OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3mo ago
I vaguely remember that he wasn't allowed to talk after Jan 6th. He lost Twitter, I don't remember any press conferences, there was the impeachment, but I don't think he was permitted to talk to the public or sign anything.
Legally he should have been able to issue pardons up until his last day, that is a power the president has. But I don't know if he was allowed near a pen.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
Please show me where all the orphanages are hiding in the US. But yes, I would assume that the further you get away from the "Biological mother and father raised me" the further you would get from the ideal childhood. I'm not sure what point you think you are making.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6mo ago
The wording on this tweet makes me think it was a Palestinian rocket intercepted by the Iron Dome close to the hospital. Which would be a huge cluster**** for everyone however you split it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
The other alternative theory is that some things just are "brute fact", but that this "brute fact" does not have the features of God in classical theism for whatever reason the philosopher favors.
The question, "Why something, instead of nothing?" isn't at all an easy question, and is not solved by an infinite universe. I don't mean to imply God is an easy answer to the question. Just that there is a differentiation being made by classical theists between God and the universe, and that distinction is "change."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
Can we split the difference and say female temperament in a male body?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
I don't extend it to novels where a protagonist harms another, has sex, or does any specific immoral action. I would extend it to a form of fiction where the sole point was to dwell/glorify violence, sex, or a specific immoral action. Most forms of fiction provide some sort of philosophical evaluation of right/wrong, and utilizes immoral actions to demonstrate this. Or they provide a psychological snapshot of someone else's viewpoint, which broadens the mind of the reader. Or they provide a glimpse into another way of life.
Something like Agony in Pink, on the other hand, takes a little something away from everyone who reads it, be it time or a tiny amount of psychological well-being.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?
I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.
And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming. Even the cool grandpa and the old fashioned magazines. It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2mo ago
there would be a bunch of boring guys getting degrees in it by now, explaining how it all works.
It's called parapsychology, and they have a Journal and various research groups in various Universities including the University of Virginia and UC Santa Barabara.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
These are words of art that require precise definitions and examples to understand what is even being said here. For example your rebuttal of "quantum superposition" doesn't work on what is meant by the word "form." Without writing a hundred pages on what is meant by the terms Act, Potency, Perfection, etc I cannot defend this argument, and so I will not be defending these arguments in a forum post (or at all, dozens of better people have written these books already.) But please desist from claiming that theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
This part of the review goes over research on comparing adoptions with adoptions:
If one looks on the surface, findings are mixed with respect to family functioning or children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors. With respect to family functioning, there are few studies, but Erich, Leung, and Kindle (2005) found lower family functioning (d ¼ 0.14) for SSA parents in spite of those parents having advantages in terms of social support and education. After some, but not all, of the relevant variables were controlled, even lower levels of family functioning were found (d ¼ 0.36, p < .07) for the gay and lesbian adoptive families. Even though that discrepancy represented a small to medium effect, its nonsignificance (p < .07) permitted Ryan (2007) and Averett et al. (2009) to argue for the no difference hypothesis. Nevertheless, there were several other factors that were more influential for predicting family functioning than parental sexual orientation. Averett et al. (2009) also examined family functioning and found lower levels for same-sex families of younger (d ¼ 0.14) and older (d ¼ 0.27) chil- dren. Thus, with respect to family functioning, it appears that SSA families are experiencing lower functioning, but the effect sizes are small to medium at most, usually not significant given the small sample sizes involved. There is some evi- dence that same-sex families may do better with younger children than older children with respect to family functioning.
