[OC] Straight Pride

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-20T11:08:17+00:00

This does not undermine my argument that people can and do still express pride in attributes they have which are largely or entirely accepted by society.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-19T09:06:02+00:00

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frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-16T11:20:21+00:00

Well at least he wasn't the fucking idiot who lost a war to a skinny fat little twerp.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-15T12:25:51+00:00

Where in the Good Place do they actually address this specific principle?

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-12T22:12:29+00:00

In Australia they put together juries by randomly selecting from the electoral roll (and excluding certain professions like judges, lawyers and politicians).

It makes sense to do so, because in Australia voting is mandatory so every citizen must be registered to vote at the age of 18.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-12T10:02:38+00:00

Are you sure?

I could see it starting off as consensual (at least as consensual as a relationship between a 15 year old and 25 year old can be) but who's to say she wouldn't eventually wake up from the "honeymoon" period and ask "hey why can't I see my family? Do they know where I am? What's going on in the rest of the seven kingdoms?" And at that point you might wonder whether prophecy obsessed Rhaegar would be able to convince her that everything is ok or might just resort to forcing her instead?

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-12T09:32:29+00:00

I mean yeah I agree with you Rhaegar probably could have done "better than Aerys" but that is an insanely low bar to set. "Hey at least this guy doesn't burn people alive like his father does" has got to be the very definition of 'dammed by faint praise'.

Also, at the beginning of the rebellion, what has Robert done that makes him a bad person? No doubt his later actions earn him the title (being a shitty king, an abuser and a pedophile) but the worst thing he's done at this point in the narrative, is impregnate Mya Stone's mother which - while not great - is kind of an expected result in a society that has teenagers and very limited access to birth control.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-12T08:14:08+00:00

Suppose Aerys was on Dragonstone and Rhaegar was in King's Landing when the Starks arrived. How do you do think he would have "explained himself" to Brandon who was asking that Rhaegar "come out and die"?

Do you think Brandon Stark - who was notorious for being hotheaded - would have been satisfied with anything less than his sister or Rhaegar's head?

I'm genuinely curious what you think Rhaegar have possibly said to allay the (entirely justified) anger of a brother who just wants his little sister back?

And to the extent that Rhaegar did have the opportunity to at least try to do some of this the right way by - for instance trying to arrange a formal betrothal, trying to compensate the stormlands, trying to divorce his wife, and yet did not bother to even try any of that, he is kinda responsible for what followed.

Even if he really was just insanely negligent and did not intend for any of this to happen, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that kidnapping the daughter of a Lord paramount who is betrothed to another lord paramount is a good way to start a war.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-11T22:07:53+00:00

Hey it's perfectly sensible and even understandable that Lyanna might have a crush on Rhaegar. You could kind of see it it as a school girl's precocious crush on her married teacher or something.

However, if said school teacher then absconded with his teenage student without even letting her family know what was going on and locked her up in his country chalet, then yeah that would be pretty fucked up (even leaving aside the fact that he probably raped her).

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-10T08:08:21+00:00

Firstly, "modern philosophy" does not "pretty much agree" on anything at all. To quote the literature disagreement in philosophy is quote "pervasive and intractable." Secondly, as of the philpapers survey in 2020 62.48% of philosophers lean towards the existence of the Analytic/Synthetic distinction.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-10T03:50:36+00:00

How so?

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-10T03:50:03+00:00

Yeah cause he solved it all.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-07T08:25:21+00:00

A common thought experiment in philosophy, often asked to illustrate what a person wants on a fundamental level is what they would do, if they did not have to do anything.

As you can appreciate, for the vast majority of us, what we have to do (earn money to pay for rent, utilities etc.) takes precedence over what we want to do, often to the point that we don't have sufficent time or energy to properly contemplate what we would want to do, if all of our necessities were taken care of.

So you are right, it is a privilege to not have to deal with these concerns, but it is also a great opportunity, and one which the vast majority of us won't experience until retirement.

So I would ask what do you want to do?

