Jiro
11hr ago
There is a historical person who actually existed named Jesus, and he did not write a testament called "The Book of Mormon". This isn't a debate about theological interpretations, it is a historical fact.
I find Jesus writing a book that nobody's heard of not inherently goofier or ahistorical than rising from the dead. Or having communion wafers turn into his flesh. Of all the weird things people say about Jesus, writing a book that isn't in the historical record is nowhere near the top of the list of "things secular historians don't think are true about Jesus".
Jiro
2d ago
hay with performative outrage.
Yes, but it would be performative outrage.
Pretty much nobody would actually say and mean "well, I used to be a supporter of that top Democrat, but now that he made a bad joke, I can no longer support him!"
Jiro
3d ago
To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"
My response is basically "why can't you take a joke?".
As an anti-Catholic act, posting a picture of yourself as the pope is pretty weaksauce. It isn't even saying anything bad about the pope, except maybe "the Pope is only human", which a lot of people do sincerely believe, and Trump doesn't seem to be a Catholic.
This... led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)
I'm inherently suspicious of "this minor act is why I can't possibly support this politician any more!" Yes, there's such a thing as a last straw, but something like this shouldn't be a last straw unless there are substantial unrelated reasons why you no longer support him. If that picture is the major reason why you don't support him, you're way, way, overreacting.
Jiro
4d ago
The Amish are grandfathered in and you could not create a similarly isolated group from scratch. They don't even pay Social Security taxes--just try doing that with a new group.
Jiro
7d ago
You did not speak plainly. You didn't state what your plan was. If you don't state what it is, we have to try to figure it out. And nobody could figure out anything except killing.
If it isn't killing, say what it is.
I'm partial to the argument that undertaking this project in the year 10^9 AD or even 10^6 AD might be a better use of resources than in the year 2025 AD. But I'm also partial to the argument that technology doesn't just progress through time alone, that we can always come up with excuses for why this would be easier or more efficient to tackle later, and as such, we might as well start working on it now.
By that reasoning we should have worked on rockets to the moon in 2000 BC.
Very few of either "realistic" hard scifi scenarios, or "realistic" speculative scenarios have us escaping the Earth only in 10^9 AD. The decades of scifi we've had about exploring the solar system have been about much more recent time periods. Sure, maybe we'd do it in 10^9 AD, but 10^9 AD is a long way off. and it isn't what everyone talking about this stuff wants.
And "excuses" is just a spin you put on "reasons".
Jiro
8d ago
The typical retort is that what there is, is a chance of survival for the human race in the event of total catastrophe befalling the Earth
This idea seems to come from scifi geeks thinking space is really cool, and trying to come up with some sort of justification for exploring it.
It's not hard to think of a catastrophe that would make the Earth unlivable, but space is already unlivable, unless you can terraform something, and that's a generations long project. Going into space won't be any better than going to Antarctica or the sea floor, or underground.
Jiro
8d ago
The graph wasn't predicting that cars would go faster than light. It was combining different transports from horses to cars to rockets--the graph was for all human transportation put together. That is, it basically was looking at cars and predicting maglev trains--not by name, of course, but predicting that there would be newer modes of transportation that would be faster than the existing ones. At some point one of these future transports would be faster than light.
Except, at some point, we just stopped getting faster transport. If you look at cars and predict maglev trains, and you look at maglev trains and predict moon rockets, and you look at moon rockets and predict FTL... well, no.
It's like how Moore's Law broke down. Processing power doubled every 1.5 years for decades... until it didn't.
Jiro
8d ago
The FTL graph included horses and cars. Cars got faster than horses, and planes got faster than cars, but speed eventually reached a limit. Saying "cars can still get faster, so they can go FTL" would be wrong.
If you were at the point where cars were just invented, and you said "cars will get faster, but they will reach a limit", you would have been correct.
Woiuld you mind sending me your computer monitor, or your refrigerator? I really doubt that your family members called dibs on them first and are in line before me.
Jiro
8d ago
That occurred to you, not me. I see nothing in what I said that could be reasonably construed that way.
This is why we have a rule about speaking plainly.
The only obvious meaning is to kill them. If you have some other meaning, you haven't said it. Of course people will try figuring out what you mean if you don't tell them! Go ahead, say it. If it isn't killing them (or taking first, and eventually killing them when they refuse), what is it?
Jiro
8d ago
If the scaffolding can be built and the problems made legible this box will expand and expand and expand.
