orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
"nobody is agitating for it and you are silly to agitate against it."
That's a perfectly coherent statement if you interpret "agitating for" as "wanting to mandate" and "agitate against" as "wanting to forbid" (or "keep forbidden"). Not that I think anyone in this thread wishes to ban the consumption of insects, but in many countries selling insect-derived products as food is currently illegal*, and one can wish to change this fact without wanting to force any diet on anyone.
"It's not happening and it's good" is not contradictory, either, if the two "it"s refer to different things. One can quite plausibly believe, for example, "forcing insect-eating is not happening, and permitted insect-eating is good".
EDIT: * With at least one universal exception being honey, of course.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
Group selection, AIUI, only works when selective advantage for groups traits is stronger than selective advantage of individual traits. This is generally not the case because 1) individuals reproduce faster than groups and 2) individual heredity is much more reliable than group heredity. Strong pressure on groups is not necessarily sufficient to counter these two factors. That said, the situation is different if the group selection is in fact kin selection, in which the component individuals of a group have a high probability of sharing the genes being selected for.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
I don't suppose anyone in this thread is going to consider the idea that attractiveness is largely subjective? This discussion feels like reading "Bananas are delicious, if you disagree get your head checked!" "What are you saying? Bananas taste vile, you idiot".
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Wouldn't that depend on the context the term is used? "Room for rent, looking for people with a prostate" I agree is bizarre and dehumanizing; but "People with a prostate should occasionally get tested for prostate cancer" seems to me pretty reasonable, and if anything more precise than any plausible alternative. Similarly, I wouldn't be caught dead using "people who menstruate" as a term to refer to women in general, but something like "people who menstruate are at a greater risk for anhaemia" is if anything better targeted advice than "women are at a greater etc." (I think, I'm not an expert on anhaemia), given that a fairly large fraction of women do not menstruate and therefore are not the subject of that statement.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
How many people died in the XXth century?
How many did not? For most of recorded history, one third of all born children died in infancy, quite often taking their mother with them; of course these billions died quietly, often unnamed and unrecorded, and a death tax of a child every three in nearly every household is not so notable and exciting as a holocaust killing a hundredth of that number all in one event. The survivors didn't even find it all that noteworthy; after all it was all natural, and probably the will of God. Now the death tax is gone from most of the world, and on its way to be gone from the rest of it.
Granted, Mao is still to blame for the worst famine in history. But famines with a death tolls in the millions were quite common before the 20th century; before mechanized agriculture and the Green Revolution, it did not take a mad ideologue to starve millions in India or China; it happened quite naturally whenever the weather was too dry or too wet or too warm or too cold for a few years in a row.
Smallpox killed half a billion people just in its last century of existence (its thirtieth, give or take). It killed a significant fraction of all humans who ever lived, and left most of the survivors crippled, blinded, or disfigured. Now it's gone; and nazism and communism and religious fundamentalism and all other deranged ideologies ever dreamed up have a long, long way to go before they even get close to the death toll of one of these perfectly natural facets of the human condition.
"Accept nature", if taken as seriously as those other slogans, could be stained with quite a lot more blood than "proletarians of the world, unite" or "work will set you free".
orca-covenant
1yr ago
It's a lot less blurry at the edges, if nothing else -- at least ever since Neanderthals passed to the greater number. There's still ambiguity around the beginning and the end of life (e.g. fetuses, vegetative states) but there isn't much doubt on whether something is Homo sapiens or not.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
There was plenty of lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating in times and places when theistic faith was most ascendant. Do you think Renaissance Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Ottoman Empire had none of that? Members of the Sicilian Mafia all consider themselves scrupulous Catholics. You may say they are not, in fact, good Catholics (and I would agree, and AFAIK so does the chief of the Catholic Church), but convincing them that God is watching them would not stop their crimes, because they already believe that. People usually think their behavior is either righteous or at least justified by the circumstances; the thought does not become "I better not not burn down that store, God would punish me"; it becomes "Let's burn down that store, it's what anybody would do in my place, actually it's a pretty good idea, God will be happy I'm not a pushover".
orca-covenant
6mo ago
then your definition of honor is so selective as to be meaningless, and I suspect it really just boils to people you agree with
If the goodness of a cause is too subjective to judge people from, what makes honor any better a standard? The concept of honor also varies quite a lot from time to time and from place to place -- it's not like one can't construct a coherent definition of honor that does not include Lee's conduct.
If this description is accurate, than this would imply that Marines are a much greater threat to their own society than subway hobos, at least per capita. Being gratified by killing and mutilation, and being likely to uncontrolledly resort to it upon provocation, sounds far, far worse than being unable to hold a job and a home or being numbed by drugs.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
AFAIK, the kind of grammatical gender familiar to speakers of European language (he/she/sometimes it) is a peculiarity of Indo-European (Hindi, Farsi, European languages except Basque, Finnish and Hungarian) and Afro-Asiatic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) languages. Most languages of other families either have very different "gender" classes (e.g. the prefix system of Swahili, the noun classes based on shape and appearance in Navajo) or none at all.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Which trans men are not.