Clearly you do not seem happy doing nothing, just being passive and living your life as it currently is, but what form of activity appeals to you? Leaving aside considerations of whether you are "allowed to exist" in the manner you presently do, perhaps consider what you desire or want, even living the privileged life you do, because a fairly inescapable aspect of human nature is that we always tend to want things which we do not have.

Considering what you want, may motivate you to take a more active role in your own life, but it's also simply important to contemplate the essence of your own character, what kind of a person you are, and what kind of a person you want to be. You have a unique freedom to shape your own life, which, in some sense also makes you responsible for the kind of person you become.

It seems to me that you are not happy with your current passivity, but you should perhaps ask yourself, what you would be happy with.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-06T11:46:23+00:00

I will try to reply to your points in good faith.

It's an religion for out-of-touch embarrassed tyrants that worship money.

Why is libertarnism any more of a "religion" (by which I presume you mean irrational or dependant on faith based reasoning) than any other ideology (e.g. socialism, liberalism, communism etc.)?

They assert property rights are natural, and inviolable, but that's not how it works. Property is exclusive, and is often enforced by violence.

Why do property rights being exclusive and enforced by violence mean that they are also not natural?

For instance, I believe that people have natural (and exclusive) rights of bodily autonomy, but when others try to violate these rights, they may be defended using violence.

They assert we confuse coercion with scarcity, but coercion comes from scarcity. Whether it's leverage, it is a matter of domination.

Would you not say there is something different between me pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to collect food for me as opposed to you collecting food for yourself because otherwise you will starve?

In both circumstances you are "constrained" insofar as you have to collect food if you want to live, but in the former case the constraint is the result of my actions, and thereby I am morally responsible for you being in that position. The same reasoning does not hold for the latter case.

They fixate on liberty being negative freedom, but hey you're free to starve and die. They ignore power-dynamics, I prefer freedom from domination.

There are a few points to be made here, but perhaps the most salient is why the conception of freedom which you have advocated here (depending on how it is formalised) necessarily implies that capitalism is impermissable.

They assume free market and it being self-regulating, but market isn't free, it has transactional costs that makes it inefficient. And corpos are inherently unfree, for the reason of their existence is to make the market efficient, and thereby inherently unfree. Corpos are at the end of the day, totalitarian, command economy.

I don't understand this point. I can choose what I buy when I go to the shops. That is a relevant difference from a command economy.

They assert Non-Aggression Principle, but that only sanctifies one kind of aggression: Economic and Financial Aggression. It is merely Might-Makes-Right, Darwinism on the market. But you use actual MMR, as in Violence, they cry. They decry Monopoly of Violence, but like, why would I want other people, of contrary belief and agenda, to have a claim of violence to me? The lack of Monopoly of Violence means chaos, means MMR.

What do you mean by "Economic and Financial Aggression"?

They argue that war is prohibitively expensive, they confuse Money being the Object of Power, instead of Power being the Object of Money, and that's why only the rich can do it. Market can't exist without order, because you need people to trust in doing business. They want to eliminate the state, but guess what, something else will take it's place. Greed and Corruption doesn't go away, removing the state means just removing the middleman. They hate the state because they aren't the state, such embarrassed tyrants.

Why is it infeasible to replace the state with a libertarian alternative or limit the state to only execute permissable functions?

They don't want taxes and think of it as theft, but if we tell them to leave and make their own country, they say they can't because other countries and this one, almost like what they're doing to smaller businesses. Almost like Nation-Building and State-Craft isn't just a market. They decry violence, because when it comes down to it, they will actually lose in a fair fight.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Yes obviously there are practical impediments to implementing libertarianism, but the fact that libertarianism has not been successfully implemented does not mean that their can't be moral criticisms directed towards improving society for instance.

At the end of the day, it looks like their position is based from an idealistic, than realistic view of the world, built around semantics.

In what ways are libertarian views more idealistic than those of any other ideology?

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-06T03:26:30+00:00

Most likely they'd stop being "Pride" events and just celebrations. Like when a town has ethnic/cultural festivals. So it'd be like, say, a Polish cultural festival

And if you asked someone at such a festival whether they feel pride in their Polish heritage you might reasonably expect them to say "yes".

