Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
5d ago
As a moderate opponent¹ of Mr Trump, I did get a 'nabbing al-Capone for tax evasion' impression from the matter....
¹Capable of understanding that not every possible criticism of him is necessarily true², and of recognising his stopped-clock moments³.
²Compare the cancellation of Bill Maher post-9/11 for pointing out that the hijackers, while irrational⁴ anti-freedom murderers, were not, in the usual sense of the term, cowards.
³Such as the Executive Order on architectural styles.
⁴For those not familiar with Mr Maher's oeuvre, he has a very dim view of organised religion.
⁵As opposed to the vague 'bad person' sense, which far too many terms for specific character flaws erode into....
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
5d ago
...system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions.
Institutions ... that have self respect have pivoted back to some form of standardized testing....
Standardised tests are the worst method of determining college admissions, except for all the others that have been tried.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
5d ago
Possibly relevant: today is the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
5d ago
get the military to act in some very under-specified way
Seems more like they're trying to urge the military not to act in a particular way.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
There's almost nothing that women can do better than men that society values. If society valued these things, I don't think the issues between the genders would be anywhere near as clownish as it is today.
That was G. K. Chesterton's issue with feminism.
But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.
-- What's Wrong with the World (1910)
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
...and use goats as a medium of exchange.
On the other hand, goats have actual uses beyond 'Alice will give me useful stuff in exchange for this because Bob will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because Carol will give him useful stuff in exchange for it because Dave will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because....'; they'll clear out overgrown vegetation, fuel themselves in doing so, and are delicious!
(I still don't get how people can be like 'USD is only valuable because people think it is, but gold has real value.'; they both derive their value from that same endless loop.)
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
Are the refugees welcome in their neighbourhood or in their kids schools?
Yes.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
11d ago
The part of their brain with which they can grasp that electrical safety comes from the laws of physics and not regulation seems to be atrophied.
Compare Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, on being told that his demands for a backdoor in encrypted communications were mathematically impossible: “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”
(Where's King Canute when you need him?)
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
12d ago
if it's generally considered that 14 year olds can be mature enough to decide to have sex
With each other.
it's tough to argue that 17 year old is too young to have sex
With someone much older.
You may or may not think this distinction relevant, but it is drawn by those advancing the aforementioned propositions.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
12d ago
They were also threatened with/subjected to violent reprisals.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
14d ago
I've got mental health = I've got mental health problems
Possibly analogous to referring to someone with a fever as having a 'temperature'....
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
14d ago
One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well?
I'd still take that over "Have a good one.", which has been plaguing us for nearly a quarter-century.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
14d ago
not getting their/there/they're right.
What do you say to comfort an English teacher?
There, their, they're.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
14d ago
an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less
Ackchyually, an ellipsis at the end of a sentence can contain four dots, the last being the period.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
becomes
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur....
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
14d ago
'E work for 'elfin safety?
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
14d ago
The actual conflict is between Natural Law people and transhumanists.
Also between 'people who believe Elliot Page to be a woman with mental defects, causing her to change her body away from its Natural Form' and 'people who believe Elliot Page to be a man born with a defective body, causing him to try to bring it closer to its Natural Form'.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
19d ago
A reasonable point, and one which was unfortunately lost in the noise as the pro-equality side either naively pattern-matched¹ the case to one of a business posting a 'WHITES STRAIGHTS ONLY' sign (or worse, all the businesses in a less tolerant area doing so), or possibly sought to avoid creating a precedent which would allow such an outcome.
¹cf. the Rightful Caliph's Meditation on Bingo Cards.
To what extent?
To a greater extent than metaphysical propositions.
They are, at least in principle, amenable to some form of test to determine which side is correct, even if we do not yet know what form that test might take.
This line of thinking, taken too far, gets towards scientism and "trusting The Science (TM)." It wraps back around the horseshoe and becomes a faith all it's own. "The men in the long white robes (scientists) said it must be so!" Even though the entire idea of the scientific method is that everything is held as, at best, the current state of research and theory and, almost never, and iron law of the universe.