That's the whole point of contention, though. From how you're constructing the definition, I assume you don't think being capable of impregnating a woman is a necessary feature of being a man, since many people who cannot do that are generally regarded as men. So you, correctly, broaden the definition by stating that it's enough to belong to the same general "natural" category as people who can father children. But where are the borders of that category (assuming it even has borders and doesn't gradually fade away at the edges)? In a pro-trans perspective, trans-men are, indeed, members of the category that can impregnate women, even if they can't individually do that themselves. Your definition does not forbid this.
orca-covenant
5mo ago
If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.
Because in this case they see a reason other than grossness to make it illegal. It is certainly a progressive tenet, although one that many people who call themselves progressives often forgo, that one should not be punished only for behaving in a way that others find gross or distasteful. It does not follow that no behavior that others find gross or distasteful should ever be punished. AIUI (might be mistaken), the Bible forbids murder on the grounds that it offends God to destroy something that is created in His image. This rationale makes no sense if one does not believe in the divine creation of humans. Nevertheless, people who don't believe that still have reasons for wanting murder to be forbidden and prosecuted. It does little good to say "But you're fine with sinning against God's creation in this case [eating blood pudding], so why are you not fine with sinning against God's creation in this other one [mass shooting]?"
I realize this is an extremely minor and tangential point, but...
Take another example - "evolution is just a theory." A Bible basher may take this expression to mean that "evolution is just a guess," whereas a scientist may understand this phrase to mean, "evolution is a falsifiable hypothesis that has been verified through empirical study and evidence." The Bible basher simply does not understand the academic definition of the term "theory;"
... every "Bible basher" I've met to date knew quite well what "theory" means in a scientific context; "evolution is just a theory" are not, in my experience, the words of scientists expressing a properly humble understanding of the physical world, but of precisely the people who need the scientific definition of "theory" explained to them.
EDIT: I'm open to seeing counterexamples, of course.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
Problem is you have no way of telling which action results in less suffering.
It's certainly easier to check, with a confidence high but lesser than 1, whether an action results in suffering than whether it's inherently Virtuous or whether God approves of it.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not.
If you're of the view that physics is the only science worth of the name, perhaps. It's absolutely not the case for biology. If you could see from the inside what a mess taxonomy is, to mention one subfield...
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Agreed -- in my (certainly imperfect and second-hand) understanding, even if the Overall Culture is broadly opposed to LGBT discrimination, most of it occurs in local/familiar settings where the OC has little reach.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn?
One is strictly dependent from a specific, non-replaceable (with current technology) human body, the other is not. You can agree or disagree that this is morally relevant, but this is a significant difference between a fetus and a newborn. At the very least, it implies a very different distribution of costs.
Plus, birth as a Schelling point -- the development from a single cell to basically-a-newborn and from a newborn to a fully sapient human are both gradual, hazy, and complex, while birth is an unambiguous, easily observable discontinuity.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
Why should nice people who happened to catch jury duty need a splash of Smith's blood on them?
Because they're the ones who voted to spill it, presumably.
orca-covenant
5mo ago
Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.
I don't know. The physical problem with sustained inbreeding is the pathologies that occur when recessive genes with the same harmful mutation are paired together, and low genetic diversity in a group makes it more vulnerable to pathogens and less flexible when conditions changes. It's not absurd to make an analogy with cultural and social diversity. If people get all their memes from the same metaphorically-inbred pool than deleterious memes are harder to identify and lose, and it becomes harder to generate new ones. A society with low cultural and intellectual diversity would allow viral memes to spread more easily, would be very vulerable to social pathologies that different societies could avoid, and would have fewer resources to deal with changes in circumstances.
orca-covenant
9mo ago
The two things could still be mutually excluding possibilities: If it's impossible for a thing to exist without a cause, than the Uncaused Cause is impossible too, much like a circumference-less circle is impossible; if that's not the case, then there's no reason there must be only one from which everything else is caused. You can, of course, say that everything needs a cause to exist except for a special uncaused being that is an exception to the general rule; but then the statement collapses to "assuming that one and only one Uncaused Cause exists, then one and only one Uncaused Cause exists".
Not exactly the same career, but -- won't someone who spent most of their youth learning no skills that are not crime-related, socializing with nobody except other criminals, and is actively discouraged from finding non-criminal jobs and forming non-criminal social connections even after leaving prison, be rather unlikely to become a highly productive member of society, even if they strongly wish to?
orca-covenant
11mo ago
There's an interesting hypothesis (postdating Diamond? I think I loaned out my GGS copy a decade ago and never ended up getting it back...) that potatoes (even better nutritionally than corn) might not have been an advantage for civilization in particular because "leave it in the ground until you need it" doesn't reward the sorts of planning and storage and trading and so forth that lead to large scale social organization ... but maize is the same sort of "harvest it in season and dry it and store it" crop as the Old World grains.
Sounds like a hypothesis mentioned in James Scott's Against the Grain. (Although, weren't potatoes a staple on the famously centralized Inca empire? I might be wrong)
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art.
Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.
If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...
I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.
... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.
This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.
I feel it would be a strange choice to represent Americans as a whole by a man who fought in a war specifically to not be American. (Assuming by "America" you refer to the United States of America and not to the American continent as a whole, but in the latter case I don't see how you can't consider Hispanics to be not American too). I'll admit I'm not American in either sense, so there might well be a third interpretation I haven't thought of yet.
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