I'm reminded of the 1960s article in Analog SF which extrapolated the speeds at which people can travel and concluded we'd have faster than light travel by the 1980s.
Things just don't expand and expand and expand without limit.
Jiro
8d ago
If the dead man has equity in the house, and if that equity in the house can be transferred upon death rather than just gone because it isn't owned by a living person, why wouldn't that apply to wills in general? You can transfer equity in a house after you're dead, why can't you transfer a whole house, or some money, or jewelry?
Jiro
8d ago
I don't consider sex transactional, but of course I don't consider property as kidnapping either. But by your reasoning, sex can be analyzed as such. And by your reasoning, we would conclude that sex is something that you are keeping away from other people who want it, just like property is. You may not like to think of it that way, but it does fit.
Jiro
9d ago
The 3/5ths compromise resulted from the slavers wanting slaves to count as much as a citizen for legitimate representation in the political system.
They wanted slaves to count in giving the states a vote, but they didn't want the slaves themselves to vote.
It's not like Union (il)legitimacy affects whether the Confederacy was or was not legitimate.
But then you just have one illegitimate government invading another illegitimate government. Probably every war at that time was like that. If every government is illegitimate, how is it even meaningful to say that some particular side is a valid target because they're illegitimate?
(How do you feel about the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor? Hawaii was part of the US because it had a coup by people favorable to American interests. You can make a reasonable argument that the US's rule over Hawaii is illegitimate. So was it okay for the Japanese to attack it?)
Is the current US government illegitimate because illegal aliens can't vote,
If you define the scope of legitimacy to include illegal aliens, certainly
Well, I didn't expect you to bite this bullet. Not even the Democrats say that Trump is an illegitimate president because the illegal aliens weren't allowed to vote against him. And in the end, this standard just turns into "every government is illegitimate", in which case being illegitimate says nothing useful about the two sides.
Jiro
9d ago
What ownership transfer? The bank has the house at the start. X dies before the house gets transfered to him, so the bank keeps the house. There's no transfer.
Jiro
9d ago
Refusing to have sex with someone also follows those five points in a similar way to how property does. You usurp rights over resources (sex with you), and don't let people use the resources except as you see fit.
Jiro
9d ago
The contract did not extend past the death, it ended: It said, paraphrasing: 'X will pay for 30 years and then gets the house. If X stops paying because of deadness for example, the house is sold and the proceeds shared according to the following formula:... , etc." .
If contracts with the dead really aren't valid, this wouldn't be true. If X stops paying because of deadness, there is no contract. The clause about selling the house and sharing the proceeds is part of the contract, so it's no longer valid. The bank just owns the house, period, they don't need to sell it or give away any of the proceeds if they don't want to.
Jiro
9d ago
But it wasn't "retroactively gerrymandered", that's my point! It was accepted at the time, and by the north, before secession, that slaves weren't citizens and couldn't vote. Nothing changed retroactively.
And women couldn't vote either.
Ah, so the north's government wasn't legitimate either?
Is the current US government illegitimate because illegal aliens can't vote, and if they could we probably wouldn't have elected Trump?
Jiro
9d ago
Would bombarding Fort Sumter have been different if the Confederacy had first insisted that the residents at the fort give up their unregistered weapons, pay property taxes on the fort, and allow building inspectors in to make sure it's up to code, and only bombarded the fort when they refused to do that?
You don't get to annex a nation because they do bad things. You can invade them, but that's not the same thing. The US did not annex Germany after World War II.
It also leads to the question of when the 13 colonies seceded from Britain, could Britain find some act that the Americans have committed that they decide is an intolerable crime, and annex the colonies again?
By your standard could the British invade and annex Zimbabwe?
Jiro
9d ago
This matters - in no Confederate state did the pro-secession majority of whites represent a majority of the whole population. The Confederate states were (in most cases explicitly) seceding in order to prevent self-governance by numerical majorities of their multiracial populations.
But the slaves weren't citizens. Non-citizens don't get to be part of a ruling majority.
You might have a point if the Confederacy had suddenly deprived the slaves of citizenship after secession in order to gain a majority of voting citizens, but that's not what had happened--it was already accepted, even by the north and even before secession, that slaves weren't and didn't need to be citizens. When the south seceded, the secessionists were a majority by this preexisting, accepted, standard. The north can't just change their mind and decide that slaves have to count as citizens in order to deprive the south of legitimacy.
He's asking you because multiple parentheses are a dogwhistle for antisemitism (although that's actually three, not two).
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