Jiro
7d ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat", and I think this counts as saying that the Tsar is poorly advised:
Manchin said he is a proud Democrat, having been raised with the values of “always reaching out, trying to help others have a better quality of life and help themselves” and taking care of those who cannot help themselves.
But he said sometimes his party’s priorities in Washington are “out of balance with … how we do business in West Virginia.”
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism. And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
Jiro
5mo ago
Would these people also be vile exploiters?
Fiirst of all, yes.
Second, the whole argument should start with "is such a thing as exploitation at all?" A lot of the extreme rationalist arguments on this subject aren't really about sex, they're about the idea that exploitation isn't real unless you're forcing someone at gunpoint.
If you believe this, it's an extreme minority position among pretty much everyone that isn't a weird Internet guy, and really needs to be defended on its own terms, not taken for granted.
If you don't believe this, you should lay out exactly what you do think counts as exploitation before trying to argue that something can't be exploitation, especially based on a principle that you don't believe anyway.
Jiro
6mo ago
Presumably all of those things occur regardless of whether you get a degree paid for by the company. Do you think that somehow choosing to not get a degree paid for by the company stops those three things? If so, how?
It stops it because if you don't have to pay something back to the company, and the company mistreats you, you will leave. If you do have to pay the company, you won't leave unless the harm caused by what the company is doing to you is greater than the amount that you have to pay back.
I suppose technically that isn't arbitrary because it's not infinite, but if the amount you have to pay back is big, so is the harm that the company can get away with doing to you.
...would you even dismiss giving someone a raise on the same grounds?
If the company gives you a raise, and then harms you, that isn't going to stop you from leaving, unless the raise is to an amount above market rate.
Jiro
6mo ago
On the other hand, it might work like self-driving cars: the technology improves and improves, but getting to the point where it's as good as a human just isn't possible, and it stalls at some point becase it's reached its limits. I expected that to happen for self-driving cars and wasn't disappointed, and it's likely to happen for ChatGPT too.
Jiro
10mo ago
In combination with JR, this amounts to "they weren't harmed, and besides, they deserved it".
Jiro
3mo ago
Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs.
If we wanted to write a law saying "you can use a non-work visa to work, as long as the industry or the quantity of work makes it laughable that they're taking someone's job", we could have. I hope the reasons why not to have such a law are obvious.
If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me.
If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you. What makes me suspicious of you is that by playing this hypothetical game you are reacting as though you want to cause suffering. It doesn't matter whether the suffering is real.
That doesn't generalize to society "wanting to torture rats" because "society" is only "torturing rats" as an instrumental goal in the process of doing something else. If it's an instrumental goal, whether the suffering is real actually matters.
(Likewise, I'd look askance at anyone committing bestiality, not because it harms the animal, which isn't a person, but because of what it says about the person doing it. First of all, humans who are attracted to animals are generally messed up anyway, and second, anyone having sex with an animal probably has false beliefs about the animal's consent, which is delusional.)
Jiro
1mo ago
"Bullshit jobs" strikes me as a massive motte and bailey.
There definitely are bullshit jobs. But a very common case of a "bullshit" job is one where the employee does work that's actually essential to a company or to societyy, but doesn't directly produce tangible things, so it feels like his job is useless.
Jiro
3mo ago
Taking that to the logical conclusion, we shouldn't be able to deport immigrants for anything whatsoever, since that would be unequal treatment that is analogous to treating the Devil unequally.
Jiro
5mo ago
I would argue that it should be in the interest of anyone who dislikes sex slavery to have legalized (and somewhat regulated) prostitution instead.
By this reasoning pretty much everyone should be in favor of legalized-but-regulated rape too. (Or legalized, regulated, bank robbery.)
Jiro
5mo ago
Once there are plenty of places where one can empty one's excretory organs without spending anything, it will be much more justifiable to take strong measures
If it turns out that political considerations keep you from doing those strong measures, will you give the businesses a refund on their taxes? My guess is no.
