SSCReader
1mo ago
Yes but to an extent everyone is an amateur alligator wrestler. Some people overeat, some people smoke, some people drink, some do extreme sports, or sports in general, some drive too fast, or pilot light planes and so on and so forth.
There are very few people who are utterly viceless when it comes to activities that increase the risk of illness or injury.
SSCReader
1mo ago
It is in fact possible. Why wouldn't it be possible? I do it all the time.
Most cooking is not a high decibel activity.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Even if that kind of idiosyncratic statement was true, so what? You just said society isn't real, so if my family wants to outwork your family then you have no say. Society is what sets norms around what is reasonable behaviour. If it doesn't exist then everyone gets to set their own norms, no?
SSCReader
1mo ago
Sure, but with an absolute position i only need a thin expansion to disprove it. And of the if the French could and so could the Spanish, then it seems like the Ottomans could have and so on and so forth.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Sure, but there is a large gap between no-one else can do it and anybody else can do it.
Your claim was no-one else, my claim is likely someone else. I don't claim it is everybody else.
If you're claiming only this specific idea of gravity could do x, probably yes. The US was a huge mostly empty resource heavy new frontier. It's why we called it the New World. I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.
If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.
SSCReader
1mo ago
The same kind of purity death spiral you see on the left,
Given the churches repeated and ancient schisming I think you have it the wrong way round. The left has the same sort of purity death spiral we see in Christianity.
SSCReader
1mo ago
You are not getting it -- this conversation never happens, people just do stuff.
That however isn't good enough. In order for the audits (some even by Republican officials) to match, it would have to be organized. Otherwise one person is paying homeless people to vote, one person is faking postal ballots from scratch, one person is faking postal stamps from the right areas on ballots that are late, one person is swapping ballots by faking damaged ones and the last is adding a tranche of made up votes to the reports. And obviously none of these people can rely on monitors being kept away because they aren't organizing anything. So you have to have someone else decide to keep Republican monitors away even though they have no idea anyone is actually cheating.
There will be simply too many discrepancies in too many places, so not only do all the auditors have to be on side to cover it up, they also have to know which things are THEIR side cheating and not the other.
It's simply not viable. Your options are one single lone wolf actor making small changes or an organized group. A whole swathe of lone wolf actors acting independently is not going to work.
If Democrats can indeed even with no communication, cheat undetectably individually and then cover up something they don't even know is happening, and convince Republicans to also participate in the cover up while not saying anything to anyone, then quite frankly elections are the least of your worries because Democrats have evolved into a psychic species and we're going to be manifesting Daemons from the warp any day now.
SSCReader
1mo ago
How do wokies deal with the very common idea of "You don't like thing x, but you have to do thing x as part of your job / role / responsibility?" They don't, the cry out "oppression!"
I wager most of them just get on and do it. We could also turn that around of course. Christians sometimes refuse to do their jobs and cry oppression (Kim Davis and gay marriage?), and often complain about being persecuted for their beliefs. So it goes. It's nothing to do with being a religion pseudo or otherwise, just that people who believe things strongly enough understandably may not want to violate their beliefs. And if forced to will often complain about it.
Nothing special about wokeness in that regard.
SSCReader
1mo ago
I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
I would certainly agree with that!
SSCReader
1mo ago
Yeah it's maybe not perfect. But if you must convince every single person the election is legitimate, then one person (the heckler equivalent) is able to unilaterally undermine the legitimacy of the election. Much like a single heckler can unilaterally silence a speaker. It's not quite tyranny of the majority either, I agree.
"In discourse, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced."
SSCReader
1mo ago
The Democrats acted in a way that was indistinguishable from how you would act if you did do something wrong.
As did the Republicans as I showed you an example of.
In a democracy run by rationalists with good faith politicians and rational voters, the responses should be "let's audit" I agree. That is not the world we are in. So it is not the response you should expect. Because it is not what Republicans would do in return as they demonstrated perfectly. That is the the framework everyone's actions need to be interpreted within.
But your point was all about the fact that persuading had to be done, not anything beyond that. And Republicans failed at that harder than Democrats did.
And you may well not fix flaws! They might be too expensive to fix or have other trade offs. Remember there are two competing axes of voting legitimacy, maximizing legitimate voters and minimizing illegitimate voters. Those trade off against each other. There is no objectively correct answer. It's a values choice. And within our non-good faith framework, Democrats would be crazy to do anything to reduce turn out even fractionally if they think high turn out helps them. Likewise Republicans would be crazy to do the opposite.
As PA demonstrated, Republicans took an act they erroneously thought would help them, then flipped on it as soon as they discovered it would not. That is the framework our democracy operates within. No-one is operating in good faith. They are all acting for what will help them most. Expecting the Democrats to rise above when Republicans do not is an isolated demand for rigor.
