Jiro
1mo ago
Money is fungible. This allows an accounting trick where the government can say "we aren't reducing your taxes nor are we changing how much of the budget gets spent on each item, but we're taking the money for this program from other people and using your taxes for something else". Unless objecting to a particular expense actually leads to your taxes going down, using "other people's taxes" is indistinguishable from using yours.
Jiro
1mo ago
The two characters drastically differ in how recognizeable they are to the general public. I don't believe for a moment that the replacement was done mainly because someone wanted to copy something from a comic.
Jiro
1mo ago
If I were wrong about this, we'd see nothing but woke replacements and writers and directors being overt about their intentions, no retrenchments or cancellations by studios when a property fails to earn, and massively budgeted productions like "Captain America: Gay As You Want To Be."
They replaced Captain America with a black man. I don't think he's supposed to be gay, but surely it counts as a woke replacement.
Jiro
1mo ago
The argument was that someone was saying "I could be replaced by a robot, but I'll break your stupid fucking robot so you'd better just pay me". This clearly refers to a threat to cause damage to the robot if the robot is used, not just to ban the robot, so the analogy is killing the immigrant, not just disallowing immigration.
Also, the concept of "everyone" becomes meaningless if you're allowed to change who "everyone" consists of. It's like using robots and claiming that automation is good for everyone because you think it's good for the robot and you're counting the robot as part of everyone.
Jiro
1mo ago
Are they threatening to kill the immigrant, which is analogous to breaking the robot?
Jiro
1mo ago
The US government acts shady about lots of things. If looking into something would expose classified projects that have nothing to do with space aliens, their reaction is going to look an awful lot like someone acting shady about space aliens.
Jiro
1mo ago
Irresistible to quote from that:
Similarly, Francesca Tripodi [98] has shown how evangelical voters do not vote for Trump because they have been “fooled” by fake news, but because they privilege the personal study of primary sources and have found logical inconsistencies not in Trump’s words, but in mainstream media portrayals of the president.
Jiro
1mo ago
Taiwan and Japan ban drugs just fine. ... There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.
This isn't true. First link I found.
Okay, so you're telling me that a parable that is about Jews, mentions Jews, and whose analysis says that Christians have misinterpreted it because of antisemitism, is trying to say that Jews do not count as your neighbors for the purpose of loving your neighbor? I'm not even asking you about Samaritans or Pharisees.
(And even if that's what you think it means, that's not what the video you linked thinks it means.)
Jiro
1mo ago
Loving your neighbor means loving other Christians, and specifically precludes false Christians. ReligionForBreakfast explains this well in his recent “the most misunderstood parable of Jesus” analysis video.
That video mentions Jews and even antisemitic tropes several times. It does not say that loving your neighbor means loving other Christians; Jews are not Christians.
Jiro
1mo ago
Are there some relevant things you are willing to have your mind changed on? The whole point of being here is discussion. Not making write-only posts.
Jiro
1mo ago
And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him
Because the territory controlled by the British today doesn't overlap very much with the places where Washington did stuff, not because Washington was a traitor.
There are several statues of Mahatma Gandhi in prominent places in the UK.
Jiro
1mo ago
It's true that the optimal amount of bridges collapsing is non-zero. But it's also true that if you're going to decide whether a particular collapsing bridge is worth it, "the optimal amount is non-zero" is the last reason you should try using to justify a collapsing bridge. Otherwise, it becomes a fully general argument for all collapsing bridges, since any collapsing bridge you might care about is a non-zero amount.
A collapsing bridge is strong evidence that something went wrong.
"What I can say is that the bridge has been constantly inspected and examined in accordance with the guidelines as required. We were all very surprised by this incident and are now devoting a great deal of attention to investigating the cause"
Come on. Do you really expect him to say "Oh, no, we didn't inspect the bridge. We didn't follow the guidelines. And nobody was surprised by this incident. Everyone in the government expected the bridge to fall down"? Of course not. Nobody's ever going to say that regardless of whether it's true. (And even if it's true, "we followed the guidelines" is just ass-covering. Nobody can put any blame on them if they followed the guidelines, right? It's entirely possible the guidelines are bad.)
Jiro
1mo ago
If you really knew in advance that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X, you should immediately believe X even without taking the courses based on your knowledge that the rationally persuasive evidence exists.
I doubt that you know that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X. What you do know is that after taking such courses, you feel that you have been rationally persuaded. But being irrationally persuaded feels like being rationally persuaded.
Jiro
1mo ago
A society which has to sugarcoat their killings as medical procedures (lethal injections) is simply lying to itself about still having the stomach for killing.
The "society" is a heckler's veto by death penalty opponents. I'd be fine with not making executions look like fake medical procedures. But death penalty opponents would seize upon this and use it as lawfare to stop the execution, so we can't do it. Don't blame "society" for this.
Jiro
1mo ago
That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --Carl Sagan
There are a huge number of things that people laughed at thirty years ago, and in hindsight... as far as we can tell, yeah, they turned out to be jokes. Pointing to the one example where they laughed at something that panned out is a combination of availability bias and cherry picking.
Also, novel mathematics in the sense of genuinely useful things is a very noncentral example of things produced by AI. It may have happened once, but mathematicians haven't exactly been made unemployed.
Jiro
1mo ago
It creates incentives for the prosecutor not to do this. You or a loved one could also be the person who the prosecutor was discouraged from framing. Of course this is a seen versus unseen fallacy; it's impossible to see that you escaped being railroaded by a prosecutor because he was discouraged from doing so by the rules, while it's easy to see if you are victimized by a criminal who gets let go.
Because there's no way to let a defense attorney do it only for innocent people and not for guilty people, and there's substantial value in providing protections to the innocent.
There's also another problem: If the attorney is not supposed to put up a defense for a guilty person, that means that the defense attorney needs to decide guilt, making him essentially a judge. There are good reasons why judges and defense attorneys aren't the same thing.
Jiro
1mo ago
I think we're at the point where the "subversion" of having the monster not be evil is so common that having the enemy be irredeemably evil has become the subversion, even though everyone who makes good orcs or demons or wicked witches thinks they're being clever and original about it.
Jiro
1mo ago
The view that sane, neutral or good actors can have a conflict worth fighting over for sane reasons is now fringe.
I'm not convinced that it's false, though. You can fudge it by saying things like "he wanted to conquer the enemy because he honestly sincerely thinks the enemy's country belongs to him", and insane and bad actors really like to say that kind of thing. But I'm hard pressed thinking of any conflict in the modern era where sane, neutral, or good actors have a conflict worth fighting over, except maybe for wars of independence, and we don't have too many chances for those any more.
Jiro
1mo ago
People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character.
Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.
If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".
Jiro
1mo ago
But it was obvious to most at the time that the distribution would inevitably drift rightward, until you have what you have now.
The distribution drifts rightward because a huge portion of leftists will consider a site to be biased towards the right and full of fascists merely because the right is permitted to speak at all. If the site doesn't give in and censor the right, these intolerant leftists will flee, making the site drift rightwards.
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