There is nothing “progressive” about apostates raving against the belief system they left behind. It demonstrates a lack of maturity, imo. True progressive thought is constructive and positive. Burning scripture, dipping religious symbols in piss, making porn with performers in religious garb, these are all destructive and negative and never a manifestation of progress, enlightenment, or spiritual progress. There is also nothing courageous for someone performing in front of an SNL audience dumping on the Catholic Church and it’s Papa.
I hope Sinead rests in Salaam. And I’d rather remember her for her God given graces, her beauty, her voice and her support for justice for oppressed, than what was clearly an error (certainly according to Islam, even in its “Sufi” modality) on her part.
This take certainly feels like a perspective only someone entrenched in organized religion could put forward. It is far more courageous, progressive, empowering, and inspirational for a victim of abuse to actively identify and oust their abusers than slump into the type of passivity you advocate for here.
There is inherent destructive energy in pinpointing abuse. It’s destructive because these “belief systems” and more general social structures are amazingly, regularly built on top of that abuse. The abuse is a part of it - they go hand-in-hand. It reproduces the power structure of the system. The more people that know, the more the foundational rot is exposed, the more obvious it becomes that the entire thing needs to be torn down.
“Feels” is accurate. That is merely your personal non-rational response to a position you disagree with. You have no insight into my personal condition whatsoever (and you are entirely off the mark in your feelings).
Sinead (RIP), for example, could have simply recited a line from Jesus regarding what awaits those who harm children (it’s in the Gospels) and held up the picture of the du jour Pope and then list the grievances against that institutions in that regard. Now that would have been a powerful, positive, and progressive, without causing division, and far more effective in causing reflection amongst the faithful of that institutions to do the necessary house cleaning.
The issue here, since it was not clear to you, is the way new understanding, new insights, are to be communicated. The goal remains a Humanity that dwells in harmony and peace after all. Correct?
Since Christianity is topical here, let’s see what we can find in Christian lore to help us understand the way of the superior human being when confronting corruption in religion, clergy, and institutions.
There is a well known incident as related to us in the Hadith of Jesus son of Mary. One day “the morality police” of the Pharisee apparently thought they were being clever in shooting two birds with one stone (pun intended). They went to the quarter where prostitutes worked and dragged a woman caught in the act and brought her before that lovely one. This was to discredit him before the Israelites as his progressive and luminous teachings were indeed a threat to their station of power and prestige and control over the people. Jesus did not tear them a new one using words (even though certainly capable of it) nor did he pick up the stone and throw it at them (even though they certainly deserved it).
No. What he did was silently allude to the poor grasp of the people of the actual Law, and then with a simple statement he not only confronted the Pharisees with their own corruption and sinful nature, but also saved a soul from certain death. To their credit, the Pharisees in question were ‘self-reflective’ enough to get the message and leave in peace.
This is how he was inviting people to a superior understanding without alienating them (!) and at the same time clearly establishing the guilt of the standing church and its priests. In fact, this way was so effective that the Sanhedrin decided that they had to get rid of him, intent on murdering him.
I’ve come to believe that this is a universal principle: disbelief regarding feasibility prevents actualization of vision; once one sees that it is done it is as if a mental barrier has been removed.
However, even after the mental barrier is removed - Majority of us do not have the motivation to actualize our visions even after we know and believe that they are feasible.
I suspect that it takes a special human emotional/energy makeup to overcome enormous obstacles in pursuit of actualizing a vision. Thats what makes entrepreneurs/hustlers special.
> Majority of us do not have the motivation to actualize our visions even after we know and believe that they are feasible.
Much of the time the decision not to pursue the vision is the right one, because so much sacrifice is required. A lot of successful entrepreneurs have tragic personal lives because in the pursuit of their vision they sacrifice their families. For those of us who are perhaps older, with a lot of personal commitments, and perhaps are also economically comfortable, those sacrifices are too great.
IMO this needlessly aggrandizes entrepreneurs. The way I see it, certain people end up in situations where they can take the risk, and some take the risk. For instance if you already have some wealth saved up you can take a couple of years to try your idea. Or if you work in a field where you are very likely to be able to get back in. On the other side, you might have relationships that are likely to come with you on your journey, whether that's customers or collaborators.
It just comes down to being able to give it a try, mainly from having a combination of low failure cost and high success probability.
Luxury conversions - 2 apts max per floor? — could address the single shared utility risers/core of the typical office building. Schematically: [ a | util | b ].
Malls are also on the table for conversions these days. That is a much simpler transformation.
Why are malls simpler to transform? All the malls I'm familiar with have relatively few bathrooms per floor, and huge interiors (low wall:floor ratio) that would seem hard to slice up into apartments.
Was discussing the same with dad when walking through a nearly abandoned mall in MD a while ago. Think a sort of gated community - anchor stores can become things like WholeFoods. Reclaiming a ribbon of parking around the mall allows for creating a green zone around the mall and possibly even ‘backyard’ gardens. And as noted by others, it is far more trivial to add the necessary infrastructure to support housing. Natural light is another issue which can be addressed with minor alteration to the external facing walls of stores. Basically you can easily stamp out big studios, merge stores for n-bedrooms, and depending on the structure of the mall possibly even punch through floors for duplexes, etc. These will be luxury units. And the ‘food court’ etc. can form the core of the ‘village’.
The problem to solve is GPU utilization rate. Training a “huge model” on n GPUs will have a cyclical pattern of idle GPUs and GPUs are expensive. This approach is likely scheduling GPU access across t training jobs to insure GPU is always in use. Maximizing GPU utility is a key requirement for training as a service.
The biggest issue is that the failure mode of this approach (one fault hoses the entire pipeline of T jobs) is exactly opposing the goals of its most likely users: Training SaaS providers.
I hope Sinead rests in Salaam. And I’d rather remember her for her God given graces, her beauty, her voice and her support for justice for oppressed, than what was clearly an error (certainly according to Islam, even in its “Sufi” modality) on her part.