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The biggest argument, I think, against "Republicans are singlehandedly blocking climate change mitigation progress" is the fact that not a single First World country has mostly transitioned to solar panels despite the GOP only having political power in the US, and despite the governing parties of Europe being far more liberal than the GOP on average.
If not one has actually done it after all these many decades of global warming doomsday headlines, that suggests it just isn't practical to scale. If we go by the broader "renewable energy" then maybe. But two of these, geothermal and hydroelectric, won't work to scale unless certain geographies are combined with certain low population densities. Wind power is also more conducive to some geographies than others. The last, nuclear, is hamstrung by onerous regulations that cause it to take years and years and years to commission a given plant. And NIMBYism gone wild limits the deployment of nuclear in most areas.
So long as First Worlders (along with the growing middle class in the Global South) consume on the level that we do, there is no easy solution. And 90%+ of us, regardless of political leaning, won't volunteer to consume drastically less for the rest of our lives, so we can rule that out.
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@HistoryBuff
Democrats resign when they get caught doing bad things? Tell that to Senator Bob Menendez (D--NJ).
The day VP Harris, who controls the Democrat-majority Senate, holds a binding vote to expel Sen. Menendez, and the day half of Senate Democrats (the rough percentage of GOP reps who voted to oust Santos) vote in favor of said motion is the day that what you're saying now will have some credibility. Until then...
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@HistoryBuff
A person who lacked the integrity to avoid committing obvious fraud/embezzlement in the first place would have the integrity to resign out of a troubled conscience? A dubious assumption.
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@Best.Korea
Grand ambitions from a country that can't even take care of the 25 million people it has now.
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@FLRW
Still a hundred votes higher than the number of Democrats who would vote to expel a Democratic colleague in the same boat. Additionally it was GOP Speaker Johnson who allowed the vote to happen in the first place, even with the party's majority being as narrow as it is.
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National Socialism wasn't so much a hard ideology as it was the personality of Hitler and his cronies; or in other words, whatever the sales pitch for NSDAP and its leadership to stay in power was at a given time. There were consistent elements like ultranationalism and antisemitism (neither of which was a unique innovation of this government), but otherwise it was prone to waffle on a lot of issues.
Sometimes they spoke the language of "survival of the fittest" corporatists and other times they were economic populists promising to take care of the little guy. Sometimes they claimed to be the saviors of Christendom and other times they flirted with Germanic neopaganism. Young German women were part of government programs where they'd be encouraged to bang soldiers and get pregnant; other times, this same government extolled traditional family values. Hitler railed against urban cosmopolitan values and had a "back to the land" movement, while also engaging in building projects to make world-class modern German cities. At times Hitler even tried to sell himself as a champion of anti-colonialism, so far as concerned British and French colonies (apparently, even Gandhi bought into this act).
One could even go so far as to say that neo-Nazism doesn't truly exist, since there's no fixed set of uniquely Nazi principles to endure beyond the original context of Nazi Germany.
Same as Juche; ideologically a nothing-burger that couldn't really be exported, but it makes sense in describing the reign of Kim Jong Un over North Korea. Or Putinism in 21st century Russia.
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@Best.Korea
After all, Christianity is in decline
Where? In the Western world? Is Christianity losing overall if it declines in one part of the world while steadily picking up more adherents elsewhere? Because newsflash: There were an estimated 2.38 billion Christians in 2020. There have never been so many alive in the world at one time.
If the number of Christians in the world literally halved every 20 years, then 200 years from now there'd still be more Christians globally than the number of self-identified pagans currently alive in the United States.
and you really dont want to admit how your religion eradicated entire cultures
I care about people, not cultures. Human beings aren't museum-pieces who belong to X set of behavioral and ideological norms just because they were born in a certain place at a certain time. If a culture practices human sacrifice, widow burning, infant exposure, coercive prostitution, pederasty, or treats some people like cattle because they were born into a certain socioeconomic caste, then good riddance. I would be glad to see Christians put said culture to death.
and installed religious totalitarianism
The Western world that Christians built is decisively not totalitarian. In fact, the only totalitarian states left in the world today are communist (atheistic) regimes like China and North Korea, or Islamic theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
This is because normative Christian values are informed by the New Testament, not the Old Testament. Of course, at certain points in history this happened to not be the case, but the inherent structure of our faith means these were deviations that, eventually would be corrected.
It doesnt sound okay, which kinda adds to the already big pile of things that dont sound okay in Christianity
I understand if one might view the concept of eternal hell as monstrous. However, believing in an otherwise non-existent hell doesn't make it real, nor does refusing to believe in an existent hell make it fake.