In part 3 of this report, outcomes for children adopted by same-sex parents are considered. Studies conducted within the past 10 years that compared child out- comes for children of same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents were reviewed. Numerous methodological limitations were identified that make it very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the impact of parental sexual orientation across adoptive families. Samples were often small and nonrandom. Some ‘‘same-sex’’ adoptive or foster parents may be mother–adult daughter heterosexual dyads. Important variables were often overlooked, including social desirability response bias. None of the studies assessed child outcomes in terms of delayed gratification, self-control, impulsivity, emotional self-regulation, or time preference. Most par- ticipating gay and lesbian families were from the socioeconomic elite of U.S. society. Most studies involved the adoption of young children, under the age of six years. Because of numerous methodological limitations, it might be best to hesitate to draw much in the way of firm conclusions from the available research. We still know very little about family functioning among same-sex families with low or moderate incomes, those with several children, or those with older chil- dren, including adolescents. Some important child outcomes (e.g., substance abuse, sexual orientation, educational progress) may not become relevant or apparent until an adopted child reaches adolescence. Within the limited available studies, it appears that same-sex families may report slightly lower levels of family functioning, especially with respect to older adopted children, but most studies have found few differences in children’s internalizing or externalizing behaviors as reported by parents. Two studies appear to have found opposing longitudinal trends in which children in heterosexual adoptive families fared better over time while children in SSA families fared worse. Small to moderate effect size differ- ences were observed in terms of children’s gender role behaviors and attitudes, probably reflecting less traditional gender role attitudes among same-sex parents compared to heterosexual parents.
So mostly you nailed it when you said it was too early. A lot of the negative factors that we would measure couldn't manifest in the literature for a while. Couples adopt kids under 6 years of age, but things like academic excellence, teenage drug and sex habits, etc are things that can only be measured from kids 14+.
However, I am not sure that the average adoptive parent provides better outcomes than average natal parents. When looking at mixed families of adopted and biological children, adopted children receive more attention but have worse outcomes. Could this effect partially negate the socioeconomic effect?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
I'm asking OP to defend one of the consensus-building statements he made, "there are a lot factual errors: ... children raised by two same-sex parents have equal or better life outcomes to straight parents." I'm not arguing for any particular policy regarding where to put kids once one or more of their parents are unwilling or unable to raise them.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
You still didn't call out a single stance that I hold which can be gleaned by the tagline. "Reactionary" just means someone who believes that, for at least one topic, some group in the past did things slightly better than they way they are now. The definition of the word itself is anodyne.
For example, the thing I am most reactionary about is that I believe we did a lot of child-rearing better in the past. We've slaughtered nature and kept kids in an electronic bubble, preventing them from calming down or encountering something transcendent. More kids have never existed due to car seat regulations than lives saved by car seat regulations.. Parents used to be able to send small children to be entertained by groups of other small children, playfully existing outside while the mother did economically useful tasks, such as textile production and food processing. Instead, we have created a system that maximally stresses out parents while preventing kids from thriving.
Were you able to guess any of that by my tagline? Meanwhile, the username with 1488 in it tells me the poster is arguing when creating their username some variation of "the Holocaust didn't really happen the way people think, but the Jews deserved it anyways." There isn't really a wide range of possibilities there.
My tagline is not, "Repeal Car Seat Regulations." That would be myself making a provocative argument in a place people wouldn't be able to counter-argue.
I don't think the Mods said exactly that they are "asserting their aesthetic preference." That is not in the mod chain I can see at least. Ctrl+F "aesthetic" doesn't come up with any hits. Instead, it looks like you are badly misinterpreting them.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
Are we looking at the same Hooper study? It's funny how we can both look at it and zoom on different things:
We found little or no effect of reducing saturated fat on all‐cause mortality (RR 0.96; 95% CI 0.90 to 1.03; 11 trials, 55,858 participants) or cardiovascular mortality (RR 0.95; 95% CI 0.80 to 1.12, 10 trials, 53,421 participants), both with GRADE moderate‐quality evidence.
...
There was little or no effect of reducing saturated fats on non‐fatal myocardial infarction (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.87 to 1.07) or CHD mortality (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.82 to 1.16, both low‐quality evidence), but effects on total (fatal or non‐fatal) myocardial infarction, stroke and CHD events (fatal or non‐fatal) were all unclear as the evidence was of very low quality. There was little or no effect on cancer mortality, cancer diagnoses, diabetes diagnosis, HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides or blood pressure, and small reductions in weight, serum total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and BMI. There was no evidence of harmful effects of reducing saturated fat intakes.
I looked through a few of the studies they reviewed but most don't really demonstrate a low PUFA/high Sat Fat diet anywhere.
The Black Study reduced fat entirely (not substituting PUFA for Sat fat) and found that keeping fat under 20% of calories helped reduce skin cancer.
