And zero trials or convictions for what you claim are crimes. The patterns of the false accusations, though, are never-ending.

“After our last hearing. President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee, said on Tuesday.

“That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump’s call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us. And this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice,” she added.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/12/jan-6-committee-notifies-doj-that-trump-tried-tampering-with-one-of-its-witnesses-cheney-says.html

Witness intimidation is a crime.

Phoning someone isn’t.

He allegedly phoned someone who never answered. Bmbshell!

The consistency here lies in wanting to deter the killing of human life. Punishment, capital or otherwise, is one such deterrent.

Not necessarily lies, I apologize. I left out other possibilities.
"Dissent" from universal expert consensus, i.e. climate deniers (are you one?), is either lies, or Dunning-Kreuger idiocy. Of course there is always the theoretical possibility of "Maverick Genius", but for our purposes we can ignore that one.

However, you have taken it one step further. I say, "Let X be true...", and you immediately raise your finger and say "I dissent! This contradicts my experiences and intuitions!". I don't know what to say, other than you must have been a joy to teach.

There is no evidence or compelling argument for the existence of p-zombies in your scenario. Unfortunately the assertion that something is true is not enough to convince me or many others. If you had some evidence or reasonable arguments it would be a different story.

The phrase “pro-life” pertains only to the abortion debate, not to other matters. It’s the same same with “pro-choice”. If pro-choicere were to oppose populations from choosing to enact anti-abortion laws, it doesn’t mean they harbor hidden reasons for defending a woman’s right to choose to kill her baby.

Simply banning abortions is not going to prevent all abortions. If you actually care about fetuses, then you should support the development of technology that will make it less likely that a women will choose to have one. But nobody in the pro-life movement supports this, because they don't actually care about fetuses - they care about keeping women controlled. They don't want women to be relieved of this crucial weakness. They want women to be vulnerable to becoming pregnant and make up a bunch of bullshit about the rights of fetuses to obscure it.

Every anti-abortion argument I’ve heard has to do with the termination of human life, so I’m not sure that’s accurate or a fair interpretation of what they care about or want.

Who knows? Maybe they would support artificial wombs had they known about them. I see little to no evidence that they wouldn’t.

In my imaginary scenario I have the power to stipulate whatever I wish. But please, "dissent" away. Is that you I see with the tin foil hat and cardboard sign?

You did stipulate what you wished, and it ended up implying dissent is lies and consensus is truth. I would wear a tinfoil hat and cardboard sign if it meant I didn’t have to agree with such absurdities.

It’s it doesn’t follow that because one opposes the evisceration of a human fetus he ought to support the production of artificial wombs. It’s like saying that because one opposes the evisceration of an adult human he ought to support life support technology.

That doesn’t make it true, either. Your stipulation is just that, a stipulation, like they stipulated phlogiston or a pantheon of gods. A dissenting view isn’t a lie. You ought to have had an option for dissenting from the prevailing view.

It’s not a lie to dissent. I would defer to dissent from the prevailing view because the claim that one is not conscious but they still perform the activity of conscious people betrays my intuition and experience.

I would retain my relationships in the belief that greater minds will supersede these views with their own.

That's just your poor interpretation. The golden rule considers all stakeholders on an equal and balanced basis.

That’s the problem to begin with. Tastes, manners, proclivities, beliefs, desires, etc. are pluralistic.

Not much of a rule, then.

It could be as simple as a handshake. No need to pretend we’re speaking about cannibalism.

Not much of a rule, then.

Still, assumptions are made, behavior is premised on them. Worse still, it’s self-cantered. You consider yourself before considering anyone else.

Well, other people might not want to be treated the exact same way you want to be treated. That’s why the golden rule fails, in my opinion. Better to find out how they want to be treated first of all instead of assuming that everyone wants the same treatment as yourself.

The problem with religion, as far as I can tell, as that it has placed value on unworldly objects, whether the supernatural, the soul, the afterlife, God, and so on. Essentially, and in practice, it places value on ideas instead of objects. These ideas can be myths, stories, narratives, characters, but all are products of the mind, never visible or reachable by any method other than turning into oneself.

We’ll have to dig our way out of that. One way I’ve come to value a person is to recognize her originality. Nothing like her has ever existed, nor ever will, because she’s original, one-of-a-kind, and in that sense effectively priceless.

I’m not an economist, so perhaps it’s for the best.

I don’t know why you would tell a person his lot in life is well deserved because his skin color is a certain shade. But you’re thinking with race here. That’s the problem to begin with. If you look at a crowd and divide it into races you will get disparities that you cannot explain without resorting to racism.

I haven’t contradicted anything. A state might be more or less wealthy for a variety of reasons, like the nationalization of industry, higher taxes, less wasteful spending, debt, and so on.