For the sake of this discussion, what matters is the consequences of Christianity on earth. And the world created by Christians is profoundly liberal. Slavery is outlawed everywhere, women have an inalienable right to withhold sexual consent even to their husbands, poor children around the world are able to receive an education, Third Worlders are beneficiaries of food and other aid, global lifespans now average about 70 years, etc. Furthermore it's a modern world with electricity and the internet.
But Christianity was doomed to decline anyway.
From Constantine to this moment, about 1700 years have passed. How can a religion be doomed to fail if its corresponding civilizational bloc survived 1700 years? That's probably longer than the period of time during which Latins believed in Roman polytheism, or the Greeks in Greek polytheism.
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Consider Mithraism.
For maybe a hundred year stretch, the devotees of this god met in caves and worshiped the slayer of the cosmic bull. Unlike the worshipers of a certain Jewish figure, however, the Mithraists didn't consider their religion exclusive. They worshiped the emperor and the Greco-Roman pantheon as well.
What happened to them? They went extinct by the end of antiquity. Their extinction, in fact, was so complete that today we know almost nothing about their faith. Very few records or artifacts pertaining to it survive.
In contrast, the religion of slaves, illiterate women, and martyrs being turned into live tiki torches for Nero's dinner parties now has adherents on every continent. Sounds to me like Christians chose the winning strategy.
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Still a better safety record than NASA. SpaceX relying on unmanned vehicles and all.
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@sui_generis
I guess my question is: Why isn't everyone a p-zombie?
Because a p (philosophical) zombie should be what you get from the mere physical conditions for life being present. It shouldn't be able to explain what actually is experienced.
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Also, welcome back. I remember you from DDO.
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For starters I would expect it to answer this question:
"Why do individual perspectives actually exist?"
I'll put it this way. Somewhere out there in the universe is a life form which, on the internet, has the username sui_generis. This person exists. And this person has the bodily equipment needed to think and perceive.
But this should be nothing more than an abstract fact; why are YOU actually living that perspective? Why am I living mine?
I've never been able to successfully articulate this thought before now, and even as I write it's not impossible that I've once again failed to express what I mean. But it seems to me the strongest evidence for metaphysics and a universe that can't be explained solely by physics. Your theory of everything should give an answer for this question.
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@Sidewalker
I suppose it would've been preferable if he said "I hate the poorly educated"?
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Give us the verbatim quotes or tweets by Trump in question. Not another "anonymous report claims Trump said this/is planning this", but a provable thing that Trump uttered.
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Unfortunate, but it goes to show that Republicans aren't mindless NPCs who all think exactly alike and have the exact same political takes. There's some diversity of thought here. Unlike in a certain other party.
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@triangle.128k
How about none of the above?
Let's review the historical record:
-Around the end of WW1, the Greece and Turkey conducted a mutual population exchange, expelling their respective minorities to go live in the other country.
-The Arab countries de facto consented to such an exchange with the Jewish state of Israel when they expelled their Jews, who for the most part went to Israel. Under the circumstances it would've been fine for Israel to do the exact same to its Arabs.
-Israel didn't. Instead, they effectively divided the Palestinians into two groups: those with Israeli citizenship, who live in Israel proper as full citizens exempted from the draft unlike the Jewish majority, and those without Palestinian citizenship, who have the Palestinian territories as their homeland.
-If there are Palestinians who live abroad and aren't allowed to return to Palestine or integrate into their new Arab home countries as full citizens thereof as opposed to refugees, then that isn't Israel's fault.
-If the Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip find it too densely populated, then the fault lies with: (1). too high a birthrate; or (2). their refusal/inability to immigrate. None of this is Israel's fault.
-Gazans have lived under blockade these past 16 or so years because they elected Hamas, who've fired untold thousands of rockets into Israel with the aim of indiscriminately killing a maximum number of Israelis. Whether or not these rocket attacks are thwarted, due to Israel spending money and effort on self-defense, doesn't make them less liable for the damage the rockets would've caused, and sometimes do cause.
-The Gazans' refusal to oust Hamas is collective consent to the blockade, and whatever retaliation Israel may render from time to time for said rockets.
-If the Gazans cannot oust Hamas, then the only way to resolve the situation is for Israel to remove Hamas by force, which is the exact contingency in effect right now.
-Because Hamas uses the Gazans as human shields in their war against Israel, either blatantly (e.g. rockets in hospitals) or tacitly (they're hidden somewhere in a densely packed urban landscape), they alone are responsible for Gazan fatalities so long as Israel's aim in conducting strikes is to kill Hamas militants and civilian deaths are an accidental byproduct of that effort. An exception can only be made if Israel knows with high certainty there's no only civilians in a building and they choose to blow it up anyway, but I don't know of any cases where this happened.
