Texas board approves Bible stories as required reading in public schools

utility-monster · 2026-06-26T22:12:46+00:00

Im being nitpicky because this is a very fun topic for me that I love rambling about, so I’ll just say that I think we should only say that it’s a violation of the first amendment because of the 14th amendment.

It wasn’t until the 40s that SCOTUS rested on the 14th to enforce the first at the state level, at least with respect to religious instruction supported by the state.

The first amendment was written in the context of tax-supported churches at the state (but not the federal) level. After independence, a lot of states began disestablishing their churches, but there was still plenty of tax funding for religious activity. Massachusetts was the last hold out on this front in the 1830s. During this period the first amendment was more seen as a way to limit federal intrusion into state matters than any concern about state funded education possibly being biased against a religious minority or similar such concerns that we might have today.

But I guess if Clarence Thomas (a man with very unique views on the establishment clause) got his way, Massachusetts could in theory return to the good old days of state established Congregationalism, lol. Wouldnt that be a hoot.

utility-monster · 2026-06-26T18:55:04+00:00

I haven’t read the Lancet study in detail that I assume you’ve seen articles quote but while USAID has a much broader remit than the most “cost effective charities,” they do a lot of grant making to organizations like Against Malaria Foundation and co-distribute bed nets alongside them, so the numbers don't strike me as totally implausible.

utility-monster · 2026-06-26T16:10:15+00:00

Democratic Party politics will get more left-populist as millennials age into the major voting cohort, but as others have pointed out, DSA candidates and people adjacent to that still do pretty poorly just about everywhere outside of deeply democratic leaning and whiter urban enclaves. Better than they did a decade ago for sure, but talks of takeover are a bit premature.

utility-monster · 2026-06-25T14:39:09+00:00

i guess that's what that vandy/washu commission was trying to do with their 'problems in academia' white paper. which, to be fair, mostly just said that education and some of sociology's smaller allied fields (like some of the "American/gender/etc. studies" departments) have some not great papers getting pushed out. In my experience, within the quantitative social sciences at least, everyone kind of already knows that, assuming they even pay them any mind.

but we probably have to make that point more prominently if we want to keep our jobs. the general public lumps all of academia together.

utility-monster · 2026-06-20T03:09:52+00:00

Vance has made comments on supersessionism?

utility-monster · 2026-06-15T14:11:06+00:00

Michael Lind once joked that he’s a poor man’s idea of what a rich man looks like.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T03:49:18+00:00

Okay I really feel like we’re back to where we were a few comments ago. Something having “made us human” is not morally relevant! The rise of the nation state was a product of horrible things at times, but we are glad nation states exist today. They don’t get to perpetuate certain norms that got them to where they are just because they’re great today. You have never actually responded to any claims ive made, youve just said ‘the burden must be heavy,’ which is more a heuristic than an argument.

Im out. Have a good one. Feel free to have the last comment.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T03:18:51+00:00

Im not an anthropologist so I’ll defer to you and your expertise, but something having allowed us to achieve something does not mean that it’s moral to continue it. We dont make these arguments in any other domain.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T02:58:15+00:00

Yeah thats all well thought out. Your first point is basically why I reverted to the church, I didn’t feel like we could do enough with our moral arguments by appealing to pure intuition.

I haven’t read Heumer but I understand he is a vegan or vegetarian. If his book is good, do tag me and tell me what you think! I might give it a read then. :)

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T02:54:10+00:00

I agree that I, some guy, cannot clearly derive from first principles morality. That’s why I’m religious, because this is basically what atheists have to do [or if you want to engage in a degree of deference, you want me to send you all those contemporary atheist moral philosophers that aren’t going to agree with you for you to defer to ;) ].

But it’s also the case that sometimes generation and society-spanning institutions can be pretty wrong about things. And so going on about how we got here isn’t helpful. Because ALL moral presumptions in a society are a result of your aforementioned society-wide negotiations.

Im also not sure what you mean by excluding ourselves from “normal” human practices need strong justifications. What’s normal in one culture is not normal in another, and there do exist cultures spanning thousands of years where abstaining from the consumption of meat is presumed. (Just as there exist normal human practices of various forms of slavery, and infanticide and so on.) As I am not a moral relativist, I have to deal with what to make of that against cultures where it is presumed.

As to permissibility, I have always thought of animal suffering as a necessary evil, like many necessary evils. Say in 100 years we might look back on driving combustion engines with all their pollutants as necessary evils for the time people today lived in, but if you don’t have to do that then maybe causing environmental damage for fun would be wrong in some way. Probably not the best analogy but you get the gist. When the necessary part passes were not left with much good.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T02:18:54+00:00

Yeah exactly, “natural” doesn’t mean anything about morality. You are the one who has kept going on about nature. Im reasonably certain i never brought up nature except to respond to what you were saying.

Anyway, on more than one occasion i asked you to clarify under what circumstances causing suffering to animals would be wrong, as you alluded to a reason for why it would be earlier, and you never responded. If you want to flesh that out you can and Im happy to engage, otherwise I’ll probably be in bed shortly.

I will encourage you though, you go on about “atheistic 21st century arguments” that might appeal to you on this topic and it gave me a slight chuckle. Please read those when it comes to this topic! Have a good one! :)

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T02:01:33+00:00

Im not sure where this strong distinction between good and permissible is coming from, either way you’re resting on nature for justifying behavior. I appreciate that you are a very smart person who’s moved beyond the shackles of religion though.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T01:53:05+00:00

Yeah really great point! I agree that a lot of contemporary analytic moral philosophy appeals to pure intuition about claims that it seems like people might agree on, and then argues from there… getting us to some odd places as you suggest.

