So, is there any set of jokes a comedian could make that are filled with enough punching down or hateful rhetoric that you would condemn, even if the comedian was adamant they were just jokes and that he doesn’t believe anything that’s actually racist/sexist/transphobic/pro-genocide/etc?
Or is it a “no true Scotsman” thing where, if the jokes are bad enough, you just decide that he must actually mean them for real, and therefore you can condemn them out of hand?
If Kyle Gass came out and said, “I meant what I said, I’d have been and would be very pleased if he was killed,” would you consider the reaction justified?
If Chappelle came out and said, “I absolutely don’t wish harm on any trans people. It’s all just part of the act,” would you find his jokes acceptable?
Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.
I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’ll admit I’ve read your comment a few times, and couldn’t really latch on to what you point was.
But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there’s a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I’m in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I’d be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of “running a business” would all fall on me.
Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it’s a gamble I’m more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.
The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.
If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.
And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.
Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?
“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.
Your position could be equally stated as, “anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me.” It’s a misuse of the “no ethical consumption” idea on its face.
A fair point. It’s been a while since then. I didn’t recall that.
That said, he’s just an easy example. There’s a few other people who could be used. There’s a billionaire who was an early Bitcoin adopter for example.
And it certainly would have been possible for Notch to become a billionaire without hiring people. The company only had 25 employees in 2014, and was doing $330million in revenue every year. There’s certainly a path he could have tread to still becoming a billionaire without hiring anyone.
It would have been harder, taken longer, and not been as profitable for sure, but doable.
You’re moving the goalposts though, you realize that right?
Your initial position was that you have to have exploited people to be worth a billion dollars (with an implicit “directly exploited,” since if you can’t make any money without indirectly exploiting people, which would make your point even more pedantic than I’m being.)
Other people later exploiting others to profit off your product is irrelevant. Hell, it’d be irrelevant if you made your billion dollars and then started exploiting people yourself. You still would have, in fact, become a billionaire without exploiting people to do so.
Notch is a billionaire. He made Minecraft as a solo project, it became what it was, then he sold it to Microsoft.
Not saying that most billionaires didn’t get there via exploitation, but I don’t think it’s a strict prerequisite.
That awkward silence was effing wild, lol. Judge was giving him the hard stare down.
Fair. I’ll admit, I did start skimming at some point and you’re right, it’s pretty explicit in section 5 and I just didn’t see it.
It’s a wall of text though for sure. I probably would have skimmed it in the same way if I was looking to travel there, lol. Which is on me for sure, but I also wouldn’t expect the penalty for skimming the list and missing something to be ten grand out of my pocket, lol.
I can’t find the pork ban on the link you provided. The closest I saw was “Quarantine inspection of animals, plants and their derived products” which isn’t a prohibition of anything in particular, and the link to the relevant authority literally goes to a dead page.
I googled what not to bring into Taiwan, and this was the first link that came up: https://support.carousell.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008674167-List-of-Prohibited-Content-Taiwan
I can see pursuing that and not putting together that your lunch violates it. It has a big red text about animal product imports, but specifies that it’s about animals under quarantine, which makes it seem like more of a livestock restriction. Especially when it starts referencing legal codes instead of giving you any kind of meaningful explanation.
Combine that with the fact that the dude was Indonesian and routed through a Hong Kong airport, and I think it’s not wildly unreasonable that he would have missed the memo, even if he’d done his due diligence.
And I stand by that, even if he’d not done his due diligence, the punishment is excessive. This feels like more of a “we confiscate the offending material, slap you with a $500 fine, and send you on your way.”
It’s not like he was smuggling in livestock. He had the equivalent of a carnitas burrito from Chipotle in his bag.
The guy was from Indonesia and routed to Taiwan via Hong Kong. There’s a good chance there were no signs or announcements in a language he could understand.
Check what though, that’s the issue. I would never think that my carnitas burrito from Chipotle might catch me a 10k fine.
And let’s be real, there’s no reason to put that “(maybe)” in there. Are you suggesting the dude was like, “Ahahaha, my dastardly plan is in motion! I’m going to snuggle 4oz of pork hidden away in my lunch, in direct violation of import controls. It’s so clever because I have absolutely no discernable reason I would want to do this on purpose!!!”
And what are you recommending me check? Google every item on the “ingredients” list on my coke zero to make sure I’m not smuggling red dye number 33 into a country that bans it?
Most civilized countries don’t fine people $10k for breaking laws that it would be very reasonable they have no idea exist.
I mean, I don’t know that that changes my point at all, but if you’d really like me to rephrase it:
I don’t Google every item in my suitcase to make sure the the type of cotton my socks are made of won’t get me immediately deported and fined $10,000 that I don’t have.
I mean, that headline implies intentionality, no? I doubt the guy knew that his lunch would get him slapped with a $10k fine.
I know I don’t Google every single item in my bag to make sure that something like the type of cotton my socks are made of doesn’t get me thrown in jail.
No, but I also don’t think their base lines up with something closer to me either. I get that drawing with perspective isn’t something mastered in all cultures for all time, but without that it’s an impossible distinction.
Do you think cultures have only ever done drawings of things in real life and have never depicted anything fictional?
We’re both just guessing intent though, right? Is there any evidence for either position beyond, “that’s how I feel”?
I’d be happy to change my mind if someone informed on ancient Babylonian art weighed in, but right now we’re both just asserting why we think the picture asserts our interpretation with no basis.
Eh, the “child” looks to have much more adult-like proportions to me. The head is to small.
But, as you say, analyzing ancient Sumerian drawings and interpreting them through a modern lense is guesswork at best. Especially since I assume neither of us have the context surrounding this image.
Your gut feeling is that it looks like a mom and child. My gut feeling is that that looks like a small adult. Without further evidence, we’re just in a feelings war.
Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean giants were real in either case. But ancient people pretty holistically believed they did, so seeing them depicted in art wouldn’t be unusual.
Of course there’s nuance. Of course every set of jokes fall on a spectrum from universal to heinous.
And obviously a lot of factors go in to deciding if something is truly unacceptable, up to and including if the person truly believes what they’re joking about.
I’m not really arguing against any of that, and I think we’re in fact largely in agreement on that score.
The point I’m actually fighting is one of introspection. To what degree is your opinion on whether a joke is okay or not dependant on your personal political leanings?
How much are you using things like “whether they meant it or not” as a post-justification to make you feel less biased about why you took the position you did? If I provided a hundred different jokes by a hundred different comedians, would your “this is acceptable” vs “this is not” graph more align with a graph of how much they meant what they said, or with how left or right leaning the joke was?
And maybe for you, it wouldn’t be politically skewed at all. Maybe you truly hold an objective metric that can be applied across the board, without a bias towards accepting more things that align to your own beliefs. But you must admit, if so, that it would make you an overwhelming outnumbered minority.
And furthermore, surely you would admit, that most people who do have the “it was a joke against my candidate, and therefore it’s unacceptable, but it’s fine if the joke was about the enemy,” mindset, are quick to argue that they are in fact the most objective person on earth and only make decisions about acceptability based on cool hard logic and rules, not partisanship.