domain:academic.oup.com
Corvos
1d ago
I like 最凶 better - you get the pun on さいきょう and also the slightly evil connotation.
The term that JP net culture uses for these sorts of videos is MAD
Good to know, I thought the M stood for music and it was the same as an AMV.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
To my way of thinking elephants are rarer than rats and so killing one should be a much higher bar to clear, but there isn’t a moral problem with shooting a depredating elephant from a helicopter in the same way that there isn’t a moral problem with setting a rat trap.
I think I disagree. There's a point of rarity, or even just majesty, at which I'm more upset by the death of an animal than the death of a human.
I'd consider it worse to kill a critically endangered species than to kill a random human. Because killing the endangered species gets closer to robbing and harming every human forever (leaving aside scifi Jurassic park stuff) while the death of any individual human probably doesn't.
Where exactly I draw that line, I'm not sure. Definitely when a critically endangered species population is almost unviable, every kill is one step closer to extinction.
But examining my feelings, I'd probably also be more upset by a dead bald eagle than a dead person, depending on the person, for purely symbolic patriotic reasons.
HereAndGone
1d ago
What the general population of Israel may or may not want is one thing. What the Israeli government is doing is quite another, and since they're the ones sending in the IDF to shoot people looking for food and water on the grounds of "desperate people didn't patiently form orderly queues and that threatened us with our arms and armour", they're the ones who hold the responsibility as Israelis.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, that was probably it. Same as with Rotherham - in some instances the police tended to go "well these are trashy little slappers anyway, how can you say they're being abused when they probably ran off with their older Indian/Pakistani boyfriend of their own free will?"
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, I can see the prosecution problem (is this prostitution? so are we gonna charge a 15 year old schoolgirl for being a prostitute? that's not gonna fly with the public) but it's also the kind of thing where if a father learns what some guy has been doing with his 15 year old daughter, at the very least someone's nose is gonna get broken.
Epstein was probably smart enough to get the kind of girls that were already into sex with boyfriends, even if underage, and drugs and the rest of it - that's why he used them to recruit other girls as in the Jane Doe anecdote. He wasn't out there debauching nice respectable girls by getting them drunk/high, he was targeting the kind of girls who were already colouring outside the lines, as it were. That's what gave his lawyers the edge in digging up dirt to discredit the victims and witnesses - after all, the girl had already tried to claim that the $300 was drug money, how could she be any kind of credible witness or complainant?
Still sleazy as hell, but it doesn't automatically mean he was running a literal paedophile ring. I think if he scoped out some potential partygoers were also interested in 14 and 15 year olds, he'd have been happy to hook them up (and record all the blackmail material) but I don't think he was doing that as a full-time service, too risky in the long run (as it turned out anyway). Plausible deniability would have been the name of the game: parties and events that were must-attend attractions for high society where he hosted attractive young women (the girls enticed in with promises of getting them started on modelling careers, and he had legit connections there with the Victoria's Secret CEO: "Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company") who may have been on the young side but were assumed to be of legal age, and if they were happy to be friendly with the attendees, and maybe if a pretty girl and a rich guy hit it off and they got intimate, well sex is no longer confined to marriage only and that's their own business, right?
HereAndGone
1d ago
French-Mexican fusion food
Vive L'Empereur Maximilian!
HereAndGone
1d ago
if a Tasmanian devil could talk, it might prefer to stay in the sanctuary, where it has safe and clean places to sleep, has food provided at regular intervals for minimal effort on its part, and even has breeding opportunities orchestrated for it
Do humans want to stay in prison, even "Club Med" type prison? Or institutions like mental hospitals and detox clinics? A wild animal might prefer a life in the wild, the same way that even the nicest prison would not suit a lot of people. Heck, we even have homeless people refusing to go into shelters not just because of the dangers and restrictions, but because they prefer living their own lives even on the streets.
HereAndGone
1d ago
"The rabbit has a pleasant face,
His private life is a disgrace
I really could not tell to you
The awful things that rabbits do."
