Jiro
6mo ago
I wasn't actually asking you to steelman the KKK. I was pointing out that steelmanning is a bad thing to do here because that kind of steelmanning ignores the actual facts. It just isn't possible to honestly steelman Hamas or the KKK, any more than I could honestly steelman homeopathy or creationism.
We believe that we are required by Jesus to try to warn those people away from hell, and convince them to accept salvation. Keeping quiet about it is not something we are permitted to do; keeping our Christianity secret is not an option.
You are mixing up "convincing people", "not keeping quiet", and "keeping secret". In the modern world, you aren't keeping secret; it's common knowledge that Christianity says that nonbelievers go to Hell. And "not keeping quiet" isn't the same as convincing people. Nobody outside the lizardman constant gets convinced to be a Christian by being told that they are going to Hell. Saying that people go to Hell in public doesn't "convince people to accept salvation", and can't be justified on the basis that you are required to do that.
We Christians had it hammered into our heads that we didn't own the public square and anyone could say what they liked without consequences.
No, you had it hammered into your heads that you didn't own the public square and anyone could say what they liked without going to jail for it. Maybe even that you shouldn't be fired from your job for it (I disagree with the left here.) But if by "consequences" you mean people getting offended, no, you don't get immunity from consequences, and nobody ever said that you do. The toupee example may be useful here. I won't get arrested if I walk into the public square and say that your toupee sucks. But you can still think I'm being rude and tell all your friends what a jerk I am.
I think you can put up with being offended, because I certainly do on an hourly basis.
I don't go around saying "all Christians believe lies" or anything similar outside of contexts like specifically discussing Christianity. You don't put up with offense from me that is similar to the offense you want me to put up from you.
Q: Was Susan left out of heaven because she was sexually mature, or generally a grown up?
Decoder: Does Christianity exclude adults or the sexually mature from heaven?
A: No.
Christianity doesn't have a rule whose text explicitly reads "adults and the sexually mature don't go to heaven".
But Christianity does think things are bad that are thought by nonbelievers to be harmless and which are associated with being adult (such as loss of childhood faith) or being sexually mature (such as immodest dress and behavior). Claiming that this doesn't count because Susan's only being penalized for non-Christian sexuality, instead of for sexuality, is a nitpick that makes no real difference to the criticism.
By this reasoning, no religion has ever been against adult sexuality except the Shakers.
But it's weird and dishonest to interpret a vague euphemistic line in a particular way for the sake of disagreeing with that reading.
Saying that she was penalized for a harmless thing because you don't want to be explicit about how bad a thing she actually did describes the thing euphemistically, but the punishment dysphemistically--punishing someone for a less severe thing is a more severe punishment.
So whether or not a lack of faith in Jesus is enough to keep one out of heaven, we know that Susan had both a lack of faith and a lack of moral uprightness within the context of Lewis's narrative. This isn't an interpretation, it's deductively so.
"Atheists can go to heaven, but pretty much all atheists happen to be evil people who don't go to heaven" is, in practice, "atheists don't go to heaven". Believing in a negative stereotype about X amounts, at some point, to believing bad things about X, even if you don't literally think that every single X is like that. And as I said before, Lewis isn't stupid. He knows very well that this is a common Christian stereotype of atheists. If he puts it in anyway, he knows what he's doing.
Yes, he said that Calormenes can go to heaven, but Calormenes are not atheists. They are misguided believers, but they are believers and don't fall into the stereotype. "You may think you are worshipping someone else, but you're actually worshipping Aslan" still requires worship.
All you're observing is that Jews tend to be liberal, and the things you describe are done by liberals. Being Jewish has nothing to do with it.
Jiro
1yr ago
"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who go to Mass." Would it be fair to call that a Catholic-free zone? I'm pretty sure that many Catholics don't go to Mass, after all. What if you just banned people for agreing with the Pope? I'm pretty sure many Catholics don't do that either.
Jiro
5mo ago
That's a bad summary because it doesn't account for how frequent the things are. We haven't banned anyone for murdering their opponent even though that's a worse offense than either low effort or LLMs.
(And the proper comparison isn't LLMs specifically. You ban relatively fewer people for long grammatical, low information posts than you do for standard low effort posts. This creates incentives for long, grammatical, low information posts.)
Jiro
7mo ago
we do not have a revealed preference for length for the sake of length.
...
We use length and effort as proxies for quality
A revealed preference is what shows up in your actions. If your actions are to treat long posts as a proxy for quality, then you do in fact have a revealed preference for length.
Jiro
8mo ago
The laws of physics require that to get fat, you have to eat. If you don't eat enough calories, you won't get fat. No amount of genetics can overcome physics.
Jiro
8mo ago
Being fat is a choice, to the point where excluding it is an unprincipled exception.
Jiro
10mo ago
Being charitable, let's consider
Being charitable to attackers is being uncharitable to their targets.
Don't "be charitable to" trolls.
Jiro
10mo ago
Let me now go through his claims one by one.
I think you're being too charitable. "Unexceptional idea, therefore absurd idea" shouldn't count as having 50% of his claims right.
Jiro
11mo ago
I'm not interested in going round and round with your whining about why I modded Suzy but I didn't mod Johnny.
There are some things that moderators should be doing regardless of whether they are interested in them or not.
It's like having a restaurant owner who's "not interested" in making sure his food is stored at the right temperature.
Jiro
1yr ago
Fighting fires costs time and money. If he is obliged to fight fires for people who didn't pay him, he'd go broke. It just looks bad because the firefighters are physically standing next to the fire, but standing next to it and not fighting it is no worse than being far away and not fighting it.
Would you quote it the same way if a supermarket was refusing to give away food to someone who couldn't pay?
Jiro
1yr ago
He just told you that denying a green card is not denial of permanent residence.
Jiro
1yr ago
I find it hard to imagine how he could make any relevant statement without saying that the crime had to be worse than something. And anything he used would be a "contour".
Jiro
1yr ago
Anecdote. But Dragoncon last year had a mask policy. Pretty much nobody got Covid. This year they tried a mask policy but it failed because the hotels were not under control of the con and didn't also have a mask policy. Lots of people got Covid.
Jiro
1yr ago
Explain the "apartheid" in Palestine. This is a classic example of a controversial claim made without evidence.
Jiro
1mo ago
That's just a semantics question over what "bad" means. You can say "hurting someone in self-defense is always bad, but sometimes it is the best option" or you can say "hurting someone in self-defense is not bad" and you're really saying the same thing.
America does for instance have too much gun violence.
The optimal amount of any crime is non-zero, short of lizardman constant situations. This is true for gun violence as much as anything else.
Besides, since some gun violence is self-defense, the optimal amount of it isn't zero anyway.
Jiro
4mo ago
Apparently people gave this 13 upvotes without reading the source. This is taken out of context. The switch is used because of the prohibition against the rules against using electricity on the Sabbath. Your insinuation that Jewish law lets it be used in bombs to kill without anyone being responsible is a lie.
Jiro
5mo ago
Do you suggest that Israel use children as human shields, so that they can increase the number of Israeli children killed, in which case it would be proportional.
You're just penalizing Israel for being able to protect their own people.
Jiro
10mo ago
The magic steps in to turn Narnia from [decades of firsthand evidence] into something much less tangible and much easier to convince yourself to forget.
The stereotype is that atheists have good reason to believe in God, but reject him anyway.
To fit this stereotype, people can't magically forget Narnia--that eliminates the "have good reason to believe in" part.
"Conspiracy to promote ugliness" in that context is mostly about women, so it doesn't apply here.
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