviewed medical journals (such as the AJLM discussion of fiber).
Maybe I’ll get around to responding to this pseudoscientific garbage, maybe I won’t. Let alone that your treatment of the RDA is just completely fucking wrong.
The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) is the average daily dietary intake level that suffices to meet the nutrient requirements of nearly all (97–98%) healthy persons of a specific sex, age, life stage, or physiological condition (such as pregnancy or lactation). The RDA is a nutrient intake goal for planning the diets of individuals. […] The risk, but not the certainty, of inadequacy increases as intakes fall further and further below the RDA. However, the RDA is an overly generous criterion for evaluating nutrient adequacy. By definition, the RDA exceeds the actual requirements of all but about 2–3% of the population. Therefore, many individuals who are below the RDA may still be getting enough of the nutrient in question to be above their requirement level.
But for anyone who comes across this in the interim who just sees two people slinging nutrition science terms and thinks “well gee I guess it’s just inconclusive”, I’m going to point out that jet follows and peddles a carnivore diet, a health fad with zero clinical evidence of any health benefits and a known major risk factor for multiple chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer. They’re the “smoking doesn’t cause cancer, and it’s good because it helps you relax” type of quack you’d see in the 1960s in the face of increasingly overwhelming scientific evidence otherwise. They’re trying to drag as many impressionable people as they can to lifelong, debilitating health issues. You arguably cannot find a less trustworthy source of nutritional information on this website for just how steeped in disinformation they are.
Full disclosure: I’m vegan. Not plant-based for health, but vegan for the animals and the environment. Yet despite having every incentive to focus only on the extensive long-term health benefits of a plant-based diet (especially one predominantly from whole foods), I will continue to loudly advertise the shortcomings of a plant-based diet whenever it’s even somewhat relevant. This is because I treat my diet as a nice side effect of my ethics, not a bullshit pseudoscience panacea to our accelerating health crisis. I would gladly eat plant-based regardless of if it were less healthy than an omnivorous diet, and yet vast amounts of evidence continue piling up that the opposite is true.
Rare, and I meant to say “atrophied” but can’t now because it’s been called out. 😩
OP, LLMs don’t “know” shit. When they say something that conforms to a preexisting bias of yours, that’s nothing. That should affect the strength of your argument in no capacity. It’s not a knowledge base; it’s a transformer model that exists to tell you what you’re most likely to want to hear given what’s come before.
The part of the anti-AI crowd who denounce rampant, uncritical use of LLMs but who also shit their pants and clap every time an LLM says something against LLMs tells me they don’t have even a bare minimum understanding of machine learning or of cognitive biases like confirmation bias.
(Your link results in an internal runtime error btw.)