mdurak
2d ago
Given how divided the country is already due to the culture war, how do you see the country getting back to agreeing on a single myth?
mdurak
2d ago
I see. So are you arguing that the monolith itself is secure in its power (everyone wants to see it hold), but Xi himself is not (everyone wants his spot), and therefore Xi must use the monolith to control the popular narrative?
mdurak
2d ago
For example, if a state legalizes marijuana, then cops can no longer use the smell of marijuana alone to establish probable cause for searching a vehicle. Or if it's legal in a state to carry a concealed firearm (especially permitless carry) then cops can no longer "stop and frisk" a suspect based on someone saying they're armed, unless they also say they're committing a crime in some way (the standard is armed and dangerous).
Well, duh? I don't see how any of those examples are relevant. That's exactly how you would expect the second-order effects of those laws to propagate throughout the legal system.
If we allowed murder in the case of consent, there would be a huge incentive to create fake notaries or otherwise fake documentation supporting the murder
Not a problem because notaries are appointed by the state. How would you even have fake notaries? If the state doesn't recognize the notary then obviously the notary's testimony or signature is worthless.
It really feels to me like you're overcomplicating this. Okay, let's say the US legal system is too fucked up to make this workable. Fair enough, the US legal system takes a lot of good ideas and fucks them up, like allowing for the capture of regulatory agencies. Doesn't mean that regulating industries is a bad idea in and of itself, just means that the US is bad at doing it.
You can throw at me all the nitty gritty problems that might exist in some hypothetical poorly implementation version of them, and okay, I'll grant you that such a piss poor implementation is a really bad idea. I don't see how that changes anything at all.
mdurak
2d ago
- The only thing you said was "Marshall Plan." That by itself is unworkable for obvious reasons. Now you're adding "AI police state" into the equation. That changes things. So you'd support Israel unilaterally imposing an AI police state on Gaza then? Because that would go far and above Israel's current actions, which you already do not support.
- Your blessing is relevant for reasons I'll mention below
- Because I assumed you only support things that are fair, unless you oppose Israel's actions for reasons other than fairness, in which case my bad, I assumed incorrectly.
- What workable solution have you provided?
make Gaza not a shithole disaster
How? You already do not support Israel's current actions in Gaza.
How many times have the Israelis been surprise attacked, swore "never again" and then dropped the ball and been surprise attacked?
Yes, because they keep not finishing the job, and a large part of the reason for that is external pressure.
This actually isn't my job
It is your job if you want to complain about someone not doing a good enough job. Either provide a better way for them to do their job, or stop complaining about the job they're doing. Otherwise you're simply showing your bias.
So why don't you justify why the current Isreali paradigm is such a great solution, given it's complete failure to fix this so far?
It's not a great solution, but it's one of the least terrible ones available to Israel given the constraints Israel has to operate under. I'm not the one criticizing them for their actions, I'm fine with them as they are.
Frankly, I've done quite a lot of explaining, and you've essentially just said "erm, no".
I can say the exact same of you. You're finally giving me something more to work with. It still leaves a lot to be desired, but at least we seem to be moving somewhere on this discussion.
mdurak
3d ago
The first one I've addressed as unviable.
The second one you don't support.
Unless there is a viable alternative option that you support, how is it at all fair to say
Israel... is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically
Either provide a workable alternative you'd actually support, or do not complain when the only reasonable course of action is taken.
mdurak
3d ago
Well, my fellow human, I too have observed plenty of humans. Care to elaborate on which specific observations lead you to which specific conclusion?
I'll start. I've met plenty of guys who act honorably and without bad motives towards women. I've met plenty of women who act the same way towards guys. Therefore I am inclined to believe that it is very possible for a woman to act that way towards an underage boy.
mdurak
3d ago
How do you want to define “best” in this discussion?
Good question. I suppose that would be, what gives me the most accurate mental model to work with? Modeling NK as "democratic," for example, would not be very accurate at all for any reasonable common understanding of the word "democratic." You'd have to construct so many epicycles to make that model work that it's much easier to model NK as simply being a very undemocratic dictatorship.
Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned. Socialism is a system where the means of production are controlled by the workers. Now how both of these different systems go about trying to enact and carry out their aims is multifaceted.
Right, and when "private ownership" and "worker control" start blending into each other, what use do the labels have anymore? To go back to the beginning of this thread,
If you’re a lefty though, why object to socialism?
Well that depends on what is meant by "socialism", no? If by "socialism" you mean a Chinese-style economy where you can have more billionaires than the US, but the billionaires are explicitly subordinate to the state, then yeah I'm sure that's more palatable to a lot of people. It sounds pretty similar to a fascist Nazi Germany or modern Russia where the state has overwhelming power to direct industrial titans to work towards the state's goals, and neither of those were/are communist states.
mdurak
3d ago
That's surprising to me and good to know. I guess the external facade of a strongly unified country is just that, a propagandist facade.
mdurak
3d ago
Surely medieval and ancient rulers must have run into this problem too? I have a hard time imagining that they were much more self-aware about their own limited access to information than today's elites.
mdurak
3d ago
The theory goes that suicidal people are not in their right mind and if they were cured of their afflictions would no longer wish to die. By giving up this protection we would be causing thousands or even millions of unnecessary deaths.
That's only one way to look at it, no? By demanding such "protection" we cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
As I said, allowing this sort of defense at all would result in the second-order consequences of spawning endless litigation over whether someone consented to being murdered, especially if there was a high bar of evidence.
