Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

Hello, #Republicans.

#Democrats have been telling you for months that we don’t care if #Clinton is in the #Epstein files. If he raped kids, he should pay the same penalty as anyone else. But I guess y’all have your talking points and you are by God going to stick with them.

You know as well as we do that #Trump is all over the redacted parts. Every time you pretend otherwise, you’re announcing to the world that you’re just fine with pedos as long as they’re on your side. For some of you, it’s a selling point.

We see you, and we won’t forget.

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Feel free to quote, share, or copy and paste if you find it useful.

Texting is fine for short communications, to be clear. But anything more than a few sentences is actively painful.

Also, that 30-minute video you want me to watch could and should have been an essay. If there's no transcript, fuggedaboudit.

Something you may not know about me: I dislike reading long-form content on my phone, or really doing anything on my phone more than necessary. E.g. if you want to have an in-depth conversation with me, please send me a direct message rather than texting.

Hey, it was better than spilling a bunch of jewel boxes all over the passenger seat floor and leaning down to fumble through them while going 80 mph down the interstate! Which I, uh, may have done a time or two.

Sword in one hand, latte in the other, combat boots on both feet. It's a thing.

#Knowledge is #justified #true #belief. That definition is about 2500 years old, and although #philosophers have been trying to come up with a better definition ever since, no one has. All claimed counterexamples are #sophistry.

A lot of my fellow #scientists and/or #atheists have trouble with the word "belief" because they associate it with faith—which in turn can be defined as belief *without* justification, or whose truth is unknowable. But it's really a lot simpler than that.

If I walk inside dripping wet, and someone asks me if it's raining, and I say it is because I've just been out in it, then I'm stating my belief. What you believe is anything you can honestly affirm if someone asks you, "Is such-and-such true?"

Belief can be simple and immediate or complicated and long-term. It can be trivial or profound. It can be true or false, justified or unjustified, testable or untestable. The honesty, that's the key. Knowledge, a proper subset of belief, has a much higher standard.

The above is an extended way of saying that if someone begins a loaded question with an aggressive, sarcastic "Did you know ..." then you are amply justified in truly believing they're full of shit.