The labor theory of value has largely been abandoned and widely criticized. I’m not sure it applies.

It’s theft on a grand scale.

So should we let the chips fall where they may, how do we explain to racial groups that go dramatically under-represented in some fields that the cause is pure fairness?

Tell them the race of those involved has no bearing on anything in the entire process.

Now, why do states back such things? What's going on between states? Which state is richer? And how did it become richer?

In short, it accrues to its power and benefit. The state has no real mechanism to earn wealth of its own so it must take it from those who are productive.

Representationalism is odd in that it always assumes an image or “representation” (“a pixelated appearance”) of what is seen, but can never show us this image, upon what medium it appears, and can never point to the being whom is observing it. It is odd that it is present in both materialism and idealism, as if one conceded something to the other.

Your instincts are correct here. It’s morally wrong. As the case proves, any race-based inclusion leads to race-based exclusion. When you make an effort to advance some groups you impede others. This is why we ought not to favor some races, and for the same reasons we ought not to disfavor other races.

It is also demeaning both to the favored and unfavored groups insofar as it paints the candidates as requiring special considerations based on superficial phenotypes, none of which factor in to education.

It’s unjust. It doesn’t rectify any past injustice because it doesn’t even consider them. It doesn’t distinguish between the deserving and undeserving. That it is premised on fuzzy taxonomies makes it all the more threadbare.

A case for affirmative action could be made to flesh-and-blood human beings who have actually been excluded from such institutions because of their race. That sort of injustice could be rectified by giving them the full benefit of proper consideration as they give everyone else. Beyond that it should not go.

Is the method of pretending others say things they didn’t say a bad habit or a tried and true method of deceiving fellow travellers?

Isn’t the mind, too, an abstract object? An idea? How do we experience abstract objects with other abstract objects, ideas with other ideas?

As usual, misrepresentations, made up logic, and other absurdities. The statist knows he can start a corporation and compete with the very corporations he despises, but won’t, because risk is best left to other people and other people’s money.

If you experience the world through the five senses, what being and with what kind of senses do you experience abstract objects?

One wonders why, since corporations control the United States, one doesn’t just start one. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to do. Once done he could let it loose on the battlefield and immediately possess the power and influence he claims they have.

But all that would involve effort. Much better to fall back on the hope that he may one day control social activity, capital, and most importantly the lives of other people with the monopoly on violence, so long as he can elect a body of benevolent angles with the swing of his vote.

Tickets are worth things because people work—I’m not so sure what that means. As far as I know currency is usually valued according to what, if any, commodity backs it, or on the faith in the issuer of it, in many cases governments and their central banks.

Watch the faithful statist reserve a special code of ethics for his government that he refuses to hold to any other group of men and women. Wealth should taken away from those who earn it but we shall let it forever coalesce, without work or effort, in the politician’s coffers. Hundreds of millions of people cannot work together, but the faction we put in power can do it all. The private man should never earn and save too much wealth, god forbid, but our officials should take it and hoard it for their own uses. They, and only they, know how to spend it. This we know because we voted for them.

The paternal politics of the servile.

I like the idea of no force threatened against peaceful people, but it doesn't feel right in this context.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths v making the rich pay a little bit more.

Obviously those in poverty aren't being helped by other means. Do you have any suggestions?

Taxes are quite an old concept and they haven’t helped much yet. I’m not sure a little more will do. And they might even have a worse effect, which is indifference. If the state takes a man’s quarter and promises it will help the poor with it, the man no longer has the quarter to give and less responsibility towards the poor. He has already done his part.

It is also an unjust mechanism for helping the poor. It is unable to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, those who want and do no want help, and it operates through the theft and extortion of other people’s money.

My suggestion is we need more concerned people such as yourself to cooperate and help.

Yes, I accept the former, but not the latter. I don’t think taking people’s money or property is the right thing to do. I don’t think advocating to take other people’s money and property is the right thing to do either. The right thing to do would be to help those in need.

You can do no more than to try to belittle me, whether to pad your weak theories or to make yourself feel better, but the fact remains that your oligarchs have not nor cannot shaft me. They do not have the power over me that you claim they do. I respect that you want to advocate for their employees and feel you know better how they should run their businesses, but the power I speak of is real and affects millions residing in particular jurisdictions.

So yes, maybe stick to fiction.

You said these oligarchs will shaft me yet you cannot say how. Odd, that.

I don’t own a Tesla, use Facebook, and am largely unaware of Koch industries. If they ever strip me or anyone of our human rights I will stand in opposition. Until then, I guess the gubberment is the problem after all.

Uh oh, those those scary oligarchs. Can you name one and how he’ll hurt me?