Thankfully, it was not rape — ArguingWAristotleTiff

You never heard of any other credible rape allegations against Bill Clinton? They've got their own Wiki page. Before one of the 2016 presidential debates, Trump brought a group of Bubba's accusers to a press conference. You don't remember that?

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

I think of AI being used in the setting of Hospice — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Have machines keep the dying company. That's a fate I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Is that how you would like to go? They hook you up to a morphine drip and wheel in a chatbot?

— Posty McPostface

I've never seen an argument made in favor of equipping AI with positive human emotions like compassion, empathy, altruism, and so on. — Posty McPostface

I saw a simultaneously funny and chilling cartoon about that the other day. Two lab workers are talking about how their robot will be perfect once they give it human emotions. In the next panel the robot is using a magnifying glass and the sun to kill ants, as the workers look on in dismay.

True, right? You take a good hard look at human emotions. The front page of today's newspaper will do. You really want machines to feel like us??

Why does Bill Clinton not get held accountable by feminists? I have never understood this.

How about we judge the nation based on a totality of her citizens actions rather than based on one aspect alone. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Never mind that torture thing! We're really good people!

And those wars? Nothing to do with us. That's the volunteer army. We barely even heard of them. Illegally invaded half a dozen countries since 9/11? Hey we're Americans, we're the world's policeman.

My God man. What are you saying? Do you know any history? We killed a million people in Iraq. Our invasion of that country is an international war crime by the standards of the Nuremberg trials. You are unaware of this or think that our being Americans makes it ok?

I am interested in what you can see from Australia that appears to have "gone wrong" in the USA that I am not able to see from within her borders — ArguingWAristotleTiff

We became a torture regime. We've been at war in half a dozen MIddle East and North Africa countries since 2001. We spy on all our citizens. I hope this isn't new information for anyone.

Boomer here. Of the generation getting blamed for it. I can tell you exactly when I saw it go wrong. The Vietnam war. I was a college student. College students got a deferment from the draft. The kids of the working class, the "deplorables" of the day, went to die in the jungle. That was was no joke. Several hundred men -- and it was almost all men -- died every week.

Dropping or flunking out of college was a ticket to the jungle. Professors then as now were liberals. That's when grade inflation started. If you give a kid a C you may be condemning him to a horrible death in a steaming jungle on the other side of the world, in a war that the country was starting to hate.

So they gave out A's. And that was the real start of the split. College-type kids are the elite, non-college kids are fed into the meatgrinder.

All of our politics comes from that. That's when the split between the elite and the deplorables really got bad. In WWII everyone served and everyone sacrificed. After Vietnam only the high school grads served. The college kids were too good for that. That's your elitism and your moral degeneration of the country.

The question he raised was whether there is something morally or ethically wrong with sexual fantasy about acts that would be considered immoral. — T Clark

No there isn't. The standard is consenting adults. If myself and one or more likeminded adults content to get together and engage in mutually agreeable behaviors, that is the definition of an ethically permissible state.

Now if two people of legal age pretend to be underage, that's not illegal, immoral, or unethical. Let alone if I have a private fantasy in my brain. Ethics and morals are about what you DO. It's a behavioral standard

Let me give a nonsexual example. Some moron cuts me off on the freeway. For a moment I think, "Man if only I had a machine gun mounted on the roof!" But of course that's just something the mind does, serves up a little irrational revenge fantasy almost as a coping mechanism to defuse some anger. There is never any intent within me to murder someone and of course I take no behavioral actions in furtherance of doing them harm. These days I don't even honk. I drive the California freeways and you don't know who's going to shoot at you for looking crosseyed at them.

But that's an example where my mind, my internal dialog, entertains a fantasy that I have no intention of acting out; and even at the moment I'm having the fantasy it's not real, it's not something I think I' going to do. It's just human nature, a little quirk of the brain. Momentarily imagine violence against someone who annoyed you.