Yes, sometimes people use science as attire, using appeals to authority rather than facts. "We gave $PILL1 to 250 people with $DISEASE2 and a placebo to another 250; 237 of the first group got better while 71 of the second group did; therefore $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2." is science; "Dr Weißmantel has umpteen Oxbridge/Ivory League degrees; he says $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2; therefore $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2." is not the Scientific Method being tried and found wanting, it is the Scientific Method being found difficult and left untried.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
19d ago
Unlike your radioactivity example, there's no Geiger counter for detecting the presence or absence of, say "the universal right to free speech."
The parallel in that case is the observation that:
- Censorship regimes tend to have bad outcomes, and
- This happens even when it appears that they will have good outcomes.
In the Sequences, this is referred to as an Ethical Injunction.
It's impossible for any state to be truly neutral on metaphysical commitments
...but some states are closer to it than others.
As metaphysical beliefs are not falsifiable, disagreements about them, if derived from diverging axioms, can only end in one of two ways: either the sides agree to disagree, and mutually refrain from attempting to forcibly impose their beliefs on others, or they wage war against each other until one or both is dead.
Liberalism is the 'agree to disagree' option; for the other, see 17th-century Europe.
The state is still picking sides on metaphysics, it's just picking the side that pretends not to have any.
More the side that is willing to agree to stop the bloodshed even if those people keep thinking and living in a way which, even if it 'neither picks anyone's pocket nor breaks anyone's leg' (as Jefferson put it), is nonetheless heretical/problematic/unnatural/[insert snarl word here].
I posted an argument, by toy analogy, a year ago here. The tl;dr is that "teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law" even in an imperfect, entropic universe.
....which rests on the metaphysical assumption that 'same-gender couple' and 'infertile opposite-gender couple' have little XML tags saying that the latter is supposed to be able to bear children while the former isn't.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
19d ago
Yeah, I remember that line. And the companion line about how gay marriage was not going to affect your (straight person's) life at all. Funny how soon it morphed into "bake the cake, bigot!"
The baker was trying, in a small way, to impose his beliefs on the couple. A hypothetical symmetrical case could be imagined in which 'people being allowed to believe in God and attend religious services' does not affect atheists' lives, even if Mr Euphoric-Fedora, who owns a hotel and sees no difference between religion and psychosis, is expected to provide rooms to religious people on the same terms as he provides to non-believers.
Just try the line "hey, if you don't want to own slaves, nobody is forcing you to do so" and see how far it gets with regards to "this law will not impinge on you"....
But it impinges on the enslaved persons. There is a difference between 'I am imposing my views on you' and 'I am not allowing you to impose your views on someone else'.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
19d ago
...and the banana for scale.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
19d ago
Do not impose your religious beliefs on people who do not share them.
Do not impose your atheistic beliefs on people who do not share them.
For the purposes of civil liberties/avoiding sectarian conflict/&c., atheism is a religion.
Thus, if Alice believes in a deity or deities, and Bob does not, they are equally obligated to refrain from imposing their beliefs on each other.
This is why many New Atheists drew such ire; they promoted their Views in a manner that would have been seen as inappropriate in the other direction. However, the symmetry breaks down in that atheism per se does not impose demands founded on metaphysical assumptions, although some atheistic ideologies do, e. g. Gaianism ("Thou shalt not eat of produce that groweth not where thou livest, even if it be transported in a minimally-damaging way, for it is an Abomination Unto Gaia for people in northern climates to make it through the winter without developing early-stage scurvy.") or Wokism The Ideology Which Refuses To Be Named Because It Considers Itself Entitled To Have Its Precepts Be Unmarked ("Thou shalt not eat of ice cream from an ice-cream truck, for the song they use has the same tune as a racist song used by ice-cream places during the Wilson Administration"; "Thou shalt not avail thyself of the easing of thy toil by human-shaped machines, because certain pre-civil-rights-era attempts were designed to resemble caricatures of black people and called Mechanical Negroes-with-two-Gs.")
The same principle applies to those demands as to "Thou shalt not engage in coitus with a consenting adult of thine own gender because the Bible says something that, if you squint at it, looks like it says not to; never mind that the relationships to which Paul was referring to were probably the older man/young boy type often seen in ante-Christian Greece."
I don't think it's the recent immigrants who are preventing houses from being built....
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