domain:archive.ph
Tree
2m ago
I’m a utilitarian, but even granting human-level moral worth to animals, I have no problem with cannibalism, in principle (avoiding the brain for health reasons, etc), so eating human-like animals is obviously fine. You are what you eat. The closer to us the life form, the more nutritious. It’s unnatural to eat grass and wood like vegans do. Say no to exophagy.
I was thinking about that watching Ravenous, where cannibalism gave you super strength and eternal life. There’s a great contemplative moment in the middle of the film where the hero lies in the woods wounded, while seasons pass and the cannibal just enjoys nature. In the end cannibalism was a tortured metaphor for colonialism and capitalism. Fine, those things are obviously awesome and bring eternal blissful life and immeasurable wealth. But cannibalism as a metaphor for the fire of life itself would work too. Get busy living, or get busy dying. Those who walk away from omelas are the latter. Are you so self-hating that you would scorn your own meat?
It is an absurd position to tell me that I am a twig or emaciated at that weight when I am well within the bounds of a healthy BMI.
By what measure? By whoever wrote the BMI definition(probably some ascetic quack), yes. By the light of modern science, no. BMI of 20 for a man is severely underweight imo (any connection to the topic above purely coincidental). All meta studies find lowest mortality in a BMI range of 25–30. Mortality for the (lower than BMI 20) is as high as the (higher than BMI 35) group.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3m ago
I’m guessing you don’t argue against background checks for buying a gun(is this guy currently on probation?). But what about the more in-depth ATF background check off fingerprints? What about requiring psychiatric testing? And, of course, do we require owners to have safe storage facilities so their guns don’t get stolen- people who steal them being, almost definitionally, among the categories you’ve articulated as shouldn’t own a gun.
Having laid out a slippery slope, you now understand why I argue against background checks for buying a gun. Gun rights are like speech rights; no prior restraint is reasonable, nor are special rules which impose some sort of additional burdensome responsibility for exercising the right (the equivalent for speech here is "stochastic terrorism").
I broadly agree that the right to keep and bear arms is pretty core to full citizenship in the west. But I don’t agree that that right is incompatible with gun control.
Gun control by definition vitiates the right to keep and bear arms. If I have the right to keep and bear arms I don't need to ask the government permission to do so.
hydroacetylene
7m ago
I would not consider Gustav thé crocodile to be evil- but at the same token, I would consider it morally obligatory to kill him if at all possible, because humans are so far above crocs in the great chain of being that it’s not worth having thé discussion.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
8m ago
Some societal stereotypes seem to be based on things that haven't been true for 10-20 years, and the updates are slow to happen. The "middle aged dude running off with the floozy from work and buying a red convertible" trope is indestructible, but I've personally seen more of the "woman loses her mind and gets divorced (or the opposite order), borderline abandons her kids, and goes on a years-long drunken sex binge" version.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8m ago
#NotAllDolphins
hydroacetylene
11m ago
It’s not uncommon, although it isn’t the majority, for native English speakers to use ‘meat’ to mean specifically beef and refer to chicken, sausage, ham, Turkey etc with the specific term. I’m wondering if that’s the origin of the confusion?
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
11m ago
ajuuiomml
12m ago
Veganism is a product of modernity that I imagine only exists due to industrial petro farming. The Jain are the closest I can think of, but they do dairy. Veganism is an impoverishing luxury diet.
hydroacetylene
14m ago
The interesting question you raise is ‘where do you draw the line on figuring who is a mentally sufficient non criminal responsible adult?’
I’m guessing you don’t argue against background checks for buying a gun(is this guy currently on probation?). But what about the more in-depth ATF background check off fingerprints? What about requiring psychiatric testing? And, of course, do we require owners to have safe storage facilities so their guns don’t get stolen- people who steal them being, almost definitionally, among the categories you’ve articulated as shouldn’t own a gun.
I broadly agree that the right to keep and bear arms is pretty core to full citizenship in the west. But I don’t agree that that right is incompatible with gun control. There’s even some euro countries which seem like they qualify based off of a quick wiki scan- and some blue states with theoretically laxer gun laws which seem like they don’t.
Pongalh
15m ago
"What will the effect be of this 50% tariff?"
"I don't know. Are we talking about Hutus or Tutsis here?"
You can see how un-illuminating this is pretty quickly.
Throwaway05
19m ago
I know this is a meme but it is one I've never encountered in real life (although I've heard about it often). Hard to tell if that is due to geography or era (these days most of the male doctors I know are terrified of being on the wrong end of woke crimes and are careful at work for that reason).
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
24m ago
I feel like i addressed @rae's objections about structure and LLMs just being token predictors within the body of the text itself. Eg
most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model. An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word...
