fuckduck9000
9mo ago
Squeamishness often covers a lie. We tell children that their beloved pets have gone to a happy farm. The meat comes from the store. The death row criminal humanely goes to sleep. Extreme squeamishness requires euphemisms which compromise the truth, our model of the world.
Unlike igi, I do think there are other sources of morality, but still the emotional punch associated with death and violence is morally helpful, and should not be easily sidestepped. Or one day we could find ourselves processing units when we are in fact murdering people.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
By the time Damiens was executed well into the early modern period, execution was much less religious and much more a demonstration of state power.
So says foucault, but I disagree. I contend that the reason for the extreme torture was not demonstrating state power, but instead, straightforwardly, discouraging regicide.
You want to demonstrate state power, you build a pyramid - or if you’re feeling edgy, cut off ten thousand heads, and make a pyramid out of that. By contrast, any low-rent psycho can torture a man to death.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
The gore is a feature, a token of our respect for life. We’re not “putting people to sleep” here. Each juror should get a splash when the blade falls. They shouldn’t eat meat if they can’t kill the animal.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
So you want morality checks, employment histories and doctor’s referrals on all purchases of duct tape? Unless they’ve been proven guilty, they’re free citizens allowed to buy goods for any suspected killer they choose.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
I don’t see your angle here. Condemning the ATF for causing the deaths of mexican and parisian civilians and that border patrol guy, implies that letting people buy weapons is complicity in murder. You can either condemn the ATF, Obama, and the right to bear arms, or none of the above.
If you're a consistent 2A gunman, you have to, you know, bite the bullet. Obviously some of the legally sold guns are going to kill people. But guns don't kill people, and anyway protection against tyranny is worth it, and so on. So the ATF is perfectly innocent here.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
If the vassals are comfortable and self-satisfied, how can their wills be said to have been subverted by the hegemon? This isn’t domination, it’s don’t-mind-ation.
Let’s say you had an all-carrot-no-stick hegemon, who uses his bulk surplus to bribe his ‘vassals’ into recognizing his nominal overlordship. The vassals can still do whatever they want. The vassals can even get him to do their bidding because he wants their approval. I mean, when is it no longer domination? Surely at some point of hegemon softness, the relationship is more accurately described as transactional, friendly, or even reverse-domination.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
What if I told him to declare bankruptcy, and he countered with the offer to suck my dick? I was going to get a hooker anyway, so the money might as well go to my dear friend. I think he's a stupid and sick man, but yeah it's his decision and i owe him at least my patronage.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
This is exactly the problem with the whole ‘consent’ framework though, which is an inherently modern thing.
The ancients knew what rape was, women refused suitors all the time.
Widespread consent of the governed is relatively modern. Modern man, and woman, is considered capable of deciding.
I’d like you to assume the full consequences of your critique of consent. Could you develop? I think reactionaries who seemingly criticize consent, really value the consent of the father above the adult daughter’s, which kind of makes sense from a ‘women as overgrown children’ perspective, but I don’t think that’s your position.
Everyone understands that there’s such a thing as getting someone drunk. “I got my friend drunk last night”, or “our boss go us so drunk last night” are statements everyone understands.
Not in the exculpatory sense you’re using it for women. If you’re stopped for drunk driving, “my boss/friend got me drunk” does not work. The responsibility is yours. The fine is for you. You can reproach your friend for bad advice, being a bad influence, but ultimately, it’s all your fault.
I mean you’re surely not denying that social pressure, perhaps the most powerful human communal force, exists?
My parents, like I’m sure, most parents, warned me extensively against social pressure as I was growing up, to prepare me for life as adult. Are you saying women are psychologically too feeble to resist that pressure?
that results in the man’s gain of status and the woman’s loss of it
Well that seems morally entirely fine. Surely you can’t expect a human to privilege the status of another above his? Any contest, any discussion between people has a status component, and usually one’s gain is the other’s loss.
often a clear sense of being exploited or dirtied afterward.
Subjective state of mind contradicted by their actions. Worthless as an objection to the original deal.
If their consent at the time did not matter, then their withdrawal of consent later matters even less.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
How do men ‘get’ women drunk? Do they threaten them, do they syringe them in the back? No, women voluntarily pour the inhibition-reducing liquid into themselves. Are they capable of making their own decisions or not?