If ad infinitum problems crop up, that's a bug of the legal system, not of the moral code behind the legal system. Not every legal system has this issue.
Was the notary licensed at the time of notarization? If so then it's legit. If not no. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes of the court's time with a sufficiently competent legal system.
mdurak
3d ago
To begin with, China defines themselves along the way I described.
Right, but is a country's self-definition the best way to understand it? North Korea defines itself as a democratic people's republic, when it's obviously neither democratic nor for the people.
They see examples like Russia as a God that failed and China as an example of one that works.
Interesting. The internet socialists I've been in contact with in the past were the type to bemoan that China had lost its socialist way.
Call it what you want. Just as there are different flavors and varieties of capitalism, there are different flavors and varieties of socialism.
Fair enough. How is one to differentiate between a capitalist versus socialist economy then, when there can apparently be many shared characteristics across both? As I've mentioned, I'd like something more objective than "They claim to uphold the ideals of their ruling ideology."
mdurak
4d ago
Ok, so then what realistic and fair option do you actually support for ending this conflict?
mdurak
4d ago
The harm comes from the 14 year old not knowing what they're agreeing to and being too scared to say no once it starts.
Okay, the latter is something I hadn't considered. But the former: what do you mean by "what they're agreeing to"? They're agreeing to stick their dick into someone they wanted to stick their dick into anyways.
Because we as a society have agreed to grant as much protection as possible to everyone, even to people who are either stupid or mentally disturbed enough to want to be killed
I don't see why this is a useful protection to grant.
because we generally value human life.
But we're not talking about the general case. We're talking about the specific case of someone who no longer values their own life and actively wishes for it to be taken away.
There is also the fact that if consent was an exception, so many murderers would claim the "but they actually consented" defense which would drag out the (already unbelievably long) criminal justice process of putting murderers in prison.
This would be trivially solved by requiring a high bar of evidence for this defense. Can they produce the amount of documentation that Meiwes and Brandes had on hand, signed and notarized and what have you? 99.9% of murders are not going to have that on file.
mdurak
4d ago
it will have bad motives and dynamics
Ok, but why do you assume that? Or what do you mean by "bad motives"?
mdurak
4d ago
China is a socialist market economy with strong Leninist leanings
What are the defining features of the Chinese economy that get you to call it "socialist"? Given the state of the Chinese labor market and the bargaining power that Chinese workers have, it does not strike me at all as "worker control over the means of production."
WSDE's don't "get rid of" market signals and expressing a preference.
Likewise, I don't see any actual real-life implementations of that that don't seem like they'd be better described by the term "capitalism."
mdurak
4d ago
Huh. Would you argue that to be the case for all authoritarian governments then?
mdurak
4d ago
Every man understands this in his dealings with other men.
Sorry, what exactly is the "this" here? Every man understands that they're signing up to compete and potentially get fucked up?
mdurak
4d ago
These systems weren’t regularly allowed to fail or succeed on their own merits but were always being fucked with by outside actors.
At some point you gotta stop blaming outside actors for internal failures, right? The Soviets were large enough to stand their own and engaged in international trade. Still ended up collapsing.
Even China had to adapt to capitalism in the end. Worker control of the means of production simply doesn't work if you get rid of the market signals that influence the means of production -- and if you're adopting a market economy then you're not doing classical socialism anymore anyways.
mdurak
4d ago
That's a lot of resources to check out, thank you!
Do you actually believe in your religion's unproven claims about metaphysical reality and the afterlife? Or are you partaking only for the sake of the rituals?
And even if you can come up with some hypothetical where it is possible
I already provided an obvious one that myself (and I'm sure millions of other teenage boys) went through: horny 14 year old me jerking it off to a whole lot of different adult women.
Suppose it were somehow made known to me that I could have sex with one of those women, I just have to say the word and she would allow me to have my way with her. The consensual qualifier is already satisfied, so that leaves the manipulation one. Would she be manipulating me by simply allowing the act to happen?
I don't see how this is a weird hypothetical at all. I may not have been exposed to any such situations myself, but given the amount of news articles where an adult woman was caught doing something like this, there are likely to have been far more unrecorded instances of this happening where an adult woman was not being manipulative, unless your definition of "manipulation" is far more expansive than mine.
mdurak
4d ago
Except for "developmental vulnerability", by which I assume you mean damage to underdeveloped internal organs, doesn't everything else (pregnancy, reputation, etc.) also apply to really old geezers dating really young adult women?
Also, I wouldn't be so sure about legal risks, given that even a 15 year old boy was ordered to pay child support to a 34 year old adult woman. But that seems almost tautological: it is immoral to fuck a child because society might hurt the child if you do.
mdurak
4d ago
Ok, I agree with most things you say, but just to clearly separate out the practical rules that must be put in place to protect the median case, versus the purely ethical side of things:
Is it or is it not fine for a 14 year old who wants to fuck a 30 year old to be allowed to fuck the 30 year old? If not, where is the psychological harm coming from?
This is similar to why you can't consent to being murdered, and murderers who only murder "consensual" victims are still murderers who are still imprisoned for murdering people.
But why? Why should it be illegal if there's ample documentation that the person being killed actively consented to and wanted to be killed?
mdurak
4d ago
You can't "Marshall plan Gaza" when the aid money is just going to get funneled into Hamas.
As for "actually genocide it fr",
I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically.
You would start ethically supporting Israel if they went even further than doing things that you find impossible to ethically support?
Well, I feel like many men would be fine without true love then. Better a partner that stays without agency than a partner that leaves with it. See the number of historical societies that have had severe restrictions on divorce.
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