That will obviously be overturned yes. What's morally wrong is the assumption people have the right to benefit from past wrongs, that people should not carry responsibility for others and that society is atomistic, all problematic but persistent assumptions in US society.

While I think that affirmative action is defensible in principle (and the benefits of inclusive diversity are well documented and researched), it has shown to be ineffective to change overall culture and should be replaced with something that works. That it hasn't changed anything is because the "tone at the top" is the same old, racist, white people in power. There's no good example to be had (and in this respect the Netherlands is even worse).

The question is, for instance, if you consider the following discrimination: I don't have any females in my team. My next hire is going to be a woman no matter what, even if she wouldn't be the best candidate (but does qualify). I would do this because I believe in a "diversity dividend" and the larger a team becomes the more group dynamics become important.

Take that to the larger stage of society and if we take "all men are created equal" seriously then this should be reflected in every segment of society but we don't see it. Maybe just throw hiring managers and CEOs in jail if they're caught discriminating. And any company with a skewed composition of employee ethnicity is suspect.

Fantastic, now we're also pretending capitalism would reward virtue. :rofl:

That's because you're apparently living under a rock. Zuckerberg - privacy, Koch - environment, Musk - labour rules.

The first two directly affect you, the last one if you'd work at Tesla. I forgot Bezos but I'm sure you never order via Amazon to avoid the continued exploitation of its personnel.

It's not that I can't point it out, it's that I expect someone to be moderately informed about the world to realise all this for yourself which makes any conversation with you tedious, so I'm gonna leave you to it and read the short stories instead. There will be more wisdom in those stories than in your posts.

Yes, the world revolves around you. Which is why you are and remain an idiot.

Koch, Musk, Zuckerberg.

Oh, my bad, it's the "lock downs are fascism" bullshit again coming from the guy who will happily roll over to get shafted by oligarchs because he thinks the gubberment is the problem. This should be fun.

Maybe pick up a book and figure out what fascism is. Universal healthcare isn't it.

That's already established policy in the US (the pivot to Asia). The only thing I can hope for is both China and the US screw each other to the extent the EU benefits but that requires the EU to stop being a US lap dog.

Not the subject of the thread but as far as I'm concerned having a de facto dictatorship and a fascist state masquerading as a democracy join forces seems like an eminently bad idea for everybody with a pulse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_China%E2%80%93India_skirmishes

That's ongoing. And there was the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979, current brutal treatment of Uighurs and the recent annexation of Tibet. Totally peaceful. But keep cherry picking the facts that best suit your pre-conceived judgments. Carry on!

Historically, China has waged war almost continuously in what are now China's borders. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battles

But don't let not knowing what you're talking about stop you from having an opinion. Carry on. I've decided this thread is much more fun as a spectator any way.

That's because Turkey is strategically too important to kick out of NATO, which is really what should've happened a decade ago.

If it's silent on the point, all the more reason not to use it as a basis for literal interpretation, which is the error Anglo-Saxon lawyers keep making. They believe literal interpretations are necessary where these are woefully inadequate and then even call it the "golden rule". This is why so many decisions in the UK and the USA are divorced from justice, because literal interpretations only provide legal certainty as if justice is static and not localised and time dependent. It totally ignores context. So yes, dumb cunts on the SCOTUS.

SCOTUS are a couple of navel staring constitutional cunts. There are human right treaties and natural rights theories (particularly bodily integrity) that could've formed an excellent basis to continue to protect abortion without having to overturn this - it's purely political and caters only to a relatively small group of people living in the USA. So it's shit in every way.

It's not as if we'll survive global warming either so it's kind of moot. :razz:

I sincerely hope American empire will implode in my life time if its politics and judiciary continues to be this regressive.

Putnam's BIVs are about meaning and not a suggestion about how a simulation would look like or even suggestive of that as a possibility. I think the question "are we living in a simulation?" is moot. If we live in a simulation our reality is simulated and our ideas about things refer to simulated things. Doesn't make our experiences any less real though. And since there's no "really real" to meaningfully talk about (all we have is concepts of simulated things), then the existence of the really real is irrelevant and so is the nature of our reality. It's all we know and can know.