You say the problem isn’t ‘men being interested in sex’, yet you assume ‘declining sex’ is the right decision. Your whole angle is: men are tricking women into this sinister deed. Let’s say I ‘got’ a woman drunk and used her drunkenness to… teach her spanish. Is that considered generally objectionable behavior? Obviously not. So like the sex-neg radfems which came up with ‘rape culture’ and ‘objectification’, in reality, you don’t object to the tricking, you object to the sex.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
What's the reward, meth?
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
I could ride my horse to the next valley for 10 potatoes. Or I could walk there for 3 potatoes.
The market has determined that generally people's time is more valuable than the energy, and the market's efficiency is calculated by taking the two factors (among others) into account. To say that the market result is not maximally energy efficient is a trivial, one-eyed view. The labour efficiency of organic farming is abysmal.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
Just have the state confiscate it. The inheritance tax is among the fairest of them all. If the state can deprive living, breathing humans of the fruits of their labour, it should most definitely squeeze the dead for contributions. Those zombie orgs have no right to exist in the first place.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
What leverage does the EU have? We could cut off aid to the palestinians, I’m all for it, but somehow I doubt that will sway israel. We could stop trading with israel, but that seems expensive for a conflict which does not threaten our security (unlike a certain other conflict). Assuaging the islamic world’s perpetual religious anger isn’t worth a euro cent, frankly. It’s not like the region was a bastion of stability before this, the pirates were just on the other side of the gulf of aden.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
Imo they're trying to get it as low as possible, just mining for the right combination of factors:
In the analysis of all participants the lowest mortality was observed in those with a BMI of around 25. In subgroup analyses, however, the lowest mortality was observed in the BMI range of 23-24 among never smokers, 22-23 among healthy never smokers, and 20-22 among studies of never smokers with longer durations of follow-up (≥20 and ≥25 years).
On the curves, the mortality at 30 BMI is roughly the same as 20, and 18 is way worse than 32, so I strongly suspect aesthetic (and perhaps ascetic) considerations tainted the definition of the seemingly ‘healthy range’ of 18-25.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
Still, it’s a waste of goodwill. People used to want to serve for patriotic reasons. That was pure profit for the state. It was like a charity, they were fed and housed, but some of the work they did was effectively donated. As with billionaires, the state should find ways to encourage donations, not turn them away to make the diversity quota. You know, tell people what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them, all that jazz.
fuckduck9000
9mo ago
But it’s not just cancer patients. Peripheral vascular disease too.
As your study says:
Recent studies conducted in patients with chronic diseases have reported an inverse association between body mass index (BMI) and mortality.
So where doesn't it? A dozen specific explanations aren't satisfactory.
Like regular ice cream and alcohol consumption, overweight BMI is one of those things that annoy modern medicine by stubbornly correlating with lower mortality.
One more reason I give the poor bastards ice cream, beyond the cardiovascular benefits.
And the fun. But don’t forget the alcohol. My grandma’s universal cure showed a deeper understanding of the human body than all of modern medicine: If I even thought about looking pale, she would forcefeed me delicious desserts, baba au rum, black forest cake, rinced down with a warm grog.
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
Bad faith accusation. Takes a simple request to provide evidence for inflammatory claims as a personal insult.
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
All feminists believe in patriarchy.
I don’t think that’s true. There’s the radfem meaning, where patriarchy is the all-powerful, primary ordering of society (you describe its supposed mechanisms in your comment), that needs to be radically overthrown, and there’s the watered down, pop culture version, where it means almost nothing, just that there’s an overrepresentation of men in boardrooms. Similar to how a communist and a neoliberal don’t mean the same thing by ‘capitalism’.
Modern feminism is usually divided in radical feminism, marxist feminism and liberal feminism.
Marxist feminists are more reluctant to talk about the patriarchy, because for them sexist oppression, although part of the system, is not the defining characteristic of it, which would be the oppression of the poor by the rich.
Liberal feminism, also called women’s rights feminism, has no need to postulate an all-powerful patriarchy to achieve its moderate demands of legal equality.
