Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
41m ago
I would say the renewal of chattel slavery isn't impossible in US - but it would require dramatic changes in culture and/or government to be possible. It would at minimum take a constitutional amendment and broad social acceptance.
I think changes in technology would have a greater impact; e. g. Alien Space Bats zapping away everything from the steam engine onward. (It's not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution and the Abolitionist movement came from the same island.)
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
48m ago
See this is an important and valuable post. He knows my ideas are a threat to him. He's not interested in abstract logic or the interests of other ethnic groups. Nobody could ever persuade him to give up power or his co-ethnics position for the sake of some universal value or the interests of others. The thought would never enter his mind. He would much rather fight and die than lose power. He doesn't spare a sentence to justify his case based on universal values (besides the value that blacks deserve more), he holds the very idea of justifying in contempt. Why should he need to justify his ethnic group's position?
He sees a threat to the power of his ethnic group and he rails against it as hard as he can. Because losing power is innately bad. Anything that reduces the power of blacks obviously threatens him, even if it's a random person deep down in the comments of a tiny internet forum speaking with people who either already agree or despise the idea. The interests of other groups? Totally irrelevant.
There is a difference, not just of degree but of kind, between "I refuse to give up a superior position and be equal to my neighbour." and "I refuse to give up an equal position and be inferior to my neighbour."
It is entirely consistent to condemn the former while holding to the latter.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1hr ago
Because it is part of the definition of 'species'. My first draft had "...whose mother is the same species as Carolus Linnaeus...", but I realised that some individuals could split hairs over whether all humans are the same species; thus I Replaced The Symbol With The Substance.
If a woman could have children with Mr Linnaeus, but all of them were sterile, that would be evidence that she was of another species in the genus Homo.
(For those using a mobile browser, Carolus Linnaeus established the modern system of biological taxonomy, including a description of Homo sapiens. The type specimen of a species is an individual organism in reference to which other organisms are defined as being of or not of that species. In the 1950s, biologists realised that Linnaeus had not specified a type specimen for Homo sapiens, but there was one example with which he was almost certainly familiar!)
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1hr ago
I'm not certain what part of my comment is unclear; can you be more specific?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4hr ago
I doubt most self-professed advocates for modern-day "national socialism" are aryans
They weren't in the '40s either.
Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4hr ago
So we start by defining who 'the people' are, and call that our nation.
Any animal whose mother, had she been given the opportunity, could have gotten pregnant by Carolus Linnaeus, and given birth to children who were themselves fertile.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
Right, but using "men" as your outgroup is ridiculous, no?
It is less than optimal, certainly; however, it can be made reasonable with a slight change: namely, reduce the scope from 'all men' to 'men who claim that certain actions by a woman constitute irrevocable consent to sex'¹.
If Alice does not want to have sex with Bob at this time, and has made this clear to him, and Bob forces himself upon Alice, Bob is always in the wrong. This does not change if Alice stays overnight at Bob's house rather than risk dying of hypothermia, it does not change if Bob paid for Alice's dinner, it does not change if Alice got drunk and pursued sex with every other man in their circle, it does not change if Alice eagerly consented to sex with Bob last week, and it does not change if Alice and Bob declared at a large public ceremony and in official records that they intended to have an ongoing sexual relationship; the same applies if the gender of either or both is reversed.
I would advise my daughter to avoid dating anyone who disputes this.
¹cf. claims that consenting to sex constitutes an absolute acceptance of the obligation to pregnancy.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5hr ago
So there'd be a lot less nastiness in the world if we didn't make a habit of regularly putting anyone in a position where they 'feel powerless'? "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.", indeed.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5hr ago
I'd say the same is true of people who are psychopathic, and genuinely do see women (and men, and children, and animals, and everything) as inanimate objects to be used as they wish.
This problem is exacerbated by society's insistence, despite the efforts of 19th-century philosophers and fin-de-millénaire fantasy novelists, that there are some circumstances in which human beings do deserve to be treated as such; this makes declarations of "This isn't one of those times." less credible than "You shouldn't dehumanise them because no one ought to ever dehumanise anyone.".
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5hr ago
Politics seems to often select for people that care very little about their constituents, and are mostly just there to climb the social hierarchy whatever it takes
That's what the advocates of sortition have been saying.
Surely he must see that his warning implicates himself and his friends as dangers to women as well.
Per the German Wikipedia, he is married with two children; the article does not specify the gender of his spouse.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
First gulf war replaced Saddam with Saddam.
Well, for a couple million people it replaced Saddam with Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, who, while not a paragon of humane governance, at least didn't descend to the Saturday-morning-cartoon-villain levels of the former.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
3d ago
“R U D 1 2 C 4 A B J?”
I don't understand the middle part; (I suspect the first two letters are 'are you', and the last two refer to the act for which Mr Clinton was impeached?)
The defensive answer would be to read it as "Romeo, Uniform, Delta, One, Two, Charlie, Fower, Alfa, Bravo, Juliette."
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
3d ago
An associate of mine asked several autistic people with autism what terminology they preferred; one respondent rather crankily stated the View that the entire debate was a disingenuous attempt to wave a shiny object in front of them, in order to gain anti-ableist credit without having to do anything inconvenient such as making workplaces and hiring processes less Kafkaesque.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
3d ago
distribution of child pornography is worse than child rape and child prostitution.
