Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I'm not saying Jesus personally saw Samaritans as his outgroup, I'm saying that the Jewish man he is telling the parable to did because most Jews at that time did. It's unexpected that a Samaritan would help a Jews in the parable just as it is unexpected that a Jew would ask a Samaritan for water in John 4.
I'm confused about your reading of the Good Samaritan Parable.
The Samaritans aren't the friendly neighboring faith to Jesus's jewish audience, they're the heretical near outgroup. The Jews had demolished their temple in the previous century and in Jesus's time the Samaritan's profaned the temple mount by scattering bones on it. The parable is given in answer to a questioner asking 'who is my neighbor' that they should love as themselves. Before the heretical Samaritan helps the injured man, a priest and a levite refuse to help him, possibly because they value ritual cleanliness so highly they don't want to touch the man who may be dead. Jesus ends the parable by asking which of these is the injured man's neighbor.
Casting the hated heretic as the merciful unexpected neighbor rather than the high status fellow Jews suggests a broadening of the boundaries of who is a neighbor we are commanded to love, not a limiting of it to co-religionists.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes, but as well know from British period dramas like Bridgerton the black share of the population was much higher back then and that it explains crime rates /s
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Right, which is why you shouldn't escalate a confrontation unless it's necessary to prevent imminent violence. If this guy was about the attack someone and he intervened imperfectly then it's self defense gone wrong. If he was simply spouting profanities and throwing (non-injurious) trash then the person who decide to escalate the confrontation to physical violence shoulders the legal risks of that violence going wrong.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It depends on exactly what was going on in the car and how potentially lethal that choke hold is. The guy was not assaulting anyone he was reportedly throwing trash around. If he's throwing plastic bags and paper then unless you're extremely confident you can safely restrain him you probably shouldn't do something precisely because the risk of violence for escalation is not worth preventing someone from having harmless trash thrown at them. If he's throwing glass bottles or heavy objects pointedly at people then restraining him seems justified to prevent harm. I don't know what the typical risk of death with that chokehold is. If it's really easy to kill someone if you hold slightly too long and anyone taught that hold would know that then his use of force was clearly disproportionate. If it's a one in a million chance then he's probably not.
Comparing 2008 and 2020 it seems like there's a clear policy choice whether an economic shock shows up as inflation or unemployment. In 2008 the bottom of the labor market took a massive hit, but people who kept their jobs could pick up assets cheap. In 2020 massive stimulus has kept the bottom decile of the labor market up and kept unemployment quite low, it created a surge in asset prices and has driven down real income for the top decile.
There's a top bottom trade off but it also seems like we should try really hard to do the right amount of stimulus. The deficit panic post-2008 kept the economy way under-stimulated, and the second round of COVID stimulus was probably way too much. There's also a lot of partisan politics that get in the way, Republicans really didn't want Obama to be able to stimulate. Biden campaigned on a bunch of stimulus because the Democrat can't do less stimulus than Trump. Some sort of pre-commitment to automatic stabilizers pegged to the unemployment rate seems ideal.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah, I think the second paragraph is a big part of it. If once every now and then a homeless man threw trash at people on a subway, then endure it and wait for the police to show up is pretty tolerable. If they're doing it constantly and the police do nothing then the temptation to take matters into your own hands is quite high. Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Walterodim said he wanted to strip the vote of people making less than 25k because they're basically wards of that state. Romney said 47% of the country is dependent on the government. Ted Cruz famously disparaged New York City values in the 2016 primary. Marjorie Taylor Greene called New York filthy and disgusting.
I suppose I'm conflating all these politicians (and one random commenter) with "the right", but it is an interesting phenomenon that open disparagement of cities and low income people is acceptable on the right at the same time they claim to be anti-elite populist crusaders.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's not rhetorical sleight of hand, it's a disagreement about the burden to respond proportionally that falls on people who are provoked.
The logic is that you're only allowed to use necessary and proportional force in self defense. If someone else throws the first punch in a bar fight you can fight back and claim self defense, but if you start stomping on their unconscious body it's clearly not necessary. If someone throws an empty beer can at your head and you pull out a gun and shoot them that's not proportional.
