Jiro
9d ago
Cigarettes seriously harm you when used as directed. Most other vices have to be abused to harm you.
Jiro
9d ago
If the law as written says that harassment is illegal, but society accepts it, it doesn't really make sense to have the system be both about the law as written, and a metaphor for society. These meanings are in tension with each other.
I can guarantee you that if someone gets seriously and continuously called Satan, a lot of listeners won't take that perspective. And stochastic terrorism is about when to blame someone for the actions of listeners.
Besides, I was trying to describe a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Belief in religion is so low nowadays that comparing someone to Satan hardly means anything, unless you're Iran.
Jiro
13d ago
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).
Jiro
14d ago
What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date?
That's like praising the Mafia for running a lot of great Italian restaurants when nobody else is. The reason that nobody else is running Italian restaurants is that the Mafia won't let them, not that the Mafia is particularly good at running restaurants.
You don't get credit for doing X when your rivals didn't, if the reason your rivals didn't is that you didn't let them do much of anythng at all.
Jiro
15d ago
Here's some "witches" you might not like but are broadly unpopular in American society, I guess we need to DEI these views too.
Conservatives were deliberately driven out and are there in far below their proportions in the population. This isn't true of the groups you mention.
Also, having one witch everywhere is still far below the proportion in the population, so I wouldn't call that DEI.
Jiro
16d ago
Aside from the obvious, there are two big differences between this and the civil rights era that make it much harder to do anything: First, the activists are in favor of the discrimination. Second, the people doing the discriminating won't admit they're doing it.
Jiro
16d ago
What worries them is that the process afforded Garcia is not constructed in such a way that it must differentiate between Garcia and the citizen.
This is the thing daezor pointed out above. The process needed to show someone isn't a citizen isn't the same thing as the due process needed in a criminal trial. There's no serious dispute that Garcia isn't a citizen, and if he was one, he'd have been able to present the information by now.
"POSIWID" is meaningful, but
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the "different" definitions that people have been proferring are on a range of severities of basically the same thing and
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Scott is being autistically literal about it not being exactly what it literally says because clearly there are some cases where it doesn't apply.
Also, if you read carefully, Scott actually concedes that it can have some meaning, but these meanings are not something he likes to use the phrase for, which is a much weaker argument. Such as:
I agree this is a useful thing to talk about, I just don’t think “purpose” is the right word for it. I’m not even sure “system” is the right word for it.
Jiro
17d ago
Abrego, had the government not shipped him to El Salvador would be living in Maryland and raising his kids quietly.
He was illegally present in the US. Had the government not shipped him to El Salvador, the government would have legally shipped him somewhere else (or cancelled the ban and then shipped him to El Salvador). He certainly wouldn't be in Maryland, unless the government ignored its own immigration laws.
Jiro
23d ago
- If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!
Saying that X counts as a miracle doesn't mean that if you claim X, it automatically counts. It means that you managed to get over one hurdle--you managed to claim something that, if it happened, would be a miracle. Getting past the "if it happened" part is a separate hurdle.
One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud.
The reason such things are dismissed as incompetence or fraud is that they are incompetence or fraud.
There are plenty of cases where science has noticed a lot of incompetence and fraud in something, and yet determined that some of it is real. (High temnperature superconductors come to mind.) Miracles aren't dismissed because scientists dismiss everything, miracles are dismissed because they have particularly bad claims and evidence, just like psychic powers, space aliens, and non-Christian miracles.
Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent magic an invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them.
No they don't. Actually, I have no idea what you're talking about, except maybe ether, which you'll notice modern scientists don't believe in.
Jiro
23d ago
In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public.
The US didn't want its test flights to be seen by the public, and so tried to conceal them. Religious believers don't claim that God is deliberately concealing miracles from scientists.
My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?
I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.
If you are asking "couldn't they have healed normally?" that's TA's point: "miracles" happen in ways that are hard to scientifically corroborate. It's always healing something that naturally heals in 10% of patients or otherwise could happen, not regrowing a limb. Then yes, the CAT scan doesn't prove it's miraculous, but that's not because it never could for any miracle, that's because the miracles are conveniently hard to corroborate.
If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.
If you mean "how do we tell between a miracle and aliens shooting their heal ray at us, or some other explanation that's weird but doesn't involve God", the answer is that saying "it's either a miracle or aliens" is a really good start and drastically increases the credibility of religion, even if aliens can't be ruled out yet. Once that happens, we can proceed from there.
Except of course, it doesn't happen.
Jiro
28d ago
Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence.
This assumes that you have control over the dangerous parts of producing the airplane. If you run the company, perhaps you do in some sense. If you're an engineer or software developer, you do what the company tells you to do, and you can't resign from the company after every poor decision outside your control that goes into the airplane, so this is just a way to doubly screw employees over by management.
Robbery has been a constant through all recorded history too. And greed is pretty emotionally significant. (And I'm pretty sure that greed isn't the result of particular social customs.) But we don't blame the banks when the bank is robbed and an innocent person gets shot.
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