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George A. LaBonty

@galabonty.bsky.social
213 followers 149 following 619 posts

Public defender, film nerd, philosophy fan

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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Couple more cuz this is fun to me Philosophy of science: very tepid realism, with sympathies toward khunianism Personal identity: skepticism Zombies: inconceivable Time: B-theory Free will: compatiblism, with sympathies toward skepticism
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Ontology: eliminativist materialism, nominalism, mereological nihilism Epistemology: externalist virtue epistemology Moral philosophy: constructivism, hovering between rights-based deontology or rights-based rule utilitarianism Theology: atheism Political philosophy: nebulous anti-fascism.
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James McLeod @jamespmcleod.ca · 08/10/2026
Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said the author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the academy reached her to notify her of the win. apnews.com/article/nobe...
apnews.com
Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in literature
Anne Carson, a Canadian poet and essayist, has won the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy recognized her for her bold and inventive work that engages with classical traditions to create ne...
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Evening hike with dog. Got done a while after sunset, saw an owl. Look how cute her face is.
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Got a dog from the shelter, her name is Eurydice. Spent a couple hours practicing not pulling on the leash and now she exemplifies nominative determinism by preferring to walk slightly behind me
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Got a not guilty verdict!!! Client was absurdly innocent but it was still such a relief I sobbed in my car afterwards (the sleep deprivation of trial prep didn't help in that regard)
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
While many are just unscientific reactionaries as you say, I think good faith interlocutors can say "this new definition is really ad hoc, the old one made more sense and better captured the common meaning" (provided that you accept that there are now at least 13 planets, probably a lot more)
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
by this definition, neither earth nor theia were planets before they crashed into each other, but earth became a planet after (except actually not bc that clause of the definition only applies to the "settled" solar system, so they were both planets even though they failed the IAU definition)
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Tbf, the 2006 redefinition wasn't a discovery about properties other planets have that pluto lacks, but a deliberate gerrymander to keep the number of planets from ballooning, with some semi-unprincipled clauses included to that end (like "must clear its own orbit")
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 29/08/2026
COYOTE VS ACME is legitimately great
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It is corny as hell to say this but the ending of Coyote vs acme legit kinda moved me?? (my sister said the same thing walking out of the theater). Like it's a dumb little looney toons movie but like the ethos espoused is kinda what public interest law is all about??? Wonderful movie tbh
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
But if god (or Mary or whoever) will appear to a bunch of looky loos at Fatima to inspire the true faith or whatever, but didn't, say, appear in Berlin in 1931 to tell people not to become Nazis, you can't resort to this alleged policy of non-interference
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Like, if god let the Holocaust happen because he's just got to be hands off, let history unfold naturally without interference to preserve freedom or something, ok, I still have issues with that, but I guess that's at least a logically consistent answer
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Like, the problem of evil and it's sub variants (hiddenness, animal suffering, etc) are obviously the single biggest problem for theism, and miracles make it even harder to deal with evil, because they take away all your theodicies for why god has to be hands off
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Thinking about Joe schmid's conversion videos and it's weird to me that the argument from miracles is what did it for him bc I have long thought (and still do) that miracles introduce so many problems that if I were an apologist, I'd disavow them rather than dealing with the problems they introduce
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I have often thought (sometimes in jest sometimes dead serious) that the ultimate social privilege is charisma. Likeable people dominate at every social scale and it's unfair to us miserable goblins
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🌈Tyranny🫧Sparkles🏳️‍🌈 @tyranny.sparklenoise.com · 25/08/2026
Dolly Parton with Keith Haring in 1985, incredible woman and supporter of LGBTQ people for decades going back to a time when few others dared.
Black and white photo of Dolly Parton with gay artist Keith Haring.
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
But as long as you do that then speed cameras are obviously so much better than any alternative (such as "no enforcement" or "capricious and arbitrary enforcement by cops looking for an excuse for a more serious privacy invasion")
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
I am very pro-speed camera *provided* that the data is used to check for violations and then promptly deleted if violations are not detected such as eg maryland. The things you can do with these if you hold onto the data are a privacy nightmare
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Plus even more people I couldn't talk to but probably heard at least a dozen languages. We're all just human beings staring at the wonder of the cosmos together, what more is there to life than that?
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
best thing about eclipse chasing, maybe even more than the eclipse itself: on this little patch of dirt next to the third millennium bridge in zaragoza, I met people from 8 countries & 4 continents, traded tips, took turns watching each other's stuff in the hot sun and all looked at the sky together
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Micah @rincewind.run · 06/08/2026