Your good faith framework might be nice (I'd surely prefer it!) but it is not the world we are in and both Democratic and Republican politicians need to act accordingly. And they largely do.
I think you are massively over-estimating the "future death of America" issue here. Democracy will continue, politicians will continue to be conniving rats (in my direct experience of working with national level politicians!) and that the best we can do is set one group of conniving rats against the other such that they broadly even out, by attempting to out connive each other.
SSCReader
1mo ago
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
You can't persuade everyone of anything, so this is just the heckler's veto writ large. And your own view can just be flipped, if persuading people is the only measure.
Democracy does require consensus, so YOU (the generic you, not your own personal self) need to be persuasive and to make everyone believe the elections were NOT free and fair. If you cannot convince enough people, then they stand.
See how that works? Republicans pushed for mail in voting when they thought it would help them, then flipped to calling the laws they themselves passed as being unconstitutional (see PA, below), those are not the actions of people trying to build consensus and persuade people objectively that the election was rigged. They are the actions of political partisans seeking advantage.
So they were not persuasive. They failed to persuade the majority the election was rigged. Time and time again expansive claims were walked back. If you want to blame anyone, blame those who claimed they had rock solid proof repeatedly then demonstrated they were untrustworthy. As much as you think Democrats need to persuade you the elections were fair, you also need to persuade them that they weren't. And from Sydney Powell to Rudy Giuliani, to Dan Moul a terrible job was done.
You may be examining this objectively and deciding what would help you trust the process better, but unfortunately many of your fellow travelers were not. So the consensus stood, because your side failed to persuade them.
"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021.
"So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says.
Moul is one of 11 Republicans in the state House who are claiming in the lawsuit that the mail-in voting provisions in Act 77 that they voted for three years ago are unconstitutional.
"We pass bills all the time. Do we go back and check every single one to make sure it stays within the confines of the constitution? We'd never get anything done if we did that," Moul says."
Why should we trust Republicans on this matter who vote for a law (because they thought it would help rural turn out and thus Republicans), then "realize" it is in fact unconstitutional and whose excuse is basically: I just voted it for it, I didn't check it was actually in line with the Constitution I was sworn to uphold, right after it becomes a big deal about giving Democrats an advantage? Suspicious isn't it? Almost enough to persuade you that it wasn't anything to do with fairness or election security, just who got the advantage.
And finally. If your argument is that consensus must be reached then:
"Recent polling shows roughly 28% to 36% of the overall U.S. adult population express ongoing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election"
It was. The majority of people do not believe the election was rigged. They were persuaded. It can't be a requirement to persuade everyone, especially when it becomes a partisan issue. 18% of Americans think the moon landings were faked. 20% think the government is microchipping them. A third of Americans think the FDA has a bona fide cure for cancer they are hiding.
Persuading everyone simply cannot be the standard. And if it were, well your side also failed to meet that standard, significantly more so in fact. That's quite a lot of persuading that still needs to be done for your consensus.
"Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
SSCReader
1mo ago
Correct. Though of course if no-one hears you, or no-one who cares hears you then it's a moot point. It's rude/mean but nothing will happen.
I suppose unless you are a Christian or similar in which case God might be taking notes regardless.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Assuming for the sake of discussion that it's "mean" to "misgender" someone, are you saying that this applies to all conversations, discussions, etc. everywhere, public or private, regardless of whether the person who has been "misgendered" is present or otherwise privy to the conversation?
Correct. If you call my wife a bitch I will consider it "mean" whether my wife is there or not right? I can take offense and tell you off on her behalf. I may not even tell her about it.
SSCReader
1mo ago
"Going along with trans people's preferences constitutes being nice to them; misgendering them constitutes being mean to them"
This is the comment your hypothetical was built off.
So if misgendering is mean/rude then your worker is being rude/mean first and his preferences for people being nice to him are overridden by him throwing the first punch as it were.
If it isn't rude/mean to misgender then this does not apply, but then our hypothetical Jenner would not be offended whether present or not.
So your scenario must implicitly accept the framing from the comment you were replying too. That it is rude/mean to misgender. Your response was that it would also be mean to critique the person for misgendering.
But if misgendering is rude/mean then it isn't rude/mean to critique the worker in return. Someone being mean, allows you to be mean in return.
Make sense?
SSCReader
1mo ago
No, I am not saying it is rude to refer to Bruce Jenner as he. I am saying in the hypothetical it was being considered as rude (or mean or whatever). And the rest follows from that.
Personally I don't care if you call Bruce/Caitlyn he or she. But IF it is considered rude then the person being rude/mean in this way, cannot then demand they are treated nicely.
SSCReader
1mo ago
If you remember I was just contesting your point that if being nice is a reason to use someone's pronouns then being nice should also apply to how you treat someone who doesn't use someone's pronouns.
