ApplesauceIrishCream
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User ID: 882
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
That sounds like a pretty clear statement by Biden.
Question: What's special about this particular statement by Biden that leads you to believe it reflects American foreign policy? It's not uncommon for Blinken or unnamed staffers in the White House to issue statements that "American policy in this area remains unchanged" following a Biden statement that is sharply contrary to the status quo.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
"the people" aren't an entity you can actually consult.
Yes, it is, and that's in fact the whole point.
The practical implementation of democracy still requires you to go around and ask all of the individuals that compose "the people" what they want.
This is not "the practical implementation of democracy," it is democracy itself.
Any government that claims to represent "the people" without actually consulting them might as well be ruling by divine right for the religion of democracy.
Pure democracy has no government layer; it's decision-making by a committee-of-the-whole, so to speak. Past a certain size, this is impractical, therefore governments exist to solve the scaling and coordination issues. They necessarily do so imperfectly, though some instantiations are better than others, in terms of their fidelity to the expressed collective will of the demos.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Imprisonment, as a punishment, is intended to restrict a prisoner's ability to commit crimes, by separating him from the rest of society and putting him under the supervision of guards. This is a direct, and intended, removal of liberty.
However, there are also second-order effects, that are not intended, but are--practically speaking--inevitable. One of those is the limitation on the prisoner's right of effective self-defense. This limitation isn't justified by the standard philosophical defenses of imprisonment-as-punishment, so in my view, the state needs to step in to replace what it has taken without justification.
You could similarly argue that if the state takes away someone's freedom, they are obliged to provide him with freedom.
More precisely, I'm arguing that if the state takes away someone's freedom without justification, they are obliged to provide him with something in exchange. In this case, if you remove someone's right to effective self defense without justification for removing that right specifically, then you're obliged to step in and make a reasonable effort to provide protection.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Learning disorders are pretty close to being a special case of an IQ differential. Someone with a lower IQ will struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone with a higher IQ, holding other attributes constant. (Lower IQ does not directly indicate a better bedside manner, or other benefits; that sort of "fairness/balancing/whatever" is for video games, not reality.)
Affirmative action has many problems, and "less capable graduates" barely makes the list. Even if you set aside the naked racial preferences and the reputation hit to successful minorities, you still have the mismatch between students and institutions, leading to much higher minority dropout rates from institutions above their level, when they could have been successful at institutions closer to their testing levels. Testing has a tight correlation with academic performance and graduation rates; when minorities end up thoroughly dominating the lowest quintile in class, it should come as no surprise that they also dominate the list of dropouts. (Of course, when you add in predatory student loans, and the worst case scenario is "loans + no degree," affirmative action starts to look like a perfect storm of how to screw over minorities most efficiently. I guess advocates of affirmative action can rest on their good intentions?)
"Adjusting" is never free; there is always a tradeoff. Even the mere knowledge that "adjusting" is happening generates second-order effects. Sometimes the specific policy is net-positive--the tradeoff was worth it. All too often, though, the effects are net-negative, as with affirmative action.
ApplesauceIrishCream
13d ago
An axiom is a premise to an argument. You don't set out to prove axioms within the scope of an argument not because they are obviously true, but because they are outside the scope of the argument by definition. You use axioms to prove conclusions. Yes, you may use "self-evident" more or less interchangeably with "obvious," but I never said otherwise. I said that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is not the same as "self-evidently." "We hold" is doing crucial work here, and may not be discarded without changing the meaning of the statement.
Jefferson's use of "self-evident" in the quoted letter to Madison is consistent with the above. Again, Jefferson is declaring an axiom, or at least offering one for discussion--"I suppose to be" is a somewhat less emphatic phrasing than "we hold," but it serves the same basic purpose.
Jefferson's twenty-year sunset idea is famously nutty[1], but there's a distinction to be drawn between his private writings to Madison, and the public documents he drafted, like the Declaration. In the Declaration, Jefferson isn't just speaking for himself--after all, there's a long list of signatories, and Jefferson's early drafts got cut down a fair bit in editing-by-committee.
[1] Well, they are famously nutty now, with the posthumous publication of a great many letters and documents that were private at the time they were written. As I recall, Madison's response was more or less, "what a fascinating idea; you should definitely not mention it to anyone else." Madison was considerably more sensible than Jefferson, admittedly not the highest of bars.
ApplesauceIrishCream
11mo ago
Off Armageddon Reef (and the remainder of the Safehold series) by David Weber is one example.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency.
Already addressed.
I'm not saying you should like or even tolerate a lack of plot or agency--I agree that any work meeting your original description (or even close to it) is crap. The common modern failing is to replace the missing plot and agency with wokeness, which is why I brought it up. But you are painting with too broad a brush to say there aren't any female authors in SF/Fantasy worth reading, which is exactly what you did here:
It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
A large amount of creative output is dreck, of course, but man, when you find the good storytellers...it's worth the hunt.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Have you read his other stuff? My favorite is the Imager Portfolio, though I also liked Recluce and Soprano Sorceress.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
That would be the same ICJ that has no jurisdiction over Americans, as the US is not a party to the Rome Statute.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I believe Zorba said at one point that the system includes a random sample of (unreported) comments as a sanity check. I've tagged any number of comments as "neutral," and I suspect plenty of those were not human-reported.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
On the whole, I'd say the first book is very good, but every book afterwards is better. Also, the scope of the first book is mostly Liscor and some nearby places, but much more of the broader world is introduced in the second book.
