Again, you are upset about words, something Sessions said on a right wing talk show. — fishfry

As you know, people go to prison all the time over "words". The words of the Attorney General matter, regardless of where he's talking. The whole country was upset by the zero-tolerance immigration policy (the action behind the words), which is why the policy ended just weeks after people found out. Discussing this with you is pointless. You're beclowning yourself now.

I think we have a duty to save a drowning child in the scenario I talked about. Why does that duty fade the further away the child is? If I can easily save a child by flying to a pond and rescuing them, don't I have an obligation to do so? If I have extra money and could save a child by sponsoring one through Save the Children, don't I have a moral duty to do so? Singer makes good points.

If you come across a child drowning and you have merely to reach out your hand and get your arm wet to save her, do you have a duty to do so? Are you acting immorally if you let her die?

Yeah, but I think animal rights will be near the top of the list.

When future generations judge us harshly, it will be for how we treat and eat animals. It doesn't bother me enough to change my behavior, but I would pay twice as much for meat if there was a lab-grown alternative that was as good.

What's wrong with solar panels? I live in the desert and my panels have saved me over ten thousand over the years. I lease them through Solar City.

How does theory of universals/platonism handle borderline cases where you have something that has qualities of both x and y, say a couch that folds into a bed? As you're manipulating the thing, there's going to be a point in time where half the people think it's a couch, and the other half think it's a bed.

What was the worst thing Trump did while he was president, in your opinion?

https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/29/politics/donald-trump-howard-stern-iraq-war/index.html

“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump said in the fall of 2002 when asked by Stern if he supported an invasion. “You know, I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

He's singing a different tune now, of course. But if you're going to call out the NYTimes for what they were saying back then, what's good for the goose...

The link is not about Trump, it's about Jeff Sessions.

"Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Monday that he hopes the administration's new policy that separates children from their parents will serve as a deterrent to other immigrants considering crossing the border illegally."

To recap: the Trump Admin started a new zero-tolerance policy to separate all families as a deterrent. This had never been done before and was ended just a few weeks after the public found out. Do you see how that is different than what Biden and Obama were doing?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/11/pence-trump-endangered-my-family-on-jan-6-00086664

"“I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”"

If I was religious, I'd assume god really is on Trump's side. — Echarmion

Or Luck of the Devil?

Both sides have claimed over and over again their opponent is an existential threat. And this Republican nutjob apparently decided to do something about it.

"In addition to the QAnon-adjacent posts, Trump shared several conspiracy theories Tuesday on his Truth Social site and he re-posted a picture of Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with the words “Your enemy is not in Russia” written in black bars over their eyes."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-shares-barrage-qanon-content-conspiracy-theories-social-media-pl-rcna45465

And then there's Qanon and Alex Jones. Remember the pizzagate shooter?

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5112472/donald-trump-calls-president-biden-threat-democracy
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/11-ways-biden-handler-hell-bent-destroying-america

I'm 90/10 sure they are going to abolish the filibuster to push through a lot of new legislation to ensure they are less likely to lose elections in the future. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They won't have the votes to do this. At best, they'll have a margin of 1 or 2. Susan Collins would never go through with it.

One bystander killed, another in critical. Sounds like shooter was on a rooftop with a rifle.

If you think Iraq was such a bad idea (which it was), why are you voting for the political party that got us into it? A majority of House Dems voted against the Iraq war authorization.

If there was going to be a democratic vote on same sex marriage, I'd bet everything I own that it would be outlawed. — Patterner

The polling on same sex marriage is that it's very popular.

The truth is you don't actually know that his motives were different than Obama's. — fishfry

https://www.axios.com/2018/06/19/sessions-says-he-hopes-child-separation-policy-will-serve-as-a-deterrent

You made my point for me. In 2014 when Obama was separating families and putting kids in cages, the MSM did not widely report the story. People were not outraged because they didn't know it was happening. When images of kids in cages covered in foil space blankets "like baked potatoes" started circulating on social media, Obama dialed back the cages and loosened the vetting of families. Even the WaPo was forced to report on the kids Obama was losing to traffickers. — fishfry

Sure, it looked bad, but the two cases are not the same. Obama was not separating every family. The Trump Admin was. Obama was not doing it as a deterrent. The Trump admin was. Those are crucial differences, don't you agree?

No, the behaviour is the same, no? Behaviour is public.

EDIT: for the avoidance of doubt, I agree with you. I'm arguing the opposite, I forgot why. — bert1

Yeah, I know. I play Devil's Advocate a lot too. B.F. Skinner thought that behavior is public. That's not too popular these days. I don't know how it ever caught on. But what can I say, other than I think it's loony. It's so obvious to me that my feelings cause my behavior. It's axiomatic to me. It's like trying to prove a=a when someone is trying to argue a can sometimes be b.

For the same kind of reason that a ball rolls down an incline. — bert1

But I don't go through life like a ball rolling down an incline. None of us do. We don't behave like that. To say the p-zombie does the same things as us because it's an elaborate pachinko game is to already admit we're talking about something fundamentally different than us. That's not how we work.

Suppose I'm acting in a play. My line is "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Then I run off stage. Now suppose in a parallel world I've taken a drug that is making me paranoid. I'm hallucinating. I think a priest is trying to kill me. I run into the backstage of some theater, wander out on stage at a pivotal moment and say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and run off stage. To the observers, both me and parallel world me did the same thing. But are we going to say we behaved in the same way? No. In one case I'm acting, in the other case, I'm freaking out. Wouldn't you agree?