"Part one: hurt people by making them do X, part 2: ameloriate the harm from part 1" is a terrible idea because it's easy to say you'll do part 2 without actually doing it. The most charitable scenario is that you're too optimistic, but in the real world sometimes people just lie about part 2 so they can get part 1,
Jiro
6mo ago
In real estate or other transactions, people often put money down in the same sort of way, basically just pre-paid. Are all these things absolutely terrible, because then the counterparty will just arbitrarily harm them?
The problem with the employment contract is that the employee can't leave the job without losing money, and therefore the employer can harm the employee in ways that the employee could otherwise avoid by leaving the job.
There isn't anything similar to this for most penalty contracts. You could sell someone a house and arbitrarily harm them, let's say by shooting their dog, but refusing to follow through on the house contract won't save their dog, while leaving a job does save you from on-the-job harm.
Jiro
7mo ago
New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.
They do? Social media, except X, is all on the left too.
Certainly themotte didn't leave Reddit because Reddit was censoring Democrats.
Jiro
10mo ago
In the past I've made this sort of argument and been rebuffed by some people on the grounds that if we imposed very severe punishments then people would just double down on lying and blaming others to escape liability. Plus it would disincentivize people from taking up important roles.
Remember the scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake predictions? If you severely punish scientists for harming someone, you're going to get tons of cases like this. A lot of scientists don't have political connections and therefore are easy scapegoats. Don't think "well, we could have been able to catch these scientists who really were responsible for lives" but rather "what else would we be enabling, by making it easier to catch these scientists?" (Yes, they were exonerated later, but the point still stands.)
Also, pretty much anything you do on a large scale involves lives. Approve a drug a little late and lives are lost if people couldn't get the drug. Approve a drug a little early and lives may be lost to side effects or displacing better drugs from the market. Support cars that run on fossil fuels and get dinged for all the lives lost to pollution or global warming. If you punish scientists for things that they do on a large scale that cost lives, you will no longer have scientists, because everything on that scale costs lives if you do it wrong and no human is 100% perfect.
Jiro
10mo ago
25 mph speed limits in your local area don't lead to 25 mph speed limits on the freeway because there's no mechanism by which the former makes the latter easier, so slippery slopes are only weak ones like "someone who wants to restrict one thing might have more desire to restrict another".
Having computer-controlled cars that phone home makes it easier to have cars that the government can turn off because the computer phoning home is a part of the mechanism that the government would use to turn the car off.
She's positing the counterfacual of "if a rightist made an attempt on Biden's life". but she's making things up when she then decides how conservatives would behave in response. The behavior of conservatives isn't a premise of the counterfactual, it's an assumption about what conservatives are like in the real world.
We've already established that LoTT didn't recognize the in-jokes, so I'd answer "obviously not familiar enough".
Jiro
1yr ago
We've been mooting those same ideas since the 80s! When I saw The Capitol Steps when I was 12, they did parody duets between Yassir Arafat and the Israeli PM where the punchline was something like "well your great great grandfather once planned an attack, it's been hundreds of years who could ever keep track, no one can remember anymore!" How's anyone supposed to keep all this straight, let alone a fading old man?
"All sides are equal" is unfair to the better side. And since we have white supremacists here, let me make clear that Israel is the better side. From the Israeli side, the punchline is "the Gazans made an attack yesterday".
Jiro
17d ago
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either.
Cool. Tell me about some relevant instances of your outgroup acting in good faith.
Jiro
1mo ago
A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc.
By that reasoning, if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.
God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.
The word "accountable" here is tricky. Clearly nobody can punish God if he doesn't act appropriately. So in that sense, God isn't accountable. But surely people can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts live up to his principles, and if they don't, conclude that God is acting badly.
Jiro
2mo 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
2mo 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.
I would at least limit the concept of "stochastic terrorism" to either direct calls for violence, metaphors or figures of speech that are strongly violent (not just using the word "kill"), or metaphors that compare someone to a great evil that cannot be handled peacefully (such as Hitler or Satan).
More options
Context Copy link