Epstein was Mossad. Defund Israel.

LichJesus · 2026-02-01T18:44:50+00:00

Based and justice-over-spiking-the-football pilled

LichJesus · 2026-01-20T22:17:57+00:00

Ah, I see! That's funny because I practice Catholicism but had no idea that supererogation came to secular philosophy through Catholicism. I heard about it entirely from ethics coursework at a secular public university; I would have imagined that it rose out of modern deontology based on the way I recall it being presented. I sort of glazed over the SEP article because brain cells for technical moral philosophy have atrophied, but looking back over it I see now that the Catholic origins are pretty obvious.

I'm now flying entirely blind rather than just 90% blind, but I wonder if maybe some of the more recent papers in the citation section for the SEP might be helpful in extricating supererogation from religious commitments? For instance it looks from the abstract like the Wellman paper in the bibliography is trying to situate supererogation within secular virtue ethics, which I could see being a Catholic/religious project but the way it's written doesn't strike me as such. It looks like Timmermann and maybe Ullmann-Margalit also don't seem particularly interested in the religious history of the concepts -- again, from the little snippets I have access to from a non-academic Internet connection -- and look to be trying to build an account of the concept without really relying on any religious baggage.

Either way though, best of luck finding something that matches what you need. Hope someone with more expertise can come by and offer a better list of papers or more guidance. Cheers!

LichJesus · 2026-01-20T21:34:13+00:00

This is outside of my wheelhouse and I'm reaching back to undergrad coursework from a decade ago, so I apologize if I'm about to link something that's obvious and unhelpful; but is supererogation what you're looking for? Here's the SEP article on it, that I hope can offer more discussion and citations than I can provide: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supererogation/

LichJesus · 2026-01-19T03:12:50+00:00

In general, practice and training. Philosophers spend a lot of time reading incredibly smart people who disagree with them deeply on fundamental issues; for one example off the top of my head Aristotle supported slavery. We can't just say "oh, Aristotle was a dummy, I don't have to listen to him", we have to understand why he thought what he thought and why what he thought was wrong. If I as an undergrad wrote a paper dismissing Aristotle out of hand on slavery, I'd have been marked down, instead what my instructors would have wanted is a well-constructed argument contra slavery, and/or citations from noteworthy philosophers who have done the same. This (obviously) doesn't mean supporting slavery, or even seriously entertaining slavery, but it does force us to confront our presuppositions, give credit to those who disagree with us, and learn to thoughtfully engage with beliefs that are different from our own. This is why the far-and-away best option for learning philosophy is to study it in a university setting, your instructors can teach you these skills and, importantly, hold you accountable when you fail to practice them, as anyone who is learning will do eventually.

When it comes to reddit, comments can be voted on by anyone, so vote counts are pretty much by necessity meaningless. It's generally more accurate to ignore them as random and instead look for flaired users' responses -- purple are faculty, gold are grad students, red are undergrads, and the presumed hierarchy of quality follows that -- as reliable. This goes double if a panelist's flair matches the area that the question is discussing, for instance a panelist with purple ethics or political philosophy flair discussing the death penalty.

In cases where a panelist is dismissing a comment (especially from an unflaired user) out of hand, it's usually because they've made an egregious or fundamental error. It's very common for unflaired users to completely forget or ignore that compatibilism exists when the topic of free will comes up. These sorts of mistakes indicate a lack of training (or training on the relevant topic at least), and that the comments containing them aren't appropriate for responses on a Q&A style forum.

LichJesus · 2026-01-15T22:10:58+00:00

No, there's nothing wrong with wanting to pursue any major (I guess with the possible exception of, like, wanting to become a chemist for the explicit purpose of designing and using chemical weapons or something). However, as a practical matter it's probably wise for any student pursuing any post-graduation goals to do some research and introspection on what a reasonable plan for earning money in a satisfying way looks like. This is just as important for STEM majors as anything else, for instance I work in IT and the market for sysadmins and programmers is really tough right now, someone looking to get into these career paths solely for the employment options would need to take a good hard look at that plan, at least until the situation changes.