So that's my two cents. Anything at all in your brain, no matter how horrible, is legal, moral, and ethical. That's why by the way I oppose hate crime laws. It's already illegal to hurt people. If you do it while thinking a particular thought, that is nobody's business. You are allowed to think your thoughts. Hate crime laws are literally Orwellian "thought crimes." We're going to punish you for what you think.

No. That's wrong. It's a basic human right to think what you think. It's what you DO that we judge.

And as I mentioned earlier there are many different models of the Universe on which we can base our calculations. — Meta

I can live with that. You made an interesting point earlier. In Newton's world we can take space to be Euclidean 3-space. As I understand your idea, you are speculating on what would be true if the universe did happen to be continuous and that we could arbitrarily divide space and time.

In that case we could take a convergent infinite series as true about the world. Calculus would genuinely be a solution to Zeno's questions.

Is that what you are saying?

I am really out of the discussion about that off topic. — Meta

As long as you insist on confusing math with physics, people are compelled to push back. Contemporary physics does not allow for infinite divisibility of matter or time. The question isn't even meaningful since there's a certain point past which we can't measure space or time. Math does allow infinite divisibility, but math isn't physics. I suspect you know this, and I'm not sure why you are pushing this line of argument.

Zeno's paradox "shows" that an infinite number of events can happen in finite time. — Meta

Nonsense. [You must know that else why the quotes around the "shows?"] But please, someone start a separate Zeno thread.

For the original topic ... consider the set of all possible infinite bitstrings. One of those bitstrings is 00000. It exists, same as any other one. If we reach into a bag containing all the possible bitstrings, it's possible -- but unlikely -- that we'll pull out the all-zero bitstring. But it's possible. We might pull out some other bitstring. That would be unlikely too! That's all I'm saying.

Maybe we're missing what each other are saying. Do you agree, there can be an infinite number of flips? — T Clark

Yes. And there's no reason they can't all be heads. You think there's some law of nature that says that eventually there must be a head. But why is that? It's clear that on the zillionth flip, after all preceding flips are heads, the odds are still 50-50 (or whatever the unfair coin's odds are) and that zillionth flip could perfectly well be a head.

I agree that this is unlikely. That's because the event "at least one tail" has many ways of happening, but "all heads" only has one. But each WAY of getting at least one tail is just as unlikely. So you're being fooled by psychological clumping. "At least one tail" includes all the infinitely many different ways you could get at least one tail. You could get a tail on the first flip, or the second, dot dot dot.

But there's no fundamental reason that you couldn't get all heads. It's unlikely. But so is the event of your birth, or someone winning the lottery, or Trump becoming president. Unlikely things happen all the time. In fact every particular thing that happens is incredibly unlikely.

You are confusing something being unlikely with its being impossible. And that's the fallacy in your argument.

In an infinite universe, eventually that number of heads will come up. — T Clark

You keep saying that but there's no reason it should be true. You might get all tails. Or all heads. Any particular sequence is just as likely as any other. Do you understand that point? It's like picking a real number from the unit interval. Convert the number to binary, that gives you an infinite sequence of 1's and 0's which we can interpret as heads and tails. If you pick a number at random (sometimes called "throwing darts at the real line") one bit pattern is just as likely as any other. At each coin flip the odds are 50-50 that you'll get heads. The first flip, the tenth, the trillionth. The odds are always the same. (Also goes for an unfair coin). So why couldn't we flip all heads? Or all tails? Or alternating heads and tails? Every single individual pattern is exactly as likely as any other. No law says that there must eventually be a head or a tail.

In an infinite universe, can you tell me why any particular specific sequence of heads and tails won't eventually show up? Tell me why that sequence won't eventually recur an infinite number of times. Or maybe that's not what you meant. — T Clark

Why must it? Suppose I flip infinitely many times. Why can't every flip be heads?

Do you understand that all heads is exactly as likely as any other particular sequence of flips?

