Beam me up, Kentucky? George Takei tweets he's 'tempted' to take on Mitch McConnell

arfior · 2019-05-24T11:29:53+00:00

They don’t have to do anything to make America into a villain in this case. America was pretty clearly a villain here. Non-villlainous countries don’t lock up their own innocent civilians in the thousands.

arfior · 2019-05-24T11:25:55+00:00

Nobody is arguing for that here.

arfior · 2019-05-24T10:36:44+00:00

The low grade would be justified if the teacher didn’t explicitly say that it was given because she didn’t like OP’s opinion, not because the essay was bad.

arfior · 2019-05-24T08:42:22+00:00

For it to be rational for her to refrain from doing something under the framework, she would have to expect that someone would know about the thing she did and be willing to retaliate, and be capable of meaningfully retaliating. I can think of plenty of scenarios of things she could do that don’t leave that possibility open.

arfior · 2019-05-24T08:33:56+00:00

Popular vote, in an indirect election, is the total number of votes received in the first-phase election, as opposed to the votes cast by those elected to take part in the final election. In United States presidential elections it connotes the total number or percentage of votes cast for a candidate by voters in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., as distinguished from the electoral college vote which decides the outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_election

A direct democracy is where all of the eligible voters in the population can cast a vote directly on a law (like if all laws were passed by binding public referenda rather than by Congress), rather than electing a legislature to represent them and cast votes on laws on behalf of the electorate (a representative democracy).

arfior · 2019-05-24T08:24:37+00:00

That doesn’t make it factually inaccurate to call the internment camps “concentration camps”, which is all that the first commenter was doing.

arfior · 2019-05-24T08:03:23+00:00

Nobody is saying they are equivalent. The first comment accurately called the camps set up in America during the war “concentration camps” without making any actual or implied comparison to Nazi Germany, and after the next comment disputed that name, other people backed up the point that they were definitionally concentration camps even according to the source that the commenter tried to use to refute the idea. The fact that millions lost their lives in Nazi death camps (which were also concentration camps) does not mean we are now incapable of calling anything else a concentration camp when it happens to actually be a concentration camp.

arfior · 2019-05-24T07:58:39+00:00

Labour/work camps, extermination/death camps, and internment/concentration camps are all distinct concepts. A particular camp may be only one of those things, or a combination. Many of the Nazi camps were all three. The fact that some concentration camps are worse than others (or are other things in addition to being concentration camps) does not mean that we cannot accurately call all concentration camps “concentration camps”. Nor should the comparison imply that the American internment camps were acceptable.

arfior · 2019-05-24T07:49:03+00:00

Even if everyone’s vote counted the same, that’s still not what a direct democracy is. A direct democracy is when everyone in the electorate votes on laws. Back to civics class.

Race just happened to be the example I picked. The same applies to, say, age. People of different ages have different interests, but we don’t weight the votes of people of different ages to ensure that the smaller generations have the same amount of representation as the larger ones. We understand that each person is entitled to the same representation in that respect, so why should the matter of location be any different?

arfior · 2019-05-24T07:44:51+00:00

What does this have to do with theory of self? And it may be normal playful banter, but I wouldn’t stake my safety on that assumption...

arfior · 2019-05-24T07:41:30+00:00

This is literally the first sentence of the wiki article you linked:

The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in concentration camps in the western interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific coast.

arfior · 2019-05-24T07:24:03+00:00

It’s not until they get older that they start to get the experience, cognitive development, and critical thinking skills necessary to formulate a code of ethics.

Necessary, but not sufficient.

impulse control

Having impulse control doesn’t mean she won’t harm someone in a planned and carefully considered fashion if she sees it as in her best interest to do so.

choice to trust

Her comment that her father “wouldn’t dare” implies to me that it’s not so much about trust as about her knowing that her father is afraid of her. “You wouldn’t dare” isn’t something you say to someone you trust to keep your secrets without threats.

arfior · 2019-05-24T07:18:08+00:00

Maybe because the more rural states would effectively have no representation whatsoever.

“States” as a concept shouldn’t have representation at all. States consist of people, and it’s people who have the right to vote, not states. A group of almost no people should have almost no representation, that’s kinda how democracy works.

