She had a reputation as an indifferent navigator and aviator which is consistently downplayed.

Toss in jail and throw away the key.

If an omnipotent God could arrange such an explosion, and we presume Him loving of all sentient creatures, He could easily arrange His explosion to avoid harming His creatures. Such a story wouldn't happen in the first place.

But what if He did? Anyone reading the Bible -- as certainly a Jesuit would have -- knows there is no theological requirement in Christianity that God value a life as humans value a life. "My ways are not your ways, says the Lord." St Paul is explicit that the notion that Pharaoh was created entirely for the demonstration of God's power by Moses does not contradict the justice of God. (Nor does he say Pharaoh was created for that purpose; he doesn't know, and treats the possibility as a hypothetical.)

Nor need the civilization's members be created simply for some demonstration. Perhaps they suffered the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps the nova was the End Of The World for _that_ civilization, a component of its Second Coming, just as (Christians believe) our world will eventually experience. Genesis, Exodus, Paul, Revelations each provide precedents for such an apparent catastrophe. The priest can easily imagine any number of explanations consistent with his faith. (Indeed one might be the light of one world's closure illuminating the opening of another, reminiscent of the Greek's beacon signaling the fall of Troy in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon".)

Whether we look at the story from God's end or the priest's, it doesn't make any sense.

The reader doesn't need to _like_ any of those possibilities. The point is that the values by which we like or don't like anything are not necessarily the same as those of God. C.S. Lewis imagines a devil overseeing temptation during WW II saying "I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work." ("The Screwtape Letters".) For Lewis, death doesn't mean the same thing to God as it does to us.

Still more, the Christian thinks the perspective by which we judge doesn't know all that He does. Many very clever people have pointed out that a super-intelligence will think differently than we do. Boethius argued (in the sixth century) that God's different experience of Time can explain the apparent contradictions of omniscience and free will. That lightweight Godel argued out that what is logically contradictory for us, trapped in sequential thought, can be resolvable by an infinite knowledge that is beyond sequence. More recently (and casually) Vernor Vinge posits (in "A Fire Upon The Deep") that the study of super artificial intelligences will be classified as "theology".

And the reader doesn't even have to buy any of that. That's what tolerance is about, we're all free to form our opinions and arguments as we think best.

But it is just ignorant to, well, ignore those opinions and arguments that we don't agree with.

And it is remarkable how many supposedly intelligent, curious and tolerant people become so ignorant of what careful and intelligent people have thought when the topic is theology.

I've complained to HN about this and proposed solutions. They don't care.

Anyone wanting to be taken seriously on "disinformation" would get as far away as possible from a place like Harvard in the first place.

"[Shakespeare's] version of Mark Antony's speech is probably the greatest written speech ever"

Let us not forget the Gettysburg Address, which is the pivot point not of a factional quarrel but a national repurposing to equality, and shorter to boot.

Quibbling can be fun!

In theory public sector unions cannot legally strike or engage in work actions but this constraint is ignored whenever they find it inconvenient.

They create a feedback loop between public expenditure and political power which is very bad for liberal democracy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283329

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

My rule for the slide deck was "don't use a term you haven't explained". So I'd write a slide and check for new words. If I really needed them I'd have to add a slide before that introduced and explained the term.

Figuring out exercises that got students oriented to the concepts was another trick. People really don't get stuff until they've done it for themselves.

By the end of the second day I had people writing joins on their own.

The market and society are beginning to correct and that's a very good thing.

Failure of a number of regional banks does not threaten the whole system but the handful with sketchy solvency / liquidity.

And many banks make lots of money on fees and various services. It's problematic because no one likes ATM fees and minimum balance fees, and the politicians get involved.

I understand many banks offer "insured sweep" accounts that do just this but of course this costs them cheap deposits. Go ask the various VCs why they didn't press SVB to make this service available to their portfolio companies.

It's a pretty good business model with a stable deposit base, but SVB got a huge influx of deposits and mismanaged it.

And notice that in 2018 SVB was explicitly relieved of the increased regulation accompanying the "systematically important" label.