PokerPirate
5mo ago
That's more-or-less my point. It's all ultimately mundane to the people who do it regularly.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'd be shocked if there was only 1 sample from the Oslo mine. This is a super trivial thing to verify, and I would have assumed both the US and IAEA at a minimum would have done so.
I did a brief read through the references in the wikipedia article and found a handful of non-French scientists who've published about Oslo, but I don't see any references to actual samples taken from the mine except the French one.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Ehh... I think you have a bit too much of a "soldier climbing over the top at the Somme" notion of physical courage. The other examples [1] of physical courage in the prompt don't have nearly the chance of resulting in a "cheap" death, but are still associated with physical courage. I think a more poignant military-adjacent take is that all these examples of physical courage can be explained away by "training" your body to react a certain way in the face of danger so that you don't need courage in the moment. For example:
-
Fire fighters practice running into burning buildings everyday. This may seem scary to an outsider, but after you've learned to do it safely, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You rarely see firefighters meaningfully risk their lives for strangers, and the captain would certainly scold them for breaking protocol afterward if they do.
-
Steelworkers don't start on their first day 10 stories up. They've been slowly building the building floor by floor, so that by the time they're 10 stories up, they're confident in their balance. And any violations of safety protocol are going to get them quickly fired.
-
The underdog boxer and the mugged man standing up for themselves are certainly putting themselves in real danger. But it's not the sort of danger that results in a "cheap death" so much as potentially very painful and longterm injuries. I'm sure that most people who do this also have trained for it in someway, but I can't know for sure.
-
The mother has trained her mind/body for years through countless small acts of service to her children in order to value their lives above her own. "Mundane" sacrifices like waking up for years at midnight, then 2am, then 4am to feed a baby and change it's diaper make throwing your body infront of fallen debris a no brainer. These mundane sacrifices don't seem at the surface to be too related to physical courage, but I definitely think they end up resulting in actions that seem physically courageous.
[1]: for reference, I'm referring to
The courage exercised by a soldier climbing over the top at the Somme, by a firefighter running into a burning building, by a rock climber attempting a difficult route with shaky fall protection, by an underdog boxer stepping into the ring in a fight against the odds, by a steelworker calmly welding ten stories in the air, by a man refusing to give his wallet to a mugger wielding a knife, by a mother using her own body to shield her children from falling debris.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'm trying to challenge your statement:
And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature.
I don't see how you can argue that a "traditional Christmas display" (such as the angels/trumpets linked in the OP, or the still common nativity scenes) is "fully secularized" while a Menorah is not. My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity, and I'd even argue it is much more minor than something like the nativity.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
sex positive traditionalist
This is more or less how I hope to raise my own children. It'd be nice if there was a catchier name though.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
The Menorah is a minor religious symbol and does not hold the same status in Judaism as the cross does in Christianity. The Torah is probably about as important to Jews as the cross is to Christians, and the Torah is not regularly displayed in public spaces.
It's true that Menorahs on public grounds have always been culture war, but I think everything else in your post is gross exaggeration.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
I think the editors don't allow links in news stories because it harms the website's pagerank to have outbound links to other (often competing) webpages. This is one of the many subtle unforeseen harms caused by google's monopoly on search that I haven't seen people properly discuss.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.
There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).
There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
FWIW, I am a Christian, and this line of reasoning was a major factor in my becoming a pacifist and leaving the navy as a conscientious objector. Killing abortion doctors seemed obviously un-Christlike, and I couldn't find a moral difference between killing abortion doctors and killing enemy soldiers. So I decided I should stop killing enemy soldiers.
I tend to agree that I used to worship the flag more than I worshiped Jesus, and that I see a lot of other Christians doing the same.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.
Christianity has a pretty strong tradition of requiring the "consent of the ruling authority" in just war theory. For example, Thomas Aquinas describes three criteria for a "just war", the first of which is that it must be waged by a proper authority. (The second is that the war must have a just cause and the third is that the soldiers must have a just intent.)
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Are these 3d printed guns remotely useful in combat? I can't imagine any plastic parts---let alone printed plastic---standing up to the pressures/temperatures created when firing a bullet. And AK47s are already dirt cheap.
I could see a 3d printed gun being useful for an easily concealable, single-shot assassination weapon, but that's not what a jungle guerrilla needs.
I'd love to hear what you think is "expensive" if you call daily devotion to those mundane tasks of firefighting/caring for an infant/etc "cheap".
More options
Context Copy link