domain:npr.org
jeroboam
11mo ago
Somewhat related. I've noticed that the quality of hackernews discussion has decreased in the last year.
There are a lot more Communist teenager vibes now then there used to be, and I'm afraid its heading down the same path as Reddit with left-wing politics drowning out everything else, even topics completely unrelated to politics.
Gdanning
11mo ago
No, it answers your question. You asked whether capital punishment is not "murder" because the victim is deemed a bad guy. The answer is no, because there is a different reason that capital punishment is not "murder": because an execution is not an unlawful killing.
As for mens rea, an executioner clearly has the mens rea required for murder: The mens rea required for murder is malice aforethought, which is usually of two kinds, one of which is actual malice, which is the intent to kill. The executioner clearly has the intent to kill, so he acts with actual malice, and so has the mens rea necessary for murder. But the killing is not unlawful, because states with capital punishment obviously provides that an intentional killing by an executioner of a person who has been sentenced to death is not an unlawful killing. Therefore, despite causing the death of a person while acting with the mens rea required for murder, an executioner is not guilty of murder.
Similarly, in California, the killing of a fetus is murder. See Penal Code Sec 187(a) ["(a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought."]. But, does that mean an abortion is murder? An abortion is an intentional killing, so the mens rea is satisfied. But, an abortion is not murder because the law goes on to explicitly state that an abortion is not unlawful:
(b) This section shall not apply to any person who commits an act that results in the death of a fetus if any of the following apply:
(1) The act complied with the Therapeutic Abortion Act, Article 2 (commencing with Section 123400) of Chapter 2 of Part 2 of Division 106 of the Health and Safety Code.
(2) The act was committed by a holder of a physician’s and surgeon’s certificate, as defined in the Business and Professions Code, in a case where, to a medical certainty, the result of childbirth would be death of the mother of the fetus or where her death from childbirth, although not medically certain, would be substantially certain or more likely than not.
(3) The act was solicited, aided, abetted, or consented to by the mother of the fetus.
Jiro
11mo ago
Trump's the underdog. He didn't win. And even "winning" would be losing here.
it is not evidence for OP's very different claim that underdogs can't win
He didn't claim thar underdogs can't win, he claimed that the rules don't lead to underdogs winning.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’ve noticed it in a lot of places. I do retail so I’m dealing with the public and it just seems like nobody has any patience to wait their turn.
Biden's inviting the low priorities to the White House to show they're low priority?
jeroboam
11mo ago
What would you do?
I was in Istanbul last month. I saw two people being scammed.
Here's the setup. Istanbul's tourist district is full of scammers. They prey on naïve Westerners who are good people, and thus believe that other people are good people too. On the first day, I was standing near
Hagia Sophia with my sister, looking lost. A scammer slithers up and says "The Mosque is closed. Where are you from?" My sister, a sweet and innocent person, answers honestly. "Seattle". The scammer is smooth. "I love the fish market. I used to drive a Penske truck near there for my carpet business." He's not letting us talk and he's trying to get us to do something. I'm not sure what. After a little back and forth I blurt out, implausibly, "we're busy", grab my sister and walk away to a stream of insults from the scammer.
I figured that he just wanted to charge us for an overpriced tour. Searching online, I realized it's worse. After giving you a "free" tour, they try to get you into their carpet or art shop. "I just need to pick something up. Please come in." Free food and tea is given, as well as a hard sell on an overpriced carpet. At this point, the tone changes, and people might feel forced to buy a carpet because of the "implications".
After our encounter, I was hyperaware of this sort of scam and I think I saw it happen twice.
The first time, I saw a tourist woman being led by a Turkish man. After following them for a couple blocks, they entered this ceramics shop. I kept walking.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Testi+seramik/
The next day, on nearly the exact same block, I saw another woman being led by a Turkish man. This time, the destination was an ATM machine. The woman withdrew some cash while the man stood back doing weird air punches. They headed the other way and were gone.
What, if anything, should I have done? I wasn't 100% sure that the women were being scammed. And, of course, by intervening I could have put my own safety at risk as well as the safety of the women.
