Harlequin5942
No bio...
User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1d ago
But not surprised by the "US" annexing the oilfields and key military locations, right?
Harlequin5942
1d ago
the alternative is clean lunacy of more pointless migrants, more trans* related insanity, more cultural revolution.
Was January 2017 to January 2021 notably free of these things?
Harlequin5942
2d ago
Constitutive, not constitutional.
Its sanctity lies in its foundations and principles, not individual events.
Exactly my point. It's not defending the foundations and principles of policing to defend each and every thing that police officers do. That's like, given an incompetent president, saying "I'm rallying round democracy."
Note I'm also not criticising US policing in general. I don't know the statistics well enough, and I suspect even they skirt over a lot of circumstances. For all I know, maybe more info. will come to light that exonerates this officer. What I can say is that, from the info provided, he acted incompetently (I see no evidence of racism, personal vendetta etc.) and unfortunately if you act incompetently when wielding a gun, you can end up going to prison. Maybe his hormones were wrong that day. Maybe he found out that morning that he was being cucked. That's tough on police officers, but it's the law, and it's that way for a reason.
I thought you were suggesting that, if people don't have guilty conscience, they will react to threats by backing off. She didn't do that and he didn't do that.
She did have a potentially lethal weapon. That was his reason for pulling his gun her, after all.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
You can argue that policing is better this way, but in the context of that discussion, my point was that you don't have to oppose the institution of policing to think that the officer should have acted differently.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
JFK assassination: the proof is that the files are still sealed 100 years later
I have really lost track of time since the covid pandemic.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.
However, exploiting such a case for national politics is unleashing a Pandora's Box, as we saw with the George Floyd hysteria. So it's not generally a justified strategy.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
It is unclear how her actions improved on the situation though.
She acted irrationally, but if people have to walk on eggshells around police to avoid being shot, then people (especially mentally unstable people) will tend to avoid the police at all costs, which is not good for law enforcement. (Not suggesting you disagree.)
Harlequin5942
2d ago
So do you think he might have originally intended to kill her, since he threatened her and got closer to her when he perceived her as threatening him with hot water? (Apparently, in your model, if he was innocent, he would freeze and back off in such a situation.)
You might say that policemen are trained to not freeze and back off from threats, but they are also trained to defuse situations and to remove themselves from a situation when appropriate. If he felt so unsafe from a woman with boiling water, he could have left the room and called for backup, or at least left to wait for her to calm down.
I'm not convinced he intended to kill her, rather than just couldn't handle the mental responsibilities he had undertaken as a police officer.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
If you "jokingly" say you're going to attack someone with a [pot of boiling water] and then you actually do it then you clearly weren't joking.
That's not true and I'm not sure why you think it would be? If I pretend to stab at someone with a fork (a deadly weapon) then they go crazy (like the police officer) pull a gun on me and in a panic I actually do stab at them, it doesn't indicate that I originally indicated to stab them with a fork, because the circumstances has changed.
Did she act rationally? No, but I don't think that acting rationally when threatened with a gun should be a requirement of not being shot by police officers, who could have left the situation without meaningful consequences. If police officers can't be trusted to handle situations like that in a rational way, maybe they shouldn't have guns?
Harlequin5942
2d ago
the difference between the median UK or European police officer's uniform and a US police officer's.
Looks pretty similar, except for the high visibility vest, but do you have less superficial info than me?
Random US: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c4635ee41d8d1fb890d78a62d15268a7-lq
Random UK https://spf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/B_15674-scaled.jpg
Harlequin5942
2d ago
Is it constitutively part of policing to kill someone because they threaten you with being scalded?
If not, it's not defending the "sacred institution" of policing to defend these officers. I think it's the opposite: if police officers can't handle situations involving crazy old ladies, then this will encourage many people to avoid bringing them into situations, undermining policing and supporting crime. "Should we call the cops? Well, she's acting crazy, but I don't want them to gun her down and maybe us too."
Harlequin5942
7d ago
By "before", do you mean taking precedence over the utilitarian arguments? Because in that case, as always with deontology, you face this position being taken to absurdity, e.g. claiming you have assassinating the dictator at the cost of a nuclear war that kills everyone but you.
Do you not think that you can ever be morally obliged to suffer indignity or coercion?
Harlequin5942
9d ago
Check out the Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. It's by no means obvious that Operation Barbarossa was a dumb idea. Opinions to the contrary often seem to assume that militaries and societies can run on orders, rather than oil and bread.
However, I think that Hitler's earlier decision to go to war in 1939 was the beginning of the end of fascism. The promise of fascism was military power. By fighting a war against two of the main powers of the day (France and Britain) with backing from an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA) Hitler was taking a huge gamble with the risk of defeat. And the defeat of fascism militarily was its defeat ideologically. Soon, even the Spanish and Portugese regimes were moving in a conventionally conservative direction.