No, why? Here's an infinite sequence of events: 0,1, 0, 1, 0, 1, ... Does 2 ever occur? No. Can you frame a more precise question? The answer to that is no as well. Suppose I flip a fair coin infinitely many times? It's unlikely but perfectly possible that we'll get all heads. Tails may never happen. Remember that ANY particular sequence of heads and tails is just as unlikely as all heads or all tails.

It's simply not true that "everything" must happen. It's also not true that everything must re-occur, or that there would be an exact double of you. Its just false. Something that floats around the Internet with no actual basis in fact.

By the way did you know that if you put a frog in a pot of water and put the pot on the stove and gradually turn up the heat, do you know what happens when the water gets too hot for the frog's comfort? The frog jumps out of the pot. Somebody did the experiment.

Don't believe everything you think.

P2: Information does not abide to this law. E.g. if I give you information, I don't have less of it. — Samuel Lacrampe

How exactly can you give me information? Say you have some bitstring that you want to give me. You need to input energy into the system to send that bitstring out over a communication network. You don't have less information than you started with, but you did have to expend energy to reproduce that information and transmit it across a distance. The information itself has to be stored somewhere, on a hard drive for example that takes a constant input of energy to keep spinning.

Leave electronics out of it. Take a classical technology like a book. A book sits in a library, in physical form. Someone had to mash up some dead trees and mark up the paper with ink and run it off a printing press and truck it over to the library. These are all physical actions that require an input of energy.

Now I show up at the library or bookstore and I read the book. The information has been transmitted to me. Well that's amazing, except that in order for that to happen, some light had to hit the paper and bounce onto my retina and get transmitted to my brain. All physical processes whose energy content could be calculated by a biophysicist.

And eventually that book will disintegrate into dust from exposure to the air and the light. If instead you seal it up so that no air and no light can ever get to it, you can preserve it forever. But then you can never transmit that information.

So I challenge your assertion that you can duplicate information for free, and that you can send someone information without having less of it yourself. It's a subtle point, you might be able to save or at least sharpen your argument. It may be true that abstract information -- the story told by the book -- is nonphysical. But any representation of the information is physical; and it's the representations that are transmitted, not the abstract information. Abstract information has no physical existence; and therefore you are going to be hardpressed to say that it has any existence at all. When I dream, my neurons and brain processes are working like crazy, and using energy derived from what I ate for lunch. It's all physical.

Now I am not making an argument against Platonism. But I'm asking if you are making an argument FOR Platonism. And if "information" lives out there in the Platonic non-physical realm, what else lives there? The baby Jesus? The flying spaghetti monster? The number 5? Your argument depends on information living somewhere that's not physical. That's a lot of ontological baggage to carry.

You can only transmit physical representations of information. Your argument fails on that point I think. And even the abstraction of information only lives in the mind, and mind (as far as we know) is a function of brain, and brain is a physical process that stops if you don't keep putting in energy from outside the system.

Damn. I'm sorry I missed this. I do not know what the OP wrote in the body of their post. But I'd be happy to talk about whether math is a lie. A very strong case can be made that math is a lie. See in fact. this excellent article on fictionalism in the philosophy of mathematics.

On the other hand a strong case can be made that math is not a lie. It's trying to tell us something about the world, if we can only figure out what that is. That could be argued as well. Certainly math has immense practical relationship to the world. The "unreasonable effectiveness" of math, as the famous essay goes.

I hope you see that there are many good avenues for discussion based on this title. It goes directly to the foundational struggles of the 1920's, with Hilbert looking for a purely symbolic way of settling all questions in math. And Gödel dashing those hopes and showing the very limits of formal reasoning in determining what's true.

Is math a lie? We could talk about that all day.

Here's another angle. Are some areas of math more real than others? We're all pretty sure that 1 + 1 = 2 tells us something about the real world. But how about large cardinals, which are infinite quantities so large they can't even be proved to exist in standard set theory. Set theorists keep making up new higher levels of infinity based on additional axioms. Large cardinals have been an active area of study for decades. Are these higher cardinals as "real" as the first few positive integers? Discuss.

What did the OP say so as to merit such a rapid no-platforming?