The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.
Your Autobahn example is not comparable because it reduces the whole thing to one moment where there's a life or death choice comparable to justified self defense. The people in the subway car had other choices, they could have endured having trash thrown at them, the man could have used a less dangerous hold, he could have stopped squeezing slightly sooner.
I live in California, I am annoyed regularly by a particular homeless man who lives near where I work and I have had fantasies of doing violence to him. I think it will be tragic if the guy who inadvertently killed him spends significant time in jail. But I don't think it would be good to have a legal code that says you can choke someone out if they throw trash at you and if you happen to do it a bit too long and they die well then there's no consequences.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The Right is allowed to say cities are hell hole slums, that they hate NY city values, and that people making less than 25k are lawless leeches who should be disenfranchised because they're the party of the real working class fighting back against elites who disparage deplorables.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Does that mean it's impossible for war to ever be primarily caused by one of the two belligerent parties?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
In this framework I'd say Iraq was hawkish internationalists using 9/11 to pull one over on Hawkish nationalists and get them to do a democracy/market access war that didn't really have much to do with national security. Ukraine is an alliance of dovish and hawkish internationalists that defends an international principle (no annexation of territory in Europe) without U.S. troops. My dovish nationalist Mennonite uncle is opposed because nothing is worth the risk of nuclear war and the young conservatives hawkish nationalists I know are opposed because it's money spent on something that has no obvious benefit to America.
But I don't think it's really that simple. The polarization over Russia post Trump and the legacy of the Cold War probably has a lot to do with why there's an age divide among conservative people I know. Older ones fantasize about America wiping the floor with the corrupt Russian army and the younger ones complain about the cost of foreign aid.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The argument there would be that amputation is such an irrecoverable harm that a child can't possibly consent to it, not that I find amputees aesthetically or philosophically revolting.
Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities. Prosthetic arms are nowhere near the capability of a real arm but a child born from stored eggs and sperm is genetically your child. You don't lose the capacity for fertility even if you lose some genital tissue. I also grew up in a church with many loving adoptive families and and I'm not inclined to view having to adopt a kid rather than having a genetic one as a loss of capability as significant as losing an arm. Reducing children to a means of gene perpetuation flattens one of the deepest and most transformative human relationships possible.
It also seems significant that many adults choose never to have children, where there are no adults I know of who spend their entire lives without using one of their arm. If there is human capability that a large share of the population voluntarily never exercises then I'm inclined to think it's okay for a tiny sliver of the population to modify their bodies such that they lose that capacity.
I'm not unsympathetic to the concern. There's clearly some level of social contagion going on and gender care providers need to move from a model where if a kid has any cross gender identification that must mean they're trans because there's nowhere in mainstream culture where they could have picked that up to one where they're far more skeptical of it. But I also think Gender Dysphoria is not wholly sociogenic and so I would prefer families be allowed how to approach trans children on their own rather than having it dictated to them by the state.
Minnesota's law says it will not enforce Texas's law which makes gender affirming care legally child abuse, strips parents of custody and potentially imprisons them. The idea that Minnesota would emancipate trans runaways is a conclusion posters in this thread have reached by assuming that a state claiming jurisdiction to do a custody proceeding also means it claims jurisdiction to terminate parental rights which is not in the bills text.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
You can't argue about what causes someone to experience revulsion so it's not really a good basis for public reasoning in a democratic society. Especially if you're going to make the case that the state should do something to curtail someone's individual autonomy you generally need to ground it in the prevention of harm.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
"Let's sterilize all the Jews" is extremely different from "we'll let ~1% of the Jews voluntarily sterilize themselves".
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes, and you can explain that as either a) the government is really bad at getting black kids to study and really good at convincing them to chop off their genitals or b) the state isn't actually very influential over either and culture/genetics is the driving force in both cases.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Ummm, I've had sex wearing and not wearing a condom and it's noticeably different. Sex with a condom on is still great and guys who pressure women by claiming it's awful are shitty but no, it's definitely not identical.