Radical feminists, however, have derived their belief precisely from the idea of fundamental, inalterable biological differences, as far as I've understood.
Again, biological essentialism doesn’t have much to do with the fundamental radical feminist position. Radfems can go either way. The definitional borders of womanhood are peripheral to the central claim, the oppression of women by men(‘s system).
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
My goal isn’t to ‘sling crap’. And I don’t consider mine or his comment personal attacks, they’re legitimate points.
Regardless of whether you or BC are super offended by the debate, when everybody sees it, and sees it not being modded, it changes the tone of the whole place. It becomes just that little bit more acceptable to trash your debate partner rather than discuss civilly.
The other side of the coin is that banning people has a chilling effect on free expression, especially the expression of controversial views, until the place turns into a stuffy dinner party, where people politely avoid all heavy subjects like politics and religion, and just nervously talk about drapes and outside temperature and stuff.
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
since the radical feminist thinking is predicated on there being fundamental, inalterable biological differences between sexes
No, like jericho says, what defines radfems is belief in the patriarchy. There are Trans-inclusionary radfems, including famous ones:
In a 2015 interview, MacKinnon cited Simone de Beauvoir's famous quotation about "becom[ing] a woman" to say that "[a]nybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I'm concerned, is a woman."
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
My model on how civility rules fit with the foundation : imagine we still had the full spectrum of ideologies here, in a normal distribution. Because of the ideological distance, the most vicious fights would be between extremes, say left-anarchists vs nazis. They’d be hardest hit by the tightening of civility rules, and it would narrow the ideological spectrum.
I think this fits with the nearest example, the two long bans under discussion here, burdensomecount’s and mine, which started as a spat between us. While most of the sub has sympathy for christianity, or at least ‘believes in belief’, and finds /r/atheism cringe, I’m still a virulent antitheist, while burdensomecount is an earnest believer in a different religion (also different race, which was more of a factor in his ban). So the odd ones cancel each other out. I’m not saying it’s impossible for an individual to stay impeccably civil despite a considerable ideological distance with the median, but it’s less likely, so on the scale of ideas, that’s how it goes.
I suppose you think greater civility would help recapture some of the center and left commentariat, but in practice, civility mostly protects the sub’s majority. A representative example is darwin’s ban, which I always opposed as a too strict interpretation of civility rules.
My instincts (and as you say, that discussion may be pointless) favour the man who gets banned for offending over the one who leaves when offended.
But whatever happens, even though my ban would obviously be a grievous loss, I'm sure this place will remain pretty great. If there was an election for motte dictator, you’d get my vote, and I’m not just saying that, dear leader.
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
I wasn't trying to fight BC.
Maybe it was a bit harsh of you, no, nothing? Just Marlo threatening to shoot people in the head. Okay.
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
I feel like your use of anarcho-tyranny implies elite control and nefariousness, but if they fast-tracked it by ignoring safety concerns, the antivaxx masses would flip their shit. Even regular people are more comfortable doing nothing than risking harm, copenhagen ethics style. They’re not pushing the fat man on the tracks, no matter how many kids die. It’s really only 'psychopathic' utilitarians who care.
fuckduck9000
10mo ago
Let me try again: you banned me (and warned @BurdensomeCount ) for this, and later banned him for something similar.
From one perspective, the pro-civility one, he ‘insulted’ my western-liberal conception of honor and ‘baited’ us, and I ‘bit back’ by insulting his islam-inspired version of honor. This perspective ignores our ideas and sees us as just two guys vying for status.
But the underlying truth is that each of us feels utter contempt for the other’s conception of honor, and no amount of civility can change that. It can only obscure it. Our disagreement isn't personal. This kind of fundamental value difference is precisely what the motte exists to discuss. I think I’m stoic enough that the honest insult/criticism of my worldview does not result in an ego-driven shit-flinging fest, and so is he. Therefore your attempt to preemptively and violently smother the fire was unnecessary.
Because as worthless as it may be, it’s still a life, and we should not get comfortable taking it with the simple push of a button.
On the specifics of the case, I have a problem condemning multiple people to death for a single murder. It’s blowing past the balance of lex talionis, into this exponentially growing orgy of bloody vengeance.
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