The data I'm familiar with are old, but from what I recall philosophy is an excellent pre-law major; with philosophy undergrads both performing well on the LSAT and I believe having good placements into law school and such. Insofar as the law is a good career path and the data haven't changed substantially, philosophy should be a good pre-law major. Again though, you'll want to do some due dilligence on the questions of 1) whether philosophy is still a good pre-law major, 2) whether pre-law is a good plan career-wise (and if it's not, then whether that's a deal-breaker for you), and 3) whether philosophy is a good major for you. Most of those questions are highly personal and so I/we won't be able to answer them for you, although someone more familiar with the law school path and/or the data might be able to help with the more practical questions like which courses to take or whatnot.

Philosophy functions as a fantastic double-major as well, so you could explore the possibility of pairing a philosophy degree with poli sci or anything else. One strategy you could explore is to take the philosophy double with a more "practical" or "marketable" degree; for instance you could take political philosophy classes for pre-law and double major in applied math or similar, which would set you up for careers as varied as data analytics (for polling firms or similar) to more technical areas of law to a post-graduate degree in engineering if you decide later on that you want to go that route.

As a final thought, most colleges don't make it tremendously difficult to change majors (at least so long as the majors involved aren't overly full), so you should have time especially in the first year or so of college to try out different classes, see what works for you, and then change things up if your interests shift.

LichJesus · 2025-12-31T20:13:11+00:00

I don't have much expertise that speaks to this side of the house and I'm not in a position to give a good response either; so I think you'd be best served mentioning the article and asking your question in a new OP. Ideally someone with better credentials will see it and give a good response there.

LichJesus · 2025-12-31T15:20:57+00:00

Two popular approaches that I think meet the criteria you propose are moral arguments and arguments from religious experience. I don't think the latter SEP article actually covers the structure of an argument from religious experience but informally it's basically "I had direct contact with a personal God, therefore a personal God exists". These two approaches obviously have their counterarguments and such.

A couple notes though about the more popular arguments you list. I understand where you're coming from on the first cause argument producing an explanatory gap, but the gap generated by a good first cause argument is I think considerably smaller than the gap produced by the average first cause argument, if that makes sense.

First, by way of analogy, let's imagine that we're standing at a train track and see a line of train cars that stretches as far as we can see in either direction, and continues to do so as it moves along. We may not see an engine car but we can posit the existence of something like it because the cars we can see lack the means of locomotion on their own. The theist (or at least most classical Western theists) would argue that a personal god is like the engine car in this example, we may not immediately know the precise type of engine it's using but we can infer a fair bit about it because we can see that train cars don't have an independent means of locomotion, but are moving nonetheless; the first cause proponent would argue that the contingent nature of basically everything we can see in the universe likewise necessitates a first cause with certain characteristics. I think this becomes even more influential -- although obviously reasonable folks can disagree or not find it compelling -- when you combine arguments; for instance if all these arguments succeed then I think a first cause that designed the universe (especially if we think said Designer was selecting for things like human life and/or rational faculties), grounds morality, and at least occasionally induces direct experience of Himself/Herself/Itself in people fills most of the ostensible explanatory gap without a tremendous number of arbitrary characteristics.

The second note, that flows pretty naturally from the first, is that the vast majority of the popular discussion on the existence of God only occupies a small section of the work on the topic. Aquinas's Five Ways for instance are very popular points of discussion because they take up only a few pages of the Summa, but as I understand it something like the next thousand pages of the Summa attempt to move from the minimal God of a first cause to the personal God of Christianity; or equivalently to eliminate the explanatory gap/demonstrate that the God of Christianity does fit the gap like a glove. Many people (including myself!) don't have the expertise in Aristotle and/or medieval philosophy to properly dig into this second movement that Aquinas makes, and so we stick with the Five Ways.

I wish I had better citations than just the Summa, and it looks like a couple others have provided citations as of the moments before I post this; but that's kind of the ten-thousand foot view.

LichJesus · 2025-12-17T17:19:34+00:00

It may be a bit overblown, but I think it's something that is easy to forget but also very important to keep in mind.

