Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
1d ago
I tend to think that this bet will fail and it will be another loss of popularity to Trump administration. They are total losers who are on a fast track to self destruction. Good luck to them!
Why did I hear that in Stephen Colbert's Trump-tweet impression voice...?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
3d ago
Begging a lot of questions here....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
4d ago
they commit murder over promiscuity
seems odd to square with claims that promiscuity is "harmless"
Because the harm is attributed to the person who chose to commit murder.
If Alice does $THING (being promiscuous, wearing the 'wrong' clothes for her gender, expressing unpopular opinions, eating rice on Tuesdays, &c., &c.), and Bob chooses to kill or otherwise harm her over it, that does not make $THING responsible for the harm done to Alice; the blame lies on Bob. Otherwise, Bob would have the ability to prevent Alice from doing anything he didn't like. (cf. the Heckler's Veto.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
4d ago
They do damage while they are in your lungs, and that damage may or may not be permanent. However, healthy lungs have cilia which will expel foreign material, limiting the total damage that it can do; but if you kill off the cilia, asbestos fibres will linger for far longer, and do much more damage.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
4d ago
smoking was intentionally used as a patsy for a lot of cancers caused by commonly used industrial compounds
Sometimes they can compound each other; e. g. asbestos fibres will stay in the lungs of a smoker long after they would have been expelled from a non-smoker's lung due to the former having killed off their cilia.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
8d ago
You never answered that question the other day about exactly how incredibly privileged and sheltered you are.
That wasn't so much a question as an insult.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
8d ago
This is The Motte, where you're supposed to "always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed". Either defend your claim or retract it; don't deflect and yell at me for responding to what you plainly said.
Fine. I will lay out my Views on the matter plainly.
As I have said elsewhere, I do not like MS-13. They are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, and Something Needed To Be Done About Them.
However, Mr Bukele's chosen approach was both
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not necessary to solving the problem, and
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not justifiable.
The former is demonstrated by the possibility of more humane methods, such as the methods I would endorse if my area were suffering similar depredations. (If someone is probably a gang member but has not been convicted beyond reasonable doubt, detain them under a regime akin to that applied to POWs [conditions no more severe than those extended to our service-members, Red Cross access to detainees to verify humane treatment, release anyone not convicted in a court of law after crisis is over].)
The latter derives from the concept of the 'ethical injunction'.
Tthere are certain things such that, under a purely act-utilitarian-consequentialist framework, the circumstances in which $THING is justified are vastly outnumbered by the circumstances in which $THING looks justified, but isn't. Thus, if from the inside view, it appears that one is faced with only the options of 'Do $THING' or '$WORSE_OUTCOME', it is nevertheless highly probable from the outside view that you are wrong.
One therefore ought not to do $THING even if it seems necessary; this in practise works out to ruat cælum. (cf. "Sacred Values Are How Ethical Injunctions Feel From The Inside", Thing of Things, April 2016.)
(There is also a game-theoretical explanation, which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
9d ago
These new jails break the ability to communicate with the outside
Which could have been done in a more humane manner, much in the way that countries at war are expected to stop captured enemy troops from coordinating with the outside without subjecting them to inhumane conditions.
We have a precedent for 'organisation is trying to harm us; we have members of that organisation in our custody; they are or might be motivated to continue their malicious goals from inside'. We monitor their communications with the outside, set minimum standards for their conditions, and allow the Red Cross access to the facilities to verify that the standards are being upheld.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
9d ago
You won't even risk yourself in a hypothetical.
Not when the hypothetical is 'you face execution for your political opinions.' If the hypothetical were 'you live in San Salvador and face the same risk as everyone else' or 'you meet me on the field of honour at dawn', one might be able to justify arguing whether it is unreasonable to refuse such a risk.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
Fortunately, they don't have to let the heavens fall, or let the gangs run rampant, in order to not be evil. Just treat the detained alleged gang members as POWs under standards akin to the Geneva Conventions.
Do you think they treat their sex slaves better than Bukele is treating them?
