orca-covenant
No bio...
User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
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]?"
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
9hr ago
This, of course, is exactly the same thing that leftist, or members of any other group, tell themselves -- when They break their stated principles for expediency, it's because They are treacherous faithless hypocrites; when We break our stated principles for expediency, it's because We really need to play dirty to win. As for principles like tolerance of differennt ideas, freedom of speech, or body autonomy, approximately nobody gives or ever gave a damn about them; a smattering of individuals here and there may care, but in practice they are ad hoc weapons against customs or laws one doesn't like.
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
10mo 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
2mo ago
IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?
orca-covenant
4mo ago
Ah, nevermind, then. Thanks for the context.
orca-covenant
4mo ago
That seems extremely dependent on fads of the time and initial axioms, honestly (which divine authority are you going to take? On what subjects?) -- are experiences of divine revelations less tied to what is currently popular than experimental results?
orca-covenant
7mo ago
Putting a statute of limitations on revanchism is a good idea, but not one very compatible with the establishment of the State of Israel in the first place.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
Moral teaching regarding what, if I may ask? I swear it's not a polemic question, I honestly know nothing about this matter.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
True, and fair enough.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
With that they can deduce my biological sex (with a karyotype) and my ethnicity (with finer sequencing), but they still couldn't find my specific identity unless my DNA is already in a database somewhere (which is probably the case for people for whom this kind of security is an issue) that they have access to (less likely). Tbc, this is hypothetical, I haven't purchased their services and I probably wouldn't go to these lengths if I did.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
but he kept using that term.
He kept mentioning it, which is quite different.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Under what conditions and in what contexts?
That is the key part: in such a case, the status of X as Y applies only to a particular context for a particular purpose. Formulating that question as "Is X a real Y?" obfuscates that by turning Y-ness into an inherent, universal, and permanent quality of X.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
The Orthodox Church (Roman or Eastern?) also took active part in quite a lot of that killing and torturing that RandomRanger mentioned above, though. If His Holiness the Bishop of Rome is the one who decides who does and does not count as a Christian, for example, I don't think you then get to claim that Innocent III o Julius II does not qualify as one.
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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