I'm for free speech. What did I miss?

For those who are genuinely transgender, public understanding and acceptance is a godsend.

But many people these days think transitioning will solve their emotional problems. It doesn't, and now there's a trend of reverse surgery, where people want to go back where they started, gender wise. Recently a well-respected academic wanted to do research on reverse transitioning, and he got into some sort of political trouble.

So I wholeheartedly endorse and support understanding and acceptance of gender issues. But the politicization of it, I deplore. Well that's true of just about everything. I'm a social liberal who is appalled and horrified by the tactics and rhetoric and anti-intellectualism and flat out hate and anger of what passes for the left these days. I'm unalterably opposed to the people I agree with!!

Another datapoint is that they'll give hormones and other gender drugs to toddlers. At 3 years old you don't know what gender you are and you don't care. 8, 10, it's a phase. If you drug and surgery every confused adolescent, that's a bad idea.

It's like everything else. The poisonous politics of the left outweighs their good intentions. That leaves me no political allies at all.

So, support for transgenders? Yes. Excessive politicization, taking everything to extremes, name-calling and no-platforming everyone who even raises a question? No. That I don't support. I really hate modern politics. The US didn't used to be this crazy. I'm worried.

ps -- Here is the story I alluded to earlier.

In late September, the United Kingdom’s Bath Spa University turned down an application by James Caspian, a psychotherapist who specializes in working with transgender people, to conduct research on gender reassignment reversals. The university deemed the subject “potentially politically incorrect.”

http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/04/university-refuses-research-growing-numbers-trans-people-want-go-back/

Madness! You HAVE to be able to ask questions. But the politics are that you can't do research on anything that contradicts the leftist orthodoxy.

What it would take to convince academia that they've gotten something wrong? — creativesoul

There's a saying about that. Science progresses one funeral at a time. Someone else made the same point. That no scientist is ever convinced by the newest theory. Rather, the old generation dies off and the new generation, which has grown up with the new theory, comes to accept it.

So basically you have to have a new hot theory and wait for the establishment to die. Physics, math, you name it. You can view a lot of science history through this lens.

But this has no bearing on the appalling incidents of mass murder in America. — Wayfarer

MURDERS ARE DOWN! Even freaking HuffPo admits that. You think they're up because the media want you to think that. The numbers say otherwise.

Gun ownership is up, murders are way way down. But this week you can't even put facts in front of people because the media has everyone so hysterical.

So they'll ban butt stocks. It's like after Columbine when every school district in the country banned trench coats. Makes as much sense.

If you're a relative of a victim of a drunk driver, your point would be lost.

I asked you to explain to me why the 59 have such a powerful hold on you that you downplay and dismiss the horror felt by the loved ones of the victims of car crashes. If your neighbor's spouse got killed by a drunk on the freeway would you say, "Hey no biggie, at least they didn't get shot."

I'm asking you to explain this to me. Are you capable of pulling yourself out of the media haze and comprehending what it would be like to have a loved one die in a car wreck? 100 Americans every single day of the year. What if you stacked up all those bodies in a warehouse and brought in the media. Then you'd care, right? But if it's not on cable tv 24/7 you don't see it and you don't care about it and when challenged, you actually think the grief of the survivors would be less. And that the drunks themselves have no moral culpability. Not like if they used a gun, right?

This is precisely my point. Your thinking is clouded because you are being told what to feel by the media. You can't step back and imagine any horrors other than the ones you're told to care about.

This is EXACTLY the point I'm making, and you are demonstrating it. Dying at the hands of a drunk is an "accident." Because, you know, you can't really expect people not to drive drunk. It's an American right.

Only the 59 have meaning.

In all seriousness I would like you to explain this point to me.

accidental shootings — Wayfarer

Oh now you care about accidents. An hour ago you couldn't be bothered. The 59 killed by drunks today are joined by another 41 who died in accidents not related to alcohol. Texting, fatigue, inattention. Another 100 tomorrow. You are making my point for me. Those 59 in Las Vegas are 59 out of 151,000 that day and another 151,000 every day since. Why do you only care about the 59? It's emotionalism whipped up by the media and the circumstances. If you can pull yourself away from your melodrama for a moment, grieve for the others as well. Please.

