MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
The left has been running the "blame your political opponents for bad weather" play for 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less stupid when the right does it.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It appears that you are just using Jesus's words as a jumping off point for a claim you want to make rather than seriously engaging with what He meant. He tells the parable in response to a troublemaker asking for a rigorous definition of whom he needs to love as his neighbor, and after telling the story he asks "which of these was a neighbor to him?" - in other words, trying to limit to whom the commandment applied and to whom it didn't was the wrong spirit in which to approach it.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Are you raising the utilitarian perspective because that's the grounds for your opposition to a state putting people to death? If so, I'm not sure it works out very well.
what is the marginal utility / justification / satisfaction found in execution versus life imprisonment?
This one's pretty easy, it's incredibly expensive to house an unproductive prisoner for 50+ years and incredibly inexpensive to e.g. build a gallows.
But I only address the utilitarian argument because you raised it, my belief is in no way utilitarian and is simply founded on the principle of retributive justice that a murderer should die for justice to be done.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
First, a tangent: this "pro-life in all cases" mindset seems to me a case of a whole swathe of society confusing a slogan with a moral principle. It's baffling to me why so many on both sides seem to have the idea that killing should either be absolutely indiscriminate or not done at all. Most of us are pro-jailing criminals but no one has ever insisted that we ought to jail babies as well to be consistent.
If you are a pacifist or have a principled objection to the state executing people in cold blood, by all means make that case, but abortion has absolutely nothing to do with it.
To interact with the case that you do make, I'm not sure if your slippery slope argument is supposed to apply to abortion / euthanasia only or to the death penalty as well. If it is aimed at the death penalty, I don't think it's well-supported and would be hard to meaningfully reason about given that practically every society in history up until the past hundred years has put some people to death. There's essentially no example one could look at of stepping onto the slippery slope since humanity has always existed on the supposed slope.
Your other support doesn't seem to be an argument but just an expression of your belief that the state ought not to be executing its own citizens. I think it ought to be, because the only human justice possible for a murder is the execution of the murderer, and only the state is in a position to do this with due process which at least attempts to ensure that the guilty is punished rather than the weak. What's your support for the belief that the state shouldn't do it?
If responsibility is diffused between many different people in the process of executing someone, that's fine by me as long as the person is actually guilty. They should all feel good for having worked together to achieve the only earthly justice possible under the circumstances. The fact that, in the modern west, most of them don't feel good about it, because they aren't persuaded of the goodness of justice, is a hindrance to the system working well in practice, but not an argument that the death penalty is principally unjust.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I hadn't considered leaving the oil in the pantry in the fryer between uses, if you use it often enough I guess that's workable.
I had also forgotten that deep fryers have lids which will trap most of the oily steam. So consider me convinced on that point.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.
Also keep in mind that getting in a comfy car and driving to McDonald's and back doesn't register as work to most people in the same way that cooking and especially cleaning dishes do.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
If someone was stretching me out on the rack, I wouldn't need a complete answer for what my happiest possible state looked like to know that I would be a lot closer to it if the torture stopped. You don't need to fully flesh out (no pun intended) the ideal body type to argue it's better not to be obese.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I think the comment makes more sense if you interpret "the regime" to be not identical to "the US government" but rather what's referred to as "the Cathedral" or "the elites", i.e. a class of people who comprise newspaper editors and politicians among others.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
If it's hard to detect, that's extremely difficult to coordinate on short notice. It's almost literally impossible for an organization that's not all in one location together to suddenly get rid of / replace all of their communication equipment.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It's also possible that the pagers were sold much more widely but only the ones that were eventually pinned to Hezbollah agents were triggered today.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Your theory makes sense a priori but I don't understand why we don't see firms that are run internally like a free market dominating the supposedly inefficient command-based firms which we actually see.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
True, I should have said "another explanation".
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
The other explanation for the timing is that a limited time window to use it was closing, either because of an inherent limitation in the bomb design or because the cover was about to be blown.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It's really pathetic how little progress the tech industry has apparently made towards measuring and incentivizing actual productivity, that some of the foremost employers still feel like they need to chain people to a desk and hope that they'll get something done that way. This is despite having approximately the most naturally conscientious workforce in the world.
Remote work aside, there is so much on the table for the employer that's able to keep the 10x software engineers and fire everyone else that it's mind-boggling how few companies have even tried to pull it off. I'm not sure if it's ideological commitment to egalitarianism, principal / agent problems where middle management pursues empire building instead of efficiency, or just genuinely that difficult of a problem to solve.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
There just isn't a large enough number of people in the US who feel deeply enough that abortion is wrong to go do anything about it other than vote.
And yet there is a whole arena of lawfare around protesting / demonstrating outside of abortion clinics, and a second one around crisis pregnancy centers.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I still agree that lying like this is bad and he shouldn't do it, but it doesn't seem like you've interacted with the core of the counterargument. The fact that his statements are exaggerated makes them bait for the media to debunk and therefore signal boost them.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
My only point is that it's apples and oranges to compare drivers vs. bikers being deferential to pedestrians, because it's nearly costless for the drivers.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I wouldn't expect distracted driving to disproportionately impact hit and runs but not overall accidents, so the fact that that's the statistic used here makes me suspicious that overall accidents don't follow the same trend.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
There might be a cultural dimension but a big part of it is that slowing to a stop and restarting is actually a significant inconvenience to a biker in a way that it's not to a driver since it requires a large expenditure of your personal physical energy.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Maybe there are more details we are missing about the incident, but on the face of it, the uproar about it makes me less sympathetic to activist bikers. Drivers deal with unexpected construction obstacles all the time, and I don't understand why a biker would expect to have right of way when merging into the main lane to avoid an obstacle.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
That's interesting because I was going to bring up Lewis as a counterargument to the "gender/sex distinction recently invented to undermine gender norms" POV. Lewis discussed it extensively in both fiction and non-fiction and certainly didn't intend it to undermine gender norms. In multiple places he argued that God is infinitely masculine although not male, and that biological sex was in fact only the expression at the biological level of a more ultimate reality.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
The Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty is well known, but their doctrine explicitly allows for the possibility of just warfare.
If your claim is just that they teach that war is bad then I fully agree. I read eetan's "endorsed by the Bible" to mean permissible under some circumstances, not preferable or desirable.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Then the Christians you know are very unusual, even just considering the set of Christians alive today, let alone considering the set of Christians across history.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
This is just smart politicking, there's obviously no chance of passing these with the current Congress, so it's just forcing the Republicans to defend what are probably moderately unpopular positions about the Supreme Court.
You can just repost it in a few hours and it will still be the 1 year anniversary in Australia right?
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