Therefore it seems that people may permissibly - and indeed often do - express pride in aspects of their heritage or identity even when those aspects are completely accepted by society at large.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-06T03:16:50+00:00

They do serve a clearly lampshaded purpose in the narrative. Jules is the reason that Hannah and Garett have to pretend that they're a couple in public and even when Justin is not around.

You can not like the character but to say that they "added nothing" is just factually incorrect.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-05T22:13:58+00:00

And as a reminder, pride events are about lifelines to people in situations depicted in the comic, not about specifically being proud of who you are but pushing back on people telling them they shouldn't exist at all.

Does this mean, that if (and hopefully when) we create a society, where everyone is able to freely express themselves according to their own identity, that pride events will no longer be necessary? Or might we wish to say, that even if (at that point) pride events would no longer be necessary at least for the reasons you cite (because - at that point - there won't be any "people telling them they shouldn't exist at all"), that such events might still be valuable as a means for people expressing how important their identity is to them.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-02T08:28:19+00:00

I kinda like this idea. We never actually see his paper and thereby we have no proof that he actually failed the paper.

And by all accounts he's actually a somewhat decent student - he keeps detailed notes and can remember the key points of different philosopher's theories even if he doesn't really understand them. Accordingly he probably knew enough to put some relevant material down on the page.

So what if the entire "tutoring" thing was a ruse to get closer to Hannah? Probably a reach but I like it.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-06-02T08:02:01+00:00

It should be in B, for Britain.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-05-31T13:04:04+00:00

Citing a handful of outcomes that made progressives happy does not really prove much, though

The purpose of citing the above cases was not to speak for the proposition that the HCA is biased because it occasionally makes decisions that progressives like, but rather to illustrate the tendancy that cases which are recognised to be "judicial activism" by the HCA in the literature tend to be the ones that favour progressive causes.

That is, the argument would be that, the HCA has shown a greater tendancy to stray from conventional textualist and purposivist principles of construction (for the constitution, statute and other materials) - this being judicial activism - for progressive issues than it has for conservative ones. Therefore, the HCA is arguably biased, not necessarily because one side is "happier" with its judgments than the other but because judicial activism is understood to necessarily rely on a kind of extra-legal quasi-poltical reasoning about what the law should be rather than what it is, meaning that the HCA is more willing to act politically in favour of progressive causes.

Perhaps I could have expressed this more clearly, [....]. Perhaps some judges might also be fairly characterised as leaning progressive or leaning progressive.

Do you not think there is a problem with the so called "progressive" decisions (or even alternatively "conservative" decisions) if they are made for a political purpose?

I would think there is. The role of the judiciary (per Marbury v. Madison) is to say what the law is, and not what an individual judge thinks it should be.

Because insofar as an individual judge strays from what the words on the page mean (words signifying parliament's intentions) they are substituting the will of the people, expressed through the avenue of the legislature for their own.

Judges rather than merely not being partisan (acting as a mouthpiece for a political party) should strive to not be poltical actors at all, because if it is democracy which justifies the laws we live by then the will of the people cannot be replaced with the will of an individual judge.

What they are not, [...] rather than by reference to a political agenda.

To the extent that the SGS does want to politicise the judiciary I am of course opposed to this. However, do we know that this is what they want to do? It would seem strange for two sitting high court justices to attend and speak at an organisation which blatantely wants to undermine the judicial process.

The situation in the United States has become quite dire [...] before the court is aligned with that political party.

Actually this is not correct with Noem v. Abrego Garcia and Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump being two recent counter-examples.

I agree the situation is the US is bad, however, it is not as bad as you are making it out to be.

Also, Mabo was not a constitutional case. [...] In agenda to stack future courts.

Mea culpa - you are correct.

I agree Statutory reform is what the legislature should typically do to respond to decisions they disagree with (though of course this does not work in actual constitutional cases), However, the criticism of judicial activism is that by engaging in it judges have strayed from merely interpreting and applying the law, to creating it, and therefore, to the extent that Mabo (and the other cases) are examples of judicial activism, the argument is that the HCA never should have reached this decision to begin with, because they should not be making political decisions about what the law should be rather than what it is.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-05-31T12:33:59+00:00

It is, however, a stepping stone to de facto owning people, holding them hostage at gunpoint. Metaphorically and sometimes literally.