More guns, less gun violence. As long as people are tossing around charts.



http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-more-guns-less-gun-violence-between-1993-and-2013/

Even liberal HuffPo gets it. "We Are More Afraid Than Ever of Gun Violence, But the Truth Is the Murder Rate Is at a 50-Year Low"

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-reifowitz/we-are-more-afraid-than-e_b_8740750.html

There's a lot of emotionalism in the air but this is a philosophy forum. Another 59 people got murdered today by drunks. Their deaths were every bit as horrifying as the deaths in Las Vegas, their loved ones just as devastated. They just didn't all die in one place, and the media aren't jerking our chains about it. Someone called that point "tripe." I call it perspective.

It's an illusion.

Globally, 151,000 people die every day. That's a hard fact. It's objective. [Going back to the recent objective/subjective discussion].

Now people overlay their cultural biases on it. The overwhelming majority die of heart disease. They don't make the news. 21,000 children die of malnutrition and disease secondary to poverty. They don't make the news. Just in the US, 100 people die every day in automobile accidents, most involving alcohol. They make the local news but not the national or international news. They're just as dead and their deaths were just as unexpected and tragic and horrifying as those 59 in Las Vegas, but they don't have the same cultural resonance.

Suppose that objective facts stay the same but the cultural emphasis changes. So we ignore the 59 dead in Las Vegas because crazy gun nuts are actually a statistical anomaly. Perhaps the news focuses on the the automobile deaths. We show the 100 daily dead on the evening news, show the grieving relatives, find the bartenders and liquor store clerks who sold the perpetrators their booze. Something might be done.

The 151,000 deaths are objective. Which deaths we regard as newsworthy and culturally meaningful is purely cultural. It's an illusion. The deaths are real. The horror over this 59 and not the 21,000 dead children is cultural and political.

You want to ban butt stocks? Why? Why not ban drunk driving? First offense, 30 days in the slam. Second offense, a year in the slam. No excuses, no picking up trash on weekends, no slaps on the wrist, no suspended sentence because you play golf with the local police chief or contribute to the mayors reelection fund. Drive drunk, go to jail that night.

You'd save a Las Vegas worth of lives every single day of the year.

Why are you worked up about the 59 and not the 151,000 or the 21,000 or the hundred a day? Why are you emotionally troubled by the number 59 and not bothered in the slightest by 151,000?

It's the same phenomenon as plane crashes. A hundred people die in a plane crash and it makes the national news. That same hundred die in geographically dispersed car crashes and nobody except the friends and relatives even hear about it.

Death is objective. What makes the news is cultural and political. One is real and the other's an illusion.

That provides no argument at all in favour — andrewk

It's a datapoint, not a whole argument. Just shows that the American tradition of gun ownership is part of the country's history, and often for the good. Nor was I making an argument, only presenting an anecdote in opposition to the popular wisdom that gun rights are uniformly evil.

As above I hope you understand that I am making intellectual points and in no ways moral once. I haven't got enough interest. If for you this is a moral issue and you want to go ban guns, then YOU go talk to the 55 million American gun owners. I'm not one of them and haven't got a dog in this fight. I hope this is clear. I have no emotional stake in this issue at all.

of lax gun laws. — andrewk

What you call "lax" gun laws are one of the core freedoms enshrined by Americans at the time of the nation's founding. Many on the left these days would decry "lax enforcement" of suppressing hate speech, not understanding that free speech is a core freedom of Americans and a damned important one.