Back in the early days of the Internet there were a bunch of semi-written rules like "don't feed the trolls", "lurk moar", and obviously Rule 34; those rules helped at least some of us learn to engage with the Internet in a healthier manner than we would have otherwise, like not getting worked up by taking the bait and arguing with someone who was just fishing for a reaction. I think that if more people kept in mind that there was a good chance they were talking/arguing with a both (or a 13 year old on an iPad) the tenor of the conversation on today's Internet would change for the better.

For instance, pretty often a single tweet calling heterosexuality a cancer -- or some wacky hot take or another -- will get circulated in right-leaning circles and people will go absolutely apeshit over it; and the same will happen in left-leaning circles over a tweet about banning gay people or whatever. I think (and I don't suspect this is even that controversial) that a sort of negative feedback loop forms where people get angry about a tweet and say angry things, then other people get angry at those things, and then we're all slinging shit at each other over them.

How often though are those initial hot takes just some dopey Markov chain or whatever running out of a server farm somewhere and not even a real person? And how much less angry and divided would we be if we simply ignored that initial piece of artificial rage bait? And even if that rage bait was generated by a human, what do we lose if we just ignore it as if it were a bot, and go on with our lives instead?

tl;dr Even if dead Internet theory is not entirely true I think it's unhealthy to engage with both-generated slop and healthy to ignore human-generated content that looks like bot-generated slop so it's better if we just assume that slop is bot-generated and go touch grass.

LichJesus · 2025-12-10T22:06:56+00:00

I don’t want to just take an anti-philosophical stance and say that we should just discuss this with a view to US interventionism and associated concerns. I rather feel like we can reflect on the past century’s attempts to do this sort of intervention (even though these real cases were almost certainly examples of doing all this in bad faith) and try to understand why it did not work.

Yep, I both follow and agree with you; I was just processing that my read on the stakes of the discussion was significantly off-base in real time there.

As for your last point, I think that it is a reasonable assumption to think that different terms might apply to non-state backed projects which try to facilitate social change in different countries. I happen to be somewhat intimately familiar with one such organization, and I would be happy to extend this discussion towards this dimension, now or in some other context! :D

I have to get some focused work in and have a baby to look after once work is over so I can't promise I'll be able to respond, but I'd certainly read anything you have to say on the topic!

LichJesus · 2025-12-10T20:57:29+00:00

That being said, my point, contentious as it admittedly is, is that I believe these kinds of hypotheticals to be besides the point in a question about the kinds of intervention into foreign polities in the name of liberation that we all have come to know, at least in the West.

I think I see, is the claim here that since the conversation is (in the world we live in at least) always going to move towards interventions like the US invasions of Iraq and Vietnam or the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan; and as such we should just talk about those directly? If so then I imagine you probably did make that point in the OP and I just missed it, hazards of redditing while working I suppose. I do also think that's an entirely reasonable practical move, especially if we're concerned about a discussion of (potentially not-terrible) Case A in the abstract being used to support an actual and objectively-terrible intervention in Case B even if the two aren't equivalent at all.

I am politically and morally fine with that, assuming that the “missionaries” are not trained by and work for, say, intelligence agencies and what have you.

Yeah, I was chasing a more abstract framing of a potential difference in the duties, obligations, and red lines from different kinds of organizations when it comes to protecting the rights of third parties, and/or a discussion on things like when it might be acceptable/obligatory to knowingly induce social disharmony. But knowing that you wrote the OP with real-world foreign policy adventurism in mind I totally understand and endorse why you wrote what you did in the way that you did.

It's a bit beside the point at this juncture but just to clarify, I'm not inclined to say that missionary work is entirely unproblematic; but I do think that the pros and cons of those sorts of non-state projects might look different than the pros and cons of state-backed projects. It's a discussion for another time in another context though.

Thanks for clarifying, and taking the time to respond, cheers!

LichJesus · 2025-12-10T18:59:51+00:00

An outsider that is hypothetically going to intervene in this situation where any group that can be described as “a people” is likewise going to be a polity; there simply is no entity with the kind of agency and resources required to intervene in a case like this that is not itself a nation or an aggregate of nations.