One of the things pirateaba does well might be called "character development from the audience's perspective." You're often introduced to a character and develop the usual first impressions, but your opinion of him may change quite a bit over time for various reasons--you get a second perspective on the character from a different person; you get a part of a chapter from his viewpoint, showing how he thinks; or he makes an unexpected decision that clarifies his priorities. Everyone is complicated on their own terms; it's just that you aren't introduced to all the layers at once.
Erin is no exception to this pattern--the first view you get of her is heavily impacted by the fact that she's trying to cope with being isekai'd, and it's hard. Once she finds her feet a bit, different aspects of her character come to the fore. Much much later, another character from the first book describes Erin as "a puddle that you stepped into and began drowning in." She's got some excellent qualities, and other things she's bad at, but she makes some mistakes even where she's strongest, and her limitations really do constrain her options. Erin does use humor as a coping mechanism sometimes, but both she and especially the series as a whole have a surprisingly large emotional range.
It's hard to give much detail without hitting significant spoilers; there are a subreddit and a wiki that are very good, but you'll run into spoilers pretty much immediately, so I would stay away for now. If you've got any particular questions, I'd be happy to respond.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
No, that does not follow. You must also think that the statement that God is real is incorrect, but if the person offering the statement is sincere and without the intent to deceive, then it is not a lie.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
It sounds like you are skeptical of the efficacy of magic beans? Yeah, in that case, it looks like just the worst combination of some form of quokka-ness with enough of a veneer of "trust me, I've done the utilitarian math, and it says that Democrats are surprisingly underfunded!" High-minded principles got suckered by a grift (well, to the extent that principles were involved at all beyond providing a fig leaf, which is worth questioning).
That said, as a practical matter, EA looks especially vulnerable to grifting exactly because its focus on big-picture analysis tends to dismiss individual failures. On the principles side, EA is an attempt to speedrun morality, which to me raises more red flags than a Chinese military parade.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Aside from the strictly amoral or immoral, one of the worst conceptual types is the one who knows a very long list of moral systems, from various flavors of deontology to different types of consequentialism to the ethics of many virtues, and applies the moral justification to fit his situation. In any given instance, he has a perfectly cogent explanation for why his choice was justifiable, and even an argument for why his justification was the best type for the context, and yet the central point of morality was lost along the way--fencing off bad choices from good ones. Different systems will have somewhat different fence patterns, but hotswapping fences to fit your behavior ends up destroying the concept and purpose of the fence.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Skyforger's summary is correct; if you're curious about how the cure for scurvy got "undiscovered," this blogpost from some years back is fascinating reading.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
He's here; his most recent post was about an hour ago. I've had a bit of trouble with the search function myself, but not the technical chops to troubleshoot it.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I'm offended by Carol peeling a goddamn avacado in the episode.
I mean, yes, that's bad, but did you know that some places think guacamole can be made with green peas instead of avocado?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Not exactly on point, as it's another example of an actual "revisionist" work, but it's one of my favorites.
The Vampire Tape by Fred Saberhagen is a retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula from the Count's perspective. One of the constraints on the tale is that Jonathan Harker is an honest narrator in his letters from Stoker's book; it's just that he misinterprets what he sees, jumps to incorrect conclusions, and otherwise presents the Count in a bad faith light...at least, according to Dracula himself. Reading between the lines, Dracula is not nearly so innocent as he protests, but also not the monster that the "courageous...though rather dull" Harker and the "imbecile" Van Helsing describe.
“The vision of Van Helsing as a vampire is one before which my imagination balks; this is doubtless only a shortcoming on my part; he may have been well fitted for the role, since as we have seen he had already the power, by means of speech, to cast his victims into a stupor.”
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Would you say that some level of tax collection is a necessary evil, rather than both unnecessary and evil?
I assume that various tax schemes would fall on a gradient of more-to-less offensive, depending on the details; what type of taxation (if any) would generally be on the less offensive end of the spectrum?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Would you call yourself a minarchist?
If any government is to do anything, it generally needs to pay for it. If it's going to have the money to pay out, it needs to have some method of collecting money. What would you define as the valid parameters around "government collecting money"?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Is this the gender difference thread?
Edit: Oh, wait, my mistake.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Republicans are rather unlikely to win very many city council seats in large cities, no matter what method you use. For state legislatures, though, the advantage of cities for Republicans is that they come pre-packed--it's trivial to draw compact districts where Democrats have a huge margin, which writes off those districts, but by concentrating opposition voters, allows for more success elsewhere. And yes, a mostly suburban/rural district with a small slice of city is generally a winnable district for Republicans, and an example of cracking.
I am occasionally guilty of attempted cleverness, but if asked to explain myself, I am also often willing to do so at great length. So...uh...fair warning, I guess? Though if you are here, walls of text are probably acceptable.
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