Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
None of these one-liners, if posted individually, would come even close to meeting the thread's quality standards. I don't think combining them into one huge (and very unwieldy) post makes up for it. It's the same as posting them one by one sequentially, except the format makes it even harder to discuss. (After writing this, I saw that @iprayiam3 said basically the same thing.) If you didn't want any discussion here and this was just an invitation to chat with you, that belongs in the Sunday or Friday thread, not here.
Another problem with your list:
\28. “It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro
This is just asking how you personally should feel about the lawyers. It doesn't result in any policy prescriptions. Weird to include it together with the much more concrete questions like 7 and 19.
In general, you mix strictly normative questions (28, 39, 40, 48), strictly positive, empirical questions (6, 7, 11, 19, 22) and questions that are a complicated mix of both:
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9 requires you to define "feminist" (there are many very different definitions and settling on one, even just for the purpose of a single discussion, may not be easy) and "bad" (which requires an entire moral theory), followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions
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30, again, requires a moral theory to define what it means to "deserve" something and what is "fair", followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions; for example, two people may agree that the poor deserve to be poor if equality of opportunity exists and the poor are just lazy, but they may disagree on the empirical question of whether equality of opportunity does in fact exist; or they may simply believe, as you apparently do (per 51), that equality of opportunity is morally undesirable
Maybe there does exist a carefully-developed and safe PED stack which could significantly enhance performance without significant side effects, but as soon as you allow any PEDs, there would be a strong incentive to disregard health and take the highest possible dose. In the end, the ranking still ends up being a combination of genetics and hard work, except all the athletes have now destroyed their hearts and livers. It's a prisoner's dilemma.
Edit: If you allow cybernetic enhancements, implants, etc., you would still need some restrictions, otherwise a shot putter could just mount a trebuchet on their back. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and "no cybernetics at all" is a very natural place to do it.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
It isn't just the tens of billions spent on weapons so far, it is going to be tens of billions per year for decades.
This is nothing for the US.
The inflation, caused by this war combined with the raised interest rates to combat it, far surpasses the direct cost of the weapons.
The inflation was caused by money printing during COVID. The war has contributed very little to inflation, at least in the US.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
If you say that HRT is less harmful for children than sex with an adult, you need to be able to substantiate your claim.
Given that one is a medical treatment and the other a criminal offence, our prior should be that it is less harmful, and the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claim.
But okay, I'll try. Google gives me the meta-analysis article Hormone Therapy, Mental Health, and Quality of Life Among Transgender People: A Systematic Review, which concludes:
This systematic review of 20 studies found evidence that gender-affirming hormone therapy may be associated with improvements in QOL scores and decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms among transgender people. Associations were similar across gender identity and age. The strength of evidence for these conclusions is low due to methodological limitations
It includes four studies on minors:
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de Vries, 2011 reports positive outcomes, however, it only looks at puberty blockers, not cross-sex hormones
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de Vries, 2014 looks at puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery, and reports positive outcomes
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Achille, 2020 looks at puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and reports positive outcomes
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López de Lara, 2020 looks at "cross hormonal therapy", which I assume is the same as cross-sex hormones, and reports positive outcomes
This post has a summary of the long-term effects of child sexual abuse, including "consensual" statutory rape, with an extensive list of references. It says, among other things:
There have been numerous studies examining the association between a history of CSA and mental health problems in adult life that have employed clinical samples, convenience samples (usually students), and random community samples. There is now an established body of knowledge clearly linking a history of CSA with higher rates in adult life of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, substance abuse disorders, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Briere & Runtz 1988; Winfield et al. 1990; Bushnell et al. 1992; Mullen et al. 1993; Romans et al. 1995; Romans et al. 1997; Fergusson et al. 1996a; Fergusson et al. 1996b; Silverman et al. 1996; Fleming et al. 1998; Fleming et al. 1999). A more controversial literature links multiple personality disorder with CSA (Bucky & Dallenberg 1992; Spanos 1996).
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
You can't take back decades of false imprisonment, either. No amount of money can make up for that.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
People in the Twitter replies are suggesting it's a psyop, presumably to trick the Ukrainians into underestimating them. The Russians do have a reputation for maskirovka, but this seems too elaborate for that. Besides, the CIA would have surely found out beforehand, just as they did with the invasion. And what if the rank and file take it seriously? I would assume many are unhappy with how the war is going and would welcome a change in leadership.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
The only reason they had to do that is that their product wasn't much much much better than what existed in the market.
So if your product is only slightly better than what's already available, you're not allowed to sell it, and if you try, you get executed?
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
It's silly in general terms to implement population control for fear of mass famine - food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth. People suffering malnutrition are less fecund. That's the regime we lived under for millennia. Population only grew like 0.1% a year or less in pre-industrial times.
I don't understand your argument. Why try to prevent famine when you could just have people die from famine? Why improve living standards when we could just live the same miserable lives that people lived for millennia? Really?