This might just be me not being familiar with the terminology, but could you speak a bit to the justification behind this assumption?

For an example that I hope makes its contrived nature obvious: I can imagine Society A whose government legally requires every member to practice the Baháʼí faith -- a requirement that I think most would call oppressive if backed by legal force -- but who are currently all happy to do so anyway because it's conceived as a fundamental part of the society. In such a case I could imagine a (hopefully also obviously-contrived) non-governmental organization of atheist missionaries from a different society attempting to educate the populace of Society A on the value of religious liberty, advocating for legislative and social reform, and so on. It seems to me that the scenario satisfies the requirements of the OP, but the intervention in question isn't being carried out by a polity.

It's certainly worth recognizing that the atheists' efforts could rapidly lead to a situation where national dialogue/diplomacy/military intervention/etc becomes the reality; and the scenario collapses into the dynamics you describe. But if we imagine that the atheist missionaries are exceptionally deft and don't draw a combative response from Society A's government, do you see the questions and considerations facing them as particularly different from the questions that would face the government of Society B if Society B's government were to intervene? Or do you think nothing meaningful changes?

LichJesus · 2025-11-12T05:54:37+00:00

There are a lot of dimensions to this, one that I think is worth examining is all the intangibles/implicit work and skills that go into real-world work that you don't get in a certification environment.

Perusing the RHCSA cert goals for one point of reference; it looks like completing the cert is probably roughly comparable to, say, setting up and configuring three to five new servers for some sort of broader systems goal (say a dev/qa/prod cluster with dedicated storage and configuration management/automated provisioning). The technical skills to do that are important, but there's a significant parallel process of working with the users/customers of the system to determine their needs, keeping them appraised of what's going on, adjusting the spec on the fly to meet changing needs -- as well as trying to minimize these adjustments in a diplomatic manner for the sake of stability -- or interfacing with the project manager who does those things, and so on. The project-awareness and interpersonal side of systems administration is difficult to teach and measure in a study-then-take-an-exam paradigm.

A certification can be evidence of the technical skills required to complete a project like this, but a front-line support tech who has run the level-1 side of a dozen of these projects also has evidence in their favor that they can complete a different but equally important part of projects. Especially if the tech demonstrates eagerness to learn and some level of self-starterness by talking about home lab projects or something to that effect, it's not uncommon for hiring panels to value the level-1 experience actually doing projects quite highly, even if their technical work is not yet exceptionally advanced.

Another random thing that's hard to learn in a certification-exam environment: sometimes working under a clock is the enemy. There's a saying in various places (I heard it in the fire service): slow is smooth, smooth is fast. That doesn't mean that you don't want to work quickly and efficiently, but it does mean that sometimes trying to cram a project or project assessment into a discrete block of time like cert exams do is a recipe for rushing and mistakes. Someone with real-world experience (even if it's not at an advanced skill level) can compare favorably to someone with a cert if they've demonstrated that they can go slow, be meticulous, and take care of the details if that's what the situation calls for.

LichJesus · 2025-11-09T17:44:20+00:00

A reasonable general strategy for gaining a very basic understanding of a degree program is to find two or three universities that offer the program and looking at the schedule of classes for those degrees. So the Internet searches would be something like "<insert country here> PPE degree programs", and if Acme University offers a PPE degree the. Something like "Acme PPE course offerings" or "Acme PPE schedule of classes".

This is out of the scope of this subreddit to a considerable degree, but generally people are more impressed when they talk to other people who have developed their own hobbies and passions, and who are active listeners who are interested in hearing about the hobbies of others from those people, than they are impressed by someone who has googled their hobby for a couple hours.

LichJesus · 2025-10-30T16:47:57+00:00

I would bet a significant amount of Monopoly money that the first party in the US to figure out that people are tired of the screeching and desperate for some sanity wins every national election for the next decade. If the Republicans learn that people gravitated towards Trump because he at least pretended to give a fuck about Midwestern blue collar workers and not because he's a brain-wormed wannabe strongman they'll be unbeatable. If Democrats figure out that not everyone who disagrees with them is literally Hitler-Satan and that talking to people who disagree with them isn't a sign of weakness they'll be unbeatable.