I don't find it plausible. It doesn't make any sense. Why would someone do something like heroin if not for the high? There's some hidden program in the brain telling the person to shoot up? The conscious high is only there for the ride? The simplest explanation is the best: I shoot up because I want to get high/don't want to be dope sick. P-zombies fall apart when analyzed closely over just this sort of thing. The idea of a p-zombie ODing on fentanyl is absurd. Why would it do something so dangerous if not for the feels?

The conscious state "high" and/or "buzzed" certainly is causal for a lot of people. Myself included.

I'll stipulate that Trump said what the Reuter's piece says. Not a good look, I agree. It doesn't detract from my point. Obama put kids in cages till the optics got bad. Trump put kids in cages till the optics got bad. Biden just let everyone in and is running a massive trafficking operation. He'll be out of office before people come to find out what he's done. — fishfry

Motives matter. Separating families for the good of the kids is one thing. A zero tolerance policy separating all families to deter would-be immigrants is evil, unprecedented, and was quickly stopped when the public found out what was going on. And yes, Biden's record on the border is awful. We're not doing people any favors when we make it easy for them to come here illegally and then live in the shadows and be exploited.

Ah, that's an actual statistics question. The answer is it's a chance that is infinitely close to zero. — LuckyR

Is infinitely close to zero = zero? Like .999...=1?

I get that you're trying to explore statistics, but if one drills down into the OP, as written, it devolves into an exploration of the limits of machines to choose "randomly" among an infinite number of choices. Which is to say: wholly inadequate. Thus the answer is: not zero. — LuckyR

What about the second party of the question, where I let the universe decide which world Alice teleports to?

What are and were the substantial policy differences between other GOP candidates and Trump? What exactly was the choice there? — Benkei

It was a Republican primary. They were all Republicans. Therefore, they all had pretty much the same political views. America runs a primary election before the general election so the people can vote for which candidate will represent their party.

So what do you do to avoid turning children over to traffickers? You separate the kids from the adults until you can contact the authorities in their claimed home country, and find out who they are. If they are a legit family, you reunite them and send them on their way. If not, you just stopped a trafficker and saved a child. — fishfry

The Trump admin separated kids from families as a deterrent. All families were separated. It wasn't for the good of the kids. The policy ended a short time later when the public found out.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-trump/trump-says-family-separations-deter-illegal-immigration-idUSKCN1MO00C/
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/12/16/trump-administration-knew-family-separations-harm-migrant-children/

It sounds like you're getting your information from places like Townhall, TheFederalist, Breitbart, and Redstate. Am I correct on that?

I think being married to a president would give you a fairly good idea of what the job is like. My wife certainly has a good idea of what my teaching job is like. Obviously, not as a good idea as someone who is a teacher or is president.

They call this the measure problem. This is not to be confused with the measurement problem of quantum physics, the question of what is a measurement that makes the wave function collapse. — fishfry

In an infinite multiverse, there would be an infinite number of Boltzmann Brain universes, so what are the odds you're in one? 50-50?

Honestly I still don't see the obsession people have with her, especially since she doesn't seem to have any political ambitions or policies of her own. Like is it purely because people miss Barack Obama that much? — Mr Bee

She comes across as a smart, nice, honest person. Since she was First Lady, she's intimately familiar with the job. She's been the in the public eye for a long time and not even a whiff of a scandal. If her politics is somewhat moderate, she would wipe the floor with Trump. And Barack would be back in the White House. It's a wonderful fantasy, but that's all it is. Although the betting odds have her at 7%...

The set would have to countable, wouldn't it? You could count the worlds. There's a one-to-one correspondence with each parallel world and the natural numbers. How could the multiverse be uncountably infinite?

Ike, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, Trump. Feel free to explain to me what these folks did that was authoritarian. — fishfry

What did Trump do that was authoritarian? Seriously? He tried to pressure the Republican Georgia secretary of state to "find" exactly the number of votes he needed to win. He tried to pressure his own VP to not certify the election (Pence had to call Dan Qualye, of all people, for moral guidance), and he spread and continues to spread lie after lie about the election he lost. You should listen to Bill Barr's testimony about the aftermath of the election. Total banana republic stuff. We dodged a serious bullet. Had Pence not certified, or had Raffensperger gone along with the attempt to steal the election (he says he felt threatened by Trump), it could have gotten a lot uglier than it was. And then there's the fake elector scheme, and of course Jan 6th.

You could argue that the elites foisted Biden on Democrats, but Republicans had no shortage of options when it came time to pick Trump, both in 2015 and 2023. That was a purely democratic exercise and the GOP voters got exactly what they wanted.

But isn't it theoretically possible for Bob to guess right?
ETA: Bob makes a guess as far as the machine is concerned, but in the second scenario, Bob is at the mercy of the universe, so would it be possible for the universe to send Bob to the same parallel Earth it sent Alice to?

People told pollsters that, yeah, but did anyone put pressure on elected dems or the DNC? Did the liberal talking heads demand a primary? Did the NYTimes editorial board say anything about it? The Democrats sleepwalked into this mess.

The voters made it very clear that they didn't want Joe to run again due to his age, and they ran him again. — Mr Bee

I don't agree with this. There was no appetite for replacing Biden. He sailed through the primaries and his one credible challenger got almost no votes.

But if there's the assertion that physical matter exists, and minds and consciousness emerge from it, there has to be an explanation for how that happens. The Ai's are approaching human-level. Science is going to have to say something about whether they're conscious or not, isn't it?