Can't stop yourself to make it personal can you? @Isaac as a psychologist, what do you make of his vacillating between aggressor and victim in the span of on average two posts?

Edit: no need to answer, I'm just demonstrating a point.

Does your OP assume that the simulation has to simulate everything? Can't it just simulate parts of it, making it seem as if the whole thing is simulated? In other words, the simulation only needs to simulate "appearances" not the thing-in-itself.

What if supply just isn't as easy to increase as one thinks? You see this all the time in economics, that increase in supply is just a matter of demand incentive and volition. But in case of energy and materials there are physical processes to mine or harvest them. The idea that supply would follow demand only follows up to the point there aren't any physical limits we run into to increase supply. — ChatteringMonkey

It's decreasing though.

And an option of self-imposed compliance by companies as a result of sanctions but they're doing it in such a way that makes doing business more expensive and only too happy to force the costs of those choices on consumers.

I think you cannot really tell what will happen. I suspect a recession but it could well be japanification is the economy. I don't believe, like some writers, that people are on a spending spree after covid lock downs. That reduction in spending was the result of people losing jobs. Since most companies were propped up with subsidies, the extra spending is the result of people getting jobs again, moving to pre-covid levels but most companies more or less maintained operational capacity. If this was the only driver, we should've seen deflation during covid but we didn't.

Second area, we've seen shortages in components and raw materials due to covid disruptions since 2020 causing inflationary pressures during the pandemic. You would expect, especially if people would be spending more coming out of covid, that production capacity would increase. Instead we've seen three quarters of reduced shipping in consumer electronics. Why?

Only reason I can think of is that supplier sentiment is the market is overheated and we're bound to have a recession, (see for instance onetrust laying of 10% after a record q4 in 2021, Tesla layoffs etc.).

QE is definitely a contributor, we've had years of asset inflation already (real estate, cryptos, shares, bond yields dropping) fueled by cheap credit and at the first sign of serious interest hikes, everybody is falling over each other to rebalance their portfolio. To where is a mystery to me, I've not been involved in markets closely anymore for over two years.

Wars never helped.

So, all of the above and then some?

As if sanctions have ever done anything else but punish regular people. Same can be said for war of course.

1. The point made by Apo was about legitimacy, not morality. — Olivier5

It doesn't seem that way to me. People tend to use the terms interchangeably and he seemed to want to make a moral argument. My point was about intent being relevant, even for legitimacy. Courts will rule against people who abuse their rights. So it's both a legal and moral argument, they can happily coincide.

A few posters here have rightly pointed out that morality applies to individuals, not to institutions, so to speak of the morality of NATO is making a category error. One needs to morally indict presidents, generals and the likes but not a country or an alliance of countries. These entities need to be assessed against their stated goals, which does not to my knowledge include the boy scout pledge, or any other moral creed in their case. — Olivier5

God, that must be why we have a whole approach to institutional morality? Because it doesn't exist. And even Aristotle wrote about social justice, you know, how to arrange institutions in such a way that we have socially just outcomes? But that has nothing to do with morality, my bad.

Seems to me a few posters simply don't know what they're talking about but it's opportune to agree with them because it avoids having to question how NATO functions, what it was set out to do and what it is doing now. In a very practical sense virtue ethics can be applied rather easily to institutions.

3 isn't relevant given the above.

If I raise a canvas on my land just to frustrate the view my neighbour has, I might have a legal right but I'm then abusing that right. Intent matters and legitimacy is not a substitute for morality.

But carry on, since I don't agree with either of you.

Made itself vulnerable? Despite mankind fucking up the environment for over a century it's still there in a way that it supports our existence. It's not so much that a biodiversity collapse will end nature - not even catastrophic meteor strikes end nature - but it will end us.

@boethius @Isaac @Olivier5 Deleted a moderation complaint and replies to that. Moderation complaints go into feedback.

Amazing. You need to be a particular type of cunt to be into politics and it's the same type of cunt in every country.

the distinction is false, biodiversity collapse will affect everyone and everything.