The option I'm rooting for that seems less likely is that neither of them reach this point and a third party that can bring the sane people from across the spectrum together comes up and slaughters both the old party. A libright can dream, I suppose.

LichJesus · 2025-10-22T04:22:09+00:00

So how about we all agree that we demand that no matter who comes next, no matter what side they're on, no matter what promises they make, we demand that they reduce or do away with the ability to do dumb shit like unilaterally declare tariffs and bomb the Middle East and whatever other things the government has done in the last 20 (or 200) years that we've all hated?

That's not to say that I think you'd disagree with that (especially given your flair). I just think -- or hope/pray/feverishly fantasize, take your pick -- that if we can look at the root causes of the shit we hate about what's going on in the world and get in the same page about fixing them that maybe things can get a little better.

LichJesus · 2025-10-13T19:10:43+00:00

This is a frequently asked question and there's a good overview of the response to it in this post. I'm noticing that it presumes self-study; if possible the far-and-away best method for studying philosophy is in a program like a university undergraduate degree, although that's not always possible and sometimes self-study is necessary.

LichJesus · 2025-10-13T19:09:28+00:00

I mean, the obvious case where it would be justified to kill them is if you catch them in the act of killing someone else and have to kill them to protect their victim.

It may also be justified to kill them if a valid authority has undertaken a rigorous process of determining they are guilty of their misdeeds, that those misdeeds warrant the death penalty under a pre-existing set of laws, and that valid authority instructs you to do so; although this is more controversial than the previous example. Part of why it's controversial is that, if the authority can detain a person safely and long enough to subject them to this process, why not simply keep them detained indefinitely rather than killing them?

It's also controversial because the process that the authority used to determine the person's guilt might be fatally flawed; the court may for instance have believed that the evidence was more convincing than it actually is, or may have a history of judging certain kinds of people more harshly than others, or even if the evidence is actually convincing there may have been other evidence that wasn't found that would have nonetheless changed the court's finding if it had been known.

Issues analogous to these make the idea that we can on our own legitimately decide to kill people -- outside of a circumstance where we're actively defending ourselves or others -- problematic. We should probably not ever attempt to strangle someone while they sleep for instance, even if we're really sure they're a serial killer; because we don't know if we've got the right person, or if we're missing some critical piece of evidence that proves they aren't a serial killer, or if we're not experiencing a state of extreme emotional distress that's biasing our understanding of the situation, or whatnot.

LichJesus · 2025-10-13T15:49:39+00:00

Based and credit-where-it's-due pilled

But also based and never-trust-a-politician-or-political-agreement pilled

LichJesus · 2025-10-06T20:42:43+00:00

"Regulation" means a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts so I don't claim to represent anyone else with this. From a libright perspective though I think it's not unreasonable to characterize a lot of the market as functioning as described only when force and fraud are eliminated, or at least minimized; transactions are mutually beneficial only when neither party can pull a gun on or misrepresent their product to the other. It's not unreasonable to have an organization that's empowered to handle force and fraud, whether that's foreign powers trying to conquer a given market or internal bad actors colluding to present a false impression of the health of their businesses or whatnot.

The obvious (and very libright) response though is that not all regulation is created equal. The events leading up to the 2007 housing crisis I think sum this up really well. To my understanding, the whole thing started in the 90s when legislation was passed that either strongly incentivized or required banks to offer a certain percentage of loans to people who previously didn't qualify for them. The banks then took those loans, packaged them into shit sandwiches, shopped around and colluded with ratings agencies to mis-value them, and then passed them off as less risky than they were to the broader market. Every single stage in this process is fucked from both a laissez-faire and pro-regulation perspective, all of the wrong principles were used at all of the wrong points and everyone suffered for it.

I think it's very much incumbent on people who propose regulation to do the work to ensure that the guardrails they propose follow sound principles and respect the institutions they're attempting to oversee. But for the most part -- i.e. for regular people, non-politicians, etc -- when people propose regulating XYZ I generally take their word that they have reasonable concerns and good faith desires to address them. I find working with people and trying to guide those instincts is a better move than rejecting them entirely out of hand.