-I will concede that Israel has denied West Bank Palestinians the ability to live in the large majority of the West Bank's area. This is the one concession Israel's morally obliged to make, and the one respect in which they can be labeled the bad guy.
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I have no idea why people keep claiming the Middle East is a powder keg for WW3. There are three superpower factions, at least two of which have to directly fight each other on a massive scale for something to amount to a world war: NATO, China, and Russia. Aside from a relatively weak alliance between Russia and Iran, there's just no potential there.
Israel fights Iran? Not a world war.
Israel and America fight Iran while Russia and China do little more than passively supply the Iranians with weapons? Not a world war.
Another Arab coalition against Israel? Not a world war.
Another Arab coalition against both Israel and America? A little closer to a world war, but unlikely in the first place because the US is also vaguely allied with most of those countries and hasn't directly fought them to defend Israel in the past.
Israel fights Palestine? Not a world war.
And so on.
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@Best.Korea
Dunno man, Dems are demonstrating all the hallmarks of what I'm describing.
They've spent the last 3 years gushing about how "democracy" (not a republic, but "democracy") is the highest value of the land, hinting that anyone who disagrees is an American traitor, etc. They've imported tens millions of illegals, in some cases being able to vote themselves and in others their children will be birthright citizens. They've taken control of the halls of influence and have killed ideological pluralism in mainstream media, Hollywood, academia, etc. They want to stack the Court with left-wing judges and/or impeach the likes of Thomas on phoney charges so that they can put a rubber stamp Democrat in that seat.
It sure sounds to me like they're setting up a system of government where nothing at all matters except "majority vote" and the majority is primed, through the aforementioned foul tricks and schemes, to always approve the agenda of the Democratic Party.
I've seen zero evidence that the GOP is anywhere near being able to pull off the same, or anything remotely like it. They're by far the less dangerous party to our republic.
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You're looking at this through a profoundly anachronistic lens.
The Founding Fathers were informed by the Western Canon, namely the historical examples of Greece and Rome. Athens was the poster boy for the rise and fall of nations. The steps were roughly:
-Aristocracy
-Oligarchy
-Democracy
-Tyranny
In this telling, the tyrant is the self-proclaimed champion of the people, who directs the emotions of the people for self-serving reasons. This may, at first glance, seem to describe Trump, but in antiquity this was linked to class envy, which in modern times has been the near-exclusive domain of the Democratic Party. Parties are not individuals, of course, which makes this connection harder to spot, but one could view the Democratic Party as the well-organized pursuit of tyranny in updated form: the one party state.
What separates aristocracy from tyranny is checks and balances. The aristocrats, where distinct from oligarchs, were subjected to the just laws of the land, because no one man could hope to overturn them and because the bulk of the aristocracy had no desire to overturn them. In contrast these no longer exist by the time the tyrant sweeps into power. After all, laws (e.g. laws protecting property rights) may potentially frustrate the sacrosanct majoritarian will and so will be inherently suspect in the late democracy. "What the people want" will take the place of laws, and where the tyrant/tyrannical party succeeds in channeling the concept of "what the people want" into his own person/its own apparatus, then he/it becomes the ultimate authority.
Again, this is the party to a T.
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This is the second most "debate website" post ever made, after "Age of consent laws should be abolished".
Have you heard of Reddit? I think you'd fit in there. A lot more lively than DART too.
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I was about to dismiss this guy until I discovered that he died in 1960. In his generation his words were very relevant. There's no denying that.
Unfortunately our professional wolf-callers never learned how to turn their siren songs off after the last wolf retreated into the brush, scared off for good. And why would they? It's their livelihood and quite the lucrative one at that.
The official numbers show time and time again that black-on-white violence is BY FAR more common than white-on-black violence, and a few terrorist incidents don't change that. Indeed, a fair definition would consider a black guy who indiscriminately mugs and murders a white guy no less of a terrorist than Dylann Roof, albeit with a smaller kill count.
Which is to say that white supremacy is overwhelmingly a manufactured problem nowadays. It's at least as common for blacks to hate whites as the other way around. Unfortunately there's just too much money and power to be had in keeping blacks afraid and resentful.
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Bullshit but let's say, just for the sake of argument, that it isn't.
Do you know who else wore an adult diaper? FDR. That didn't in any way make him unqualified to lead America through its worst crisis ever. So long as he's of sound mind, whatever else is wrong with the POTUS's body might make for bad optics but isn't all that important.
