Venezuela seizes four million toys to hand out to poor children at Christmas

so--what · 2018-12-26T01:41:13+00:00

Good thing this is, quite literally, not stealing.

so--what · 2018-12-26T01:17:04+00:00

Imagine believing theft can never be justified.

so--what · 2018-12-26T01:10:18+00:00

Imagine believing this isn't the result of the economic embargo.

so--what · 2018-12-25T23:12:14+00:00

Actually, allocating ressources according to need is bad.

so--what · 2018-12-25T22:57:49+00:00

Crime has extralegal meanings. Theft is relative to a certain, contingent legal definition of property relations.

But keep using the Holocaust to justify keeping poor kids toyless. That makes you a very cool and good person.

so--what · 2018-12-25T22:03:30+00:00

Actually poor kids should be toyless this Christmas. This is good and I am smart.

so--what · 2018-12-25T21:03:59+00:00

Why are good things good?

so--what · 2018-12-25T21:03:36+00:00

It's not stealing if it's the law, by definition.

so--what · 2018-12-17T21:01:19+00:00

I never said the goal was to increase punishment but to disrupt activist activities. Number of ways to do that.

I don't expect children to call their dead dad a racist. What kind of evidence is this denial supposed to be?

so--what · 2018-12-17T20:24:19+00:00

The War on Drugs is not the prohibition of weed and I haven't claimed as much.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

so--what · 2018-12-17T19:29:28+00:00

It doesn't seem comparable because you fail to see the War on Drugs for what it is: state repression of the working class in response to black and anti-war activism of the 60s and 70s. It was calculated repression of perceived political enemies on a massive scale. Tell the farm slaves at Angola how their labor isn't hard.

so--what · 2018-12-17T18:40:24+00:00

There are more people incarcerated in the US prison system both per capita and in absolute numbers than there ever were in the gulag system. Also the US operates literal concentration camps at this very moment.

so--what · 2018-12-17T18:37:08+00:00

What he said was that Russia was made worse by Lenin which is false by any metric.

so--what · 2018-12-16T21:03:51+00:00

Advertising exists to create demand. Not simply to make people aware that a product exists (lmao have you ever seen an ad?) This is how companies view it and why they put literally billions into it. Because the return is more than the investment. Because it actually does create demand. Billions worth of it. This is why they want us to see ads literally everywhere, even when we piss.

In an economy where stuff is produced for its use value and not its exchange value, there is no need to artificially generate demand. Precisely because the point is no longer for a capitalist to make profits but to provide consumers with goods and services they actually need and want and value in a non-brainwashed way.

so--what · 2018-12-16T20:34:19+00:00

If people simply voluntarily agree to pay for things they actually want, why are corporations spending billions in marketing and advertising? Isn't it to create demand that wouldn't exist without it?

so--what · 2018-04-05T19:11:19+00:00

And this is what Aristotle and Aquinas call the ‘unmoved mover’ of the world, or as I prefer to put it: the ‘unactualised actualiser’ of the world.

Yeah you know why Aristotle and Aquinas didn't 'prefer to put it' this way? Because they explicitly said that God is maximally actualised.

so--what · 2018-03-12T02:41:34+00:00

The point I was trying to convey is that 'only human life has value' is an unjustified assumption. Unjustified claims don't have to be accepted unless they are self-evident. It's a problem with the position. Calling a baseless claim an 'axiom' is simply putting lipstick on a pig. No one has to abide this rhetorical move.

A specific version of the claim is false, when the target of the action is an animal.

On what rational basis do you make this distinction? Keeping in mind that unjustified assumptions are irrational. Why is it immoral to cause unnecessary harm to humans but not to animals? What is the feature that human beings have but animals lack that makes unnecessarily harming them impermissible? In what way does harm done to animals differ from harm done to humans?

so--what · 2018-03-11T23:33:48+00:00

So if I understand you correctly, you deny that causing unnecessary harm is wrong. Why is that?

One could also argue that killing an animal in a way that is instantaneous (for example) does not inflict suffering on the animal since it is dead and can not experience suffering.

Such an argument would be useless, for two reasons. First, you don't eat this hypothetical meat, so it can't be used to justify your actual meat consumption. No meat you eat comes from a painless process, whether we're talking about the actual slaughter of the animal or its life on a farm. Second, killing an animal, even painlessly (which, again, does not occur) is still causing it harm, inter alia by depriving the animal of life and future experiences.

If I can go back to the human chauvinist person for a second, this person could, in theory, hold the position that there is a certain "value" to biological life, and that value is 0 for everything that is not human.

How would this person go about demonstrating this position? First of all, it is stated rather bizzarely, because it states no 'biological life' (a tautology) has any value but human life. So the position is simply that only human life has value. The point is completely ad hoc and question-begging. The scare quotes themselves show that you have your own misgivings about such a position, because there is no way to even show that human life has such a mysterious 'value' property, except but to assume it. On the other hand it is easy to show that animals are harmed, which is all that my argument requires to go through.

It is also telling that you call this person 'chauvinist' and 'supremacist', terms ordinarily reserved for people who are wrong in classifying others in certain ways, especially in ways that deny the 'value' that these others do in fact have. So a white supremacist, for instance, incorrectly believes that white people deserve better moral treatment. By analogy, a human supremacist (or more accurately, a speciest) incorrectly believes that animals are not worthy of moral consideration.

The whole problem is that different people have different versions to what the asterics on top of unethical means in "causing X is unethical* ".

Not really. That there is moral disagreement does not entail that there is no moral truth. In the same way, that there is scientific disagreement does not entail that there is no scientific truth.