Just today Black Lives Matter shut down a free speech rally, saying "Liberalism is white supremacy." So you tell me whether it's important to stand up for Constitutional freedoms. You can't pick and choose from the Bill of Rights. Not these days, when so many people want to tear down their own freedoms in the name of the politics of the moment. http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/04/black-lives-matter-students-shut-down-th

That somebody who has received credible death threats by powerful adversaries needs armed protection is not in dispute, and such armed protection is provided in the most gun-restrictive countries in the world, just as in the most permissive. I can assure you that the protective detail of the British PM are armed — andrewk

So the elite, our "betters," are entitled to the right of self defense. But I am not. This is a key argument of the pro-gun side. Self-defense is a human right. It's not just for the rich and powerful. It's exactly that elitism that weakens the moral position of the anti-gun lobby. Theresa May is entitled to self-defense but the proles are not.

, as are the police charged with protecting a key witness against organised crime. — andrewk

The State decides whose lives are worthy. You see in the US, the people are sovereign; and each individual has the right to self defense. You yourself are expressing an elitist view. The swells get armed protection, the rest of us are helpless victims of criminals. Am I correctly understanding you here?

Allowing or providing armed protection for people at grave risk under definite threats — andrewk

Now here you are saying that in the example of the article I linked, black civil rights workers in the deep racist south should have gone to the local authorities and said, "We are black civil rights workers down here in cracker-land, and we'd like your position to arm ourselves."

Andrew are you aware that the cops were the Klan back then? That was the reality. The local authorities were not about to issue carry permits to the black agitators coming in from out of town to sign black people up to vote. No Sir that was not going to happen.

Now I can just hear you saying, well sure but of course they could go to the Feds. But that's no help. During that era the presidents were JFK and LBJ, both Democrats. Now this is a fact not commonly realized among contemporary people, but back in those days, you know those cops and Klansmen and southern redneck racists? The were all Democrats. People don't realize that. Lincoln was a Republican, the KKK were Democrats, the southern racist rednecks in the 50's and 60's were Democrats. It wasn't till Richard Nixon's brilliant southern strategy that he got the southern white working class to sign on to the GOP agenda. JFK and LBJ were in no position to authorize black civil rights agitators to arm themselves before they went into the deep south.

Can you hear what you are saying? Did you really mean to write that? The civil rights workers should have appealed to the government to let them carry guns to defend themselves? It could never have happened at any level of government.

That is the point of the article. The American tradition of the right of individual self defense was part and parcel of the civil rights movement.

You wish to take power away from the individual. The US was a country built on the rights of the individual. That's what the pro-gun people see as being at stake.

bears no relation at all to allowing the vast majority of the population, who are under no specific threat whatsoever, to carry guns wherever and whenever they want. — andrewk

So the rest of us are the designated victims of the criminals. Unable to defend ourselves as a matter of law. Sheep to be shorn by order of our rulers. Who have armed guards.

It's not about whether the vast majority is never in a fight for their lives. I could give you a hundred cases at the flick of a Google search where law-abiding Americans defended themselves from home invasion, robbery, rape, and murder.

You would consign those people to their fate. I disagree.

Apologies for the word count! Thanks for reading.

NRA, the American terrorist group — Bitter Crank

As long as the show was objective and not biased :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

BC I hope you don't mind if I don't engage with the specifics of your post. Gun rights are not one of my hobby horses; so that when I discuss the subject it's from a more detached point of view. For the record I favor gun rights in the abstract but I don't own a gun. Who the hell am I going to shoot, right? I think a lot of "gun nuts" do deserve that name, and I am unalterably opposed to gun stupidity, of which there's far too much. So I have some mild opinions, sympathy with both sides, and like I say it's not a subject I care much about.

As tempted as I am to reply to your post point-by-point, just for the intellectual exercise, I see that it's not an intellectual exercise to you. Anything I say would be regarded by you as not just wrong, but evil.

So I'll regrettably have to pass on responding to the specifics of your post.

In practical terms there are five million members of the NRA. and fifty-five million gun owners. Who's gonna cross that demographic?

Besides I could point you to groups like the Pink Pistols, who promote armed self defense for gays. Their motto: Armed gays don't get bashed.

There are arguments and statistics and datapoints and people of good will on every side of this issue.

The hypocycloid of truth.