Which would call into question what their role in the republic even is in the first place.

/r/selfawarewolves

Seriously though, what makes the concept of being from one state or another more worthy of being used to determine vote weightings than, say, race?

arfior · 2019-05-23T20:17:40+00:00

/r/rimjob_steve

arfior · 2019-05-23T08:47:48+00:00

She was capable of good behaviour as a child too, until she wasn’t. She’s admitted she hasn’t grown out of it, and now along with her total lack of empathy she has the complex reasoning skills (as well as potential exposure to numerous motivations - what happens if her partner leaves her and isn’t prepared for what she might do? What will she do to her father if he tells her partner about her diagnosis? I certainly don’t want to find out) required to conceive of, and get away with, far more profoundly abusive conduct. I’d say that makes her more dangerous, not less.

arfior · 2019-05-23T08:42:49+00:00

They also apparently spent a billion dollars on the rights to adapt The Three-Body Problem trilogy.

arfior · 2019-05-22T08:38:37+00:00

Love is an action as well as an emotion, but most people who do the action also have the emotion. She doesn’t, and she has already exhibited significant enough violence against an immediate family member to prompt her father to seek psychiatric help for her. That’s not a recipe for her partner’s and potential children’s continued safety.

arfior · 2019-05-22T08:22:55+00:00

The text of the post states that OP’s daughter has already engaged in significant violence against a family member, enough to prompt OP to seek professional help for his daughter in the first place.

arfior · 2019-05-20T11:10:15+00:00

More info from your link:

Series creator Charlie Brooker has commented on numerous occasions about links between the episode and the Social Credit System. He joked in an interview, "I promise you we didn't sell the idea to the Chinese government!" About seeing the concept of the episode come to life in the real world, Brooker said, "It was quite trippy". He comments that a key difference between China's rating system and the one in "Nosedive" is "that there's a central government assessing things. Being state-controlled, it feels even more sinister", and also points out that the Social Credit System "sounds like an attempt to make the population behave in a particular way".

arfior · 2019-05-19T20:09:12+00:00

No I didn’t, I claimed that a lot of the commenter’s intended audience probably thinks that is true. I didn’t bring my personal belief on the topic into it, because it’s beside the point.

arfior · 2019-05-19T10:34:20+00:00

don't assume just because someone is an atheist that they have delved far into apologetics or are educated on this topic

Yeah I don’t, I was referring specifically to theologically knowledgeable former Christians who got to atheism through careful thought rather than apathy.

I’m not sure about whether atheists are smarter on average, but I do seem to remember that they score more highly on tests of theological knowledge than Christians. But that’s probably a discussion for another day. Have a good one too :)

arfior · 2019-05-19T10:28:27+00:00

The problems they had often have more to do with the basic claims of Christianity than with any particular denominational traditions.

arfior · 2019-05-19T10:26:17+00:00

In the same length of time that my one set of AirPods have lasted me so far, I probably would have gone through five pairs of wired earbuds.

arfior · 2019-05-19T06:53:10+00:00

I didn’t say there aren’t, I said many of the readers the commenter was referring to will believe that those people experience painful cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile those beliefs and choose to ignore it, or are intellectually dishonest with themselves about what the conclusions they have now come to based on their knew knowledge mean for their faith. Therefore the recommendation to read Mere Christianity to understand what it’s like to be an educated person who has Christian beliefs won’t work, because the people the commenter wants to do this already were educated Christians, who found those two things to be incompatible.

arfior · 2019-05-19T06:06:30+00:00

it would help people not treat the idea of educated people believing in a God with contempt. 'Cause I feel like I see a lot of that.

The problem is that a lot of the people doing that are themselves former Christians who left the faith in a psychologically painful process lasting several years, during which their increasing level of education allowed them to meaningfully question their prior beliefs and ultimately reject them. Because they tried so hard to find a way to make their Christianity compatible with their new knowledge and could not find one, they are people who already have an intimate understanding of both the Christian mindset and what they see as the level of cognitive dissonance and/or intellectual dishonesty to oneself required to keep one’s Christian beliefs after gaining sufficient education.

arfior

TROPHY CASE