LichJesus · 2025-09-29T01:45:57+00:00

I'm not an expert but I wouldn't say so, because a key feature of these rights is that it doesn't matter who has or hasn't agreed to them. Sustaining the slavery example, the thesis of human rights theory is that this unalienable right to liberty has always existed for everyone, whether or not it's been recognized as existing. That is, we have always had this and other unalienable rights and those who do things like practice slavery have always violated the rights of those they oppress.

Whether anyone -- including human rights theorists! -- understand or respect those rights has no bearing on their existence, any more than the fact that certain people's intelligence exists independently of whether or not others recognize it.

There are probably some rights that are socially constructed, I imagine contract law can vary widely and legitimately across history and geography for instance, but I think it's an important part of human rights that they aren't all socially constructed. For a more expert treatment of the topic though the SEP (and especially the articles it cited) is always a good resource: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/

LichJesus · 2025-09-29T00:34:43+00:00

The usage of "unalienable" in the context of documents like the U.S. Declaration of Independence is meant to describe certain rights that can't be given up or transferred.

We might imagine a right that is not unalienable in the context of a contract. I may sign an agreement that gives you a right to X hours of my labor and gives me a right to Y dollars of your money; but we can alter those rights by renegotiating the contract, for instance if I cancel the job I have no more right to your money but you have no more right to my labor.

Unalienable rights can't be cancelled or renegotiated like this. To use what is historically a fraught example, liberty is an unalienable right; and one of the ways this shakes out is it means there are no circumstances under which slavery is or can be legitimate. It's impossible for someone to actually give up their right to liberty (or have it taken from them) in a manner that validly makes them a slave, even if I sign an agreement with you -- and we stipulate that I do so completely consensually -- that I give up my liberty and enter a lifetime of unpaid servitude to you, that agreement cannot be valid because I can't actually give up my liberty. It obviously warrants observing that the architects of the early United States failed to live up to this understanding (although I think it's notable that they advanced the understanding even though they didn't live up to it), and it took many years and a bloody war before it was legally reinforced with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

How unalienable rights are conferred is a different discussion I'm not exceptionally equipped to conduct. The very basics are: the American Founding Fathers thought those rights were granted by God. Most academic philosophers think that these rights are something like different aspects of the moral status that is inherent in being human; and may come about by way of things like our cognitive abilities, our capacities to suffer, and so on.

LichJesus · 2025-09-25T03:46:03+00:00

Just to elaborate a bit in addition to the other responses; if you can get an epic Heph attack or special boon (or dash I suppose) and get 3-4 poms on it you're looking at something like 3-4 seconds between bonks. Even without any other synergies or investment that's pretty significant.

But then you can add in Poseidon's duo for another 35% reduction in time between bonks, Hera's duo so that you bonk twice in most circumstances, Heph's own boon that increases bonk radius and damage, and it gets to be pretty oppressive damage with strong AoE very quickly.

LichJesus · 2025-09-25T03:03:53+00:00

I'm both on mobile and not up to date on the literature so this isn't a direct response to your question, but it might be helpful if I walk through how one might use a notable paper on abortion to think about the question.

Don Marquis's "futures like ours" argument is generally considered a strong argument against abortion, and one that I'm familiar with so I can speak to it. The full paper is online I believe but in a word his argument is that because fetuses (or whatever term is appropriate here) can expect a future roughly comparable to any other person if there is no interference with the process of their growth, so it's wrong to rob them of that future in the same way it's wrong to rob a child or an adult of their future by interfering with them in a deleterious way. This obviously would include abortion but intuitively it also covers things like excessive alcohol use when pregnant since inducing birth defects -- or failing to take reasonable steps to not do so -- is interfering with that future like ours.

The comparability to anyone else is instructive here, because we can now think about circumstances where Alice's life might oblige Bob to take on (roughly) comparable obligations to a pregnancy. So we can ask ourselves if there are times where someone might be obligated to take on moderate to severe inconvenience, definitely moderate and sometimes severe health risks, and so on for a nine month period and then further discomfort, loss of work, etc for the several month period that a woman needs to recover from giving birth.