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@Best.Korea
Some points:
1. Roughly 21% of Gen Z identifies as some category of LGBTQ, a figure unheard of for previous generational cohorts. While it could be largely indicative of increasing self-awareness of the Kinsey Scale and one's position in it, it does very strongly imply that, to some degree, trans identity is a social contagion. After all, if it always boils down to genetics like so many activists claim, then there's no reason to think Gen Z would "inherit the trans gene" far more often than Boomers do. The collective human genome has never changed that quickly before.
2. Something people were conditioned into by modern society is something they can likewise be conditioned out of.
3. Trans people, even those who've fully transitioned, are at dramatically higher likelihood of suicide and other social ills, meaning this is an actively harmful social contagion.
4. For obvious reasons, even those trans people who suffer no other ill effects are functionally sterile. Many castrate themselves, have homosexual (allegedly heterosexual) relationships, or struggle to find a partner because they're generally considered less attractive. Thus, a social contagion affecting up to a fifth of people is a threat to the birthrate, which was unsustainably low even before the emergence of said social contagion.
5. For these reasons, it is for the good of society that the social contagion ought to be combated. This can be achieved by: (1). Rhetorically countering the left-wing narrative that glorifies transitioning; (2). Gatekeeping sex reassignment access so that only those the most predisposed to wanting this, i.e. those whose desire to transition demonstrably isn't the product of a fad, can have it; and (3). Ensuring that those who've visibly transitioned continue to incur some social penalties for life, so that people who non-medically transition are once more divided into a majority of quitters who bought into a fad and a minority of persisters who didn't.
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You are the very embodiment of the debating tactic known as gish gallop. Fling as much poo against the wall as you possibly can and hope that some of it sticks.
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This isn't even hypocrisy. Literally no one's saying that it's a sin to have been born out of wedlock. Only having sex outside of wedlock.
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Japan has much lower crime rate than USA, despite USA being very religious and Japan being very non-religious.
Japan is culturally Buddhist and Confucian. It was common for them to worship their emperor as a literal god until 1945. Shinto might be called a form of paganism but if so it was also tamed by its coexistence alongside more mature religions.
Atheists in USA make 3% of the total population, but only 0.1% of the prison population.
First, there are a lot of people in the US who, though never having formally renounced the existence of God, quietly have doubts strong enough to let them ignore religious commandments in their day-to-day conduct. We can't know what percentage of the prison population these people constitute.
Second, people who do make the formal commitment to atheism are more likely to be rich, well-educated, and so on. Factors which correlate to lower rates of crime. That doesn't mean your average Joe would suddenly become rich and well-educated if he renounced God; he would still be who he was before.
One theory is that criminals believe that what they did is what God wanted them to do.
Doubtful, given that Christians have the Bible, which expressly discourages a dissolute antisocial lifestyle. If they claim God has condoned their actions, then this is nothing more than self-deception in service to their own desires.
It wouldnt be the first time someone uses religion to justify a crime. People justified wars with religion, so justifying crimes with religion is even easier.
In the day when religion justified atrocities, it was largely as an expression of politics. In the 20th century when this ceased to be the case we still saw politically motivated atrocities, such as communist regimes killing "counter-revolutionaries", anti-communist regimes killing believers in Marxism, etc. The US could well have a civil war in the next 50 years motivated by Democratic Party and Republican Party voters hating each other.
For example, if your wife was cheating on you, she would be committing adultery. Therefore, religion can even be a reason for committing a crime, since adultery is punishable in the Bible.
Most Christians accept that the Mosaic Law is no longer applicable, and this interpretation is backed by many New Testament verses. A person who murdered their adulterous spouse while genuinely believing in this justification would display levels of religious illiteracy atypical of, say, those who attend weekly Bible studies, suggesting faith wasn't their core motivation.
I remember the story of a priest who raped a boy, saying he was trying to cure him of homosexuality.
And there's no possible reading of Scripture that would support this action, as the priest in question would be guilty of sodomy and fornication. If the priest claimed this justification then he was being manipulative and dishonest.
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@Best.Korea
The theory was simple.1. Teach a person about God.2. Belief and fear of God will prevent the person from doing evil, committing crimes...ect.
Religion exists for its own sake. Yielding particular societal benefits is just a nice bonus.
That being said...
Why didnt it work? Christian countries have about as much crime as anyone else.
Might I suggest you're looking at this from too narrow a perspective?
First of all, the culturally and intellectually developed world religions have moral codes and they're not all that different from each other. In fact it's surprising how Hinduism and Buddhism, with minimal pre-modern contact with Christians or Jews, organically arrived at similar ethics. So you're not comparing "Christian countries with irreligious countries" but "countries informed by Christian moral traditions with those informed by similar moral traditions."
