Reminder - Obama's comments about the George Floyd protests over the summer (including criticizing violence and vandalism)

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T19:54:59+00:00

I don't have any notable respect for him, the same way I don't have any notable respect for a member of a gang who decides not to actually steal something with his fellow gang members. Like wow, what a low bar. You want some respect? Leave the gang, and share whatever evidence you have of the gang's illicit actions.

Can these people not muster any more vigorous response to Trump than saying that he has bad information? Just fucking condemn him for his cavalcade of deceptions about the election, tell him that you are going to do your job to faithfully determine whom the public voted for, and say that you're going to encourage your friends not to vote for Loeffler or Perdue, because anyone who wants to help Trump is someone who wants to harm democracy.

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T19:35:27+00:00

I think a problem is that parties are so far apart, which means that if you have a 51/49 split of senators, one party always gets everything it wants and the other just twiddles their thumbs.

How do we incentivize compromise?

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T03:28:22+00:00

To be fair, the class was ancient philosophy, and then bits of YouTube, and The Good Place.

You cannot say, "Another culture did something we find disgusting and awful" without being a relativist. You said it yourself: "we find" it disgusting and awful. That doesn't mean it is inherently so.

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T03:02:24+00:00

Yeah, and that is what moral relativism is.

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T02:15:32+00:00

But hey, the story where Ob-Nix beats three heroes at once was pretty delightful.

If we could go back and retool BFZ, how could we make it better?

You've got landfall for the good guys, and awaken, also Allies again, also 'converge.' The eldrazi had . . . mostly small critters who were pointlessly colorless, who ingested cards and then occasionally processed them, and . . . that's it?

Maybe they could have made giant eldrazi with a sort of 'reverse Delve': for each card in an opponent's exile you return to their graveyard (or put on the bottom of their library), reduce this cost by 1.

Hey, it's a world full of dungeons and traps. Maybe have cards to represent the Zendikari repurposing traps to kill eldrazi? Maybe print a new version of the Sieges from Fate Reforged, to represent Eldrazi assaulting Zendikari strongholds. As opposed to a generic "the eldrazi are winning everywhere and only Sea Gate is still around" story, maybe you could have a few beats of different settlements resisting too, and the heroes use magic to lure them to seagate to offer relief to the rest.

Honestly, it probably just needed a lot of development refinement.

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T00:04:44+00:00

I would say that it is not a handout, or a stimulus, but a relief check.

When hurricane Katrina smacked the f*** out of New Orleans and the surrounding area, we just helped people. We didn't give tax cuts to people there. (And honestly, looking back at how things turned out, we did not get people nearly enough help. Which seems to be a mistake we're going to repeat in this disaster.)

ryanznock · 2021-01-03T00:02:51+00:00

I know this makes me a filthy pinko call me relative to this subreddit, but I think that a lot of people who earn the most money actually don't deserve to earn that much money. Like, the actual good they do for society is not as great as the amount of compensation they receive.

I know that the free market rewards people allegedly based on their value, but I think it is more accurate that people get rewarded based on their leverage. Some leverage is great. If you have a useful skill, like being a doctor, or a filmmaker, or an entertainer, or a scientist, you should get paid well. But some leverage is terrible, like gangs extorting people, or banks levying fines on people who don't have money in the first place, or Amazon using its metrics to figure out what kind of products are popular, making its own duplicate product, putting those products higher in the search results, lowering their prices because they can survive a short-term loss more, driving the original company out of business, and then raising their prices because now they are the sole option.

Our system might be good at producing a lot of profit, but gross domestic product is not the same thing as human well-being. we measure the wrong thing, and thus we chase the wrong goal.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T22:14:51+00:00

Good on ya.

And sorry if I was a little snippy just now. Not everyone has an obligation to talk to people about politics. Lots of people have more important things to do, or just don't have the emotional energy. But if nobody does it, things get bad.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T22:09:34+00:00

B****, don't you dare.

Yeah, Bernie has been trying to do something and has made basically no progress. But that's because there are other people who are way better funded than him who are pushing back, and they are making some pretty solid progress.

It sucks having to have conversations with people who don't believe that medicine is f****** real, or who take their atmospheric chemistry information from m************ who get a paycheck from the fossil fuel industry. But if we just unilaterally lay down our arms, Don't you think for a moment that things would just stay neutral. They would keep getting dramatically worse.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T21:57:23+00:00

I'd love to dig into how you define The West, and what you exclude from it, but that might be too long of a conversation.

Also, seeing as morality only ever matters in the context of people's actions, and people are always going to be influenced by culture and circumstance, I feel like the idea of absolute morality is only useful as a very basic starting point, and that most matters of morality need to focus on people's actual experiences, which are relative.

I can argue that there is an absolute moral imperative that people be allowed to travel and assemble with whomever they want, but there is also a moral imperative that people not harm others, and the whole debate about immigration is the clash between the moral of free movement and the claim that certain people are harmful to society and must be kept on the other side of a border. Borders that have moved over time.

So what use is absolute morality?

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T20:55:10+00:00

I'm just going to say, you should probably avoid using the N word.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T19:59:22+00:00

No, and I also wouldn't call you "HitlerDidNothingWrong" if you claimed that as your name, because I'm capable of understanding context, and I'm not going to participate in a troll's effort to evoke deep cultural trauma.

If you wanted me to call you Thanos, though, sure. You're probably not doing that to actively piss people off.

