WandererintheWilderness

WandererintheWilderness 2hr ago

Is it because you want them to be less obese and more healthy? Well good news, we have a solution for that, they are called GLP-1s.

It may work to bluntly reduce obesity, but that's just fiddling with calories. It doesn't replace an actually healthy diet with fewer harmful additives, more varied vitamins and proteins, etc.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 2hr ago

I'm not saying what he did was, on any theory, lawful (nor was it a nice thing to do). But it seems to me that the salient quality of vandalism is deliberately ruining something that was fine before you got there, or at least, fine in whatever aspect you decided to wreck. Breaking the window of a car with a flat tire - sure, that's vandalism. Poking another hole in the already-flat tire… I dunno. I guess I sort of think of "vandalism", in its vernacular if not its legal sense, as requiring an intent to deface which is moot if you're only worsening damage to something that already visibly needed replacing.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 4hr ago

Your argument

For the record it's not my argument, just my interpretation - not even much of a steelman - of those people's argument. Overall I'm very much with you on biting the bullet that all sorts of manual jobs should just be paid better, and that there is a degree of snobbery to rejecting that class of solutions to labor shortages.

That being said, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that there may be some socially-necessary jobs so unpleasant that even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies. Historically, the question didn't really arise; some degree of coercion (whether by force, or simply by threat of starvation) was always on the table. Whether you can in fact hire sufficient quantities of sewage workers etc. in a humane, liberal, affluent society where even if you choose to remain unemployed rather than take the job, you'll get enough to eke out a living - that is not a trivial question. I'm not saying the answer is definitely no - I don't think it's no for truckers, certainly - but it's worth thinking about seriously.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7hr ago

I'm not saying they don't want the pool to fail; I'm saying they want the pool to fail because its failure could be held up as evidence of Trump's incompetence. Why else would they care? (I agree they wouldn't particularly care to fix it if it were up to them and there was no political dimension to it at all; but I don't think we'd be seeing the same jeering enthusiasm for watching it falling apart.)

Context

WandererintheWilderness 8hr ago

There is, in short, a whole class of people who are cheering for decay, they want to see things break because they get to gloat when it happens, and when it does happen they will deny any responsibility as they cheered it on. (…) I am now receiving a lecture in incompetence from those people.

I don't see the contradiction. These people aren't cheering for the decay of the pool because they have a fetish for badly-maintained pools; they are cheering to make fun of Trump's incompetence. Now without a doubt, they enjoy having reasons to dunk on Trump so much that they "want" him to fail so they can keep on jeering. That's not a great attitude. But bringing up incompetence isn't an inexplicable last-minute about-face, it's been the point from the start. ‘Har-har, look at Ozymandias up there, the great public works he's so stupidly proud of are falling apart before our eyes, the Emperor has no clothes.’

Context

WandererintheWilderness 8hr ago

Is breaking a window of a car with a flat tire the right comparison? Pulling up a bit of lining that was already torn seems more like walking by a house that's already collapsed, and picking up a handful of rubble on a whim. You could uncharitably describe the latter as "pulling bricks right out of the wall", but vandalism seems a stretch.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 1d ago

What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job}

I don't think this is is quite a fair summary; the implication is that it is impossible to compensate someone enough that they will work {dirty job} - either literally impossible, or at the very least economically infeasible to do at scale.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 4d ago · Edited 4d ago

I think it's pretty explicit in the rest of his post that most people who make that gamble are big winners.

The starting point has to be considered, though. I lead a pretty comfortable life. Getting a billion dollar would still be life-changing - but I value my current life enough that I wouldn't play Russian roulette for a 5/6 chance at a billion. If you're already doing fine, how big a win does it have to be to justify taking even a small chance of ending up like Tyler? I don't think free college tuition cuts it.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago

Yes? That seems like another example of what I was talking about. I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago

Sure, they don't tend to believe that Gaza is currently a bastion of progressivism; but @4bpp was talking about a wishful belief that "with sufficient reparations and contrition", Muslims will eventually "flip to running a pluralistic rainbow-coloured paradise", not the untenable proposition that they're already doing so.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago · Edited 5d ago

That is, people who delude themselves into believing variations of the idea that the claim that an independent Palestine would be an oppressive, misogynistic, Islamo-fascist regime is just Israeli slander; that left to its own devices, Palestinians might very well become an enlightened liberal democracy, and it's racist to believe otherwise when they haven't been given the chance. In my experience, it's what a lot of Queers For Palestine types claim to believe when pushed, and I don't really doubt their relative sincerity. It'd be psychologically challenging to cheer for people who you actually believed would behead you if they got the chance.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago

I'll take your word that they don't exist in Ireland, but haven't you seen "rainbow Hamas" types on social media?

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago · Edited 7d ago

I think Clayton and Swinson might have correctly anticipated that if they give the inflammatory, partisan answer, follow-up questions will be asked. The safest way to avoid backing yourself into a "What makes you so sure?"-shaped corner is to simply not answer the first time. Come to that, I think ignorance can also be in play even with insincere people. I don't know about Clayton in particular, but it's easy to imagine someone who, regardless of their own beliefs, would more confidently answer "Trump" if they've memorized a suitable Gish gallop of alleged voter-fraud evidence that they can rattle off upon request, than if the only answer they could give to "why do you believe that?" was just "because Trump told me to". Thus, the embarrassment can result from an awareness of one's personal inability to defend the claim, not necessarily self-consciousness about the innate ludicrousness of the claim.