From here the question becomes: do countries where such traditions are totally absent have less crime? And this can't be proven, because the only case studies we have are vestigial pagan corners of Africa where albinos get raped to cure AIDS and whatnot.
Second, moral traditions created by religions can outlive the religions themselves, and introducing a religion to an area won't immediately quell prior, long-established traditions. For example, while Europe is rather irreligious today, it was Christian for a solid 1,500 years before that and has been extremely peaceful as a general post-WWII rule. And before and during WWII, Europe had high rates of government-committed violence but low rates of private individual violence.
The majority-Christian regions with the most crime, namely Latin America and Africa, are mostly inhabited by indigenous peoples who largely weren't Christian until maybe 100-200 years ago (maybe a bit longer for the Latin Americans, but still). In the United States, the big outlier among Western countries, crime is disproportionately driven by our black minority, whose ancestors were also pagan until just a couple hundred years ago.
So we can't just look at current religiosity but also historic religiosity. Likewise, we don't know what the future religiosity and crime rates of these respective areas of the globe will look like; it may resemble what it is now or current trends might eventually reverse outright.
Third, from a Christian perspective, religious acculturation is an inferior kind of behavioral change. Christians believe that those who have a close relationship with God are sanctified and made righteous, whereas those who don't will not move beyond their default tendencies.
The question of "Who is sanctified and who isn't sanctified" cannot be answered at the polls. An area which on paper is 100% Christian may in practice have low numbers of people who are sanctified, since only God and the individuals in question can know for sure.
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Depends on how you define atheists.
People who just happen to not believe in God and don't care about religion? Sure, they won't be mean-spirited tribalists when it comes to religious debates. That won't stop them from being mean-spirited tribalists about other things since that's a human tendency, but I will concede this much.
People who go on and on about how there's no God and the religious are dumb bigots? Yeah no. They are quite hateful, and they've acquired quite the reputation in the US. In early 2006, less than 5 years after 9/11, and just 3 years after Lawrence v. Texas, there was a poll suggesting Americans distrusted atheists more than they did Muslims and gay people.
A lot of time has passed since then, right? Well, yes and no. As late as early 2016, 51% of Americans said they'd be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who was an atheist. This is compared to, 42% for a Muslim candidate, 37% for a candidate who had an extramarital affair, 26% for an gay or lesbian candidate, and 20% for an Evangelical candidate
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@Darshpreet
The US already has a nuclear sharing program with certain allies. To quote Wikipedia:
"In peacetime, the nuclear weapons stored in non-nuclear countries are guarded by United States Air Force (USAF) personnel and previously, some nuclear artillery and missile systems were guarded by United States Army (USA) personnel; the Permissive Action Link codes required for arming them remain under American control. In case of war, the weapons are to be mounted on the participating countries' warplanes."
Also to quote Wikipedia:
"A permissive action link (PAL) is an access control security device for nuclear weapons. Its purpose is to prevent unauthorized arming or detonation of a nuclear weapon...The earliest PALs were little more than locks introduced into the control and firing systems of a nuclear weapon, designed to prevent a person from detonating it or removing its safety features. More recent innovations have included encrypting the firing parameters it is programmed with, which must be decrypted to properly detonate the warhead, and anti-tamper systems which intentionally mis-detonate the weapon if its other security features are defeated, destroying it without giving rise to a nuclear explosion."
In a nutshell, a small US garrison of maybe 300 guys, whose purpose is to guard the nukes and hand them over to Armenia in the event that it's determined Armenia has been invaded. If Armenia tried to just seize the weapons, the US would have a reasonable chance of thwarting this by destroying the warheads.
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Boy do I feel great today, having just donated $500 to Israel in order to trigger antisemite fascists. If they keep pissing me off I just might donate $500 more.
(This isn't actually directed toward the OP or anyone here, but someone else on the internet who I can't directly communicate with at the moment. The donation was real though.)
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Noice. A milestone indeed.
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On an unrelated note, 2020 saw most of the US workforce literally staying home for months at a time, and a cool million excess mortalities among the working age population, and a global economic downturn, yet less than half the drop we saw in 2008.
This might have been pure luck or otherwise not attributable to anything Trump did, but in any case the Trump economy remained fairly stable even in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic. It's impossible to tell whether the economy would've fared worse under a 2020 President Biden, but I think it's fair to say a president openly hostile to commercial interests wouldn't have helped keep the ship afloat.
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According to this link, it hasn't.