Can we stop accusing people we disagree with with being Nazi's or Nazi symphatisers? Thanks.

I'm not sure such qualifications are warranted. He's a moron or irrational but he worked his way up to being leader of a country? I highly doubt it. We should avoid attributing irrationality to people who simply make decisions that we wouldn't dream of making our that in hindsight look stupid. It doesn't fit the rest of the context and is too convenient and in a sense a lazy excuse not to look further into the actual reasons and circumstances. Irrationality suggests there's no rhyme or reason, no way of giving meaning and understanding to a situation. Both Saddam and Putin are ambitious and cruel and miscalculated or worked from the wrong assumptions. We don't really know but irrationality is unlikely.

Wrong. You chose to laugh.

There's also no abuse at all if I tell my kids they're ugly little motherfuckers that will never amount to anything because it's their choice to actual listen to me and believe it. I didn't do anything.

EDIT: also the verbal contract no longer exists! Nothing to enforce because words can't cause a contract to come into existence. Wait a minute. A written contracts is just words too that form into sounds in my head upon reading so that isn't binding either! Fuck yeah!

And if so - what seems to be the issue, exactly? — Streetlight

I don't have the information to agree with it because it really depends on what it costs us, or more specifically, what it costs Ukrainians, to "increase the human, financial and military cost of this war for Moscow". I think, in any case, it's a callous approach from the comfort of not actually fighting and if making territorial concessions to negotiate a lasting peace is the right approach then one assumption often seen (but not proved in my view) is:

1. Russia has imperial ambitions. If this is the case, then territorial concessions do not lead to a lasting peace. Some here are convinced Russia has these ambitions, others don't. I haven't seen definitive proof one way or the other.

Other questions it raises with me:

2. No country sending equipment seems to have asked the question whether support in the war effort is the right balance of interests between avoiding Ukrainian casualties and bleeding the Russians.
3. The last clear example of aggression (that got condemned) was Iraq invading Kuwait with a much wider range of coalition partners than we see now. That could be political expediency, energy dependency, cynicism in light of the Western double standard or a more nuanced view than propagated in Western media about the underlying reasons why Russia attacked Ukraine.

It's not about any claim to land, obviously. The problems in South Africa had nothing to do with claims to land but a set of rules for one group of people and another set for others. The problems in Israel proper are exactly the same. And that's ignoring in its entirety the issues surrounding the occupied territories.

That clarity isn't lacking at all. It has only been obfuscated because of political reasons. The only reason the GAR 3379 was revoked was to get Israel at the table for peace conferences that still seemed hopeful. Zionism is racism. It's really that simple.

Said nobody ever during Apartheid.

1) how much more extensive? in what way are our current background checks insufficient? the texas shooter had no criminal record nor documented mental health issues. should everyone who wants to buy a gun get a psychologist sent to their homes for an evaluation? — Moses

You're asking the wrong guy since I'm not a US citizen and think widespread gun ownership is idiotic. I think only hunters and cops should own guns. Everybody else that have them for sport can leave them at the local firing range and they get to own one gun at a time. There are no reasons to own them otherwise and certainly don't need to keep them at home.

Here's some interesting statistics: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/

Only about 53% thinks the rules should be stricter but then if asked about specific policy (more extensive background checks, barring guns to mentally ill) for some issues there's broad bipartisan support (85% and 90%) and (70% and 92%). Laws have been passed and presidents elected in the US with less popular support.

Meanwhile, "we should be careful about having a reflexive reaction" (some asshole in a position of power) because God knows reacting to bad shit is stupid. Nobody in the world ever does that. Nobody sells shares when a company makes a loss because it will become clear that that company "was at risk" and someone somewhere should've noticed that before it actually happened but we won't create a system allowing people to notice this earlier because we should be careful to not have a reflexive reaction.

Because if you had proof of your position I would be convinced. As simple as that.

If only you were capable of proving it but you haven't. All you have is disdain for someone who disagrees with you and confuse your feelings on the matter with actually knowing what you're talking about.