Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
20d ago
That won't work forever.
It doesn't have to work forever, just until we can get nuclear plants built and direct CO2 extraction running.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
21d ago
total command of people's lives
benefits the community because people are being useful, and excludes people who are not
These are both downstream of treating the individual human person as a means to an end, rather than an end in themself.
Government programs are always both overbroad and underinclusive.
But they don't have to be.
There will always be some portion of rich people who can by some loophole get food stamps, and some portion of genuinely hungry people who cannot.
The cost of the former is minuscule compared to other government inefficiencies and thus does not excuse the latter. If there are 11 applicants, 1 of whom needs x assistance to live and 10 amoral liars, and you cannot distinguish between them, or if the cost of doing so exceeds 10x, the morally correct action is to give assistance to all of them, even if it means Uncle Pennybags won't be able to afford a new yacht this year.
(If you can distinguish between them at a cost <10x, but Uncle Pennybags, instead of spending x on assistance and 5x or 2x or 0.25x on investigating fraud, would rather terminate the program, keep the 6x or 3x or 1.25x for his yacht fund, and let the one needy person starve to decrease the surplus population, we take him aside and explain what happened at Big Swamp Village.)
So consider the government program of marriage. Why does it exist? To simplify family formation because the government has an interest in the future children of the country.
Then extend it only to couples who, supported by oath or affirmation, declare that they either
- to the best of their knowledge, are mutually fertile (opposite reproductive organs, not sterilised, no known insurmountable infertility) and intend to bear children,
or
- intend to adopt children
and otherwise leave gender out of it.
(I don't recall where I read this, but supposedly there was at least one tribe which explicitly had something akin to your attitude towards marriage; the marriage would only be finalised once the bride was pregnant and would sunset when their youngest child reached adulthood. If they didn't have or intend to have children, what they did behind closed doors would be of no concern to anyone else, regardless of gender. I'm not sure whether two people adopting children would have been considered eligible, but they probably would be if they had kept their system into the modern day, again regardless of gender.)
Why should we allow American descendants of slaves to remain in the US, while not admitting all SSAs who want to come?
I believe, if not in 'open borders' sensu strictu, at least that the borders should be more open than they currently are. Thus I don't find this a convincing example.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.
Exactly what context could that passage possibly have that would change its meaning to something other than "Don't treat human beings as disposable for the Greater Good just because you're not doing it to very many of them."‽
Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism
What have I misunderstood? One thing that those regimes had in common prior to the piles of skulls was that they were based on ideologies which held that the community is the moral patient and human beings only matter as far as they are useful to it, rather than human beings being moral patients and the community existing for their benefit.
Is there some other thing they have in common with each other and not with liberalism?
We are talking about a specific arrangement where the state provides benefits to a sort of arrangement. Including and excluding different types of people is often necessary to preserve resources. There is no reason to extend marriage benefits to M-M or F-F relationships because they don't function similarly to M-F relationships.
Exactly how do they not function similarly?
Is there some relevant characteristic which is true of 100.000% of opposite-sex relationships but 0.000% of same-sex relationships? Then there is no reason not to judge directly on that.
Is it some men-from-Mars-women-from-Venus stereotype that applies to ~90-95% of opposite-sex couples and only 5-10% of same-sex couples? Then it is an injustice to the 5-10% who do not fit the stereotype to judge based on the gender parity of the couple rather than directly on the relevant matter.
Is it some third thing? Then please explain it, because I can't imagine anything that would fit.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
23d ago
This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant
FOO and BAR are what are called metasyntactic variables, acting as a stand-in for anything different between the average man and the average woman which would affect the morality or immorality of their relationship. If you tell us what you believe the relevant differences between the genders are, I can explain how this applies to it specifically.
You make policies for the 4 billion,
Who saves one life, saves the world entire.
and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.
Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.
Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime
Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
23d ago
I'm not referring to
s/modal woman/modal man
but to
s/woman with xyz characteristics/man with same characteristics
.