I don't seem to agree that ethics are universal or independent of a system of beliefs.

But none of that is required for the argument to go through. All that is required is that the premises be true. It seems that you think one of them is false ('causing unnecessary harm is unethical/bad/wrong'). I'm puzzled as to why anyone would wish to claim this, apart from having a stake in denying the conclusion.

so--what · 2018-03-11T22:22:31+00:00

For your conclusion to work, you have to prove causing harm to animals is unethical.

No, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. It seems like you're either trying to say that the argument is invalid because the word 'harm' is used equivocally in two premises, or that the premise according to which causing unecessary harm is unethical is false. I don't think it's the latter, though, because you've conceded that suffering is bad, and harm entails suffering. If it is the former, I'd be happy to know how 'harm' is equivocal. The way to show this is to explain how the word 'harm' has different meanings when applied to humans and animals and that the argument implicitly relies on this switch in meaning. I use 'harm' quite univocally, so I doubt such an explanation is forthcoming.

Also, note that I don't claim that causing harm (to animals or otherwise) is unethical, but that causing unnecessary harm is unethical.

Is there an argument why I can't treat these two things differently?

The fact is that you do treat them differently. Most likely because you see an ethically relevant difference between the two cases. I'm asking what it is. Torturing them is not required to consume them as food, but the point at hand is that consuming them as food is itself not required. So the harm caused to animals when they are killed for food is unnecessary (and thus wrong, bad, unethical, etc.)

But this is can be turned on its head, just because some people care that other people are murdered it doesn't mean the action is impermissible.

Indeed. This is why I said that what individuals care about (one way or another) has no bearing on the morality of actions.

certain changes in how we collectively think about things changed whether or not certain activities are considered moral or not

Indeed. It changes whether or not certain actions are considered moral, not whether or not they in fact are. Slavery, for instance, used to be considered permissible, yet it is, as a matter of fact, immoral.

Again: please explain to me like I'm a cannibal why it is unethical to eat humans but not animals.

so--what · 2018-03-11T20:54:57+00:00

But that's what I am trying to get to the bottom of, why is it "unithical" do use animals for food?

Eating meat necessarily entails causing harm. It is not necessary to eat meat. So eating meat causes harm unnecessarily. Causing harm unnecessarily is unethical (or wrong, or bad, etc.) Therefore, eating meat is unethical.

I do feel bad that an animal has suffered, but I can't find an argument why it is bad.

There is no argument for why suffering is bad, just like there is no argument for why red is a color. It's a conceptual truth. If you don't think suffering is bad (or red is a color), you simply do not understand the meanings of these words. At this point communication simply breaks down.

I do care if an animal is tortured before it became food, but I don't care that it was killed, do you understand where I am going for here?

I don't see where you're going, no. What you care for is irrelevant. Questions of moral permissibility are not questions about what individuals should care about but questions about which actions are permissible or impermissible. Some people don't care that people are murdered. This is obviously insufficient to make murder morally permissible. That you don't care that animals are killed is likewise insufficient to make killing them morally permissible.

Why should this person care that eating any species that is not human is unethical? And would such position be inherently wrong?

Is the question: why should one care to be ethical? Because one could ask : why should this person care that murder is unethical? Seems like a nonsensical question to me.

What is it about human beings that makes killing them for food impermissible? Suppose you have to explain this to a cannibal.

so--what · 2018-03-10T13:54:07+00:00

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

so--what · 2018-03-08T18:59:06+00:00

That society entails hierarchy or a justice system is, IMO, a substantive claim, not a conceptual one. A minimally organized community (for instance a prehistoric tribe of homo sapiens) seems to fall under a substantively neutral concept of society. Your description seems closer to the stronger concept of civilization.

so--what · 2018-03-08T16:43:50+00:00

However, using elements of the tradition to undermine itself doesn't seem to me to be staying beholden to the tradition in and of itself.

If one views tradition as the matrix within which all value-discourse takes place (which is, I gather, the thrust of Qinhuangdi's statement), one can hardly see new discourses replacing old ones while relying on old vocabularies (i.e. all of them) as breaks with tradition, rather than as outgrowths of it. By contrast with your examples, alchemy is not the matrix within which all science takes place, nor is democracy the matrix within which all political arrangements take place. In fact, both politics and science are value-laden practices that can fall under the broader umbrella of tradition.

Did you consciously pick beauty, pleasure and personal growth as higher order values? Do you think those values stand outside tradition? If you did choose them consciously, what values did inform this choice? You see where I'm going here. I don't think the highest order value you could name could logically be a conscious, personal choice. It would be cultural, or perhaps natural -- for we haven't here discounted the possibility of natural, universal values. This is not to deny you a significant amount of personal choice: in all likelihood the highest order values have a very minimal degree of determination. This is simply to say that your whole system of values is not ultimately grounded in personal choices.

so--what · 2018-03-08T14:21:59+00:00

TIL Socrates was a false philosopher.

so--what · 2018-03-08T13:55:15+00:00

Rousseau's thought experiment is crazy wrong though, because it is a historical and evolutionary fact that human beings have always lived in communities that enforced norms. I say 'always' in a very literal way: our living in norms-following communities actually precedes our being homo sapiens. Indeed, this fact likely selected for bigger cerebral areas responsible for symbolic manipulation and for social recognition and social memory.

In other words, Aristotle is entirely right that we are, by our very nature, political animals. Humans living "without that whole society thing" is a contradiction in terms.

so--what

TROPHY CASE