MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
4d ago
With a little creativity you could discover an unbounded number of actions leading up to the phone call without which it could not have occurred. E.g., the guy who let you in in traffic so you would be there on time, the other guy who slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a major accident which would have stopped you from arriving at the coffee shop, the gal who set her alarm so that she could open up the coffee shop that morning, the engineer who put the final touches on the cell phone communication standard your phone used to receive the call...
There's obviously no moral obligation on you to identify every single event without which your phone call couldn't have happened. You owe a normal debt of gratitude to someone who minorly inconvienced themselves to help a stranger. Of course a bigger gesture would be a nice act since this particular act of kindness looms large in your mind, but there's no coherent case that you owe anything more than you would if the call hadn't earned you any money.
MotteInTheEye
16d ago
I agree with your assessment that a repeat of Jan 6 is unlikely but I don't think it's because people are cowed, I think it's because the actions taken by the "rioters" didn't spark the admiration of their own side that progressive protests do. Begging someone else to do something about the problem, burning it all down because you don't like the hand you are dealt: conservatives, with their emphasis on personal responsibility and an internal locus of control, just don't resonate with these courses of action the same way progressives do.
For rank and file conservatives, the way Jan 6 was handled by the DoJ is a glaring injustice, but the rioters themselves are not heros. I think they are regarded as, at best, well-intentioned idiots and buffoons, and at worst, feds and their dupes working to supply the establishment with casus belli for extreme action to stamp out their political opponents.
MotteInTheEye
20d ago
There's a knock on effect of execution for murder or attempted murder on how expensive and awful prisons are. Gangs thrive in prison because the guards are not able to maintain a monopoly on violence, which is partly because many prisoners have nothing left to lose.
Edit: forgot to make the full connection to the current topic, which is that policing minor offenders like shoplifting would still get a lot easier with the consistent application of the death penalty even if they aren't the ones getting executed.
MotteInTheEye
20d ago
It's still a pretty big jump from "has read some posts by Scott" to "reads the Motte", right?
MotteInTheEye
21d ago
I don't think this question is in good faith but just in case: it was a simple misdirect joke, making it seem like he was talking about the Pacific garbage patch that progressives are very concerned about and then revealing that he was speaking figuratively about a country. It would be like if a tsunami was in the news and I said, "I'm very concerned about this massive tidal wave about to hit our shores - but enough about the Democrats' immigration policy."
MotteInTheEye
29d ago
She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.
This seems to be a strange hypothetical where the DoE is axed but its full budget is reallocated to the most similar departments. It seems like anyone who would actually axe the DoE would either be looking to shrink the federal government's budget or would at least move the money into very different departments.
MotteInTheEye
29d ago
I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.
MotteInTheEye
30d ago
Note that Trump is already heavily associated with having McDonald's as a cornerstone of the American diet.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
I think Mensa selects for people whose IQ test score itself is their highest "achievement", i.e. the lowest performers at any given tier of IQ. So it's very possible that Mensa members could have on average unusually poor mental health.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
(gestures to my username)
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.
We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
You can just repost it in a few hours and it will still be the 1 year anniversary in Australia right?
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
The left has been running the "blame your political opponents for bad weather" play for 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less stupid when the right does it.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
It appears that you are just using Jesus's words as a jumping off point for a claim you want to make rather than seriously engaging with what He meant. He tells the parable in response to a troublemaker asking for a rigorous definition of whom he needs to love as his neighbor, and after telling the story he asks "which of these was a neighbor to him?" - in other words, trying to limit to whom the commandment applied and to whom it didn't was the wrong spirit in which to approach it.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
Are you raising the utilitarian perspective because that's the grounds for your opposition to a state putting people to death? If so, I'm not sure it works out very well.
what is the marginal utility / justification / satisfaction found in execution versus life imprisonment?
This one's pretty easy, it's incredibly expensive to house an unproductive prisoner for 50+ years and incredibly inexpensive to e.g. build a gallows.
But I only address the utilitarian argument because you raised it, my belief is in no way utilitarian and is simply founded on the principle of retributive justice that a murderer should die for justice to be done.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
First, a tangent: this "pro-life in all cases" mindset seems to me a case of a whole swathe of society confusing a slogan with a moral principle. It's baffling to me why so many on both sides seem to have the idea that killing should either be absolutely indiscriminate or not done at all. Most of us are pro-jailing criminals but no one has ever insisted that we ought to jail babies as well to be consistent.
If you are a pacifist or have a principled objection to the state executing people in cold blood, by all means make that case, but abortion has absolutely nothing to do with it.
To interact with the case that you do make, I'm not sure if your slippery slope argument is supposed to apply to abortion / euthanasia only or to the death penalty as well. If it is aimed at the death penalty, I don't think it's well-supported and would be hard to meaningfully reason about given that practically every society in history up until the past hundred years has put some people to death. There's essentially no example one could look at of stepping onto the slippery slope since humanity has always existed on the supposed slope.
Your other support doesn't seem to be an argument but just an expression of your belief that the state ought not to be executing its own citizens. I think it ought to be, because the only human justice possible for a murder is the execution of the murderer, and only the state is in a position to do this with due process which at least attempts to ensure that the guilty is punished rather than the weak. What's your support for the belief that the state shouldn't do it?
If responsibility is diffused between many different people in the process of executing someone, that's fine by me as long as the person is actually guilty. They should all feel good for having worked together to achieve the only earthly justice possible under the circumstances. The fact that, in the modern west, most of them don't feel good about it, because they aren't persuaded of the goodness of justice, is a hindrance to the system working well in practice, but not an argument that the death penalty is principally unjust.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
I hadn't considered leaving the oil in the pantry in the fryer between uses, if you use it often enough I guess that's workable.
I had also forgotten that deep fryers have lids which will trap most of the oily steam. So consider me convinced on that point.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.
Also keep in mind that getting in a comfy car and driving to McDonald's and back doesn't register as work to most people in the same way that cooking and especially cleaning dishes do.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
If someone was stretching me out on the rack, I wouldn't need a complete answer for what my happiest possible state looked like to know that I would be a lot closer to it if the torture stopped. You don't need to fully flesh out (no pun intended) the ideal body type to argue it's better not to be obese.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
I think the comment makes more sense if you interpret "the regime" to be not identical to "the US government" but rather what's referred to as "the Cathedral" or "the elites", i.e. a class of people who comprise newspaper editors and politicians among others.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
If it's hard to detect, that's extremely difficult to coordinate on short notice. It's almost literally impossible for an organization that's not all in one location together to suddenly get rid of / replace all of their communication equipment.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
It's also possible that the pagers were sold much more widely but only the ones that were eventually pinned to Hezbollah agents were triggered today.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
Your theory makes sense a priori but I don't understand why we don't see firms that are run internally like a free market dominating the supposedly inefficient command-based firms which we actually see.
Has no one ever told Scott about color contrast best practices? That's not even close to a pleasant reading experience.
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