In the United States, I would have called the police at a minimum. I might also ask the women if they needed help, or even just "accidentally" bump into them and strike a conversation. Here, I felt paralyzed. In the end, I wasn't worried for the women's safety. But I could see they were going to have a bad and very expensive day. I suppose I also felt disgusted at Turkish people for allowing this as well as disgust at the women for being so obvilious. Not sure there's a right answer here. I just want to see what people think.
jeroboam
11mo ago
It feels like society is degrading. But people always say this, even during times when society is actually becoming more polite. I wonder if there's a more objective way to measure it.
No, it answers your question. You asked whether capital punishment is not "murder" because the victim is deemed a bad guy. The answer is no, because there is a different reason that capital punishment is not "murder": because an execution is not an unlawful killing.
The question that concerns us is why it is lawful, not whether it is lawful. For example, when I asked you earlier about the moral character being irrelevant, you understood that merely describing the law would not answer my question.
The law could define the killing of the president's enemies, redheads, fishermen, or any other group, as 'not unlawful killing' like it does for executions, and your answer would remain the same. And that's all good and well, but it doesn't answer the only interesting question, why. My answer does discriminate between the killing of random fishermen and convicted murderers.
Similarly, for the question 'Is abortion murder? ' a respectable answer might be of the form 'No, because the will of the mother takes precedence, or the fetus is not a person, etc', not 'No, the law in california says it isn't' . I couldn't care less what the law actually says, all the questions are about morality, what the law should be.
Probably don't tell stories about their good treatment so we only hear from people with bad treatment or that have mental illness (i.e. half of Reddit).
So here's another +1.
I had a serious form of cancer about 10 years ago. My treatment was wonderful. My doctors were excellent. Treatment started very quickly after I first went to primary care doctor with a mysterious lump. Furthermore, my cheap insurance paid for most of it. There were no surprise bills. I was out less than 10k out of pocket. I am lucky to be living in a major city in the US.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Jews in the middle ages often did live under their own laws and pay taxes separately while being citizens of the same state as gentiles.
jeroboam
11mo ago
On the plus side, we're probably less than 5 years away from really good multimodal medical diagnosis AI. Hopefully these tools will start being used more, checklist manifesto style, as a sanity check for any diagnosis.
Azth
Enoch Powells Friday night masseuse
11mo ago
You can't know unless you are inside, and telling anyone else has a best case outcome of ending up like Snowdon, so you can't know unless you know, in which case you already know but if you don't then you won't.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything.
The exponential nature of the normal distribution means that relatively small differences in the average ability translate to 100x and more differences in representation when we are talking about one-in-a-million and rarer levels.
There's this unspoken assumption that yeah maybe transwomen on HRT still have like 15% higher lung capacity, but there's like 1 of them for every 300 women athletes, nobody would notice them without looking on purpose. Then you have Lia Thomas and those cyclists and "All three medalists [in 2016 Olympics 800m track] have been found to have the 46,XY karyotype" (despite intersex women being even rarer than transsexuals) and try to convince yourself that this is a series of freak coincidences that definitely don't signify a trend.
No. Math says that if HRT and stuff limit inherent advantages of transwomen to like 15% on average, and there's less than 1% of transwomen athletes, then top 100 women athletes among 8 billion people will be entirely trans.
The power of the current system ends if populist impulse is directed at it* rather than wokes, fascist right wingers, gays, trannies, conservatives, white people, brown people, jews, immigrants, Boris Johnson, trump, the EU, racism, sexism, transphobia, bigotry, the patriarchy, etc.
*current government and property right systems.
That this strategy is awful and doesn't work very well, and seems to cause more strife than may have been anticipated, doesn't preclude it from being a driving factor.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I'm not sure that "more manpower" would solve the issue with Arab militaries. A better cohesive structure might have allowed Egyptian and Jordanian military forces to hold together long enough to bring their numbers to bear, but holding together long enough to use superior numbers is a bar that Israel's main historical rivals show an incapacity to meet.