Reason magazine posted an interesting article about how gun rights were a part of the American civil rights movement.

"I'm alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms," declared John R. Salter Jr., the civil rights leader who helped to organize the famous sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi. "Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine," Salter recalled. "The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay."

https://reason.com/blog/2017/10/05/how-the-second-amendment-helped-activist

Yes well that's the tricky part. The first generation sees themselves as part of the colonizers. A few generations later they don't. Even in the American revolution there were plenty of loyalists to King George. I don't know the answer. Just wanted to raise the question.

Too subtle for the room I see. Ok here's a version with a higher word count.

A long time ago in a mythical land, a powerful empire had some colonies across the sea. The colonists complained about the empire's monarch that "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance." [Fortunately such a thing could never happen today]. The last straw was when the empire's king put a tax on tea. That caused the colonists to rebel and overthrow the empire.

If you still don't get the point of my remark, and what consequences may result when colonizers lay out rules and regulations for their colonists ... you must be a product of the American public school system.

Also see colonialism. And the Philip K. Dick novel Time out of Joint, in which earth's colony on the moon goes to war with earth to win its independence.

The point being that no matter what kind of "benevolent" government a colonizer sets up, the colonists want freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Also see Catalonia.

You remember the story of Gandhi, in which Ben Kingsley drives the British out of India through the simple moral force of the idea of home rule. Rule of the colonies by the colonized themselves. Not by their condescending "betters" in the home offices of the ruling empire, who in the end can only rule by brutal force.

Colonies want freedom. That's what "tax their tea" meant. Colonies want freedom, not rule imposed on them by a distant power. It has always been so throughout the history of the world.

Every colonization contains the seeds of revolution against the colonizers. That's what "tax their tea" means. It's a reference to the American revolution against the British in 1776; and by extension a reference to the desire for freedom, even at the cost of bloody revolution, on the part of colonized people everywhere since the dawn of time.

It would be no different on Mars. One day you lay down rules, A few generations later you can either spend the money and blood to put down the revolution, or you can just let them go. They don't want your rules. They want to make their own rules. They want to be free. People want to be free. Colonizers never seem to understand that.

So when you're laying out your "ideal" form of government for people who will eventually see you as nothing more than a brutal faraway occupier, give some thought to the universal human desire for freedom and self-determination. Either that, or plan to garrison your colony with a brutal army of occupation. In the end you'll have to resort to secret police and torture, and once you lose your humanity you'll lose your colonial war. Go rent The Battle of Algiers. That's what colonization looks like.

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

We should definitely tax their tea.

Everything in the real world has two sides. How about clean air? Nobody in their right mind would argue against clean air. So I will.

You can clean up the air in industrialized nations by burdening energy producers with expensive requirements. Retool power plants to put out cleaner exhaust and run it though super duper filters. Make utilities commit to a certain percentage of "clean" energy, in quotes since many clean energy sources turn out to be net dirtier than conventional oil and coal. But that's another discussion.

So we marginally raise the cost of energy by, say, 10 or 20%. The first-worlders with jobs in a functioning economy barely notice the increase. They live in cities and have liberal values and feel better about themselves for "healing the planet."

But energy is fungible. When you raise the cost in the first world you raise it everywhere. Energy costs go up in desperate third-world regions where running water is a luxury. Now maybe they can't afford the electricity to run the water pump. They die of malnutrition and disease associated with the lack of running water.

I don't know the numbers, I"m just making these up to illustrate my point. What if every part-per-thousand improvement in the cleanliness of the air in California causes 100,000 additional deaths in Sudan? The coastal elite in the US and their counterparts across the developed world would never hear about it. They are saving the planet and can't be bothered with the actual consequences of their viewpoint.

If you really cared about humanity -- and not just virtue signaling at the expense of wretched peasants whose death won't make the evening news -- you'd demand dirtier air. If you lower energy costs you give the developing world a huge hand up. Clean air exacerbates inequality. The liberal elite explicitly wants to raise energy costs. Humanity would be better served by lowering them.