"Ok, so if a worker is having a conversation in the office and refers to "Bruce Jenner" and uses the word "he" to refer to this person, can we agree that it would not be "nice" -- and in fact it would be "mean" -- to criticize, shame, discipline or otherwise sanction this worker. Because it's better to treat the worker the way he wishes to be treated and Bruce Jenner (or whatever you want to call him) is not in the room to be offended?"
If not using pronouns is rude then it is in fact acceptable to be rude back in general, whether the victim of the rudeness is present or not. That's my only point.
Whether using the wrong pronouns is rude or not is outside the scope of my argument. Just that your specific argument here is weak as you've framed it because courtesy is a tit for tat scenario. If someone is rude, you are now allowed to be rude to them.
That's the fundamental reason why trans-activists want it to be framed as a courtesy argument, because if they can frame it like that, then it is in fact acceptable to criticize or shame someone who is discourteous.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Calling someone an asshole unprompted is rude. You failed to read the room and did so in front of someone who cares about that.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Setting aside the pronoun example. If you and i are co-workers in a room together and you call Bruce Jenner an asshole and i don't agree with you then you've still committed a faux pas.
If I agree with you it doesn't matter of course (just like the pronoun example) because I'm not going to think you're bring rude if I feel the same way. These scenarios are only an issue when we feel opposite ways. You think Bruce is an asshole, I like Bruce. If I too dislike Bruce, or don't care either way then i'm just going to keep eating my cheesesteak.
But if you call someone an asshole, even if not present then you may be called an asshole in return.
"Bruce Jenner is my hero, you're the asshole!"
SSCReader
1mo ago
Not any ruder than you calling someone an asshole if they call you it first.
Or in otherwords the order of meanness matters. If we assume that misgendering is rude then the person being rude first can then indeed be shamed in return.
You shouldn't punch someone, but if they punch you (or someone else) you can punch them back.
Thats only if we are granting that misgendering is rude of course as per the hypothetical.
But no if someone is mean (however that presents) it is entirely fine to be mean back. They have forfeited the protection of courtesy themselves.
Thats why framing something as a courtesy issue is a powerful tool.
SSCReader
2mo ago
No problem, if you do decide to go, you can always ping me if you want advice or anything else to do.
SSCReader
2mo ago
The rope bridge is great, as is the Titanic museum.
I bought my wife a Titanic t-shirt with a bit of Northern Irish dark humor (Sure it was fine when it left here!) and the first time she wore it home in America she got told off for making fun of a disaster.
Too soon still apparently.
SSCReader
2mo ago
You could nip over to Northern Ireland, do Giant's Causeway and the North Coast and so on. Either a car ferry from Cairnryan or a 30 minute flight. Also you could take your brother shooting if you liked. Handguns are legal in Northern Ireland, so at somewhere like https://www.nitargetsports.com/ you can pay for range time and fire pistols, shotguns and rimfire .22 "mini-rifles" on an AR frame most likely. Might give your practice for scaling up if you ever go to the US.
I think you have to sign up as a member but should be doable.
Edit: Could also do tasting at Bushmills distillery which is excellent. If so hit up Tartine for Sunday dinner. They do amazing lamb.
Right, but everyone wants to minimise their own risk factors. Which is why the deal is we won't deny medical treatment to anyone. No-one can be trusted to objectively measure their own risks (I only overeat a bit!) against those of the people they dislike (they jump out of planes like lunatics!).
We are well aware that groups cannot be trusted to tell extreme outliers apart from non-outliers when social distaste is involved (as it pretty much always is) so our institutions have evolved to minimise that issue. Trying to go back to "this group doesn't deserve x because they do y" is opening the can of worms we just escaped from. We do it this way for a reason.
And smoking may kill people but it still puts a lot people in hospital for long painful treatment and decline. Smokers are not doing it so they die early in 30 years time after smoking 2 packs a day as some kind of honorable suicide. Plus the study that showed it was cheaper for smokers is contested. It was funded by Phillip Morris after all.
"This critique analyzes the methodology used in a study of the economic burden imposed on public finances in the Czech Republic by the consumption of cigarettes. The study was prepared by a consulting firm on behalf of the Phillip Morris Company. This critique, by using economic theory and a cost-benefit methodology, refutes the conclusion of the Phillip Morris study that smoking represents an economic benefit to Czech state finances. In fact, the correction of only one among numerous errors in assumptions and calculations in the Phillip Morris study leads to the opposite conclusion: Instead of savings of $150 million per year, smoking drains at least $373 million from the state budget annually, nearly.8% of the Czech gross domestic product. The net loss to the society is even greater if all pertinent costs and benefits are calculated properly. The critique demonstrates how to craft a rigorous economic response to common industry attempts to influence public opinion in which the industry employs specious or erroneous assumptions and data."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14982702/
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