Similarly with communism: once the hydrogen bomb ended the prospect of a Soviet military victory in the Cold War, it was stuck in an economic competition with an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA again) and in comparisons with countries that had fundamentally better economic systems. The promise of communism was prosperity, which became a joke once Soviet citizens had a standard of living that trailed increasingly behind such erstwhile primitive backwaters as Finland, Spain, and even Taiwan.
There is no good evidence for intelligent design, but the closest is that God apparently directed history so that fascism was defeated militarily and communism defeated economically, i.e. on the grounds of their main promises. It's as if e.g. communism was able to deliver a more free society than classical liberalism or fascism a more stable society than classical conservativism.
A free man has the right to murder even a benign dictator.
What about Tito, if you thought there was good reasons to believe that the result would be civil war and genocide? (As ultimately there was within about 12 years of his death.) Is the right to "feedback" enough to justify instigating bloody chaos?
People are very quick with historical counterfactuals, I think. The Red Alert series was smarter. We know what happened with Hitler as Germany's leader in the 1930s; we don't know what would happen with Goering or Himmler as leader. Maybe they would have been smarter, more successful, and the Nazis would have won. Or if Hitler was killed in 1918, maybe German communist or ultra-conservatives unleash even more bloodshed. Germany was a highly industrialised and highly dysfunctional country - some degree of tragedy was likely. I also think that the USSR was likely to lead to horrors, even if Stalin died in 1923. Sometimes, a happy end requires a very big counterfactual.
That's not to say that "I would kill Hitler, in hindsight" is a bad judgement. There's a plausible case to be made that he was an exceptionally dangerous figure - that probably a Goering or Himmler or communist or non-Nazi far right Germany would have been less awful. However, it's overstating the case to think that e.g. Hitler's assassination would be utility-maximising, as opposed to expected utility maximising.
The same applies all the more strongly for those on the left who regret Trump's survival. Be careful what you wish for, because what you ask for is not always what you want.
Harlequin5942
16d ago
darkly hint towards the murder being motivated by transphobia without explicitly saying so
In the view of the Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents (admittedly not the most prominent outlet in the US, nor Pittsburgh, nor perhaps the Pittsburgh lesbian community) her death is now part of the 2024 "campaign of terror":
Harlequin5942
16d ago
I think critics would be quite happy to go back to calling it "infanticide", but there's resistance to that too. Just like "woke", "SJW", and "PC".
Harlequin5942
17d ago
On "post-birth abortion" (more accurately, non-resucitation of neonatal infants) the Republicans are right that this occurs, though it is a matter of physician's judgement rather than something the mother can just demand:
In these cases, where there is little or no prospect of an infant surviving after birth, families might opt for perinatal palliative care, or comfort care — prioritizing comfort while allowing an infant to die naturally without exercising full resuscitation efforts.
They conclude that, fortunately, there is no actual post-birth abortion... because they DEFINE abortion to exclude such cases. That's like saying there are no gun owners who commit school shootings, because you DEFINE "gun owner" to exclude those who use guns for illegal purposes that would lead to their gun licence being revoked.
For moderates on abortion who don't even like the existence of a slippery slope towards infanticide (e.g. as "little prospect" becomes extended, then a judgement for the mother etc.) this sort of thing is cold comfort and an easy point of attack for Republicans against Democrats.
More generally, to see how this is a needlessly difficult issue for Democrats, see how the (generally sympathetic to them) FactCheck puts it:
Claim: Democrats “introduced legislation that allowed abortion on demand ... up to the moment of birth."
Claimed by: Lindsey Graham
Fact check by FactCheck.org: Spins the Facts
Same with AP news:
Claim: Forty-nine Democratic senators voted that it should be lawful to kill a full-term baby the moment before birth while it is still inside its mother.
Claimed by: social media users
Fact check by AP News: Misleading.
These editorial spins are fact-checker answers for when they can't say that something is false, but they would love to do so.
Harlequin5942
17d ago
Trump and the Republicans have played things like "post-birth abortions" very well so far. If they're smart, they'll apply the same mix of hyperbole and accuracy for the "abolition of motherhood". The Republicans may struggle with young women, but married women with children have been fertile ground (excuse the metaphor) for them and other conservative parties in the past.
Harlequin5942
21d ago
From Kamala Harris's perspective, the Brezhnev -> Andropov route is the most realistic path for her, though she'd hope to live longer than Androppedoff.
Harlequin5942
21d ago
"the only reason it has a national identity is due to its language"
To which a lot of Welsh people are actively hostile, especially (I think) in South Wales, where most of the population is.
Harlequin5942
21d ago
To put the SDP in some perspective for outsiders to UK politics: they are the descendents of a centre-left breakaway from the Labour party in 1981, who largely dissolved in the late 1980s. Somehow, they managed to survive through a nuclear winter and have remerged a little as a party for people who like Brexit/social conservativism, but who are more economically centrist/left wing than the Tories or Reform. They are one of the tardigrade parties in the UK: no matter the hostility of the environment and their tiny size within it, they seem to just survive.
