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.
10mo ago
I would just like to make the point at this time that Lenin, Stalin, and Mao had power over larger populations than Hitler.
Stalin and Mao also ruled for longer.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
If Adrian Monk were a country....
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety
Probably a case of the Streetlight Effect; determining whether John Doe installed an alarm system and whether he had a licence to do so takes less effort than determining whether he, being licenced, had installed it properly.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
But it might, at least, make the arguments from each side less aggravating....
Okay, fine; there is no answer that involves making the current population smarter.
I still think that that is a bit premature. It is far from certain that we will not find a way to increase g post-birth.
(Whenever I read a story with the plot 'character tries to overcome natural limitation, first attempt fails or has very bad effect, no further attempt is shown' (e. g. Flowers for Algernon, Hawthorne's Dr. Heidegger's Experiment), my interpretation isn't 'one should resign oneself to what Nature wants us to suffer' so much as 'they should have tried again, and kept trying until they or someone else figured out how to make it work.' (cf. Edison, "I didn't fail, I discovered 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb!"))
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
assuming raising taxes is unacceptable
And do you know what happens when you assume?
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
And Asians seem to mostly have views on other non-white groups that make storefront look tolerant.
Colemak keyboard?
As a related aside - are charges of racism pretty much dead now? Feels like calling Trump a fascist nazi for all of the last 10 years only for him to be re elected by even a higher majority = nobody really cares what leftists think about who is racist anymore, at least in America.
You'd think they would have learned from what happened after Fox "News" spent the better part of two decades calling everyone and everything left of Reaganism-Thatcherism 'communist'....
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
I knew someone who made the same point about the Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site (the one people were calling the 'Ground Zero Mosque'). "Exactly how far away would it need to be before you agree that it is unreasonable to object?"
most people aren't really equipped to make that call
Was Huckleberry Finn equipped to make that call, or should he have sent Hard-R Jim back into bondage?
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
Example?
"God will decide for me whether I survive this flood."
"I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
The sin I was referring to is the sin of regarding a human being as having merely instrumental, rather than terminal, value.
Sometimes people make choices that are straightforwardly destructive to themselves and others. Sometimes these choices can't be un-made.
That doesn't change the fact that they are still human beings.
not all people can be saved from themselves or their demons.
Doesn't excuse us from doing our damnedest.
Not everyone who is suffering deserves better. Some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their own bad decisions.
The former does not follow from the latter; what is natural is not necessarily just, and it is entirely possible for a decision to have consequences which are not deserved.
For many centuries, suffering from cholera was the direct consequence of the decision to live in a city; then we built sewer systems.
This presumes that the poor are actually going to be fed, and that it actually costs 10% of their wealth to do it. What I observe is that vastly more than 10% is taken, and that a large percentage of it is either pocketed by the takers or wasted on absurdities.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of our attempts to help people; however, I was addressing the arguments against even trying.
I also observe that the poor around me are not starving, not by a very wide margin
As a society grows materially wealthier, the standard of living it is obligated to provide to the least of its members also increases.
In a society several orders of magnitude wealthier than today's OECD nations, people might very well be entitled to things which cannot be bought today at any price.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
I don't really care if you hate gay furries. Frankly, they have an easy out of not engaging in homosexual activity and not buying fursuits or going to furry conventions.
I think that proves too much; consider
I don't really care if you hate Catholics. Frankly, they have an easy out of taking the soup and becoming Protestant.
A functional, formalized, rule-based society requires writing some people off. Every society that has ever existed or will ever exist does this. The only question is who those people will be.
They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.
Losing sight of this tends to devolve down to "property-rights-in-theory", at best, and then everyone is worse off.
The value to a society of rights to property lie not in how expansive they are, but in how consistent they are.
Imagine a village with 100 rich people, each of whom makes one-tenth what it would cost to feed the poor of their village/the neighbouring village.
There is a difference between telling all 100 "We need 10% of your wealth" versus letting ninety of them keep everything they have 'earned' while telling the other ten "We're taking everything you have because we don't like your face/you married the woman I fancied/your business competes with mine/you told everyone about the skeletons in our closet/&c., &c., &c."
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
I happen to believe that leaving someone to starve or die of malaria while someone else can afford a yacht that launches a smaller yacht is evil; requiring people to contribute part of their wealth to the common good isn't evil.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
But there's no sense crying over every mistake
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
the obvious objection that this creates a loop
An eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
I'm still hoping that Lord Dampnut and the Deep State take each other down, and make room for something between Bernie Sanders and Scott Alexander....
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
ETA: While I'm here, I'd like to point out that leftism is inherently satanic in the literal sense. On the one hand we have "God is God and you are not and He knows best" and on the other "You can be like God and decide for yourself as well or better than He can decide for you." This latter sentiment is known as pride.
Where does "The clergy are wrong about God's will" fit in this schema?
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
an unemployed person without food is ignored, a country [whose] crop failed because they are too stupid to understand crop rotation is [ignored], a person who can't build a malaria net is ignored
That's how illiberal movements gain adherents; if someone is suffering and liberals tell him, "It's your own fault; you don't deserve any help; but we have the inalienable right to have you go off and die somewhere it won't inconvenience us", while communists/fascists/wokists tell him "You deserve better; it's the bourgeoisie's/minorities'/white males' fault, join us and you'll have a better life", what do you think he will do?
If you seek to build liberalism that will last, you need Liberalism With A Human Face, even if that means less-than-absolute property rights.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
A serious leader would have arrested Netanyahu on the spot for that insolence.
I'm fairly certain that that would violate several international treaties.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
But if bureaucrats or judges can't overrule the demos, you have the 'two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner' issue.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
Biden administration built a [pier] in Gaza because they didn't want the [Israelis] or the Egyptians inspecting the crates
I'd assumed it was that they were under a lot of pier pressure.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
How is it not the same?
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
10mo ago
The point is that mass killing, of people who haven't harmed anyone, is a bad thing, even if the gens survives. The destruction of the gens is tragic, but it is merely the icing on the evil cake.
I will concede that the Khmer Rouge were at least as evil as the Nazis, if not worse. (Given certain proposals of the more extreme Greens [the term 'Khmer Vert' has been mentioned among certain climate dissidents], this puts Elongated Muskrat's disputed gesture in a different light.)
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