aaa
2yr ago
He's going to appear in court, say "I took it by mistake I was tired after a long voyage", nobody is going to check if he has a similar type of bag and it's going to end there. It's probably even true. Either way nothing is going to come out of this.
PS. I'm surprised it even went this far. This retroactively justifies every time I double-checked the tag on my bag at the airport.
aaa
1mo ago
It's a little counter-intuitive how cars are far more likely to kill us, but we get more angry at cyclists.
Why is it counterintuitive? A car weights 175x the weight of a bicycle, of course it's more deadly.
aaa
8mo ago
TIL that religions removed by centuries and thousands of kilometers from christianity worshipped satan because some internet christian believes their mythology is actually real.
aaa
10mo ago
As western capitalism trends closer an closer to a command economy through mergers, acquisitions and consolidation you will have a harder and harder time arguing against communism.
About 5 companies make all beer. About 6 companies make all media. It's hard to really argue that single digit values of competition produce the level of innovation that a state run monopoly could never rather than simply producing collusion. It's hard to believe that internally the level of competence will not steadily trend towards that of the DMV.
aaa
1yr ago
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
aaa
1yr ago
I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.
aaa
2yr ago
But this argument is based on a particular interpretation of which portions of Marxism are salient (...) Specifics of the classes and their features and grievances do not seem terribly relevant to the question of how and why the ideologies operate.
IMO the contention that the salient portion of Marxism is not economic class is a pretty contorted view of how marxism has been generally interpreted in the past 150 years.
they appeal to the same people, they're pushed by the same people,
They don't, communism appealed very much to the working class. You may not see this because communism was basically illegal in the US, but where it did exist the parties were staffed by working class people and that's where they received votes. Wokism main centers of power are journalism and HR.
they attack the same important social structures in the same ways,
What would that be? I don't know where you are going with this, but often people say "the family" so I'll pre-empt that. All strong ideologies "attack the family" to some degree:
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in the 10 commandments, allegiance to the family comes after allegiance to God and to the Church
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fascism followed suit, proclaiming allegiance to "God, country and the family" (Dio, patria, famiglia) in that order
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Jesus says "For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother" as well as many others to the same effect
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Scientology practices disconnection from anyone who is declared SP, including family members if necessary
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Isolation from family members is a common cult technique
and the arguments against them are more or less isomorphic
Maybe for you.
aaa
1yr ago
PS. I'm glad that the religious right is making a comeback because maybe they can succeed in making sex negativity uncool again.
aaa
2yr ago
Google images "black dude sucking his own dick", tell me that's not what it looks like.
aaa
2yr ago
I've read it now. His story is weird but not impossible. If there is no sexual motive (which, if the bag doesn't have a garish floral motive, there probably isn't) then it's going to be even harder to prove anything.
aaa
1yr ago
You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.
The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.
aaa
2yr ago
I'd skip on Feser entirely and just read Logic and Theism by Sobel, which was written 15 years before Feser, presents the scholastic arguments in a modern, formalized way, and refutes Feser arguments, as well as approaching other types of arguments for and against theism.
That book is not recommended enough given how thorough it is.
aaa
2yr ago
You'll have to clarify, then. I'm not sure what you are talking about. Are we talking about morality of the individual (as in: the ability of an individual to know good from evil) or are we talking about the moral basis of laws? Something else?
aaa
2yr ago
If the price they report is right it could be this one: https://verabradley.com/collections/rolling-luggage/products/hardside-large-spinner-2813515185?variant=40622072627244 which does come with garish floral patterns but also in generic black and silver. All other models have one or two "boring" (sane?) variants. Regardless, none of this is a unique piece.
aaa
2yr ago
I'm also not sure why you are picking on transubstantiation in particular as a flaw of Christianity in general. That is not a doctrine shared by all Christians, it's just Catholics as far as I'm aware. So at worst it's a flaw in Catholic teachings, not Christian teachings as a whole.
Narrowly defined as the aristotelian explanation for the eucharist, yes, it is only catholic (although most catholics don't even know this). But the belief that the eucharist is some real magical thing and not merely symbolic is patristic and exists in almost all christian denominations, although there are theological differences between catholic transubstantiation, orthodox transubstantiation, consubstantiation, sacramental union and whatever else protestants have come up with. I would agree with characterising all of them as nonsense, however.
aaa
2yr ago
The first one also falls under HBD. Only the last one, that diversity is necessary for race-based democratic representation, remains. Which makes affirmative action into a race based spoils system.
aaa
2yr ago
The NRSV says "But if the slave survives for a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property." I don't know which one is more correct, but from my point of view it doesn't matter either.
someone who clearly has a lot of problems with Christianity for reasons I don't know and don't want to speculate about. Pain is pain, however inflicted.
I think you are misunderstanding me. I don't really have any problems with christianity, the point I'm making is that it's silly to think the key to true morality is in a book (or in a tradition) that is so vague and varied that it has been used historically to justify both the most virtuous and the most vile of acts. I even said the same thing of utilitarianism but I guess you were to blinded by my words offending you religion to read that part.
aaa
2yr ago
I don't think you understand the nature of the problem. In general european elections will ask each citizen a handful of questions (for example two votes: one for the senate and one for the parliament). The US has far more elected positions than the average european country and also likes to aggregate local and general elections all in one (probably because general elections happen so frequently). So a normal US ballot will ask the citizen to vote for national elections but also positions in the state and county administration and include things like: seats on the supreme and appeals courts, sheriffs, various public attorneys, one or more referenda questions, seats on the school board, things nobody knows what they are, like comptrollers, etc.