The DART Study advised men to increase ratio of PUFA to SFA, but: "The advice on fat was not associated with any difference in mortality." Men who were advised to eat fatty fish did better, but I'm open to the idea that it's the O3:O6 ratio that matters, meaning increasing O3 might be beneficial to people (especially in the context of a high O6 diet).
Then we get to the Houtsmuller study, which look like it's going to actually address the PUFA thesis. Two groups of people fed a controlled diet, one diet has 4x as much Linoleic acid as the other. Sounds good. He doesn't give a lot of details about what is in each diets how he assessed the Linoleic acid quantity in the study. But let's take him for his word. There are a couple details that stand out to me:
First is, "The linolcic acid content of diet II was 4 times that of diet I, being 20.4 gr/1000 kcal for group II and 5.3 gr/1000 Kcal for group I."
According to the PUFA hypothesis, it's more like a cliff than a gradient. Humans naturally eat around 4-5 gr a day of PUFA without seed-oil or mono-gastric animal sources. This study has the Sat Fat group get twice that.
The other detail is they mention one of the sources of Sat Fat, "except for 4 patients of group I who preferred butter over saturated margarines." The Sat Fat group's intervention included getting fed partially-hydrogenated margarine. Which means lots of transfats. The negative effect this study found can possibly be explained by the amount of transfats in the Sat Fat arm of the study.
I'll admit I didn't check every study, but the ones I checked aren't really applicable to anything I'm concerned about. The only one I saw that clearly substituted Linoleic Acid for actual Sat Fat was the Sydney Study, which showed that substituting Margarine for Butter actually increased risk of Cardiovascular disease.
That said, the Sydney study Margarine probably had transfats. I'm not going to state that the Sydney study proves Sat Fat is the best, but it does support my primary point, which is that nutritional studies on fats are Terrible, do not account for common confounders, and a meta-analysis of a bunch of terrible studies does not make for good data.
which again is fine for people without aspirations to build muscle (which doesn't apply to OP).
I'm talking about OP's wife. OP seems to want his wife to become slimmer, not a body builder. I'm indicating that to lose weight might require cutting protein down to the bare minimum (around 50g), something that is left out of a lot of advice. Losing lean mass when losing weight can actually be quite good, as you don't want a lot of extra skin hanging around.
Sandman, if you haven't already. The other graphic novel I would recommend is Batgirl (2000—2006). It stands on its own and is quite beautiful.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Off topic, but how are you leaning on the DIS fight? Do you think Trian would be an improvement? Is Blackwell Capital even a contender?
A lot of people see it as a fight against woke Disney, or unaffordable Disneyland, or whatever their current complaint is, but I don't think that's a priority for anyone in the fight.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
I am very disheartened to hear that you have deemed the Cosmological argument 'trounced... for decades." I have seen atheists like Dawkins completely misunderstand the Cosmological argument and refute caricatures of it. I have seen some philosophers provide interesting propositions that make supporters of the Cosmological argument need to add details and rebuttals. This is not a stagnant field, and no side has won (though there are several theist arguments that have no good rebuttals yet.)
In your link, rebuttal 1 shows that the author does not understand what is meant by "Cause," because radioactive decay absolutely has a cause. I don't like Craig's argument because the premise "The Universe Had a Beginning" is harder to defend than other premises, and I will not defend WLC's Cosmological argument. A flaw with Rebuttal 2 is that not every event needs to be separated from its cause in time, there are many causes that occur concurrently with the event it causes, like all Essentially Ordered Causes. My ire for Rebuttal 3 increases every time I see it. Just going to quote Feser on this one:
“What caused God?” is not a serious objection to the argument.
Part of the reason this is not a serious objection is that it usually rests on the assumption that the cosmological argument is committed to the premise that “Everything has a cause,” and as I’ve just said, this is simply not the case. But there is another and perhaps deeper reason.
