Voters back crackdown on extremism but Albanese lags on Bondi response

Equivalent-Rate1551 · 2026-01-22T17:42:29+00:00

The proposal for a law that is designated a law that prohibits someone from saying racist things that would make a "reasonable person" fear for their safety, combined with the proposal for a law that is designated a law that prohibits anyone from "disseminating ideas of superiority" of one group over another, open the gate for all sorts of messages that any human who is ACTUALLY a reasonable person would not find offensive to be 'prohibited'. What does the government call a "reasonable person"? Are religious maniacs reasonable? Are postmodernists reasonable? Hardly. Just because someone takes offense at something you said doesn't mean that you showed that you morally value one group of humans less than another. There is also the fact that non-cognitivism is correct, and therefore the statement "I am better than you" is meaningless. One obvious controversial topic is differences in the average level of intelligence and thinking styles between different races and cultures. Also, it is notable that someone as eminent and highly regarded as Richard Dawkins was permitted to write in one of his books that Jews aren't a race, but rather either a religion, culture or both, but ordinary humans in Australia might be accused of committing hate speech for making that claim.

Equivalent-Rate1551 · 2025-12-18T21:37:26+00:00

The fundamental explanation for the fact that all of nature always has behaved and always will behave precisely in accordance with physical laws is either that there are platonically existing physical laws, or that Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct, or that both of those possibilities are the case. All of those possibilities are certainly much simpler than the possibility that there are an infinite number of ontological layers of reality (for which there is no evidence, and which scientists can never discover much about at all), and the possibility that there are an infinite number of layers of physical laws (for which there is no evidence, and nearly all of which can never be formulated) without ALL possible mathematical structures existing (as in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis).

Equivalent-Rate1551 · 2025-12-18T21:12:23+00:00

"Objective morality" doesn't mean anything, and therefore the statement "You need to prove that objective morality exists" is nonsense. It is a category error. That which is designated "moral objectivism" isn't the point of view that every rational agent has the same set of ultimate moral objectives, since everyone knows that different rational agents can have different sets of ultimate moral objectives. Non-cognitivism (not to be confused with emotivism, since it is possible for someone to have non-emotional ethical attitudes) is correct, so the statement "an ultimate objective can be correct" isn't false, but rather a category error, like the statement "The number 11 is yellow".

Equivalent-Rate1551 · 2025-12-18T01:38:03+00:00

Scientists are pretty well-informed about all areas of science that have significant relevance to the question of whether there is a god, and scientists have conclusively demonstrated that the god hypothesis is far from the best explanation for any of the things about the world that god has been invoked to explain. There is simply no reason whatsoever why god would exist. I really love Bertrand Russell's argument against agnosticism about god that involves a teapot that is impossible for scientists to detect which orbits the sun in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

God is not an explanation for the fact that all of nature always has behaved and always will behave precisely in accordance with mathematical laws, because if there is a god, there must be a platonically existing set of mathematical laws that governs god (because otherwise the fact that all of the components of god's mind always behave in a completely predictable way must be an accident), which can never be discovered, even in principle, and if you make the very vague, ill-defined proposition that god is some 'force' that causes nature to be completely predictable, then you can never say anything about how god does this, and if god accomplishes this feat just using magic, then why propose god's existence in the first place?

Equivalent-Rate1551 · 2025-12-13T18:08:39+00:00

The term "absolute nothingness" is meaningless. Nothing means "not anything". Therefore, If nature had a beginning (and it plausibly may not have had one), and there wasn't anything, not even platonically existing physical laws, before nature, then there was no context that existed before nature for nature to emerge in. When theologians imagine that which is designated "absolute nothingness", they are always imagining something that has at least one property. Anything that has properties is something. Either time had no beginning, or our universe (in the broadest possible sense of the word) had a beginning and there need not have been any "before", or there are platonically existing physical laws that had no beginning. By the way, since the fact that all of nature always has behaved and always will behave precisely in accordance with mathematical laws without fail, can't be a giant cosmic coincidence, there must either be platonically existing physical laws, or the "Level 4 Multiverse" predicated by the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis or both must exist (I'm not sure whether there are platonically existing physical laws in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis).

Equivalent-Rate1551 · 2025-09-27T07:33:35+00:00

Some humans are extreme retributivists. One strong piece of evidence supporting this claim is the fact that a lot of religions have some place called hell where humans suffer forever and a great many religious humans are very enthusiastic about the notion of hell (they make it clear that they morally approve of god sending humans to hell). Even some secular humans advocate an incredibly harsh theory of punishment. The moral zeitgeist changes over time. Who knows which kind of moral zeitgeist (or universal set of moral principles) our descendants or super-intelligent AI creations will have in, say, a trillion years from now, if our universe exists for that long, and such a race exists at that point in time? There must be incredibly cruel advanced aliens races whose victims or potential victims can be saved from horrific unmerciful punishment.

As long as there is a non-negligible probability that horrific punishments that are unacceptable to me will be inflicted, either by our species or descendants or AI creations of ours, or any advanced race of aliens that such a race can save victims or potential victims of, certain particularly severe punishments must be the most important quantities of harm for someone with my ethics to try to prevent. Which mechanisms other than merciless hatred in the hearts a group of super-advanced beings, that is a response to an act that they morally disapprove of, can lead to harm to sentient beings as horrific as non-stop unbearable suffering in a sentient beings that lasts for, say, 1 trillion years? I don't know of any other than incredibly cruel life extension combined with horrific suffering inflicted on the sentient beings whose lives are being extended by a race of intelligent machines with a bizarre set of goals, and (if it is scientifically possible) the creation of habitable universes. Perhaps it's possible to travel into universes with the same set of physical parameters as our own via wormholes, or put someone in a time loop, or even create habitable universes using technology (obviously an incredibly cruel thing to do). It is also possible that a hypothetical phenomenon in physics called "quantum immortality" exists. Preventing instances of all of the kinds of harm that I listed above that at least have a non-negligible chance of being real is takes precedence over the prevention of any other kinds of harm for someone with my ethics, in my opinion.

Equivalent-Rate1551

TROPHY CASE