And Iran is not at war with China, so China can do this.
If Iran wants Israel to stop, they can negotiate peace.
Jiro
9d ago
I don't see how that's relevant. Is someone who wants to stop the suffering of non-cute animals counting it too much?
Sure, when someone says that insect suffering counts at 15% of human suffering, he's counting it too much, but that doesn't generalize. In the more general case "tries to stop animal suffering efficiently", how exactly is he counting it too much?
Jiro
8d ago
What about the atoms in your body that have gone through the food chain and been later used in someone else's body? Who gets them?``
True. So let me modify the question a bit.
He may not want to personally reduce suffering as much as possible. But not only does he not do it himself, he also seems to think that people who do do so are misguided. Why would he think that it's misguided to reduce suffering as much as possible?
(In fact, let's rephrase that again: Given that someone wants to reduce animal suffering, why does he think it's misguided to do so efficiently?)
Jiro
9d ago
I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure.
How can you consistently believe this, yet not want to minmax animal suffering? Surely if you are vegan because of animal suffering, it follows that you want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible. And "utilitarian suffering min-maxing" is how you figure out what course of action reduces it as much as possible.
Jiro
14d ago
Another Stalin-related example of how political cults of personality work is a demand that you follow the personality's line even if they make complete u-turns.
"50 Stalins" uses Stalin as metonymy. It isn't about actual Stalin, and the fact that people behave in a certain way in relation to Stalin (and have to to stay alive) doesn't make that what "50 Stalins" is about.
Jiro
13hr ago
If natural slaves exist, there's a lot of conflicts of interest and motivated reasoning in deciding that any particular individual is a natural slave, to the point where we're probably better off acting as though natural slaves don't exist.
Jiro
13hr ago
There's a difference between "an individual doesn't reject stupid comments by their party" and "the broad mass of believers doesn't reject stupid comments by their party". The latter is much better evidence for the stupid comment being believed.
Jiro
9d ago
Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.
There would be some level of getting emotionally attached to how the Sims "suffer" that I would indeed consider suspicious. I presume you are not at this level, though of course I have no proof.
Jiro
20d ago
If they're lower in cognitive ability they aren't similarly situated. And if they have a different major they certainly aren't.
Jiro
12hr ago
Beards can be shaved off, so they aren't indicators of low time preference like tattoos are.
Jiro
2d ago
It's also demonstrably the case that Jews in camps often received high-quality medical treatment and had access to all sorts of pleasant recreational facilities,
This seems to violate "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
Jiro
20d ago
How could that happen without massive disparate impact lawsuits? (Unless they're not really similarly situated--different cities, different professions chosen, etc.)
Jiro
21d ago
The jobs feminine women perform don't care about three year resume gaps if there's a kid involved.
Wasn't one of the big complaints of feminism when it started that such jobs did care about the gap?
Jiro
2hr ago
But the thing is, it didn't look like an MS-13 tattoo. It was made of symbols and in a fit of pareidolia people made the symbols match MS-13.
If it actually was a MS-13 tattoo I'd expect we'd have heard of other gang members using it.
Jiro
20d ago
He would simply point out that there is no example in history, with the exception of the few brief periods in which Israel has existed as an insular sovereign political entity, in which Jewish people have had the power to openly privilege themselves as a dominant racial group at the expense of other groups. Whereas there was a period of several centuries wherein white people — conscious of their whiteness and the way it made them different/better than other people — had both the means and the willpower to travel around the world establishing states in which they were made the supreme/privileged race and others were treated as less-than as a result.
And even people who weren't white nationalists could look at that and say "motte and bailey".
He can claim that abolishing whiteness is a technical term that doesn't imply any racial hostility. But saying "I don't really mean X" when there are plenty of people in your coalition who do mean X is indistinguishable from giving them cover and encouraging them even if you pinky swear that that isn't really what you mean.
Jiro
23d ago
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
I think "not being a slave" is pretty positive.
Jiro
13hr ago
The tattoo that was in the news was plausibly a drug symbol, but it was specifically being identified as a gang symbol based on arguments that were a real stretch.
Jiro
10d ago
It would just be disingenuous for someone to caution you that your successful theft is contributing to an erosion of trust.
But that's why you're contradicting yourself by saying that the security is meant to stop fans of Lady Gaga, not people like you. If the security isn't aimed at people like you, then you can't invoke the security to say that they already don't trust people like you.
Jiro
15d ago
It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism
I understand a 50 Stalins criticism to be that someone's positions aren't extreme enough and he should lean into them even more. Claiming that a Democrat is not left-wing enough would be a 50 Stalins criticism. (And likewise, something like "Trump isn't doing enough to stop illegal immigration" would be a 50 Stalins criticism of Trump.)
It's true that it would be dangerous to do this to actual Stalin, but that's not how the metaphor works.
This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this,
It was the first one I found by googling that sounded good enough.
The typical case is when someone neither particularly hates or helps the poor. But the missing mood test looks at how things are framed and at superficial elements. So if he thinks the dole is good for the poor, he doesn't need to prove himself, because the belief itself already says that he "wants to help the poor". But if he thinks the dole is bad for the poor, he faces an uphill battle. The problems with this are obvious.
This also leads to moral busybodies. How exactly do you know that someone hates the poor privately? Well, if he's a friend or relative, maybe you know him. But if he's a politician or someone else you don't know personally, this is an incentive to dig up ten year old Twitter posts out of context to "prove" that he's cruel so you can dismiss his beliefs.
And then there's the situation where someone who thinks some policy harms themselves always fails the missing mood test. After all, they aren't showing concern for the other people who are helped by the things that harm themselves. (And "I think my harm is more important than someone's benefit" is selfish, so it doesn't count as showing concern even if you acknowledge that someone benefits.)
His argument is that the independence of US territories is unconstitutional because the Constitution denies some powers to the states and independence implies granting those powers, and because the Constitution applies to the states and making them independent denies the inhabitants their constitutional rights.
The former argument should fail because the Constitution actually says "state" and territories that are granted independence are not states. The latter argument wouldn't apply to the Phillippines because the inhabitants were not US citizens and not born in the US. He just handwaved away the Insular Cases and he claimed the inhabitants of the Phillippines were born in the US, which wasn't true.
Note that the argument isn't actually originalism.
Jiro
3d ago
Normal people don't count 1% as more likely in most contexts. They interpret it to mean "significantly more likely".
A common tactic of people questioning the Holocaust is to say "I'm not questioning the Holocaust but..." followed by things that are carefully worded to cast doubt on the Holocaust without explicitly denying it. And that's what you're doing. You're not disputing it, but you think the numbers are substantially inflated? That's disputing it.
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