In any case in which Alice and Adam, as individual people, not as representatives of womanhood and manhood, are identical in every way except their gender, and Bob and Bill are identical in every way except that Bob is attracted to women and Bill is attracted to men, and Alice and Bob have exactly the same feelings and commitment to each other (or lack thereof) as Adam and Bill, the relationship between Adam and Bill is immoral if and only if the relationship between Alice and Bob is immoral.
The genders are not the same
I'm not referring to 'the male gender' and 'the female gender', averaging over four billion people; I am referring to four hypothetical individuals.
If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
24d ago
The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.
On the contrary, as a supporter since before it was popular of the rights of gay people, I believe that, if one condition is fulfilled, one can legitimately consider someone to have a fetish for 'homosexual behaviour'.
That condition is that one also consider heterosexual behaviour a fetish.
To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I think it started with the Thai cave incident.
As I remember it, they were talking about how their plan, training the children to use the diving equipment, was an extremely dangerous gamble. Mr Musk probably heard this and was trying to offer a safer solution. The chattering classes objected to Mr Musk not privileging social consensus over his own reason (many such cases!) and one of the divers told Mr Musk to 'take his publicity-stunt submarine and shove it up his', &c., &c. Mr Musk was probably hurt by the accusation that he was motivated by tribal status-seeking, rather than seeing a problem and trying to fix it; this led to him reaching for the nearest insult he could think of, invoking the widely known image of the Westerner taking advantage of lax enforcement of statutory-rape laws in less well-off nations.
It is my impression that this is when the Blue Tribe started aiming the Two Minutes' Hate at Elon Musk.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promised speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements
failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service
So when are they cutting off the spigot to the cable companies?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
I believe that inexpensive space-flight may actually be beneficial to the environment, insomuch as it allows us to re-locate endeavours with adverse ecological impacts outside the environment.
The long-term environmental damage caused by StarBase may very well be literally less than nothing!
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Must have threaded the needle between my loading the page and pressing 'Comment'!
I have removed the re-post and moved my comment to a reply to yours.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
EDIT: accidental post due to race condition.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
please, dear international community, if you are going to have a treaty with a long and non-memorable name then sign it somewhere that isn't the Hague.
The Hague : international treaties :: Leonhard Euler : mathematics.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
Goodhart's law strikes again....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago
The best time was 30-40 years ago. The second best time is now.
the only benefit is just to cover intermittency
"Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
There's also the land use issue. A 1.21 GW nuclear plant takes up a lot less land than 1.21 GW of solar farms or wind turbines.
there are plenty of alternatives for that as well
Unfortunately, the numbers don't add up for any of them.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
It would depend on whether, in that time-line, Californians had massacred Cascadians.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
Because the train driver will have PTSD for a lot longer than five years.
(There is also the fact that the protester is still a human being.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.
Furthermore, if Russia were to have encountered no opposition in the forceful seizure of Ukraine, how long would it be before they went after the Baltics? Poland? Eventually we wouldn't be able to stand on the sidelines any more.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
I don't recall any Serbian territory being annexed by the US or any other country. A territory becoming its own country is a different matter, as otherwise India and most of the countries in Africa would have to be considered illegitimate.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
They should have moved Homer around. Show him working at a Savings & Loan, then a dot-com company, then a defence contractor, then FEMA, then an investment bank, then a cryptocurrency-company....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
That analogy might work better if Mexico were trying to re-negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at tank-point, or if Canada were aiming for a re-match of 1812.
However, as we do not currently face any remotely credible threat of armed invasion* at this time, our 'keeping the Stars-and-Stripes flying over El Paso and Detroit' program doesn't have anything left to do.
*No, people coming in looking to work for money is not the same thing as an invasion.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
Would you wager your life on that? Your children's lives?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
issues with long term storage of nuclear waste
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1mo ago
Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.
There's always a relevant xkcd....
Also, every bit of Ukrainian clay seized by Russia will undermine the post-WWII standard against wars of territorial expansion, which will almost certainly cause more problems here.
As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s absent the post-WWI implementation of modern passport and visa systems.)
Or Japanese.
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