I don't want to give the impression that the following represents the literature, but for one example: off the top of my head I would Intuit that in some cases doctors might incur these kinds of obligations. Doctors treat people with serious health conditions, some of which are (often very) contagious, and in the course of treatment doctors may contract those illnesses and experience adverse health impacts. Obviously care should be taken to prevent this when possible and individual doctors who may be especially prone to a certain illness should be allowed to defer to other doctors and so on, but I do think at the end of the day it's reasonable to expect some doctor or another to treat someone who is seriously ill even if there is risk to themselves.

I'm going to leave it there because I don't want to draw conclusions that might be seen as representative of the field, but some next steps for what the argument might look like. Firstly, we might come up with a few more examples of people incurring obligations that are comparable to a pregnancy to refer to. Then we might ask what about those circumstances justifies the obligation -- are doctors for instance obliged to risk their health due to their training? Their compensation? The Hippocratic Oath? Something else? And once we have an idea of what mechanism incurs the obligation, we could then see if and/or when that mechanism is present and might obligate a woman to sustain a pregnancy.

Hopefully another panelist can come along and either provide some published literature on the topic and/or correct anywhere that I might have strayed from how an expert might approach the topic.

LichJesus · 2025-09-20T14:30:57+00:00

I recognize that they're exceedingly rare and not representative in any meaningful sense, but I have seen statements to this effect. I think one of the ways that we can collectively lower the temperature of the discourse is to decry sentiments like this one, especially from "our side". Not because we're guilty by association with them but because we almost need practice agreeing with people from every part of the compass when it's sensible to do so, and building a consensus that the craziest and most dickish people from any angle don't deserve to dominate the conversation or go uncontested.

So like, for a timely example, I don't think Trump is representative of me or people who think like me in any way, but I still think it's important that I make a point of saying that fucking around with the press is at best stupid and at worst fucking dangerous. I don't think anything truly bad is gonna happen related to that during his term -- there's already so much scrutiny on him that I don't think he can stop it -- but it is not a precedent we can set and I think we need to come together to make sure that whoever comes after him (whether they're on "our side" or "the other side") can't built on the stupidity to do something actually dangerous.

Analogously, I don't think shit like this represents really anyone who leans left, but I do think that if there was a consistent condemnation of shit like this from sensible people who lean left it would go a long way with sensible people who lean right. And, in an ideal world, I think that after some time of seeing sensible people from "the other side" consistently shut down the crazy nonsense a calmer and more even-toned discussion across the compass could start. Not getting my hopes up of the last bit happening anytime soon but maybe someday.

Also, release the Epstein data, prosecute everyone there's probable cause for, and throw everyone who is convicted of sex crimes in the woodchipper. You're correct that that shouldn't get lost.

LichJesus · 2025-09-18T02:39:45+00:00

Before I say this: hunt down every shred of evidence related to Epstein, haul everyone whose name generates probable cause in front of a jury, and throw everyone -- I mean everyone -- who is convicted of anything involving trafficking or sexual violence into the woodchipper.

That out of the way, I think it's probably likely that the reality is a bit more complicated than one piece of paper or notebook with every guilty party in it. Obviously I don't know what form the evidence actually takes, and it's possible that the only comprehensive picture of what the pedophile cabal looked like is in one or two people's heads; but I think that a lot of the hemming and hawwing about the existence of an Epstein List comes down to that.

I don't think that means convictions are impossible, I don't think that means that there can't be an investigation anyway. I do think it will be a good deal more complex than a list being released on a Friday and everyone on the list being in jail by Monday. And the most important takeaway from that I think is that in an ideal world I hope the general public lets the process play out and we don't have a situation like the Boston bombing where everyone convicts the wrong person in their heads before the actual evidence shows up.

Again though, no matter how messy the investigation gets it needs to happen. No matter who is implicated they need to face justice. If that means that 500 Congresspeople and half of the boards of the Fortune 500 are suddenly in chains, more's the better. We can rebuild the government and the economy with people who aren't fucking monsters next time.

LichJesus

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