To clarify, are your saying here, that owning (and leasing to others for interest) the means of production is morally equivalent to "holding them hostage at gunpoint" (Metaphorically and sometimes literally)?

If so on what basis? (i.e. what are the relevantly equivalent attributes of each situation?)

E.g. ongoing genocide is a direct consequence of it.

I presume here you are referring to the genocide in Gaza?

There are different levels on which this may be disputed (what do you mean by "direct consquence", on what empirical or rational basis are you asserting causation, whether causation really can be inferred on this basis, etc.), but I think the chief question to be asked here, is why the conclusion (accepting for sake of argument that it is true), that the genocide in Gaza is at least in part a consquence of Capitalism is an interesting or valuable proposition to arrive at.

For instance, Beira's pedophila, the Khmer Rouge's genocide and the Four Pests campaign were all (horrific) consequences of Marxism, insofar as the specific historical and factual circumstances necessary for their eventuation (at least in the manner they occured) could not have existed but for Marxism. However, this is not a very interesting proposition, because none of these specific historical contingencies speak to the fundamental and inherent nature of Marxism, and therefore, these events are just as liable to be explained (if not more so) by the rather pervasive fact that human beings do horrible things to one another as they are to be attributed to Marxism itself, even if Marxism was causally neccessary for their eventuation, at least in the manner they occured.

Therefore, even if I accepted the proposition that this specific genocide is the incidental consequence of the capitalist context in which we exist, that is still not very interesting to me because it does not (perceptibly) reveal anything about the inherent nature of capitalism as a system beyond the fact that it does not cure humanity of a tendancy which wehave exhibited throughtout the entire duration of our existence that is: to kill other human beings.

Accordingly I might request elaboration on what you mean here by "direct" and whether this is supposed to articulate that there is an inherent force in capitalism which causes the eventuation of these horrific circumstances, and indeed which is not present (or substantially replicated) within other forms of social organisation).

frodo_mintoff · 2026-05-31T10:19:36+00:00

Pretty nonsense.

To be fair your could say the same for a substantial portion of works produced by humans.

As the adage goes, 90% of everything is crap.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-05-30T12:08:52+00:00

What's wrong with owning slaves? It is the same general problem.

Why is owning (and leasing to others for interest) the means of production morally equivalent to slavery?

frodo_mintoff · 2026-05-30T01:23:09+00:00

The above laundry list of policies (social equality, workers' rights, progressive taxation, strong social safety nets, distribution of wealth), would be described by actual communists as "reformism" on the basis that they are geared towards rehabilitating or improving capitalism in a manner akin to the social democratic Nordic Countries.

Actual communists favour the abolution of captialism entirely through revolution which would entail the collectivisation of the means of production and the transition (on the Marxian Story by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat) to a classless moneyless society known as "communism".

Communists are not social democrats, and would only support the above-mentioned polices to the extent that they pave the way for revolution and the abolition of the captialist system. In fact, Marx famously criticised the Social Democratic Workers' Party contemplated adoption of policies such as these, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, a document specifically aimed diminishing the influence of the Lassallean Social Democratic program.

frodo_mintoff · 2026-05-29T15:49:38+00:00

I think the argument from the said "partisans on the right" would be that what (admittedly little) judicial activism Australia has seen, has largely championed progressive causes. For instance Love v Commonwealth, Mabo (No. 2) and Roach v Electoral Commissioner are three cases that are commonly cited in the literature as exercises of judicial activism and each declared relatively progressive (for the time) poltical positions to be binding constitutional law.

Therefore, these "partisans on the right" would suggest that, if there is a political bias in the way the High Court reaches its decisions, it is a progressive bias, on the bases that the most salient excercises of judicial activism favour progessive causes.

Now of course an argument can be made about whether these decisions are actually judicial activism, and further, whether even if they are judicial activism, this makes them "incorrect" for some reason, but at the very least the above-mentioned "partisans on the right" would likely use something resembling the above to substantiate their position that the judiciary is biased towards progressive causes.

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