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.
8hr 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.
8hr 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.
8hr 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.
8hr ago
'E work for 'elfin safety?
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
8hr 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.
5d 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.
5d 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.
5d 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.
5d ago
...and the banana for scale.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
5d 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."
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
Women are a potent political force but an incompetent military/policing one
But will it stay that way, if a disproportionally male faction wages war against a disporportionally female faction, seeking to reduce them to a state of subjugation?
"God made men, and God made women, but Samuel Colt made them equal."
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
So, it's not just that you have to find non-religious reasons for your preferred policies, it's that sincere religious belief playing any role in them puts them on the "church" side of the divide, to be kept completely away from the state. While, in contrast, your secular humanist can vote their morality, because their morality doesn't involve religion, and thus is perfectly fine being pursued by the state.
I think that the division might be better described, not as 'religious' vs. 'secular' so much as 'metaphysical' vs. 'material'. Material assertions can be settled empirically¹, whereas metaphysical debates are often predicated on diverging axioms, and thus, if placed as support for state policy, tend to lead to bloodshed; the most salient example to the authors of the Bill of Rights being the European Wars of Religion in the XVII Century. The disputants in that example being competing religious institutions led to the principle being phrased in terms of 'separation of church and state'.
To take a different example, imagine two opponents of a nuclear power plant. Alice claims that it will release a metric arse-load of radiation every hour it operates, exposure to the tiniest bit of which will cause eleventy-hundred million cancer deaths; Bob asserts that splitting atoms is a contravention of the natural order, and making human existence easier and less precarious by the provision of abundant energy is an impermissible defiance of the Will of Gaia. Alice's claims can be refuted by measuring the radiation levels outside and inside existing reactor sites with a Geiger Counter, and referring to the health statistics of the inhabitants of Ramsar and Karunagappalli². Bob's argument, however, rests on assumptions (the existence of a natural order which does not include human-built technology; the notion of a personified environment rightfully possessed of an authority outweighing human well-being) which are not amenable to testing by experiment or observation¹, and therefore can only either
(a.) be set aside as not legitimate groundings for state policy (hence 'separation of church and state'), or
(b.) be decided on the battlefield.
The Protestant and Catholic churches in early-modern Europe chose the latter, and caused such devastation, for so little gain, that even fourteen decades later, people knew that allowing the sword of the state to be wielded on behalf of metaphysical assumptions is playing with fire.
¹cf. Newton's Flaming Laser Sword: "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating."
²Locations in Iran and India with high levels of background radiation and no obvious increase in cancer rates.
I also remember that when people, in response to these claims that "there are no secular arguments against gay marriage," would present such secular arguments
The 'secular' arguments I have seen for state non-recognition of same-gender marriage while recognising opposite-gender marriage³ include arguments based on 'complementarity of male and female' (not religious in the narrow sense of "God/the Church/Scripture says so"; nevertheless metaphysical in nature), and arguments relating to parenthood, (entirely material, but do not support discrimination between same-gender couples and opposite-gender couples one or both members of which is entirely infertile.)
If you know of any other secular arguments for the proposition that the state ought to distinguish between 'two men' and 'one man whose testicles have been disconnected and one woman who ran out of eggs ten years ago', I am willing to consider them.
³As opposed to the arguments that the state shouldn't involve itself in marriage at all.
you can believe whatever you want about the supernatural, and attend whatever church/synagogue/temple/mosque/etc. you want… but you 'leave it behind at the church door,' as it were, and must behave in accord with broad secular norms outside that.
I'd phrase it more as "Do not impose your religious beliefs on people who do not share them."; or as it was put in the 2000s, "Don't tell me I can't have cake because you happen to be on a diet."
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
“if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?” I’ve seen this reasoning before. “We can control the Devil, and avoid his temptations, and look at all the power it will grant us!”
"Do not call up that which you can not put down."
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception
Or file an official form stating that they objected to doing so.
However, the Federal Government would then work with the insurance providers to fill the resulting gap, and some groups wanted to be able to opt out, not only of paying for their employees' contraception, but of anyone covering the cost!
At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
...the 'socially progressive' view being that, the arguments against equal marriage all being rooted in their proponents' metaphysical assumptions, and the imposition of metaphysical beliefs by state power having spilt rivers of blood in 17th-century Europe (more recent to the Founding Fathers than the Civil War is to today), the official elevation of opposite-gender couples over same-gender couples cannot be justified as government policy. (I wonder if 'state government issues Civil Unions for all couples, leaves marriage to whatever church/other religious organisation/other private entity the participants see fit to involve' would have been accepted.)
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state.
The reasoning behind that being that they considered it the equivalent of the installers of these water fountains claiming, per some guff about the Curse of Ham or Hex of Corned Beef or Jinx of Turkey or whatever, a Conscientious Objection to letting [hexagrammaton]s use the same water fountain as white people, or a separate but actually equal one off the same production line.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6d ago
there are a lot of people who are 'Catholic' in a woolly cultural way without ever going to mass.
Hence the question frequently asked of atheists in Northern Ireland: "But is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you do not believe?"
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10d ago
I've heard that the underlying problem is how FBI agents are promoted. They need a bust of a major incident to get a promotion so going in early is a career killer.
"...recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them." --Sir Robert Peel, father of the Metropolitan Police (aka Scotland Yard).
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
13d ago
...Lauren is what I would call a basically good person (BGP). She hasn't ever thought deeply about a values system....
The road to hell is paved with good intentions Basically Good Persons who, not having thought about their values, are easily led to commit atrocities when their neighbours all tell them that that is what a Good Person does.
(In the 1980s, some Concerned Citizens¹ lobbied heavily to include in children's television series the message that The Complainer Is Always Wrong, and that one ought to unquestioningly follow one's peers. Had I been in those meetings, I would have wanted to take out a copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem and ask "are you sure you want to stand on that principle?")
¹“He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'." -- Sir Terry Pratchett, The Truth
(GNU Pterry)
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
15d ago
Keep in mind that the rats are a stand-in for human beings.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
16d ago
And if the Device can do anything the rats can do?
I do not believe that it is possible for one human, or animal acting as a narrative stand-in for a human, to be inferior to, or a lesser being relative to, another; this applies even if there is a difference in their abilities.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
16d ago
Please be prepared to explain to your machine overlords why they should keep humans around then.
That's what 'AI Alignment' refers to.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
18d ago
It would have been better if the New Deal had been implemented with a constitutional amendment; however, the state governments were not capable of responding to the Depression on their own, and had Washington continued to do nothing, the nation would have had little prospect of avoiding a far more blatant rejection of the Constitution, as the desperate masses turned to either a Red or a Brown alternative.
Possibly analogous to referring to someone with a fever as having a 'temperature'....
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