@self_made_human disagreed with my definition of intelligence and approach to assessing it wich is interesting from a philosophical standpoint but also kind of irrelevant in practical terms. Fact is that adapability and agentic behavior are key things to consider when discussing whether a robot can replace a human worker, or if we're going to wakeup tomorrow to find out that Claude or Grok has suddenly turned into Skynet, and i don't think it's "hamstringing" my (or anyone else's) understanding to point that out.
@daseindustries just seems to be angry that someone would break from the rationalist consensus.
Though aditedly taking the week of the 28th off to go on vacation probably dindnt help.
Corvos
25m ago
I bow to your superior knowledge. I was told that 彼 and 彼女 as gendered pronouns were an innovation to allow translating European works into grammatical Japanese, but perhaps it's not so or it was a minor twist on an established usage.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
28m ago
I think the biggest logical fallacy (or questionable ethical framework) in her stance is damnation-by-association. If a chimpanzee has never molested another chimp, nor eaten it, does it make it an individually honorable chimp? What proportion of individuals must not have committed grave sin for the whole to be condemned?
This suggests an end-state which is a surveillance state for both farmyard and wild animals. I chuckle to think of a world where "cruelty free" chicken is certified on the basis of their moral behavior before slaughter.
I do not think the majority of chimpanzees have eaten another chimp, though orangutans and bonobos seem much nicer chaps.
If a chicken is raised alone in a coop, and hasn't pecked other hens to death, am I not allowed to eat it? Or should we only eat the alpha chickens, the matriarchs who dominate the rest? Once they're eaten, the next chicken down becomes the dishonorable alpha, and is thus fair game.
I don't know dawg, and I don't care. I just had half of one in a Nandos, and it's not done digesting. I will meditate on this when I have blood supply to spare.
Thank you for laying out your thoughts but this feels like the majority of apologetics - only convincing to those already convinced and skating quickly and lightly over the difficult points.
In particular you seem to pass very quickly over argument one. You lay out the anti-gun argument reasonably well:
- We allow people to have some dangerous things because it's not practical to do otherwise.
- Lots of unnecessary things are fine because they're not dangerous to anyone.
- Guns don't fall into either of these categories and so we ban them.
Then having clearly explained the main reason why lots of countries ban guns (they don't fall within either of the categories of object we usually tolerate), you don't refute it.
Guns and other lethal weapons are a unique confluence of incredibly dangerous and almost completely unnecessary. You seem to want to argue that banning things because they are unnecessary is a slippery slope, and that banning unnecessary things even when they are lethally dangerous is excessive because most people can handle dangerous things just fine. But now you've parted ways with everyone except the people who think that you should literally never ban anything, and those people are already on your side!
This is why most gun apologists either try to make them seem less dangerous (no automatic fire, strong license checks, short-range hunting shotguns or bolt-action only) or more necessary (defend yourself, defend your liberty); those arguments don't always work but they sometimes do.
Likewise for argument two. Your response to the argument that guns cause more people to die from suicide is, essentially, YesChad.png. Where's the argument here? I know someone who's suicidal; it's genetic and it runs in the family. If he had guns he'd be dead by now.
I'm reasonably pro-gun for a Brit and these arguments are doing the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. Also, it's just that classic American thing of happily insisting that all other countries are just pits of suffering and distrust and only (part of) America has achieved true civilisation. I'm a nationalist myself but really.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
37m ago
You're getting it!
You don't need to write so much to show that 2rafa's argument is risible, though I appreciate the rigorous formalization. I'd like to think the ridiculousness is apparent from my much briefer comments.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
39m ago
· Edited 31m ago
I think you are neglecting what to me seems to be the main argument against legal gun ownership, which is that the telos of a gun (especially ones that are not traditional hunting guns, which are legal in many more places anyhow) is to kill people. The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first), and given such a principle it doesn't seem hard to argue for the prohibition of a tool whose principal purpose is just that.
I don't see this value as introducing any obvious slippery slope in itself, and moreover your line of interpretation ("strip every single joy out of life") that aims to connect it to one can only work by way of trading a sacred value (no killing) off for a profane one (fun). The profane-sacred boundary in general is pretty good at stopping slope-slipping, and the argument that the weaker form of this slippery slope ("strip every single joy that grates against a sacred value out of life") is still all that bad has not been made.
This is an argument that you will have to contend with if you want to persuade people of this value system (which I gather is no longer solely a European thing, but has spread deep into urban globalised parts of the US). Of course, from over in Germany, there is also a lower-hanging question to ask: are you for speed limits on your highways?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
43m ago
Yes. The more Aryan ancestry, the lower the rates, as you'd expect from descendants of pastoralist nomads.