The cosmological argument in its historically most influential versions is not concerned to show that there is a cause of things which just happens not to have a cause. It is not interested in “brute facts” – if it were, then yes, positing the world as the ultimate brute fact might arguably be as defensible as taking God to be. On the contrary, the cosmological argument – again, at least as its most prominent defenders (Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al.) present it – is concerned with trying to show that not everything can be a “brute fact.” What it seeks to show is that if there is to be an ultimate explanation of things, then there must be a cause of everything else which not only happens to exist, but which could not even in principle have failed to exist. And that is why it is said to be uncaused – not because it is an arbitrary exception to a general rule, not because it merely happens to be uncaused, but rather because it is not the sort of thing that can even in principle be said to have had a cause, precisely because it could not even in principle have failed to exist in the first place. And the argument doesn’t merely assume or stipulate that the first cause is like this; on the contrary, the whole point of the argument is to try to show that there must be something like this.
It is not special pleading, it's basic logic. The Causal Principle is defined as "whatever begins to exist has a cause." This is a good defense of the Causal Principle. If someone can give a very good argument that A)There exists a series of causes and effects and changes, B) It is not the case that the series has an infinite regress, and C) It is not the case that its members are joined together like a closed loop, then they have given a very good argument that D) Therefore, the series has a First Cause and a first change. And many people have indeed made very good arguments on this, here is one of the latest
If there is a first, uncaused-Cause, and whatever begins to exist has a cause, then the first uncaused-Cause did not begin to exist. If the First Cause did not begin to exist it is not some sort of special pleading to say that it has no cause.
If you then go on to say, "The Universe didn't begin to exist, therefore it does not need a cause," the universe is a set of things that change, and this provides a good defense of "It is not the case that the series has an infinite regress."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
Are you referring to me linking to "A Review and Critique of Research on Same-Sex Parenting and Adoption?" Because that is a literature review on the research of Same Sex parenting. I didn't dismiss it, it was my supporting document. You don't need to read the whole thing, just the abstract provides a basic gist:
Studies conducted within the past 10 years that compared child outcomes for children of same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents were reviewed. Numerous methodological limitations were identified that make it very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the effect of parental sexual orientation across adoptive families. Because of sampling limitations, we still know very little about family functioning among same-sex adoptive families with low or moderate incomes, those with several children, or those with older children, including adolescents or how family functioning may change over time. There remains a need for high-quality research on same-sex families, especially families with gay fathers and with lower income.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
Yes, please present me with that evidence? The whole comment was a request for the iron clad evidence.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6mo ago
Now that I'm near my computer I am more confident that I can reject the idea that all the Jewish immigration during the Ottoman empire were Zionist settlers, but rather the majority were still refugees during this era.
The First Aliyah was assisted and funded by Zionists, but as Wikipedia states:
Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine from Eastern Europe occurred as part of mass emigrations of approximately 2.5 million people[12] that took place towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. A rapid increase in population had created economic problems that affected Jewish societies in the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Galicia, and Romania.[7]
Persecution of Jews in Russia was also a factor. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated, and the authorities blamed the Jews for the assassination. Consequently, in addition to the May Laws, major anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. A movement called Hibbat Zion (love of Zion) spread across the Pale (helped by Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation), as did the similar Bilu movement. Both movements encouraged Jews to emigrate to Ottoman Palestine.[citation needed]
Meanwhile, a large number of other Jews in the Ottoman Empire, primarily Yemen, moved to Ottoman Palestine at the same time.
The Second Aliyah was also driven by widespread emigration from Eastern Europe. Two million Jews emigrated, only twenty thousand went to Ottoman Palestine. There were many pogroms at this time, the most well-known being the Kishinev massacre.
The Third-Fifth took place during British rule, so I don't know if I need to keep going to make my point.
If I amended my above scenario to state "Some indigenous groups in less hostile South American countries helped pay for these people's flight to Wyoming, because they were one day hoping for a Native American State" does that substantially change the morality of these people's flight to Wyoming?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
I'm going to start referring to the philosopher's God as pGod, to disambiguate and maybe help distinguish the idea in your mind from any religious upbringing you might have had.
I have no idea what the difference between "God knows all its actions" and "God does not know its actions" are. What does it actually mean for an unchanging system to "know" a thing?
I think it can only be discussed analogously, and determined negatively. Meaning, we can be certain of what pGod isn't, and use all those "isn'ts" to develop an "is." It is so far outside our realm of experience as temporal, complex creatures.