I am also sceptical of the claim that "food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth". The poorest and most famine-prone countries also have the highest population growth rates. Not fertility rates – net growth rates after child mortality and all that. Don't bring up food aid because nutrition is still inadequate even with food aid, yet this hasn't stopped the growth.
Tarnstellung
3mo ago
The standard response to "modern music sucks" is that it's all survivorship bias, i.e., the music from the 60s that sucked was forgotten about. This could just as easily apply to political philosophy and everything else. Have you considered this possibility?
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
He was right that it would turn Russia against the West; he was wrong that it would be "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era". He was expecting a new Cold War that might possibly escalate into WW3, while the US has barely been affected by the current war. Kennan, having spent most of his career with Russia as a peer of the US, could not conceive how much Russia would degenerate and how little of a threat it would pose.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
This is too low-effort for the main thread. You should have either added a more detailed explanation or posted this in the Sunday thread. I'd suggest a better explanation in any case, because I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
"Eugenics" in the popular imagination means Nazis executing people with disabilities. Embryo selection is "eugenics" in a strict dictionary definition sense, but not "eugenics" as most people understand it.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Fascinating. Would it not be possible to just tell them explicitly that you were doing it for fun and not because you wanted to help anyone or were expecting something in return? Can the on debt be forgiven?
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Assuming your social skills are decent, and your relationship with the Black guy doesn't make this inappropriate, and he isn't too touchy about it, it might be a good idea to ask him what the etiquette is. Not only will you get your answer, but he will also likely appreciate that you cared to ask.
solome
Solemn?
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Stefan Löfven, a welder, was Prime Minister of Sweden from 2014 to 2021. He has no university degree and got his start in politics as a union official.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
There are in fact many things about which I know better than all my ancestors. The safety of lead plumbing, the causes and transmission of infectious diseases – the list goes on.
Anyway, how do you know the person you are replying to has no Greek ancestors?
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
If you are referring to the claim that Britain only got involved to defend Belgium, that is literally just British propaganda. They wanted to get involved from the very start and the Belgium thing was a convenient excuse.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
A dictator who murdered thousands and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of people is not benevolent.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I don't see the mechanism by which it would make you more physically attractive. If your intention is to tell women you did this, I expect it would only make you less attractive. They would think you are either crazy or lying.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Dark net operations can be taken down without backdoors. We know this because it happens regularly. Granted, it often relies on a stupid mistake on the part of the people running the show, but humans are a very reliable source of stupid mistakes.
Cryptography can't protect cryptocurrency. At some point, the magic internet money has to interface with the real world. Hasn't China banned cryptocurrency? I haven't really been following the news. Has it been effective?
I think you may not realize how widely used cryptography is. With HTTPS, every time you browse the web, you are using state-of-the-art encryption algorithms. Without encryption, if you logged in somewhere on a public Wi-Fi network, everyone sharing the network would see your password, as would your ISP and anyone in the long chain between you and the website's servers. The modern internet wouldn't work at all without cryptography, and if you make it available for general internet use, you can't prevent it from being used by the bad guys.
The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.
This is a ridiculously unrealistic scenario. It sounds like it was dreamt up by a paranoid, technologically-illiterate boomer who falls for chain email hoaxes that show up on Snopes. For one, only a handful of the most popular Twitch streamers manage to get a viewership in the tens of thousands, and the demand for people saying funny things while playing video games is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand for child rape and snuff. I also recall reading (I think it was in a Reddit AMA with a paedophile, it may have even been on /r/themotte) that money isn't a major motivator for the "industry" and that the people who produce those kinds of videos are mostly enthusiasts who make it and share it to raise their status or because they just genuinely enjoy it. (How heartwarming.)
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
The Catholic Church does have the disadvantage of having to stick to tradition and scripture to a certain extent to maintain credibility. The Mormons have come up with a brilliant solution to this kind of problem: if a church doctrine becomes unworkable because of social change, their leadership can just say they've had a new revelation from God and the dogma has been revised. This is exactly what happened with polygamy.
Tarnstellung
2mo ago
The fate of the newly liberated Arab lands after World War I was most certainly a political issue in the UK. There was much debate both among politicians and in the public. The British public was apparently very sympathetic due to the Arabs' contribution to the victory so official British support for Zionism was in fact very controversial, as was the Anglo-French partition and occupation. All this with the number of Muslims actually living in the UK being a rounding error.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
Is filing for habeas corpus after your client has been arrested because he criticized the president a technicality?
Yes, there is a lot of rent seeking in the American legal profession, but "all" is a strong word.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I have noticed that libertarians tend to use "government" without a preceding article. "Government collects taxes" where most people would say "the government collects taxes" etc. There are of course cases where articles aren't generally used, such as when talking about governance in the abstract. But in this comment from /r/libertarian, for example:
Government has been using the IRS to retaliate since its inception.
I think most would put a "the" at the start of the sentence.
I happen to agree with your overall point, but I think your post breaks basically every rule that this website has. This is not Rdrama. Your post is almost entirely sneering without any actual arguments.
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