What will make vegetarianism/veganism more widespread among ordinary people is not all the preaching in the world, it's the price of meat. Meat has gone up in price very fast here in Ireland, to the point that a morning radio show had butchers(!) on telling people how to make it go further, to buy (relatively) cheaper cuts, bulk meals out with lentils etc.
People may not give a damn about the moral worth of a cow or a pig, but if beef and bacon are too dear to buy the usual cuts and instead they're eating mince bulked out with lentils in stews and so forth for family meals, it's a lot easier to move towards "more veggies, less meat" in ordinary diet.
Anthropomorphising animals is natural, it’s probably fundamental to the way humans see and comprehend the world around us, it far predates civilization.
It's certainly natural, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. We developed psychological projection to help us assess the states of other humans, and even then it kind of sucks as a tool. I for one believe we have already met aliens, and coexisted with them for 200,000 years straight. There might be one in your living room right now.
Animism is natural. It's an outgrowth of our tendency to anthropomorphise everything, including natural phenomena. Is it immoral to offend the river spirits? You can't assert a harm you don't know exists.
those ‘closer’ to us intellectually (dolphins, elephants) and both intellectually and physically (great apes) have greater moral valence because we know that they have greater reasoning faculty, and therefore that the kind of moral standards we apply to young or intellectually impaired humans might begin to apply. ... With greater reasoning ability comes more understanding of consequence and empathy, which is seems likely many of these animals have in some form.
I don't see how a species having intelligence and reasoning faculty means human morality suddenly becomes applicable to it though. Human empathy and morality is not universal and is a consequence of our specific evolutionary trajectory, and you can't reason yourself into your most base-level moral principles or your emotional reactions to things, they just are. There is no reason why every intelligent animal should share it. I'm almost certain you've heard of the orthogonality thesis before (given that you're here), quite obviously this does not just have to apply to AI; it can apply to any agent at all.
I've long spoken about presentism and the projection of current moral values onto the past when it comes to historical analysis. When it comes to animals who barely even share the most basic of cognitive characteristics with us, I reject any attempt to moralise whatsoever. How can you even begin to judge something as a moral violation when it is not clear that the supposed aggrieved party would even consider it as a violation either, morally or emotionally? The range of possible minds is likely vast beyond belief, and all of humanity exists in a very tiny corner of that possibility-space.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s not about consigning them to death; I don’t believe we know enough about the natural world to morally eliminate a species unless humanity itself is threatened, in which case one’s first duty to one’s own kind applies. But it is about how we relate our own moral narratives to the animal world.
Corvos
1d ago
See e.g. the British Corn Laws. Those lined up very clearly with the aristocrats (who owned the land) and the farmers (who worked it) in favour of tarriffs on imported grain, with merchants / importers / speculators and urban industrial workers against.
Self-interest, life experiences and priorities often line up along familial, tribal and ethnic lines.
2rafa
1d ago
Anthropomorphising animals is natural, it’s probably fundamental to the way humans see and comprehend the world around us, it far predates civilization. We are animals and they exist in the context of our shared environment.
In the same way that we assign some moral value to human strangers far away (even if it is less than we assign to ourselves, our families, etc), we assign some moral value to non-human animals too.
Just as with people, their behavior is obviously part of this. Even independently from their interactions with humans (a dog that bites vs a dog that doesn’t), those ‘closer’ to us intellectually (dolphins, elephants) and both intellectually and physically (great apes) have greater moral valence because we know that they have greater reasoning faculty, and therefore that the kind of moral standards we apply to young or intellectually impaired humans might begin to apply.
General free will debate acknowledged, it is fairer to describe a chimpanzee as ‘cruel’ than a mallard. The dismissive might say that each is acting within its nature when it does something nasty, but the same is true of humans. With greater reasoning ability comes more understanding of consequence and empathy, which is seems likely many of these animals have in some form.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
827.04 Contributing to the delinquency of a minor seems to apply to dirty old men offering teenage girls cash for sex-adjacent acts.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
home-cooked French-Mexican fusion food made with wild game
I would like to humbly submit a request for you to share a recipe at some point.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
Why? No matter how successful a company has been in the past, any dip can be a long-term re-evaluation or even the start of the way to bankruptcy. Especially if you consider the average person asking for investing advice, thinking they can reliably tell apart an irrational panic that will soon be corrected, or a genuine problem that will have long-term impact seems foolish to me.
