ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
How many randomly selected humans (or, shall we say, randomly selected countrymen of yours, so there's a CHANCE its your family members) would you sacrifice to preserve Michelangelo's David?
Zero. But mooks working for a crime syndicate? Quite a few, recovering drug addicts doing it to pay for a kid's surgery be damned.
If killing a bunch of henchmen to get at the person who murdered your kin is sympathetic/justified, how is burning up a painting not just a little sympathetic/justified too?
The henchmen, in most such stories at least, are pieces of human garbage and the world is made a better place with each one the protagonist kills. The priceless work of art being destroyed is a permanent loss for humanity and its culture. The problem with your steelman here is that it presupposes that all human life is equally valuable, or at least that no humans are net negatives on humanity.
I love the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane destroys the shit out of his room. It's very visceral and conveys the emotions he is feeling exceptionally well. So I appreciate it as a story-telling device. But morally, in real life, it is purely destructive behavior and a sign that someone is unable to control their emotions. It doesn't make me think more highly of Kane's character when he goes on a destructive rampage.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point?
That's not what is being compared though, rage over the loss of a human life is what is being compared to a priceless painting, not the life itself.
But even then, on various videos of Just Stop Oil and similar protesters defacing works of art, you'll find plenty of commenters whole throatedly supportive of slitting the protestors throats.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
She won't be allowed to own firearms though, and my experience (with several friends and family that work as prosecutors and defense attorneys) is that criminal law judges and attorneys have a lot of angry people who would like to kill them.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Python is still shit, but less shit than it was. And still less shit than JavaScript, of course.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
I mean the big one that sticks out to me for Obama crossing lines is when he put out a hit list that included American citizens, and then actually killed said American citizen in a targeted strike (also killing said American citizen's teenage American citizen son). He was a terrorist shitbag who deserved to die, mind you, but the right way to do it would have been in a plausibly deniable way through one of our allies like the Brits, not straight up saying "We're going to assasinate this American citizen" and then actually following through.
Anwar al-Awlaki is the American citizen terrorist shitbag in question, by the way:
https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2010/08/aclu-anwar-al-awlaki/
The only significant leftwing criticism of this came from the ACLU, I don't recall any democrats in congress voicing opposition. Republicans were also generally supportive as well, for shitbag Muslim terrorist reasons.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
I have nothing against older men who would like to recoup their deferred compensation.
If that's all it was, sure. The problem is that Social Security is effectively a ponzi scheme. Total payouts are far greater than total contributions, with many retirees able to claim roughly 250% of what they paid in as benefits. Social Security was (and is) dependent on population growth because there need to be more people paying into it than receiving it. The only way to fix this is to dramatically lower the amount that retirees get from SS, and that's a political non-starter even after all the boomers die because that means gen x and millennials will be the ones who paid in significant amounts that they won't ever get back.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/lifetime-social-security-benefits-and-taxes-2023-update
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
I was hoping the Mormons would be it, but apparently their fertility has collapsed as well?
It's still above replacement, but yes it is dropping as well. Our new prophet (Dallin H. Oaks) mentioned the dropping fertility issues in both society as a whole and among members of the church in our most recent General Conference (back in October), so it's very possible the church will be trying to enact some changes (both culturally and policy-wise) to counteract this. We'll see what happens I suppose.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Then the Amish and breeding fetishists will inherit the earth.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
That's still a lot of fucking going on in those charts, just comparatively less
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Uv has only been available for a year or two, but it is being adopted extremely quickly (because pip was just that bad): https://wagtail.org/blog/uv-overtakes-pip-in-ci/
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
The Haredi also commit massive welfare fraud, and even if they weren't committing such fraud would still be highly dependent on non-fraudulent welfare. The Amish are probably the better example to emulate here as they do far more to support themselves and to limit reliance on the rest of society. Unfortunately that leads to some rather anarcho-primitivist conclusions.
C# added nullable reference type annotations a few years ago, and if you're strict about actually using them (my Indian coworkers are not, sadly) then you can reliably eliminate 99% of null reference exceptions. When the C# team finally gets around to implementing discriminated unions (in the next decade or three) and we finally have Option<T> there will be actual null safety in C#.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
I'd guess 30 to 50 percent
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Python also lets you commit crimes against humanity and good taste like this with ease: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/python-abc/
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Also look at the performance improvements that Microsoft announces with every new version of .NET. Where speed is absolutely critical, there is still usually no beating C/C++/Rust, but C# has become blazing fast compared to how it used to be, and is actually competitive with lower level languages in some cases.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway.
Romania's attempt failed because they lacked the will to actually continue enforcing it, not because the policy itself didn't work.
How you solve for lack of will to enforce such policies is a whole other problem, but the policies themselves work. People still fuck, a lot, and if there is little to no access to birth control and abortion that fucking is going to result in children.
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
My own experience as a missionary who did door to door tracting in apartment buildings: just start ringing random apartments and you'll find someone who will buzz you in without even talking to you
ChickenOverlord
7d ago
Spoke with a recruiter for Boeing back in about 2013 and she told me that the recruiting process was already super biased and discriminatory by that point (she was opposed to it but the pressure to do it this way was coming from higher ups)
ChickenOverlord
10d ago
Yawn
ChickenOverlord
11d ago
US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.
Sure, but without US intervention Latin America would have instituted Communism in a bunch of places, and it's extremely difficult to imagine they would have been any more economically prosperous under Communism.
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
One very simple one, because many illegals either work under the table or with a stolen identity: If you don't have any reported income you can still get welfare while having a job.
The amount of ways to do it are boundless though, that's just one of the more common ways.
ChickenOverlord
15d ago
always will be our friend
That's definitely in doubt. Demographic forces will make them more friendly to third world shitholes in the Middle East and Africa, and economic forces may well push them away from the US and towards China or other potential up and comers (BRICS?).
ChickenOverlord
15d ago
The vast majority of female OF whores don't make any real money on the platform. The lower demand and greater competition for male whores on OF means even fewer of them make any real money. This was already the case before OF, with male porn actors making way less per shoot than females.
Maybe this is a generational thing, but my friends and I are all varying degrees of weebs and have no problem calling each other gaijin (or gwailo when we're in a more Chinesey mood) all the time as a joking insult.
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