Of course they could just use two ballots, put the one or two national questions on one and everything else in the other and then use two ballot boxes, and then just count the national votes first. I guess it never occured to them.
aaa
1yr ago
this or something close to this might be right
Seriously? Sarah Palin was 49 years old 10 years ago so definitely not fertile. She was also not attractive in any conventional sense of the term.
aaa
10mo ago
I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
aaa
2yr ago
This is the Moldbug fallacy A descends from B, therefore A is B, you don't like A therefore you must also not like B. Ideas are all interconnected if you applied this principle rigorously you could refute western thought all the way back to aristotle, the trick is picking an arbitrary place to stop.
Wokism does descend from marxism but in a sense it also represents disillusionment with it, with the failure of class consciousness to materialize in the west and with the fall of the URSS simultaneously. Marxism says little about race and gender and is very preoccupied with economic class; wokeism is basically the opposite, to the point where you can make a corporate friendly version of it that disregards class entirely. Marxism is, in principle, materialist, wokeism is not.
aaa
1yr ago
It's about Natural Law. The problem is, moderns confuse the natural in "Natural Law" with natural as in "what happens naturally, what happens in nature, anything that happens that nobody tried to make happen on purpose" and that's the wrong kind of "natural".
Metacommentary: I wouldn't pursue this line of argumentation. At best your interlocutor will be utterly confused and think it's complete nonsense. At worst you'll have to end up defending extremely shoddy concepts of teleology.
aaa
2yr ago
I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience. Traditional moral systems usually try to maximize moral salience.
All ethical systems are isomorph, they come to the same conclusions on basic questions but can also be used to come to any conclusion on any real situation. The whole thing is completely irrelevant in practice. Deontological systems will have to have a bunch of vague rules to handle all circumstances, reducing to either virtue ethics or to a form of consequentialism. Utilitarianism has enough free variables and unknown parameters that will let you reach any conclusion. Virtue ethics usually comes with a big book of excuses you can pick from.
Also nothing stops you from subscribing to an ethical system and then going "well actually I'd rather grab the money and run anyway".
Consider Christianity
Yes, lets consider christianity, a religion that tells you to turn the other cheek but also that it's ok to beat your slaves as long as they don't die immediately, that says don't murder but proscribes capital punishment, that preaches poverty and used to practice opulescence.
I'm sure if you try you can think of a few big atrocities committed by devout christians, too. For example, let's say that we agree that heretics needed to die, was it really necessary to burn them alive, could we really not find a more humane way to do it?
If we are going by historical record I think there's no contest that utilitarianism comes out looking like a saint, but I think it's only had 200 years to do damage compared to millennias.
Mongolia and Georgia are very different from the average western country. Both countries:
Additionally Georgia's population growth has been negative for the past 30 years, if you don't count the bump they got in the last two years from the war in Ukraine.
In my opinion the fertility crisis is 100% economic in origin, it would be interesting to see where the increase of fertility is happening in Georgia and Mongolia. If it's concentrated in rural/low density regions then all it's doing is convincing a few people that live in very-low-child-cost areas (in the case of mongolia possibly in negative-child-cost areas) to have more. If that is the case trying to do something similar in the west will yield no result at all.
What I wouldn't do is:
No child subsidies. We're never going to be willing to spend the kind of money needed to make them work. Plus they are dysgenic, to make them not be dysgenic you'd have to make a regressive social program (rich people get more) and those are taboo.
Taxing the childless. This is the exact same thing as 1 just framed as to appeal to conservatives. The only positive thing is that you can make this not be dysgenic.
Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.
Push religion onto people. Religion is positively correlated to fertility so we can trick people into taking an economically bad deal (having more children) by brainwashing them into believing god wants them to. I think the correlation of religion and fertility is a mirage, more religious people just tend to live in lower-cost-of-child areas (living within an extended family both provides free child care and also makes people opportunistically religious). This is too long to explain but I think religion by itself suppresses fertility.
I don't think the problem is actually tractable. It's intractability is likely the true reason behind the big push for immigration we've seen in the past 20 years.
My extremely long shot proposal is this: socially normalize and encourage women to have children while in college, out of wedlock and with no expectation that the relationship will last and then dump the child on their grandparents (of the woman). After the first 3-6 months she's not going to see the child at all outside of holidays and a few sundays. This places the economic burden of children on people that are better positioned economically to handle it, who can live in less dense areas of the country (because they don't have to be near a job), it mostly removes the negative impacts on career (because she's still doesn't have one) and child subsidies can be added to the pension system and thus be regressive, because the pension system is the only social security system that is allowed to be regressive (hopefully nobody notices that we are doing this).
There is a strong social stigma against having children before finishing school, that it will make you forever poor (because it currently does do just that), so this is extremely unlikely to work.
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