(Also, re: the specific "woman" scenario, a crucial detail IMO is that the slogan everybody learned by heart was "trans women are women", not "the word woman means XYZ". "What does the word 'woman' mean in you head, anyway?" is itself the awkward follow-up question: "when you chant trans women are women, what do you mean by that word?".)

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago

I think there's a missing possibility in your bullet-point categorization of what a floundering response to a gotcha question might signal: sheer ignorance, rather than cowardice, i.e. the respondent might simply have been parroting a slogan with no actual understanding of why it's held to be true by their ingroup. It's not that they don't believe in the slogan, necessarily, but they've simply memorized it as an article of faith without even stopping to ask why. "Trans women are women" is true because gender studies experts say so and they wouldn't say so without good reason; "the election was stolen" is true because Trump says so and he ought to know. Crucially, good arguments are assumed to exist, it's just that the respondent never bothered to learn them.

Of course, there's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Most people accept both scientific and moral truths ("nothing can travel faster than light", "rape is morally wrong") as claims from authority, without personally seeking to rederive the conclusions. But it's a bad look when a person in a position of authority is shown to have no actual idea what they're talking about. Mouthing along to the Nicene Creed is all that Christiniaty has ever asked of random laypeople, but being unable to articulate a biblical argument for the Trinity would not reflect well on the Pope.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago

In addition to FtttG's reply, "Trump" as an answer to the election question does raise a lot of follow-up questions in its own way, e.g. "Does the respondent think that government actions enacted under Biden were invalid?". (The funniest is of course "then wouldn't Trump have been ineligible in the last election?").

Context

WandererintheWilderness 7d ago

In reality I don't see any evidence that Democratic politicians are more moral than Republican politicians. Why would it be the case?

One obvious reason it might be the case that one party's politicians are more moral than the other's is if one party's platform is itself genuinely morally superior to the other. If any decent person feels in their heart that e.g. abortion is a human right, then by definition only evil or, at best, amoral people will become conservative candidates. (A conservative could, of course, make the symmetrical argument: only a morally-degenerate person would support cancellation campaigns or gay rights, therefore no righteous person is ever going to touch the DNC with a ten-foot pole.)

Context

WandererintheWilderness 16d ago

Does saying "I will do X but first I will check if it's legal, and if it's illegal I won't do it" actually count as "threatening to do X", legally?

Context

WandererintheWilderness 18d ago

If you literally believe someone is Hitler then you should want him assassinated

Not necessarily, for the reasons I discuss here. And anyway, even if we disagree on the literally-Hitler case, there are surely levels of badness that a public figure can be where I don't think it justifies extrajudicial murder, but I do think it justifies public outcry, and some idiot could potentially think it justified murder. Wherever you draw the line of how bad someone has to be before you should want them assassinated, it is almost certainly case that there will be people who draw it closer to home.

-1

Context

WandererintheWilderness 18d ago

Not sure that would work. "Here is how bad this guy is; honestly, he's so bad I'd kill him if I did not hold murder to be absolutely taboo in literally all cases… and surely none of you would ever countenance committing murder either, no matter how evil the target… would you?" is still very easy for my enemies to spin as stochastic terrorism.

Also, I don't think you need to be a "hardcore pacifist" to believe that it would have been wrong to murder Hitler in 1930. Whether it can be ethical to assassinate a totalitarian dictator is a different question from whether it is ever appropriate to assassinate someone who doesn't hold absolute power because they could commit horrible crimes if they ever acquired absolute power. I interpret the "John Smith is literally Hitler" meme as more like "John Smith is literally 1930!Hitler" than it is like "John Smith is literally 1943!Hitler" - the implied claim is that if John Smith had free rein he would be as bad as Hitler, not "John Smith, at this very moment, represents as immediate a threat to the free world as Hitler did at the height of his power".

I think that is a potentially legitimate opinion to have about a modern politician, and one which it would be urgent to convey without understatement if it's true; but that it still wouldn't justify an assassination. Absent supernatural foreknowledge, this would have applied to Hitler prior to his rise to power - we can say with the benefit of hindsight that it would have been a good thing for some nut to put a bullet in his brain in 1930 but there was no way for our 1930 gunman to know that for certain, before or after the crime.

(Important disclaimer: I don't think Charlie Kirk was literally Hitler even in the 1930-Hitler sense. I don't even think Trump is; I suspect he would make himself dictator-for-life if he were ten years younger and had the means to do so, but I don't think he would use that position to declare bloody wars of conquest or organize genocides. I'm very much speaking about general principles here.)

Context

WandererintheWilderness 18d ago

Why can't it be both? If I oppose the death penalty, I'm sure as hell gonna oppose vigilante killings. Murder can be tragic no matter how evil the person is.

Context

WandererintheWilderness 18d ago

How do you suggest that I express my opinion if I do believe that so-and-so is literally Hitler but I also genuinely don't want that person assassinated? If I keep adding a "…but we still shouldn't murder the guy, because murder is morally wrong and socially corrosive even when we're talking about the literal scum of the Earth" disclaimer at the end, I'll look like I'm just doing the Julius Caesar speech. If I don't then I'm open to ordinary stochastic-terrorism accusations. It seems like a bit of a catch-22. Yet if you seriously believe that a public figure is literally Hitler, clearly you have a duty to communicate that in some way.

Context