There was a spike in 2021, but that's understandable given there had to be a bounceback from Covid year 2020. 2022 saw a meager 0.65% growth, which I guess was the bounceback from that spike, combined with Ukraine stuff.
Admittedly the figure for 2023 looked high considering it stopped halfway through the year. This is likely going to be another bounce year. But in any case, what we haven't seen under Biden is a consistent, uninterrupted economic boom. The two impressive years we have seen are outcomes largely "borrowed" from the year previous to such.
If 2024 is also considerably better than average, then you might have a point. But it's too early to tell.
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@Mharman
I think this idea only makes sense if someone commits the action they say they want banned. I can't imagine saying someone who doesn't smoke weed believes weed should be illegal by virtue of their actions (or lack of weed-smoking action). Many people value others' freedom to benefit or harm their bodies more than they value enforcing their own moral standards upon others.
Yeah, that's what I meant. And I don't just mean straight up hypocrisy but also an understandable reluctance to make really hard personal calls.
For example, you're a poor Democratic voter who supports total decarbonization of the US economy by, let's say 2035. You have a beat up 20 year old car and you're struggling to pay the bills you already have. You're not about to take out a massive crippling loan to swap your gas guzzler for an electric vehicle and reduce your carbon footprint.
Heck, let's say you're not so poor. Maybe upper working class or lower middle class. You still might see this as an unnecessary expense.
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I posit that:
1. The human mind isn't a monolithic entity. People are doubled minded, and this is probably underselling it. Oftentimes, the statement "I want this and don't want that" is misleading. People often act in ways that conflict with what they say they want.
2. Because of this, polling can't be considered a reliable indicator of what the public wants. If people's private actions seem to be informed by value sets contrary to the values which informed how they responded to a poll, then their collective actions may be thought of as an ongoing poll in itself.
3. This has implications for such debates as the legal status of pornography or marijuana, tax ethics, social justice, and climate change policy.
Discuss.
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Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has recently warned members of Congress that Azerbaijan is on the cusp of launching an invasion of the last enclave of the historically embattled Armenian people. For historical context, the Armenians are a truly ancient race who once called all of Eastern Anatolia their homeland and settled as far as the Levant and the shores of the Mediterranean. But the passage of time has been less than kind to them. Today, all they have left is a tiny piece of real estate smaller than the state of Maryland.
Azerbaijan recently succeeded in the ethnic cleansing of some 120,000 Armenians from their homes in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. You'd think that would be enough for them. But the Azeris, cut from the same cloth as their more numerous Turkic cousins to the west, would like nothing better than to see the total subjugation and possible annihilation of the Christian Armenians. Buoyed by a higher population and awash in oil money, along with the final deterioration of Russia's role as a peacekeeper in the post-Soviet space, Azerbaijan has all the tools it needs to successfully invade.
Armenia is landlocked and it would be extremely difficult for even the United States to reinforce them military in the event that Azerbaijan attacks. But I am of the opinion that the US can and should deter an Azeri invasion, by way of lending them several nuclear weapons. It would be the most cost-effective way to guarantee peace in the Caucasus.
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@HistoryBuff
Actually, I was referencing the OP. I'm guessing you have some principled reason for supporting Palestine whereas Triangle just hates Jews.
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You know the people you're rooting for hate you, right? Most Jews don't actively hate gentiles who aren't anti-semites, but the same Muslims who participate in or celebrate the killing of Jews would love to cut open your infidel neck too.
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@Best.Korea
Both sides claim an element of self-defense to their actions. And while both are at least kind of correct in the macro-sense, none of Hamas's actions this past week can be justified.
These terrorist attacks did nothing to further the cause of Palestinian self-defense; if anything, their lives are about to get a thousand times harder as the Israeli army invades their homes. Hamas indiscriminately beheaded babies when this would have no bearing on the ultimate outcome they hope to achieve (if anything, it was counterproductive). It was killing for the sake of killing.
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And personally I wouldn't play god no matter how many net lives would be saved. The idea that you can wipe your hands clean of non-defensively killing a guy because it was an "indirect death", which you had full knowledge of in advance, is insane.
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The thing about the trolley problem is that the person who flips the switch is never the one tied to the tracks. In that situation, a very different calculus is running through your brain. One that has nothing to do with "one guy versus ten".
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There's what I'd call the self-defense criterion. If a hundred men were trying to kill you, and the only way to survive was to kill them all, it wouldn't be immoral to do so even though their combined lives outweighed the value of yours.
