Commit it then to the flames

One of the most common failure modes of deontological systems of ethics is the valorisation of bad outcomes. When actions are held to be inherently good or bad regardless of their outcomes, the willingness to accept demonstrably horrible outcomes in order to behave virtuously can itself come to be seen as virtuous; and, moreover, the worse the outcome, the greater the virtue demonstrated thereby. Left unchecked, this way of thinking can, and often does, lead to the perverse conclusion that those whose actions yield the worst outcomes are the most virtuous.

This, ultimately, is why media like Breaking Bad will inevitably be received as celebrations of the very ethoi they purport to critique by their adherents. When Walter White’s cracked funhouse mirror version of traditional masculinity repeatedly leads him and everyone around him – including those he claims to be protecting – to bad ends, his persistent refusal to reevaluate his behaviour is seen not as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Walter’s ethos, but as evidence of Walter’s own moral courage. In this essay

Imagine seeing this place with no prior knowledge of Christianity

Female Sets of Armour

Armstreet on Etsy

the sheer amount of artistic talent put into these panels to portray the right feeling on clark’s face is amazing

The Cream of the Crap, 2017 

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Change your fucking url OP

architecture embodying nature

#someone help this poor child

Today I learned that in 1972 the International Chess Federation was obliged to issue an official ruling that you can’t castle with a newly promoted rook, and the more I think about the implications of that ruling, the funnier it gets.

So, you aren’t allowed to castle if there is anything inbetween your king and rook, or if any point the king travels through is attacked by an enemy piece. It’s also the case that neither your king nor your rook are allowed to have moved at any point in the game if you want to castle. Additionally castling is usually taken to be the king moving two squares and the rook coming to meet them on the other side… The only way that ruling makes sense is if someone promoted their kings pawn and tried to castle with that. I.e. Not trying to castle horizontally but vertically, moving their king directly into the centre. This would almost always be a terrible move and is the culmination of several other terrible moves (promoting to a rook and not a queen (the only reasonable alternative to a queen is a knight), leaving the centre undefended, for some reason wanting to make your king more vulnerable etc.) and yet… If this were a very specific endgame scenario, I can actually see this as working out to be a good move, and the most galaxy brain take I’ve ever heard of… I have to say, I endorse it and the chess federation made a mistake in their ruling.

the interesting thing about this to me is that my intuition is that such a move would already be invalid by the “rook must not move” clause - since a promoted rook would have moved many times (while it was still just a pawn)

but I guess this depends a lot on your ontology of chess pieces, and whether continuity-of-identity is preserved across promotion; I guess it’s the intuition in situations like this (source, in case anyone’s curious) that promotion replaces the pawn being promoted, and the promoted rook is an entirely new piece with no movement history

That source is excellent! And exactly the kind of endgame I had in mind. (also, correction to what I said earlier: a rook may be a preferable promotion to a queen if the queen would create a draw)

The question of persistent identity through promotion is interesting and akin to that of the caterpillar to the butterfly. All onions welcome as to what I should believe here btw!

The FIDE’s true cowardice lies not in ruling out the move, but in ruling it out with a kludge that declines to take a philosophical stance on whether pawn promotion preserves continuity of identity.

this is textbook wight privilege

Heresy is fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s pretty unlikely that you are, in fact, a heretic – that’s something you have to work at!

Being a heretic doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned the faith (that’s being an apostate), nor does it mean that you said something offensive about the faith (that’s being a blasphemer), and it certainly doesn’t mean you were never a member of the faith in the first place (that’s being a heathen).

Being a heretic very specifically means that you claim to be a devoted member of the faith, and may actively participate in its rites and observances, but your interpretation of that faith’s scriptures or doctrines is sufficiently unorthodox as to be worthy of censure.

Basically, being a heretic is the religious equivalent of being Problematic™.

(And yes, getting called out is very much a part of the process! If your interpretation of scripture or doctrine is weird, but no relevant religious authority has written a callout post about it, it’s not heresy, it’s just heterodoxy.)

@shinobicyrus replied:

Catharism: Cancelled

Bad: Anthropomorphising nature as a sad mom.

Also Bad: Anthropomorphising nature as a disinterested authoritarian.

Good: Anthropomorphising nature as an absolute fucking gremlin going “okay, let’s see how the little bastards deal with this one”.

Out: evolution as a process of mathematically quantifiable optimisation.

In: evolution as a dishevelled, long-fingered muppet labouring over a slightly scorched workbench scattered with improvised tools and bubbling beakers of unidentifiable fluids, muttering indistinctly under her breath and occasionally bursting into harsh, barking laughter for no obvious reason.

Just to be clear, the best empirical evidence and mathematical models of evolution are entirely consistent with the ‘absolute gremlin’ theory of evolution.

virginia woolf: actually, the only valid forms of punctuation are the comma, the semicolon; and the em dash — no i will not be taking constructive criticism at this time or ever,