I can't think of any area of public policy that doesn't have two morally compelling sides ... especially in areas where "everyone" agrees that one side is right and the other evil.

"Coach, play me or trade me." — Hanover

EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I thought the dustup between Fishfry and Sap was unnecessarily combative ... — Hanover

Not at my end. I thought it was funny. My sense was that English was not Sap's native language ... but it turns out that he is British and therefore predisposed to look down condescendingly on we uncultured yanks. And I thought it was totally funny that what I mistook for not understanding the nuances of English turned out to be not understanding the nuances of American. It's perfect that I actually used the expression "not the King's English" when it turned out I was talking to someone who DOES speak the King's English!

At my end I was never upset or thought of myself as having a dust-up. I would never do that on this forum again, having been granted an excessive degree of forbearance by the mods in the past. I appreciate that a lot. I really like the mods here. Also when people take me too seriously I like to act even more serious so as to push their buttons. There might have been a bit of that.

The Einstein thing, it was a joke. Once the subject of Einstein came up at all, the phrase just popped into my head. I never thought anyone would think I actually have a bad word to say about the moderators around here, who like I say genuinely could have banned me a while back but didn't.

As far as the point of grammar I was trying (not very well) to explain, "play me or trade me" explains it better than I did.

Sure, from the pragmatics point of view, I get it. I just wondered if there was a deeper reason for the original apparent chasm of disagreement. And apparently not. — Baden

Excessive literalism on the part of some. "So shoot me!" is not a command for you to shoot me, nor is it a request. It means "The hell with you if you don't like what I say," or something like that.

A lot of people do this lately, use excessive literalism to make a debating point. Remember when Trump said, "Maybe Putin has Hillary's emails." I recognized that as a sarcastic joke. I thought it was funny. The next day liberals said, "Oh Trump is calling on a foreign head of state to hack the Democrats." It's absurd.

Is there a name for using excessive, disingenuous literalism in order to make a debating point?

I found this online. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/220507/word-for-deliberately-taking-the-literal-rather-than-implied-message


"What is the word for understanding someones implied meaning, but being completely pretentious about it and taking their words for what they literally said?"

The consensus was disingenuous literal-mindedness. Guess there's not an exact word for it.

(Edit) I don't mean to imply that any particular individual here is deliberately misconstruing my words. Only that I personally find it difficult to imagine otherwise.

Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter now. I'm just asking a question about the grammar. — Baden

I'm happy to discuss the grammar. I was officially instructing the moderation staff that if in the future I say something objectionable to them, I would prefer my post to be deleted rather than altered. Isn't that what I said? And since I can't control what the staff does, it's clear that I'm expressing a preference rather than a command. I can't make them do anything one way or the other.

Since I haven't said anything objectionable (and in the past I've gone so far out on that limb without having my post being deleted that I can't imagine what it would take) it's clear that my request was hypothetical.

I do in fact feel strongly that forum moderators should delete but never alter posts.

it leaves me wondering as I mentioned above how you would express an instruction — Baden

Since I am not the OP (hence I had no dog in this fight) I thought it was perfectly clear that I was making the general point that a forum operator should either delete a post or let it stand as is; but never change a poster's words. Obviously that was not clear to some though I remain baffled as to how anyone could misconstrue my intention.

Edison said genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. If you wait to be inspired you'll never get anything done. Or as Flaubert said, "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be wild and original in your work."

Pretty good example.

Also presuming that objective data does not equate with an eternally fixed, perfectly stable absolute data that is severed from subjectivity (such that, for example, no awareness of it could occur) — javra

You're right, to argue against your example I'd be forced into levels of sophistry I'm unwilling to embrace. Interesting that your example refers to state changes rather than absolute entities. I wonder if that's characteristic of compelling examples of objectiveness. For example I can argue that a red light might not be red to some particular observer, but the transition of a traffic light from red to green can't be denied. Even though I might not agree that red is always red, I'm forced to admit that red is different than green.

Good one.