One might say: "Well they forfeited their lives because they were trying to kill you." There's no basis for this. The vast majority of murderers are given a less severe punishment than the death penalty, even while the same legal system acquits those who shot an attacker dead in self-defense; if explained by the previous logic, this wouldn't make sense because uncompleted murders are routinely given a harsher penalty than a completed one, and with a reasonably enlightened state's sanction. Self-defense, then, does seem to create a right to kill that isn't limited by such concerns. This applies even when it doesn't make utilitarian sense.
Modern warfare has been called "total war", and for good reason. Soldiers are paid by the taxes of civilians, and either wouldn't fight without pay or would be of limited effectiveness because they could only work as part-time fighters. Same goes for the governments that armies work for. Otherwise, civilians participate in modern war by manufacturing war materials or by performing services attached to broader war efforts, or if nothing else, by uttering speech that contributes to a general environment of willingness to fight a war. Children will likely participate in the aforementioned manners as adults, or could become soldiers or government employees as adults. Given this, one could argue that civilians are justified targets for killing in self-defense if the end result is the saving of lives on the defending side.
Under this framework, the first question becomes "What is the least bad viable path to achieving self-defense?". It stands to reason that Israel could more or less subdue Hamas without slaughtering every living soul in the Gaza Strip. As such, they are obliged to take it, for the same reason you'd be obliged to flee from instead of kill those hundred men if possible. The second question is, "To the extent that pursuing the least bad path complicates one's achievement of self-defense, at what point does this obligation end?".
To which I have no answer. It seems you can't totally throw out utilitarianism. But it isn't calling most of the shots, nor can you rightly expect the Israelis to behave like it does.
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Realistically speaking? A forced relocation of all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to neighboring Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan. Followed by the granting of full citizenship of Palestinian refugees in such countries. But since Egypt and Jordan wouldn't consent to this, it'd take the temporary occupation of both.
Let's consider the alternatives.
1. Palestine remains an independent country.
Gaza and West Bank have the highest population density in the world by far, and without the advanced economies to sustain this. Even if all blockades were lifted tomorrow, it's fair to expect they'd still be rather poor 50 years from now. On top of that the Palestinians have high birth rates, so the current level of misery will only compound. There's no way they wouldn't eventually get frustrated/desperate enough to storm Israel and solve their problem.
I mentioned the blockades being lifted. This probably won't happen so long as Hamas stays in power. In all likelihood Gaza will resemble hell in another generation. You would think the PLO-run West Bank will fare better, but their overcrowding problems are exacerbated by 2/3rds of a million Israeli settlers. The 2005 evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza involved a tiny fraction of that, so it's unlikely that the political will exists in the Israeli government to resolve this.
2. Palestine is under permanent Israeli occupation.
All or most of the aforementioned problems still apply, except that now the Palestinians are even angrier and more radical.
3. Palestine and Israel are integrated into one country.
There are 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 2.3 million in Gaza. That's 5 million, on top of 1.7 million Muslims in Israel proper and about 130,000 Arab Christians (who would also be Arab nationalists for the most part). Best case scenario, Israel's Jews just barely outnumber the Palestinians. With unequal birth rates this wouldn't be true for more than one generation. Meanwhile, akin to what we saw with whites in South Africa post-Apartheid, a cool million or two million Jews would opt to pack their bags and move abroad rather than live alongside neighbors who hate them and frequently murder them; this would only accelerate the Arab ascendancy.
I don't have to explain that belonging to a minority religion in a Muslim-majority country is bad. Israeli Jews know this and they wouldn't let it happen in the first place. If some external force tried to impose this reality upon them, they would feel they have no choice but to resort to nuclear retaliation.
4. Genocide
I'm not even going to entertain this one. Neither should you.
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Yeah, that way of viewing things does lack nuance.
You aren't forced to work for somebody else. You always have the option not to. No matter the consequences of that, there is no coercion involved so long as your prospective boss isn't the cause of said consequence. For example, you ate the last of your food and were unable to afford more, so you starved, but the cause of said running out of food wasn't another person. Being unable to afford more food likewise wasn't caused, as no one forcibly took away money you already had and would've used for this purpose (except the state when it taxes you, but I digress).
You might retort that food exists and your local supermarket's employees prevent you from just walking out with it, but that food was grown. It is the product of another's labors. Under a Georgist understanding you may be entitled to the natural fruits of the earth, but the pre-modern world didn't spontaneously generate vast quantities of wheat or magically see it ground into flour. The value added by humans belongs to them, not to you.
Then, you might add that owners of the means of production don't labor, meaning they don't add value to the earth's bounty. Rather, employees do. My answer is that owners do by proxy; their responsibility is to do the work, but they entered into consensual arrangements to sublet the responsibility to others for a fixed fraction of the end harvest. Because this didn't involve slavery, it wasn't immoral.