Bonitas non est pessimis esse meliorem. (Being better than the worst is not goodness.)
This is not to say one should not look for third options
Which is what I'm saying he ought to have done, and objected to his not doing!
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
10d ago
Hence the Glomar Response (We can neither confirm nor deny....).
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
No. Your proposal is based on two assumptions which I reject:
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the assumption that detaining gang members under the same standard as invading soldiers would significantly increase the murder rate, and
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the assumption those arguing against human-rights violations are somehow responsible for anything that can be attributed to not committing them.
There are lines that one should not cross though the heavens fall, and those arguing against crossing those lines do not thereby assume culpability for the actions of others.
Beating people up in little rooms… he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say “we’re the good guys” and do bad-guy things.
-- Sir Terry Pratchett
I do not identify with the gang members. I do not even like them. However, I remember enough of the past to recognise certain patterns, and one of them is the grave danger in declaring certain human beings to no longer constitute moral patients.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
10d ago
Why do we have such empathy for evil people but effectively zero empathy for good people who had to endure the wrongs brought about by evil people?
I have empathy for the victims of the gangs; that's why I don't insist that detaining the alleged gang members at all was absolutely unjustifiable. However, once they are in custody, their not being subjected to inhumane conditions does not harm anyone, nor allow them to harm others; the same applies with captured enemy troops, thus the Geneva Conventions.
They tried for decades applying “human rights” and all it got them was a country run by gangs.
Which is why one could make the argument that they couldn't afford the normal standards of criminal trials. It does not have any relevance to how people are treated in custody.
I just don’t see the moral argument that ES ought to treat these gang members okay.
The argument is that
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They are human beings, made B'tzelem Elohim, and endowed with certain inalienable rights.
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If you establish a category of 'people it is justifiable for the State to torture', you create the temptation for others to expand that category to include persons or groups whose existence they have long resented.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
11d ago
If the alleged gang members had been treated more humanely (e. g. at or above the Geneva-Convention standards for POWs, long-term plan for their release following the dismantlement of the gangs), one would have been able to make the argument that the Salvadoran Government's actions were justified.
The actual conditions to which the alleged gang members have been subjected would not have been justified even had they been convicted beyond any doubt in regular trials, and were definitely not justified given the looser standards of evidence allowed.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
16d ago
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
17d ago
feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.
I believe the technical term is 'negative-feedback loop'.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
18d ago
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point, for today's lucky 10,000.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
22d ago
Instead of designating a proxy, why couldn't they cast votes over a video link?
(That also gives you the side benefit referred to in technicalese as 'continuity-of-government' and in English as 'not having your entire legislature within one blast radius'.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
1mo ago
And it’s worth noting that the ‘adults in the room’ in the DNC seem to know what they need to do to be electorally competitive. They just can’t get the party to moderate on trans and immigration.
I don't think that that's their biggest issue so much as the part where they're utterly unwilling to pursue any policies benefiting the common people if such would slightly inconvenience their Wall-Street donors....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
1mo ago
If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?
If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?
I hear both sides out, then answer the case on its merits.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
1mo ago
That's a criterion that would capture many atheists, as well as practitioners of any number of non-Christian religions.
I think C. S. Lewis had something to say on that....
[The Lion] bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. [I] said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.
--The Last Battle
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
1mo ago
Several promotional bios for Obama prior to his presidential campaign state that he was born in Kenya, which was apparently a mistake but one of unclear origin
his family and their community in Kenya...would claim to remember his birth there (possibly mistaking him for a relative).
Maybe they confused him with his father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr.?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause. But if I am a dog, beware my fangs.🍞🌹
1mo ago
teaching ... severe autists not to strip naked because their tags are bothering them ... is something which requires lots of expensive specialists.
Or a ten-dollar pair of scissors. (Cf. the Hair Dryer Incident, Slate Star Codex, November 2014.)
American late-night comedy host; would sometimes read Trump's tweets in a funny voice. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=XTEECbSPOKw)
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