The further south you go, the more pure the Dravidian ancestry. Mumbai is halfway in-between, and Maharashtra is an unusually strict vegetarian state.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
44m ago
The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.
Certainly you can talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport. And that rather infamous "fire in a crowded theatre" case -- it actually concerned people distributing pamphlets protesting the draft as a violation of the 13th Amendment -- is not good law and has not been for a long time. The current law is Brandenburg v. Ohio, the famous "imminent lawless action" test.
This misuse of the "fire in a crowded theatre" incidentally demonstrates the disingenuous of those who use it to justify restrictions. Because on the close order of zero people have gone from "My new proposed restriction is OK because fire in a crowded to a theater" to "Never mind" when it is pointed out that Schenck v. U.S. has not been good law for over 50 years.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
45m ago
Jiro
46m ago
I'd say most of the same things for voting. Specifically, the only people who shouldn't be allowed to vote are people we don't trust with much of anything. Which isn't that controversial among the general public, but for some reason it is among rationalists.
Axioms:
- A1: Some humans commit murder against other humans
- A2: Murder is categorically dishonorable
Postulates:
- P1: If any member of a group commits a dishonorable act, then all members of that group are dishonorable
- P2: It is honorable to murder those who are dishonorable
Lemma 1: Humans are dishonorable Proof: By A1, some humans murder. By A2, murder is dishonorable. By P1, since some humans commit dishonorable acts, all humans are dishonorable.
Theorem: It is honorable to murder humans Proof: By Lemma 1, humans are dishonorable. By P2, it is honorable to murder the dishonorable. Therefore, it is honorable to murder humans.
Or, to progress further:
Axioms:
- A1: Some humans commit murder against other humans
- A2: Murder is categorically dishonorable
Postulates:
- P1: If any member of a group commits a dishonorable act, then all members of that group are dishonorable
- P2: It is honorable to murder those who are dishonorable
- P3: Performing an honorable act makes one honorable
Lemma 1: Humans are dishonorable Proof: By A1, some humans murder. By A2, murder is dishonorable. By P1, since some humans commit dishonorable acts, all humans are dishonorable.
Lemma 2: It is honorable to murder humans Proof: By Lemma 1, humans are dishonorable. By P3, it is honorable to murder the dishonorable. Therefore, it is honorable to murder humans.
Lemma 3: Humans who murder other humans become honorable Proof: By Lemma 2, murdering humans is an honorable act. By P3, performing an honorable act makes one honorable. Therefore, humans who murder other humans become honorable.
Theorem: Humans oscillate between dishonorable and honorable states Proof: By Lemma 1, humans begin as dishonorable. By Lemma 3, they become honorable through murder. But having become honorable, they are no longer valid targets for honorable murder (by P2). However, their past dishonor persists by P1, creating a paradoxical state.
I hope this illustrates how ridiculous this whole line of reasoning is. You may substitute murder for cannibalism here.
Stellula
50m ago
Is this regional? I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Mumbai and was surprised both at the commonality of ice cream/milk related shops, and how everything was vegetarian by default.
Supah_Schmendrick
54m ago
In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship.
This is a deep and incorrect elision of the same process - the denigrating and hollowing of republican citizenship into imperial subjection - that I am arguing is happening here, today. The socii did not participate in the roman centuriate assembly or plebeian councils, did not serve in roman offices or have any say in roman foreign policy, despite making up at times at clear majorities of roman armed manpower; in fact, the original premise of their becoming socii was that rome would not interfere in their cities' internal affairs at all, in exchange for a territorial guarantee and military mutual aid. In practice, this confederal relationship broke down and Rome did indeed start meddling in the internal affairs of the socii, and the legal distinctions between the various cities began to chafe as rome grew prosperous off war proceeds while the socii were left having to deal with trade barriers that blocked their ability to share in those rewards. By the time of the principate and empire, roman "citizenship" was a very different, much diluted thing.
French foreign legion, RPG, Israel
Of your other examples, it's telling that two are entirely inapposite - one isn't a country but instead a quasi-penal military unit, another is entirely fictional - and the third literally has a religious requirement for naturalization (at least of the type you're discussing). Far closer to my point than yours.
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream.
The term "American dream" is itself an artifact of the modern progressive era, with basically no resonance at all before that (with the exception of a tiny little bump in the years immediately surrounding the founding).
Yeah I'm in a similar mind as somebody from a country where there's no real norm of gun ownership. I feel like the benefits I get from general disarmament outweigh the costs I get in the rare situation where I'm being attacked violently and would have had my gun at hand and be able to use it effectively, or I am achieving intense guerilla warfare against state oppressor of my choice.
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