And Iran is not at war with China, so China can do this.
If Iran wants Israel to stop, they can negotiate peace.
Jiro
7d ago
Where was there criticism of Obama from Democrats that was not of the 50 Stalins variety?
Jiro
7d ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat", and I think this counts as saying that the Tsar is poorly advised:
Manchin said he is a proud Democrat, having been raised with the values of “always reaching out, trying to help others have a better quality of life and help themselves” and taking care of those who cannot help themselves.
But he said sometimes his party’s priorities in Washington are “out of balance with … how we do business in West Virginia.”
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism. And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me.
If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you. What makes me suspicious of you is that by playing this hypothetical game you are reacting as though you want to cause suffering. It doesn't matter whether the suffering is real.
That doesn't generalize to society "wanting to torture rats" because "society" is only "torturing rats" as an instrumental goal in the process of doing something else. If it's an instrumental goal, whether the suffering is real actually matters.
(Likewise, I'd look askance at anyone committing bestiality, not because it harms the animal, which isn't a person, but because of what it says about the person doing it. First of all, humans who are attracted to animals are generally messed up anyway, and second, anyone having sex with an animal probably has false beliefs about the animal's consent, which is delusional.)
Jiro
17d ago
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either.
Cool. Tell me about some relevant instances of your outgroup acting in good faith.
Jiro
2d 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
11d ago
Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.
They're still not accurate. You snuck in there "enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing" as a "successful" prediction. It's actually a failed prediction.
"Knowingly" and "will give Israel an excuse to" are not successful predictions either, unless you can read minds.
Jiro
29d ago
the dominant religion of Scientism
There are a couple of phrases which make me discount pretty much anything people are using them to say. This is one of them.
how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people?
-
if they look unambiguously black
-
if they look ambiguously black and at least one parent is black (recursively)
If the autist is not able to tell if someone looks unambiguously black, there is nothing you can do.
This fails if someone is wearing a good disguise. But that's a general problem with determining anything by sight. This problem also applies in obvious ways to the trans issue.
Jiro
7d ago
Scott originally gave as an example "There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country!" There isn't enough leftism is an obvious extension.
Jiro
12d ago
How could that happen without massive disparate impact lawsuits? (Unless they're not really similarly situated--different cities, different professions chosen, etc.)
Jiro
14d 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?
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?)
That argument might make sense if this were like any other wedding where they're essentially relying on the honor system that uninvited guests don't show up, but this wasn't the case. This is a wedding that was held at a secret location that was difficult to get to and guarded by staff checking names.
The wedding staff doesn't give up being entitled to assume people are trustworthy just because they have guards there. By your reasoning, if a store has no security, you shouldn't shoplift, but if the store has security, it is okay to bypass the security and shoplift. In fact, stores actually factor a certain amount of shoplifting into their budget, and that still doesn't entitle you to shoplift.
You're also deciding that the security counts or doesn't count depending on which is most convenient for you. You shouldn't be saying both 1) the security is meant to stop people like you, so there's no trust and it's okay to crash the wedding, and 2) the security is meant to stop fans of Lady Gaga, not people like you, so you are not the kind of people they're concerned about.
Jiro
24d ago
I can count on one hand the number of minutes per month I'm delayed by a cyclist. On the other hand, every time the Penguins or Pirates play a weekday home game I'm treated to at least ten minutes of extra sitting in traffic so a bunch of suburbanites can treat themselves to a night of overpriced disappointment.
You need to figure out the amount of delay per cyclist and per driver, not the total amount of delay. The total amount is skewed by the much larger number of cars.
I would bet that if all those people went to the ball game on bicycles, your delays would not get any shorter.
Jiro
25d ago
If you say "it's okay for the AI to do as poorly as a poorly performing human", you'll end up concluding that even an Eliza program can do better than a drunk human who can barely type out words on a keyboard. And if you say "the AI only needs to exceed a top human at a few tasks", then a C64, which can run a simple calculator or chess program, would count as a general AI.
People are not cherrypicking. What they are doing is like the Turing test itself, but testing for intelligence instead of for "is like a human". People asking questions in a Turing test can't tell you in advance which questions would prove the target is a computer, but they have implicit knowledge that lets them dynamically change their questions to whatever is appropriate. Likewise, we don't know in advance exactly what things ChatGPT would have to do to prove it's a general intelligence, but we can use our implicit knowledge to dynamically impose new requirements based on how it succeeds at the previous requirements.
Saying "well, it can write, but can it code" is ultimately no different from saying "well, it can tell me its favorite food, but can it tell me something about recipes, and its favorite book, and what it did on Halloween". We don't complain that when someone does a Turing test and suddenly asks the computer what it did on Halloween, that he's cherrypicking criteria because he didn't write down that question ahead of time.
Jiro
7d 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.
Jiro
13d 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
15d ago
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
I think "not being a slave" is pretty positive.
Jiro
26d ago
this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.
That's all right, I'm not a progressive.
The other difference between this and defining "woman" is that people who disguise themselves as other races are not really an issue, and the equivalent for women is. If a lot of white people claimed to be black and tried to look black, the definition would no longer work.
The hearing was supposed to be for expunging his commitment. People don't get committed for forgetting their medication. It's not supposed to be "is there anything wrong with him such that we don't want him to have a gun" even though the state used it that way.
More options
Context Copy link