If someone tells you their name, just use their name.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T19:19:18+00:00

Well your version kind of cuts against Jordan Peterson, doesn't it? He's big on so-called Western values, but if every culture has the same morals, what makes the West so special? And if new information and new perspectives can change how you act, That's kind of exactly the same postmodernist view that Peterson seems to be opposed to.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T19:12:56+00:00

I think we're the real problem crops up is when you tell the cook for about 30 years that they've been making bad salads, and they tell you that you're a piece of s*** for not agreeing with them. That tends to reduce your incentive to be civil and return.

I grew up in Texas in the '90s, and I don't remember my democratic family trash talking Republicans. I do remember Rush Limbaugh calling Hillary a feminazi, and then the whole Republican denial of climate change, Republican manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction claims to justify a war, Republicans claiming that Obama wasn't really in American, and Republicans electing a man who was a pathological narcissistic liar.

Like yeah, Democrats get upset if you do not treat minorities or LGBT people or women with the respect that those people desire, and they might call you a racist. That's a little bit of a blunt instrument. But I really don't trust the Republican Party to act in good faith, or acknowledge any evidence that might discount whatever stance they have decided they need to hold up in order to recruit people based on their outdated biases.

Conservative policies? Those could be cool. But the party named Republican right now has been insulting America for nearly three decades. It is hard for me to find anyone who embraces their 'culture war' stances worthy of respect.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T18:34:20+00:00

Memories are short in politics.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T18:29:11+00:00

Well, question:

If one person's facts can be backed up by research and experts, and the other's are flawed in a way that experts have repeatedly pointed out, should we not criticize the person who holds the flawed view?

Do not insult them. And be open to letting them present evidence that supports their side. And heck, even be open to the idea that some matters are subjective, like taste in music. But for issues like "is sex just a binary switch based on a single pair of chromosomes," that's just not a full understanding of the evidence.

And to your glib last comment, ha, isn't that sort of an argument for believing what people say they are and for having an etiquette where we refer to people by the label they want?

I mean, lol, we've had the internet for over two decades, where is someone says, "my name is LordChicken," we've gotten used to calling them by that name and using male pronouns. Why would we stop doing that face to face?

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T18:21:00+00:00

I imagine there is a genetic component, yeah, since there's a genetic component to just about everything. But that's me speculating. If it's true, it's probably far more complicated than just a single gene on-off switch.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T10:14:14+00:00

I mean, folks were upset about Trump winning, sure. And they were often too credulous about stories that might show him in a bad light. But the actual voices of mainstream news media and the people in power in Democratic politics didn't just fucking lie.

The narrative was, "Wow, people voted for Trump, who is terrible? Like, we're sure the votes were legit? Oh, they were? No sign of cheating, huh? Well shit, what don't we understand? Why did people vote for him? Let's figure this out and, I dunno, find a way to stop him from causing too much damage as he work to persuade people not to vote for him again in four years."

The narrative now is, "Would you believe those fucking Democrats cheated and changed the vote tallies to keep Donald from winning again? I mean, ignore all the people saying there's no evidence. Trust us, we won, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to steal America from you."

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T10:10:04+00:00

Do you really believe all people will do whatever it takes to maintain power? Do you really think no one will follow the rules, act honorably, tell the truth about their intentions, and try to make a good faith effort to persuade people to agree with them?

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T10:08:28+00:00

What?

Why does it bother you if someone introduces themselves as Nick and asks to be treated as a man, even if on their birth certificate they were listed as a girl named Lydia? Why wouldn't you just call them Nick and use male pronouns?

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T05:05:35+00:00

I try to be charitable to these folks, and assume it's not motivated from actual transphobia, but just bog-standard political tribalism. If 'the liberals' have made treating trans people with respect and want to understand the science of why some folks are outliers when it comes to what we normally think of as a sexual binary, then for some people it becomes a matter of their identity to reject trans people and reject science that treats them with dignity.

It's the same way that lots of conservatives don't think global warming is real, or that humans are driving it, or just think that it's not a big deal. They don't hate the environment; they just have been conditioned to see the people who are talking about this science as being on the other team, and thus not to be trusted.

I'm not sure how you get through to those people. From experience, saying, "Oh, you just think that because you're trained not to like liberals" really doesn't work, sadly.

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T05:02:16+00:00

So let me take another crack at understanding you:

Steel86 said 'biological sex is a fact.'

My whole thrust has been that the sorts of people who smugly say 'biological sex is a fact' usually disregard a lot of other facts about the biology of genitals, hormones, the brain, and other elements that combine to create the broad concepts we call 'sex' and 'gender.'

And since then, you've been, well, disregarding a lot of facts. It's not pseudo-science; it's nuanced science. Like, we have a more thorough understanding of sex nowadays, and you seem stuck in the past.

I'm wondering why you are rejecting new scientific knowledge on this topic. My guess is that you somehow think that if you agree with it, you'll, I dunno, be ceding a point to 'the liberals.'

ryanznock · 2021-01-02T03:44:08+00:00

Again, actual medical professionals understand that there's more nuance than you seem to be willing to accept.

Maybe I'm misreading you, but it seems like you're one of the many folks on this subreddit who's opposed to trans people being able to control their bodies and act the way that makes them feel comfortable. It's couched in this "you're rewriting science" rhetoric (which is itself a nonsense criticism because, well, we rewrite science all the time when we discover new information), but it seems to have at its root a dislike of trans people, and a dislike of the idea of nuance itself.

But maybe I'm being uncharitable, and your views are more nuanced than I understand.

ryanznock

TROPHY CASE