The final objection is to challenge their right to own the land to the exclusion of others. My answer is that arrangements involving private ownership of land and resources have proven most efficient in creating wealth for the masses, compared to all alternatives that both are known and have been tried. This is evident by all of the world's advanced economies having private property rights, and by no known anarchic society (e.g. countries in the middle of civil wars) being prosperous by modern standards.
So far as you lack the ability to change the way things are, it's because you lack the moral and legal right to do so. It's not oppression to be denied the ability to do what you mustn't do.
I will say that you are a "slave" to society so far as it informs your view of reality and traps your mind in a limited bubble. The best way to get around this is to study foreign or non-current perspectives. For example, pre-modern philosophies and diverse literature from around the world, and learn the history of the rise and fall of nations. This will broaden your horizons and give you a panoramic view of things transcending modern biases and blindspots.
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On a related note, I first learned about this concept on a blog called the Slate Star Codex. I highly recommend checking out it, and its successor blog, the Astral Codex Ten.
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Acausal trade is a concept that was first(?) explored on an online community known as LessWrong. In a nutshell, you have two actors who can't communicate directly but do so by predicting the other's actions. In a nutshell it revisits the classic "prisoner's dilemma" and asks the question: what if both prisoners could anticipate the other's move?
The "Roko's Basilisk" thought experiment is internet-famous, though it arguably wasn't meant to be a serious idea so much as a demonstration of the principle of acausal trade. The future AI god can't communicate with you now, in its past. It can only threaten you by way of you anticipating its threat and responding to it. The idea is still impractical for a number of reasons: (1). The vast majority of humans are unqualified to make any contribution to its future existence; (2). Its threat cannot be truly predicted but only speculated about, meaning this isn't true acausal communication, meaning the ultimatum cannot be issued, and it's immoral to enforce a threat made in the absence of true communication; and (3). the AI has no reason to enforce the threat after it has come into existence. Again, since acausal communication isn't happening, its decision not to enforce the threat can't be truly predicted.
Another application is the "multiverse trade" idea. Suppose that a runaway AI has taken over everything and subordinated every particle in the universe to its will. There is a multiverse but it cannot directly communicate with other realities. What it can do, however, is use its near-infinite predictive power to reconstruct what other universal AIs in other realities are like. They "communicate" by perfect prediction of each other's attributes.
They predict correctly that if they themselves do X, another AI will respond with Y, that another AI has predicted their response to its actions, and finally that the other AI knows that they know. If an AI is programmed to have a value set, then it may see utility in seeing that value set expanded to a parallel reality that lacks such. Different values may be mutually proliferated through acausal trade.
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You are such a loser you had to delete your bio. Because you don’t have a thing to show for your miserable life.
I didn't fill out my bio in the first place, because I value my privacy online. But if you must know, my education credentials are literally higher than yours and I have what I guess you could call a plush government job.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
That’s a lie.
Let me say, first of all, that my impression of this whole case was derived from the headlines I've heard over and over: "Alex Jones sued for claiming Sandy Hook was a hoax." Given that that's the only thing I've heard, the assumption on my part that he was sued ONLY for his general political claims about the incident would be a perfectly reasonable one even if incorrect. At worst a misunderstanding, not a lie.
That being said, do you have proof that he defamed specific plaintiffs or encouraged harassment of them?
So you are an idiot and a liar.
A whole lot of projection here buddy.
The required characteristics to be a Democrat.
Fixed.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
What an idiot.
Said the idiot.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Well that’s because you are a deplorable person.
The more I hear that comes out of your mouth (metaphorically speaking), the less I seem to care what you think a deplorable person looks like. You don't strike me as a particularly credible or intelligent person.
The government chose the fine, or a jury of U.S. citizens?
Doesn't matter in the slightest. This jury had no power except that given to it by the government. Its verdict would mean nothing if not enforced by the government.
Controversial speech? Saying your parents are failures for raising such a deplorable person is controversial speech. What Jones did was defamation.
He alleged that a mass shooting was a hoax. He didn't encourage violence or mistreatment of anyone to my knowledge, no matter what some of his followers might've considered the rightful implications of this claim to be. The actions of said hypothetical third parties are strictly their own.
If you call this defamation, or if you think that this "defamation" entitles the government to impose a penalty that'll unconditionally ruin you for the rest of your life, then fvck the very legal concept of defamation. It seems quite incompatible with the 1st Amendment. Given especially that his hoax claims were general and political as opposed to directed toward any of the plaintiffs.
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