enkers

That’s wild. Did you need a special program to parse stuff out of the data stream? I guess it would mostly come in as http reaponses, so it wouldn’t be too hard, but still an interesting problem.

I’m happy to take it as a win that we can avoid a real war if it means some obnoxious pettiness.

This is also just a cutesy hand sign for “fox” in Japan, with zero alt-right symbolism. Foxes are a significant part of the mythology there, and there are all sorts of tales about leaving food for fox spirits to bring good fortune. There’s even a prominent vTuber who’s regularly depicted making the sign.

I wish these alt-right fuckwads would stop trying to wreck shit for the rest of the world.

Seriously. I’ve seen letter openers more threatening than that “sword”. Was it dumb? Sure. Does he deserve a slap the wrist, absolutely. But prison?? No way. What the actual fuck?

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re not going to address your labour shortage by making things worse for labourers.

Haha, yeah, that’s why I said it’s my diplomatic answer, as it doesn’t utterly reject a capitalist framework.

Here’s my mildly diplomatic answer that’d probably get tossed:

Piracy has become a plague on our society, but there’s a more sinister cause to it. The average labourer can hardly afford to pay the same fee to access culture that the wealthy person can, and this has caused a significant and justified uptick in piracy.

This situation can be averted by increasing minimum wages and supporting universal basic income. If everyone knew they could at least make ends meet, they’d have some left over to pay for the culture that mattered to them.

We should be eating cricket flour. […] And if we got over the “ick” factor, our carb-filled food would be a lot healthier.

The length people will go to, to not eat a goddamned legume.

Good thing there weren’t any red lines in it’s way, or else they might have been crossed.

Yeah. I used to think people who were against GMOs were just anti-science contrarian types, but the more I saw of how Monsanto operates, the more I became cognizant of how it’s mostly just capitalism trying to stick its grubby hands in to literally everything to extract maximum profits.

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I was thinking about this in terms of limbs, and wondering, since pregnant women have more than 4 limbs, wouldn’t the average number of limbs be greater than 4?

There are probably considerably more pregnant women than people missing limbs, but then again, the women only have additional limbs for 9 months.

Maybe if we’re talking line fishing, but I’m pretty sure most commercial fishing is done with trawling nets, where everything above a certain size is caught.

For sure. That’s probably just a +1 on to the factors you already listed.

Crazy idea, but what about fishing-driven evolutionary pressure. If all the biggest fish are getting caught and killed, won’t that give smaller fish an evolutionary advantage?

Anyone under 36 wasn’t even eligible to vote the last time Palestine had parliamentary elections.

I’d be willing to wager that an unusually large portion of the population falls into that category as well. Anyone have any statistics about the demographics of Palestine? Oh, their annual census is out of date? You don’t say.

As a vegan, you’re absolutely right. A lot of people think the hard part is giving up meat or dairy or eggs, but it’s not. The hard part is dealing with the social implications. Explaining to your friends you aren’t willing to eat with them when they’re doing something you find thoroughly wrong. Having your mom disappointed you won’t eat her cooking.

You have to be willing, at least somewhat, to pay the cost of maintaining your convictions, and nobody ever tells you that when you start.

Social change is hard, and it takes time. But so many have already blazed a much harder path than I’ve had to endure, and every time someone else gets on board it makes it easier.

Doing the right thing is rarely the easiest thing.

What a strange mentality. When I pay for things I want, I’m generally happy to support the creator. If others can’t, why would I be upset if they get the product for free? It means more people can also enjoy the thing I like.

It’s such a crab bucket mentality, I couldn’t imagine living life being constantly bitter.

I think the inverse problem is more troubling. If you accept that nothing has inherent value, then isn’t everything morally permissible? Maybe it is an emotional decision, or perhaps a leap of faith, but I find that idea so repugnant, I couldn’t believe it and continue functioning as a person.

I think in terms of consciousnes, Occam’s razor leads me to suspect that it’s tied to brain function, and when that ceases, so does it. Of course, once again, things like this are very hard to prove. I do think, though, that science and philosophy will eventually unravel it. (Incidentally, there’s actually a book by Dan Dennett I’ve been meaning to read about this topic which was suggesting we’re quite a bit closer to figuring it out than most people think.)

One of the problems with philosophy is that there’s never any smallest part, beyond perhaps Descartes’s “cogito, ergo sum”. You can reduce any argument more and more and they all start to not make sense and eventually crumble. You can pick at their semantic foundation or the thousands of years of preceding thought until they unravel, then that nice sweater is now just a bunch of fibres. If you refuse to view philosophical arguments as a whole, then there’s nothing there to view.

It’s like an actual sweater. Does it even exist in the first place? After all, it’s just a bunch of stuff arranged in a particular way, and it’s called a sweater because it has some sort of human utility and we decided to give it a name. You could go about your life and believe that sweaters don’t exist, and it’d be quite hard to prove you wrong.

Or you can accept that it’s a useful human construct, so they do. Maybe you could even go further, and believe there’s some idealised concept of sweaterness that exists in some meta-reality, which all sweaters share a property of.

I think this is essentially the realist viewpoint.

And you could be right, maybe all our current moral theories do run into contradictions, so perhaps they’re all wrong.

Heck, we’re running into similar problems in astrophysics. When we learn more about our universe, and things stop adding up. But that just means we go back to the drawing board and find a better model until they make sense.

Same for philosophy. When you reach a contradiction, you go back and come up with better ideas. It’s a process of slowly uncovering the truth.

I think it’s rather self evident, but I’ll share a logical outline which resonates with me. To be sussinct: Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. Where possible, it’s morally preferable to let them continue in that state.

It’s basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism for more thorough arguments to show that killing is generally wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to logically prove.

So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I personally prefer using Camus’ acceptance of the absurd as a basis for intrinsic value, but there are lots of other potential arguments that lead to the same conclusion.

Ultimately, though, it’s impossible to even prove that other beings simply exist (e.g. solipsism) or have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.