On the other hand, index funds can't really go bankcrupt. At most, it just stays lower than expected for an extended period of time before going up again. The risk/reward for buying into the dip seems much better here for the average low-knowledge investor.
I second @4bpp - this anthropomorphising of animals is and pretty much always will be extremely suspect. Mallards are one of these infamous species that supposedly participate in gang rapes - several males will pursue a female and attempt to forcibly mate with her, and as a result males' penises can shoot out with surprising speed, whereas females' vaginas will be corkscrew-shaped so as to make it more difficult to mate. Clearly something to feel disgusted about, right?
Except that female mallards actually covertly elicit this behaviour by intentionally flying over the territory of other males and initiating a chase, drumming up a fight over her, and the corkscrew turns of female mallards' vaginas actually are meant to let her influence the males which get to fertilise her egg.
Do mallards deserve death for this? Does the concept of "rape trauma" exist in such a species? Should the very emotionally-laden human concept of rape even apply? If it doesn't, how can you even tell what is rape and what is not in the animal kingdom? Animals in many cases are basically alien species and should be treated as such.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
The lost the intra-right culture war - BADLY, which means that if the right wins the big Culture War then the suit-and-tie crowd don't get the prize.
This is tied into actually dressing well being correlated with education/IQ/high-status white-collar work and so becoming left-coded as a result of the latest iteration of the Sort. Hence @die_workwear. The same is true of any high standard that requires consistent moderate effort to maintain - increasingly even ones that are explicitly right-wing like regular church attendance. (The most MAGA demographic is people who tick the Evangelical box on the census but only darken a church door at Christmas and Easter.)
In the world where MAGA have won the culture war, only faggots and an dwindling minority of aging churchladies wear tailored clothes or talk in complete sentences. Idiocracy was non-partisan, but in the current year Richard Hanania thought is correct on how the Brawndo-drinkers vote.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Yeah, consigning them to death over that seems like a pretty wanton projection of human values onto animals where there is little evidence that they would or should share them. By that standard, we would have nothing to say back if AI/aliens/some bizarro tribe of humans condemned our civilisation for some unknown-unknown moral failing such as encouraging paternal investment in daughters, or not engaging in performative child sacrifice as in that old Yudkowsky story.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
What's a "chit"? I think that's an Americanism.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
Oh damn, it looks like a month ago chutes stopped being unlimited due to abuse. The deepseek api is already very cheap (and yeah, faster) so I switched to it for insane rp, I should have guessed it couldn't last and checked.
PokerPirate
1d ago
Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.
I'm 6'2" and was 155 for a long time. I look skeletal in those pictures. I don't look much better in later photographs where I was 170. That's a 20-22 BMI.
BMI is a flawed metric to begin with, but especially so for tall people. And the medical establishment knows that, too, because it's pretty obvious. If you take any random population and plot their weight vs. their height, you won't get a height^2 parabola as your best fit. It's much closer to height^2.5. Which is entirely unsurprising to me, I never understood why anyone would assume that width/depth of the human body correlate strictly linear with height...
But classic BMI has momentum now, people know it and understand it. Most of them don't carry a lot of muscle, and aren't significantly more than a standard deviations from the mean in height. So I guess it's fine.
Still, using the waist-to-height ratio instead is probably an easy fix, and gives more reliable results, even for tall and/or muscular people.
Eh. Species have been dying out (and splitting off) since forever, and our technology to re-breed them gets ever better, especially for those we have non-ancient samples. Especially since the majority of endangered species are just small variations of very similar, non-endangered species that is simply more competitive, sometimes even so closely that they can crossbreed.
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