Jiro
1yr ago
I'm not convinced that that has anything to do with HBD, actually. First of all, Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well, and not much tradition of nationalism outside ethnic boundaries. Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power. There's also the familiar poverty trap where you have to help your family members rather than save for yourself, which also leads to "you have to be corrupt because your family members will require that you use your position to their benefit".
Jiro
1yr ago
The real life version of that cartoon is a patient who has a condition unrelated to his weight, but which is less fanciful than an arm falling off, and the doctor mentioning weight and ignoring his actual condition.
Jiro
1yr ago
You are taking that cartoon out of context. It isn't saying that the patrient's arm fell off because of diabetes. It's showing the patient complaining about one thing, and the doctor telling him routine boilerplate about losing weight that has nothing whatsoever to do with the patient's problem. The patient is not ignoring the doctor's advice about weight, the doctor is ignoring the patient's complaint by mentioning weight.
Note that the cartoon nowhere says "diabetes" or "fat shaming".
Jiro
1yr ago
Every acupuncturist I know tells me to see an acupuncturist. It's funny how that works.
And every evolutionary scientist will tell you that to learn about the origins of life, you need to avoid creationists and should go to someone whose background is learning evolution. Sometimes when X tell you to see X, they're correct.
Jiro
1yr ago
Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her.
Assuming these undesirable traits are not in your wife, that means that they probably will have less than 25% of any DNA associated with the traits, or more likely, the traits are just learned and not genetic.
Jiro
1yr ago
Listening to the FDA here won't work well. But somehow I doubt that "I look at the food and decide whether it counts as processed" will work well either.
I know what they say, but I also know that only a couple of very weird people would endorse that conclusion. "I have equal obligation towards family and random strangers" is both rare, and mentally and societally unhealthy, and I'm not going to take seriously any system of morality that requires it.
People here have a habit of taking seriously the most absurd of conclusions without ever doing sanity checks on them.
Jiro
1yr ago
Why should an opoid addicted piece of white trash who was born to two parents who were white trash deserve American citizenship more than a Venezualen who fled socialism and crossed the Darien Gap just to participate in the greatest nation on Earth?
Why should my poor, mentally ill, uncle be given better treatment by my family than a random homeless person?
Jiro
1yr ago
A corollary is that to make DTR culture work at urban population densities, you need something like broken windows policing to stop obnoxious blowhards ruling the streets by behaving badly and treating a request to stop as a challenge to a fight.
I'd consider a mob of people surrounding a car as such a set of obnoxious blowhards.
Jiro
1yr ago
It is obvious enough that having protestors surround your car is a threat to your life that nobody should be required to testify that they think it's a threat.
Jiro
1yr ago
I would consider dodging this question by saying that the walrus can not be a moral subject to be a copout.
"Answering the question is a copout."
You can't just declare something to be a copout and thus make it so.
Jiro
1yr ago
Is NYC antisemitic now
I mean... yes? The left has a strong antisemitic contingent, and NYC is on the left.
Pro-BLM protestors and pro-Hamas protestors are, broadly speaking, on the same side. It took billionaires to stop pro-Hamas protests for the same reason that nothing could stop BLM protests--it's very hard to stop protests that are tacitly approved of by the establishment.
Jiro
1yr ago
My argument is simply that America's actions re: the ICC demonstrate once again that it has no interest in submitting itself to such a system
This implies that the ICC is such a system. This is, to put it mildly, in dispute.
Jiro
1yr ago
Even the most dedicated pro-Israelis concede that Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones, but Israel's war is the "extremely restrained" one?
Being good at defense does not mean you're not allowed to kill the enemy. Palestinian casualties have exceeded Israeli ones because Israel's defense is good, not because they're going light on trying to kill Israelis.
Also, Israel doesn't build military bases in hospitals in order to increase its own casualties. A lot of the Palestinian casualties that "exceeded Israeli ones" are a result of deliberate Palestinian action.
Jiro
1yr ago
"Disproportionate" does not mean "the enemy gets to kill as many of us as we do of them, or else it's disproportionate".
Jiro
1yr ago
Why shouldn't I generally be allowed to conceal myself, as long as I'm not doing anything wrong?
Because we tried that and it didn't work. These laws were often meant as anti-KKK.
Jiro
1yr ago
We don't have any obligation to keep them from being executed by their home country under other circumstances. Requiring that we keep them from being executed if they commit crimes against us is Copenhagen ethics.
If a lot of people complain about Jews who eat Christian babies, it's fair for Jews to feel targeted even though they don't eat babies.
Whether someone is attacking the outgroup doesn't depend on whether they are accurately characterizing the outgroup. It can be simultaneously true that 1) southerners don't have the values that Confederate statues represent and 2) they consider attacks on the statues as attacks on themselves. They can figure out what's in the minds of the people attacking the statues, and that's all that's needed.
Jiro
1yr ago
You can't compare the cost of food in other countries and meaningfully say "the food prices are better there"--you're implicitly comparing them against your US salary. If food costs 1/x, but if you lived there you'd be making 1/x your salary, it's not really cheaper at all.
Jiro
1yr ago
People literally say "I am planting this bomb to fight for the oppressed". They don't say "I am planting this bomb to get cool uniforms". There's a big difference in how direct the connection is, even if both of them can be classified as increases in Bayseian probability.
Jiro
1yr ago
The "connection" is that someone saw the news and thought "That's an idea. Terrorism!"
Jiro
1yr ago
That's what I thought too, at least the carbonite reference. It looks as though he's embedded in some substance.
Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.
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