it really is fascinating, it’s not like the problem never happens with other versions but there was a while there where it was like, is this all LLMs or just 4o and it turns out the answer was “4o specifically destroyed people’s minds at a massively disproportionate rate”
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
That's what I'm saying, if you can do 1000 coin flips on major decisions that's basically omniscience. 51% chance of accurate results with only a single flip is still good (you could easily beat the stock market or the casino with those odds) but not nearly as good as the second option
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
When you say "I can flip it as many times as I want" do you mean "I can flip it once per question for as many questions as I want" or do you mean "I can flip the coin as many times as I want on the same question" because while both are good, the second one is *crazy* good
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EMILY WILSON @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
12. Beyond anything about the film as a film, it was a terrible and entirely unnecessary choice to film the Trojan Horse sequence in occupied Dakhla, Western Sahara, without the consent of the indigenous population.
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
This right here is my thing: there's a lot of big ideas, many of which I kinda like in the abstract, but they don't mesh together
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
I love sozins comet and day of black sun, but the surrounding episodes literally are just in fiction killing time until those episodes. Season 1 is at least a journey from A to B so it feels like it's moving forward even if the eps are disconnected, 3 is explicitly waiting until those big events
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
2 is best, most interesting and coherent structure (one episode leads directly to the next in a very propulsive way where the other two seasons are more disconnected vignettes). 1 is a simple but very fun adventure that lays a lot of important groundwork 3 unfortunately is really disjointed
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Pie and beer day parade was blocking my house. What an amazing encapsulation of utah culture right here
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
hm, yes... imagine if some prominent scientists had traveled to a remote location—an island, say—with a strange man, while perhaps anticipating some funding...
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mensrea @mensie.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
German broadcast. Nailed it
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Andrew Hammond @ahamm.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Happy for this guy.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
CABO VERDE CABO VERDE CABO VERDE
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Jordan aka Jirdan @slclunk.com · 19/07/2026
My god, everyone treats Trump like a child
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Bryan "Gazpacho" Carr @learnonaut.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
I think about this a lot
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Where was this England in the semis?
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I thought the Odyssey was compelling but very odd. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way boxd.it/fhbQpx
boxd.it
A ★★★ review of The Odyssey (2026)
Very odd adaptation. Compelling, but odd. I feel like this movie is being pulled in several directions in terms of what it wants to be, not all of them complimentary. It wants to be a comprehensive re...
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
The joke isn't that Odysseus gives a lol random name to polyphemus, like if gave my name as "Losersayswhat" the joke is that he says "my name is Outis" which sounds like he's shortening his name to "Odys". So its clever word play instead of a random thing that polyphemus just doesn't question
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Everyone saying "no the joke totally works in English" is proving they actually don't get what the joke is
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Talia al Ghoul 🏳️‍⚧️ @usili.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Apollo gift of prophecy
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Gotta admit we kinda cooked with the sixth amendment
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Jordan aka Jirdan @slclunk.com · 05/07/2026
Mr president the libs at the weather service are calling you a pussy if you don’t give your speech
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Fine I guess I'll vote for him in the general it's just... We're now a safe blue seat, did we absolutely *have* to pick the guy we went with when we were a barely-purple-leaning-slightly-red seat?
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
And definitely that's in the movie, I just care more about that than I do about the creatures Like for instance, in House of Leaves it's crucial to the whole vibe that there is no M̶i̶n̶o̶t̶a̶u̶r̶
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Like for me (again, being familiar with the premise but not the #lore) the appeal of the backrooms is Benjamin's angel of history, watching the catastrophe of history pile at its feet, unable to look forward only back
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Not knowledgeable about the backrooms #lore, but just in terms of what I wanted it to be from the premise, the backrooms movie suffers from caring too much about what's in the backrooms and not about the rooms
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Stalker @tarkovskyframes.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Frame: 09644
Stalker Frame: 09644
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
The sagrada familia opening has me emotional, so excited to get to see it in a couple of months. Multiple entire generations living and dying to build something they never got to see finished is like what the whole "being a human being" thing is about to me
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George A. LaBonty @galabonty.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Or rather, it seems to me like in making that separation, you've already bitten the bullet on this strange inverted Ian creature, and now you're trying to go back in and add all these weird ad hoc laws to un bite the bullet
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