Because the former cannot happen without the latter, thus all victims of the former are also victims of the latter.
Even if one considers a child to suffer 100,000 units of harm from being abused, and only 0.0001 units of harm from recordings of that abuse being circulated for the gratification of other predators, 100,000.0001 is still a bigger number than 100,000.0000.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.
Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.
I default to general libertarianism as the local maxim[um].
That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.
The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
Link fixed; it should point to the relevant section of the article.
Pierre Fermat, circa 1637, wrote in the margin of a book "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain." The theorem was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.
In my proposed architecture, one side of the wall would handle content-curation algorithms and interface design, with the instruction to make it convenient for the end user to see the content they want to see, with any advertisements or sponsored content kept to designated spaces clearly labeled as such. The other side of the wall would deal with anyone seeking to purchase advertising space or aggregate data, but would have no method to adjust the experience of end-users to keep them on the site longer; advertisers could either accept however many eyeball-minutes occur without engagement-maximisation tactics, or leave the attention of social-media users to their competitors.
This gives at least some possibility of squaring the circle of having a service both free-at-the-point-of-use and prioritising the preferences of its end-users.
As for how to bring about such a state of affairs, I have discovered a truly marvelous regulatory structure accomplishing this, which this comment box is too narrow to contain.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
...the simple solution is to get children off of social media completely.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?
The second flaw is that many adults are also led astray by extreme content boosted by social media algorithms; many of the adherents of Queue A Knon were already adults when social media became a thing.
I believe a better method would be to adjust the incentives further upstream, by requiring social media companies to implement an Agatean Wall¹ between user-experience and revenue-generation.
¹GNU Terry Pratchett.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
6d ago
people who have a hard time fitting in, who don't get along with their peers, for whom social interaction is challenging.
And a society which tries to integrate them, to find a place where they can live well, even if it is not always successful, will get better results than one which continually signals to them that they are not wanted and that it would prefer that they quietly disappear.
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." -- Igbo Proverb
Your suggestion also sounds suspiciously like a threat. "You see what happens when you don't go out of your way to validate the heckin trans kids? Do you see what happens? Be a shame if it was to happen again..."
It's not a threat, per se, so much as karma.
What goes around comes around, and if you are cruel to the least of these, whether for 'the greater good' or for your own convenience, sooner or later it will come back to bite you.
I am not advocating for such retaliation, merely pointing out that the most effective strategy for preventing it is to practise the same universal benevolence you ought to have been practising all along.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
...the root cause is being a weird outcast....
So maybe we shouldn't cast out people for being weird then! ("Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs." -- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
they're just judging people by their own standards.
Exactly. People would be less bent on seeing others punished for breaking the rules if they themselves had been extended the same leniency; when Alice is expected to follow the rules herself, even when the rules are both unreasonable and difficult, under threat of harsh punishment for the smallest infractions, and then sees Bob flagrantly flaunting his flouting of even the most reasonable policies, without any consequences whatsoever, that is when Alice becomes predictably (and in my opinion, very justifiably) cheesed off.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
10d ago
Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet.
But they don't claim to have found people on another planet; a bacterium is alive, but it is not a person. Thus, I would phrase the question not as "When does life begin?" so much as "When does the developing life-form become a person?".
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
10d ago
Were Democrats (members of the Democratic party, people involved in fundraising for the party, etc.) defending the film, or just generally left-wing or progressive people? Are the defenders representative of the Democratic party?
Were the people 'defending' the film saying "It is good that it exists.", or were they saying "You don't get to demand that it not exist."?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
10d ago
Red tape and bureaucracy can be better stumbling blocks than hitting the local Imperial detention centre (which may be rebuilt afterwards).
The Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) realised this in 1944.
Which is a lot more practical if we establish a standard that "No person is ever justified in forcing himself on another person, regardless of what choices that other person made.", thus reducing the number of potential perpetrators.
Giving her advice that (1.) she can follow while still dating people of the gender to which she is attracted, and (2.) will steer her towards people who are not pre-positioned to decide that they are entitled to take advantage of her.
If by 'anything she does not like' means 'some arsehole decides that he is entitled to access to her body notwithstanding her clearly expressed unwillingness', and 'satisfying retribution on her behalf' means 'assailant not given leniency relative to the counter-factual case in which he grabbed a woman who was following the "Saved, Sanctified, Separated, and Suit-Wearing Baptist Church Manual for Godly Courtship" to the letter', then yes, society owes her such a promise.
No, but I would teach him that it is his duty to Notify The Proper Authorities; he would have a duty to personally intervene if (a.) he were one of the Proper Authorities, being issued with armaments and drawing a salary from all of our tax money, or (b.) he fell through a portal into an anarchist world in which the Proper Authorities did not exist.
Her being drunk doesn't make him less culpable for ignoring her unambiguous refusal. Whether enthusiastic consent can be invalidated by intoxication is a matter which will have to be left for a later time.
Yes.
If he makes access to the shelter contingent on sexual favours, or implies that it is, yes. If he lets her in unconditionally, and their liaison is solely motivated by mutual desire, no.
Until they get back to civilisation....
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