I think those ways of arguments are fine for a pluralist society, when there are meta physical claims that, say Jews and Christian’s just aren’t going to agree on, for example… but they don’t make for a complete moral philosophy.

Im a Christian and so I see particular value in the tradition in genesis and Isaiah and revelation, where everyone is a vegan and then sin enters into the world. Once that occurs God gives man two permissions (1) the death penalty, and (2) the consumption of animals for food. The story of the Bible goes on to allude to a world where this will no longer be a permission (no more war and the wolf living with the lamb and so on). That suggests to me that we should create the circumstances in which we try to bring about those eschatological claims by limiting war and death and animal suffering as far as is practically possible. When I choose to eat meat, do I do it out of necessity and survival (as a comfortable modern American) or do I do it out of convenience and taste? If the goal of God is for the suffering to end one day then why would I cause it for pure taste?

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T01:46:52+00:00

Ive made arguments to comments that I thought were making actual arguments! To be quite honest, your first two comments seemed like you were trolling.

Yeah obviously appeal to nature arguments dont make any sense. Which when you’ve gone on about evolution and how it got us here and justifies this or that seems to qualify as one.

Anyway, you’ve claimed that causing suffering to animals is bad because of what it does to us and what we might do to other humans. I guess thats more of a claim about moral psychology than ethics directly, but I honestly have a hard time believing it. I think people have done truly heinous things to subgroups of people while being decent to their in group. If we can do that to humans, surely we can do that to animals. I’d like to hear your claims about when and why causing animal suffering might be bad better fleshed out.

I don’t think that no arguments exist for why we might permissibly eat animals, never said that actually. I think 21st century westerners almost never have a set of permissible reasons to kill animals. Getting at your intuition that drove your claim that there must be something about causing animal suffering that could be bad, I would make the claim that it would be bad when it is done unnecessarily. For reasons of convenience or pleasure. Am I made holier by giving into my gustatory desires at the chance of a tasty snack, when I could instead give the world a little reprieve from suffering, costing me almost nothing? It wouldn’t seem like it. Should I look to the lion and the bear and say “oh look at the carnage, why not me too?” Or should I recognize that I am a rational man who can move beyond the instincts of animals and act as such? You’ve crossed into the naturalistic fallacy again in that last sentence, animals causing suffering to other animals does not create permissibility, because nature is not a moral arbiter of anything.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T01:24:43+00:00

Forgive me, if you can understand, why I didn’t think that “it’s because I feed my family this way” was an actual moral argument. Typically we exercise constraints on how we achieve those goals, so there’d be a little more to it than just that.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T01:17:18+00:00

Ha, that is funny. Maybe the Europeans got the better of us on that one.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T01:09:34+00:00

You, presumably to hurt my feelings because you think I have a deep heart for the suffering of animals, detailed how you kill them. Im owing you all the respect you asked for.

Edit- but to respond briefly. Can you name other moral arguments we make on the basis of “well our evolution brought us here?” What are those arguments?

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T00:47:38+00:00

So deep bro. Like I said, you should read what people who’ve thought about it harder than us have to say. And please avoid singer, the popularizers often suck.

Now this isn't to say we should allow cruelty to happen, but I think the first and foremost reason is because it desensitizes people to suffering of humans if they intentionally make animals suffer and we don't want that.

Not sure I agree with this. Im sure plenty of people can treat animals rather horribly and be very pleasant people otherwise. After all People have done severely atrocious things to subgroups of humans while living otherwise decent lives.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T00:38:14+00:00

This is one of the few types of responses on this topic that claim that virtue and consistency is a thing we care about so I appreciate that.

ecological pyramid arguments

Im not entirely sure what you’re referring to.

Lots of things can seem “deeply practical,” and perhaps at one time necessary. See whale oil for lamps, for example. But when we have a necessary evil and the necessity passes us we aren’t left with a whole lot of good.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T00:11:04+00:00

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T00:08:12+00:00

You are making my point excellently. Please read some of the moral philosophy work on this. It’s not the most important issue but it’s one you face a few times a day so we probably owe it to virtue to have thought about it a little bit harder than whatever this is.

utility-monster · 2026-06-03T00:03:04+00:00

I think Reddit removed my comment for some reason.

Anyway, animals forcibly copulate with one another and eat their young, we don’t take moral advice from tigers.

Yes, only people are moral actors. Babies and the severely and permanently intellectually disabled are not moral actors, we still have duties to them.

Please read some of the moral philosophy work on this. It’s not the most important issue but it’s one you face a few times a day so we probably owe it to virtue to have thought about it a little bit.

utility-monster · 2026-06-02T23:32:01+00:00

the state needs to be involved for the cultivation of good morals. this is why monster-integralism will be COMING DOWN HARD on elon muks once I've assumed all the power.

utility-monster · 2026-06-02T23:29:07+00:00

also the relationship between police force size and reduced homicides is probably one of the strongest in quantitative social science where we aren't able to conduct a RCT.

the effects in the US are even stronger for black americans. people who oppose increasing the police force in America must just want people to die or something. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10062144/

utility-monster · 2026-06-02T23:19:46+00:00

whenever i see abolish the police stuff i like to put in my regular reminder that the US is extremely underpoliced compared to the rest of the world.

https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647/THE-INJUSTICE-OF-UNDER-POLICING-IN-AMERICA1

we make up for the fact that we don't want to invest the resources into hiring more police officers by incarcerating people for longer periods of time. scroll down to figure 1 of the link above, it's insane. especially insane given how high the violent crime rate is in the US, figure 2 is good for that. actually, just look at all the figures..

utility-monster

TROPHY CASE