When we know something, we are grasping its form and holding the form somewhere inside our self. As the originator and grounds of all forms, pGod grasps these forms in their most perfect way. That is what is meant by pGod knowing everything.
Also, is there any particular reason that we would expect that the universe we live in is one that is causally downstream of an instance of this specific type of god?
What specific type of god? pGod, the First Cause God? The arguments from casualty, rationality, motion, essence, etc all point to the same type of pGod. They are all arguments for the same God that Is, Existence itself, formulated differently to avoid different objections as they arise, to try to express the idea more clearly.
Or do you mean the omniscient, omnipotent, divinely simple God? The same arguments that make the case for pGod are then continued to require such things. As you can see above, the omniscience follows from the nature of the pGod as the ground of all things, that which is "proved" (philosophically, proof just means a logically coherent argument given certain starting positions) in the argument for pGod.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
It doesn't seem you're responding to what I'm actually saying so I'm not sure what productive conversation can be had here. I'm not arguing from contingency or motion. I'm not even making an argument for God. I did not say a particular actual infinity of contingent things is impossible - in fact I explicitly said it's possible and how ("brute fact")!
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
That there are real relationships within the universe itself, without which it would be something substantively different, indicates that this is not the answer. Classical Theism requires that God be "divinely simple," composed of no parts that could even be conceptually taken away.
But I will admit we are coming up to the edge of which arguments I remember comfortably. There are lots of distinctions made between types of relationships, causal, change, etc and I have forgotten more here than I remember.
Needless to say, if presented with the box described in the OP, I would open it in a heart beat! I have spent a decent percentage of my life trying to answer the question with the tools I have, and will undoubtedly spend a lot of time in the future on the matter (I have Gaven Kerr's "De Ente et Essentia" on my desk and am trying to psyche myself up for what some have called the best proof for God's existence yet.)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
I'm not saying "I can't imagine." I said, with the starting position of no contingent things, having an infinite amount of no contingent things does not equal a contingent thing. An infinite series of contingent things that don't exist cannot explain existence. That is what I said, that is what I meant.
Your example relies on a "brute fact:" at least one contingent thing exists. And that is an argument that some philosophers make! It may be true. It is a possible solution. The implications of accepting a "brute fact" haven't been fully unpacked yet but from what I understand it is a possible solution.
I see two possible solutions to the problem of existence: classical theism (at least one non-contingent thing exists) or acceptance of brute facts.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
But why is the typical person storing the calories as fat, instead of raising their temperature by .3 degrees or making them energetic? And if they are overeating, why are they not feeling satiated? When I'm satiated (not just "full" or "no longer hungry") I have no desire to eat anything at all. The idea of eating becomes repulsive.
You seem really confident that people are eating more now than is historically normal. Outside of war or famine, I've seen evidence that people in the past consumed many more calories.
Did the French eat less than Americans in the 30 year period when the obesity epidemic was exploding in America? The answer is absolutely not! The french “disappeared” an additional 214 calories per day per person during this time. This means that a 50 year old living in America in 1990 would be four times as likely to be obese as a French person despite being responsible for disappearing 2.4 MILLION less calories between the ages of 20 and 50.
It also looks like the median American ate around 3500 calories a day in 1939.
Do you have any evidence you've seen that we are actually eating more calories today?
I've presented evidence that the calories out side has changed, not due to activity going down, but due to people's basal calorie expenditure going down. The amount of calories someone in 2020 burns just by sitting on the couch is less than the amount of calories someone in 1920 burnt by sitting on a couch, and according to the researcher, "The surprising conclusion is we spend less energy when resting now than individuals did 30-40 years ago! The magnitude of the effect is sufficient to explain the obesity epidemic."
Even if we are eating more calories today, and this is due to increased convenient "hyperpalatable" foods, do you have any explanation for the decrease in basal calorie expenditure? (Keep in mind, this is not referring to total energy expenditure, it cannot be explained by saying we're less active today because that is not what is being measured.)
There could be three fewer stars in the universe, and the universe would still make sense as a concept, but the effects of the gravity of the stars would no longer exist. Within the universe, we can talk about things having cause and effect, firing a bullet really does cause a broken window.
The imagined God would not have such cause and effect internal to it.
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