Yeah so we're in agreement, it's not actually about fertility it's about the belief that transness is fake.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
How much is the actual lifespan reduction for a trans person? The 35 year stat that gets quotes a lot seems to be based on the mortality of black trans women who are disproportionately likely to be sex workers. What is the lifespan expectancy of a middle class white trans woman/man? A sterile kid with diabetes is going to get lifelong injections and have to adopt if they want kids but I wouldn't characterize that as a "vista of terrifying possibilities".
Is this really about outcomes or is it about regarding transition as fundamentally illegitimate? Would you prefer to have a cis straight sterile kid with the life expectancy of a trans person, or a trans kid in a T4T marriage and bio kids with the life expectancy of a cis person?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
You can freeze sperm and eggs before the transition and then have a surrogate bear the child. Let's say some billionaire has a trans kid and creates a massive free sperm/egg preservation service and covers the cost of surrogacy/artificial wombs in 2040 for all trans people. Is the issue resolved, do conservative parents suddenly become okay with their kids transitioning knowing their genes will live on? Who is a conservative parent more likely to keep in their social life, an unmarried childless cis straight son or daughter, or a trans kid in a T4T marriage with a biological child?
Obviously not, because the issue isn't actually fertility (which is massively declining among cis people too). It's an aesthetic/social/moral revulsion at transness.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's funny how the "nature vs. nurture" stuff flips political valence when gay/trans issues come along. The right is skeptical of the state's ability to improve test scores and career outcomes for women and (non-asian) minorities but thinks the state is quite capable of convincing people to cut off their own genitals. The left thinks that representation and role models are hugely important in convincing women and minorities to enter male-dominated career paths, but can't possibly influence kids gender or sexual identity.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Except that Texas will take your kids away and charge you with child abuse if you let them take puberty blockers rather than allow that variety of family life to flourish. As far as I know most U.S. states have some proceedings to take away your child if you abuse them, and is there anyone who is such a believer in parental rights that they would allow a pedophile widower to retain custody of a 12-year-old after impregnating her? It's not really a meta-dispute about centralized state authority vs. anti-fragile family life, it's an object-level dispute over whether puberty blockers and/or hormones constitute child abuse. Texas thinks it does and will take your child away to be raised by bureaucrats, Minnesota thinks it doesn't and will refuse to enforce Texas's rulings stripping a parent of custody if their kid is in Minnesota.
People in this thread are then very concerned that Minnesota's claim of emergency temporary jurisdiction over child custody proceedings means they will also emancipate runaways. So far has shown themselves to be an expert on Minnesota custody laws and explained whether jurisdiction over a custody proceeding also means jurisdiction to hear a termination of parental rights by a minor, and/or whether refusing to allow a child to receive gender-affirming care would be grounds for termination of parental rights in the absence of other abuse.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Does it grant them the right to terminate parental rights or just the ability to award custody between the two parents?
I'm not a lawyer and it remains unclear to me whether something like a petition to terminate parental rights brought by the minor, or a child in need of protective services action brought by a state agency is a subcategory of a "custody proceeding" that Minnesota now claims temporary emergency jurisdiction over, or a separate legal proceeding this law would not give them jurisdiction over. There would then need to be a second step where, refusing to give a child gender-affirming care was considered grounds for terminating rights or a CPS action in an otherwise non-abusive home.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't know much about child custody law, but that section reads to me a establishing jurisdiction for the state of Minnesota to do a child custody determination. Does it necessarily follow from them having the jurisdiction to determine custody that they would refuse to return a runaway minor?
I first heard of bussy from cis gay male friends in college. The Wikipedia article references donutussy (the center whole in a donut) which seems a good indicator that appending -ussy to things is mostly a joke and not some deep aspect of gender identification. I am not in the habit of discussing trans women's anuses but my guess is that with most jokey euphemisms for genitalia the appropriateness depends overwhelmingly on context and personal dynamics and can't be deduced from the etymology of the term.
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