Harlequin5942
23d ago
I would be slightly more surprised at Gabbard being the Democrat candidate than Mitt Romney.
Harlequin5942
23d ago
Since completeness is defined, at least per wikipedia, with a ≤ instead of a <, it would seem relatively hard to deny? The others are less obviously necessary.
Suppose you have a revealed preference analysis of preference. Note that I do NOT NOT NOT mean a revealed preference theory of evidence about preferences, but the idea that observed choice behaviour is what preference is. In that case, Completeness holds trivially, provided the choices in question are in fact made.
However, if you understand preferences as mental attitudes, then it is perfectly possible that someone does not have an attitude such that (1) they prefer A to B, (2) they prefer B to A, or (3) they are indifferent (in the technical sense) between A and B. For example, Duncan Luce did experiments that found that, under some conditions, people's choices in apparently repeatable choice-situations fluctuated probabilistically. IIRC, they preferred A or B to a random choice between the two, indicating that this was not indifference. Now, it's possible that they were interpreting those choice-situations as non-repeatable, but it could also be that their preferences with respect to A and B don't form a strict ordering.
What followed: there are inconsistent, deductively false beliefs, that nevertheless need subjective credences.
There's no basis in decision theory or mathematics for that claim, AFAIK.
Fair enough—well, not necessarily in the sense that you're not performing updates, but in the sense that you have no universal probability function.
There is a cool literature on imprecise probabilities you might like to look at:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imprecise-probabilities/
I haven't read any applications of this approach to Pascal's Wager, but since IP is arguably a more realistic model of human psychology than maximising expected utility (which assumes unique additive probabilities) someone should definitely do that.
I guess I just don't have any better, clearer way to handle things.
Me too! I don't want to dox myself, but I think that Bayesian decision theory is similar to things like General Equilibrium Theory, neoclassical capital, and other concepts in economics, in that they can be useful tools to make decisions given idealised assumptions, but they shouldn't be taken too literally. Like any scientific model, their value comes not from their approximation of truth, but because of empirical and formal properties they possess, e.g. track-records and approximations of relevant features in the world (empirical) and tractability/computability properties (formal).
For more about the topics raised in the last paragraph in my comment above, the Stanford Encyclopedia page is pretty good - written by a very good young philosopher, Seamus Bradley, who has done other work on the topic worth reading. Much of the great work in this literature, e.g. by John Maynard Keynes, Teddy Seidenfeld, Peter Walley, Clark Glymour, Henry E. Kyburg, and Isaac Levi, is extremely technical, even for decision theorists. The SEP page covers most of their ideas at a more accessible level, sometimes in its appendix. The best young guy in the field is probably Richard Pettigrew, who has done some magnificent work that has still not been incorporated into the broader Bayesian consciousness, e.g. https://philarchive.org/rec/PETWIC-2 (see this video for a relatively easy introduction to that paper - https://youtube.com/watch?v=1W_wgQpZF2A ).
I find this topic very interesting, because (like you, I think?) I see Pascal's Wager (or something like it) as the best current case for religious belief. I actually like Arthur Balfour's variation of this type of reasoning, which avoids some of the features of Pascal's arguments that are awkward, e.g. regarding infinite expected payoffs:
https://archive.org/details/adefencephiloso01balfgoog/page/n12/mode/2up?view=theater
Here's John Passmore's summary of Balfour's position, from One Hundred Years of Philosophy (1968):
In his A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (1879), Balfour set out to show that the naturalism of nineteenth-century science rests on principles-the principle of the Uniformity of Nature, for example-which cannot possibly be derived demonstratively. This negative conclusion is the starting-point of The Foundations of Belief (1895). Naturalism, Balfour argues, conflicts with our moral and aesthetic sentiments, whereas theism satisfies them. If naturalism were demonstrable, he admits, it ought for all its distastefulness to be preferred to theism; but since it is not, our feelings should carry the day. He denies that there is any impropriety in thus bowing to our feelings: our beliefs, he says, are always determined to a large extent by nonrational factors.
Basically, the idea would be that, at least assuming a common human nature, it is prudentially rational to believe in God, because one is permitted to do so in the absence of a refutation; there is no refutation of God's existence; and one can expect better consequences from such belief.
Whether that reasoning is sound is one of the most important questions of philosophy, in my view, and it's brought me very deep into epistemology/decision theory. Balfour's starting place is Hume, but Subjective Bayesianism (either with precise or imprecise probabilities) seems very apt for such reasoning. Indeed, on a Subjective Bayesian view, I don't think there is any reason to think that theism is less rational than belief in even our most supported scientific theories.
Merkel's premiership was also characterised by stereotypically childless-person behaviour, e.g. her short-sighted and emotive decisions on nuclear power and migrants. Her outreach attempts to Putin, even as he conquered parts of Georgia, was also reminiscent of this Family Guy sketch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9FTk3SawjX4
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