And Iran is not at war with China, so China can do this.
If Iran wants Israel to stop, they can negotiate peace.
Jiro
11mo ago
There is a rule about posting on multiple subjects. Past some point, if he keeps doing this he becomes a single issue poster.
Jiro
4mo ago
When the Hebrews do it it's just "Old Testament justice" but when Hitler identifies Jews as adversarial then it's identity politics?
When the Hebrews do it it's "this is something written in a book, secular historians don't think it actually happened, and it's not something to do today".
Jiro
9mo ago
People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character.
Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.
If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".
Jiro
11mo ago
No, it isn't; adults that are stupider than the average teenager (including the mentally handicapped and the senile) have more rights than them, so that claim it's cognitive is incoherent.
It's cognitive, but imperfectly.
Jiro
1hr 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?``
Jiro
1d 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
1mo ago
My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways.
If they are doing it for reasons related to wanting attributes of the other sex, and admit it, then they are trying to be a woman after all, they are just trying to be one partially, and they aren't labelling it as "I want to be a woman". But the original objection applies: conservatives will know they are saying "I want to have these traits, and these traits are associated with being female, and that's not a coincidence", correctly read that as "I am partially trying to be a woman", and object on those grounds.
They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate.
The same people who object to people trying to change sex also object to crossdressing, for similar reasons, so this doesn't materially change the scenario.
Jiro
1mo ago
I've never heard of people claiming that the Bible is good literature make similar claims about the Koran or other scriptures. So I'm inclined to think that claims that the Bible is good literature are mostly halo effect (with some addition of 'everyone uses it so you need to read it to know the references').
Jiro
1mo ago
Or are you perhaps confusing the Dean quoted by Pasha here to be referring to me, the user who goes by Dean
You did say this in response to Pasha saying that ethics courses are in his experience useless:
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.
This sounds like you were saying "no, ethics courses aren't useless, go research them yourself to find out".
Jiro
2mo ago
The graph wasn't predicting that cars would go faster than light. It was combining different transports from horses to cars to rockets--the graph was for all human transportation put together. That is, it basically was looking at cars and predicting maglev trains--not by name, of course, but predicting that there would be newer modes of transportation that would be faster than the existing ones. At some point one of these future transports would be faster than light.
Except, at some point, we just stopped getting faster transport. If you look at cars and predict maglev trains, and you look at maglev trains and predict moon rockets, and you look at moon rockets and predict FTL... well, no.
It's like how Moore's Law broke down. Processing power doubled every 1.5 years for decades... until it didn't.
Jiro
9mo ago
It creates incentives for the prosecutor not to do this. You or a loved one could also be the person who the prosecutor was discouraged from framing. Of course this is a seen versus unseen fallacy; it's impossible to see that you escaped being railroaded by a prosecutor because he was discouraged from doing so by the rules, while it's easy to see if you are victimized by a criminal who gets let go.
Jiro
9mo ago
And then, who even gets to define what is right-wing?
This is like the guy on datasecretslox who claimed not to know what race is. People know what right-wing is to enough of a degree to be able to talk about it, even if you can "well, aksually" the edge cases.
Jiro
9mo ago
If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is
While most people hated school, they did so for different reasons. Rationalists hated school for reasons that are strong enough that becoming adults won't change their mind--bullies, incompetent teaching, they already know what's being taught, etc. Normies hated school for reasons such as "I can't play video games if I have to study for an exam". Adults don't agree with those reasons.
For the vast majority, who hated school for normie reasons, school is not a downside, even if it was at the moment they were actually attending school. The view that even from an adult perspective school is bad is weird.
Jiro
11mo ago
Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood.
In the modern world, this is true for nobody relevant to the question.
Jiro
10hr 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
5d 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
1mo ago
People are certainly able to articulate standards of good that God doesn't meet. They seem to contradict his nature perfectly fine.
Jiro
1mo ago
I'm sure a lot of people would have said the same thing about Nazi Germany as about Jericho. This mostly tells you how bad Nazi Germany is, not the Jews.
Jiro
1mo ago
That's not what you're implying by "God is not accountable to others". ""God is not accountable to others" means that people shouldn't criticize God for not being consistent with conventional values of being good and such. If God has a nature which is different from those values, God is following his nature, but he can still be held accountable.
Jiro
1mo ago
I would suggest that conservatives object to crossdressing for reasons that are similar to why they object to trans and different from why they object to Playboy bunnies. (Although there may be an additional objection that's similar.)
They're just men who think it's fun to cosplay as women.
But that raises the question "why women". There's a reason that drag shows are a thing and dressing up as doctors or firefighters are just minor elements in other performances. There's clearly an element there that isn't present for cosplay in general, and it can at least be reasonably interpreted as desire to be women, regardless of whether they deny it.
Jiro
1mo ago
You can't separate "is the search justified" from "is it worth saving a child's life" because the search is justified exactly when a child's life is likely to be saved.
I'm partial to the argument that undertaking this project in the year 10^9 AD or even 10^6 AD might be a better use of resources than in the year 2025 AD. But I'm also partial to the argument that technology doesn't just progress through time alone, that we can always come up with excuses for why this would be easier or more efficient to tackle later, and as such, we might as well start working on it now.
By that reasoning we should have worked on rockets to the moon in 2000 BC.
Very few of either "realistic" hard scifi scenarios, or "realistic" speculative scenarios have us escaping the Earth only in 10^9 AD. The decades of scifi we've had about exploring the solar system have been about much more recent time periods. Sure, maybe we'd do it in 10^9 AD, but 10^9 AD is a long way off. and it isn't what everyone talking about this stuff wants.
And "excuses" is just a spin you put on "reasons".
There are a couple of phrases which make me discount pretty much anything people are using them to say. This is one of them.
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