My step-kid has been on Medicaid for most of his life and he has some kind of non-metastatic cancer that grows and regrows in his throat. It's fatal for some kids and I think it's Make A Wish eligible (not really sure what that is but it sounds grim). In his case he merely had to have throat surgery under general anaesthesia on a near-monthly basis when he was a toddler to keep cutting them out.
Fortunately as he aged they stopped regrowing so aggressively and now he only needs surgery about every 12-18 months.
The surgeon who sees him is some kind of leading expert in this surgery and he's seen at this hospital that I didn't even know could be so shiny and nice.
Anyway, we never once had to pay out of pocket to treat it while he was on Medicaid. Now that we're on a private insurer it's about 10-20% co-insurance, so it's a few grand out of pocket every time we take him in; seems like a great fucking deal all things considered.
The surgeon did make a... funny?... remark once when he was finally switched to a private insurer from Medicaid that now the reimbursement will be enough that he can celebrate after each surgery with a mid-range IPA instead of PBR. Not sure how much to read into that; given how health care reimbursements work I could imagine the dude has a garage full of exotic cars or he really could mean he all-in nets beer money on each surgery. They both seem equally possible. I do hope he has a lot of exotic cars though.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
When I worked at K-Mart in college our official training told us that if we suspect a customer is shoplifitng, ask if they need any help with anything. You aren't accusing them of anything and if they have individual contact with an employee that's often enough to make them think that the store is on to them and put back whatever it was they were taking. I'd take a similar tack here. Unless you're seriously introverted it's not too hard to find a reason to strike up a conversation with a stranger; ask for directions, a restaurant recommendation, the time, anything. From there you can ask the tourist where they're from and what they're up to and if they tell you that this gentleman is offering a personalized tour tell them that you have to be careful because there are scams out there though you're sure this gentleman probably wouldn't do anything of the sort personally. Just outline the scam and it will be pretty hard for the tourist to get caught up in it.
I'm not familiar with this particular scam but when I lived in the city people would often pull the one where they claim they ran out of gas in a bad area where their car is blocking traffic and need ten bucks or whatever to buy a gas can. I saw some people about to be taken by it before and I'd intervene by butting in and telling the guy that I had a gas can for my lawnmower just up at my house and if he could wait a few minutes I'd be happy to give him a free gallon, which I would have been had the guy actually been out of gas. This was usually enough to get the marks to walk away thinking the situation was under control while the guy cursed me out after I told him to follow me. Once it happened to me when my roommate and I were walking through a dicey area on the way home from a football game. The guy claimed his car was stuck on a busy four-lane road and we offered to help him push and started walking in the general direction of where he said the car was. This guy pretended to get a call and told me his buddy was on the way and not to worry about it.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
11mo ago
Ahh the naive Westerners who are good people and think everyone else is good people as well.
The term whining here is uncalled for. That's a reflection on your irritation, not the complaint. One might also argue that for a mod to use such terms discourages active participation, to say nothing of direct feedback. Just a thought.
edit for typos
DBDr
11mo ago
Yeah? Unless your rotator cuff is fucked or you are weak as shit, you can hold an rnc forever. It's the easiest hold to hold, its why getting one locked in right should be an instant tap.
You can's struggle against an rnc once it is locked in because your point of leverage is your squishy trachea area, the best you can do is try to pull their hands off their own arms get a finger loose, but if it is locked in you have shitty leverage for that also.
DBDr
11mo ago
By all means, institutionalize mentally ill vagrants.
Also by all means, punish extrajudicial killings. We can do both, NYC police got 10.3 BILLION this year.
anti_dan
11mo ago
Those are both common wrestling moves, but not a lot of people actually wrestle. I don't even think of the half nelson as a particularly good restraint, its good at turning people from their stomach to their back, which isn't useful in real life fights. Hammerlocks, are good, yes, but they are strictly supervised in actual wrestling because its so easy to destroy an arm. Like I said, if you hammerlock this guy for 15 minutes, he's losing his arm.
This goes without saying. Most of what I talk about isn't even required for this to be true.
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