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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

    We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

    I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.


  • “A deradicalising effect”

    I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

    I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

    If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

    “And those people diffuse back into the general population”

    Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?









  • You abandoned the bodily autonomy argument because you switched to the moral status of the fetus. If the bodily autonomy argument was really sufficient to permit abortion then the moral status of the fetus could not possibly matter, because bodily autonomy will always override it.

    You seem to like the idea of bodily autonomy, but apparently don’t consider it to be sufficiently morally relevant to actually be considered in anything but morally neutral circumstances. (This is pretty standard among most people, no matter how much they want to say they value bodily autonomy)

    “There is no universal moral system, hence there should not be a law based on someone’s belief that something is moral or not”

    By this standard no morality could be enforced because you are acting contrary to someone else’s morality. Not everyone agrees that killing is bad.

    “a natural right to live… does not emerge before someone is born”.

    They are alive before they are born, so what special property do they gain at birth that gives them a right to life? If it is independence, well children can’t survive on their own until at least 4 years of age (closer to 10-12 in reality).

    “Marquis definition is too broad… plants and animals”

    That’s why it’s called a future-like-our’s. Plants and animals are certainly deprived of futures, but they are not future humans. It’s to human conscious experience that is valued, and depriving an existing entity of future human experience explains the wrongness of killing adult humans and by extension all humans with an expectation of human consciousness.



  • “Blondes are people fetuses are not”

    First you completely missed the point of that question. You initially speculated why people should care if it is not directly harming them, this is a clear and obvious example of people caring about something that doesn’t directly harm them. Showing that your initial objection was unfounded.

    Second you immediately abandoned the bodily autonomy argument, just like I pointed out you would.

    “Unless my Immoral things is infringing on your rights”

    Circle back to the serial killer. They aren’t infringing on my rights, how dare I object! What right do I have to enforce my morality on them?

    Obviously it is permissible to enforce morality regardless of whether or not the subject likes it. The question is simply how to determine if the morality is correct, i.e consistent and well-founded.

    “Moral arguments can form opinions not legislation”.

    Nope, that’s literally all that legislation is. A moral system is something that determines whether or not something is good or bad. If a law declares that some action should be taken or certain actions are to be prohibited it is enforcing a moral system. (That moral system may be wildly inconsistent and contradictory but it is still a moral system).

    There seems to be this popular notion ( outside of moral philosophy) that morality is somehow empirically derived. Unfortunately no matter how much you watch someone die, you will never gain any information on whether that circumstance is bad or good. Empirical facts may aid in classifying actions, but they do not create the requirements for the categories themselves. For instance you have a moral system that says that actions with property X are bad, you may use empirical facts to determine that action Y has property X and you can therefore determine that action Y must be bad. Without the initial premise that actions with property X are bad, you could observe Y and any other action and have no ability to determine if they are good or bad.

    “In the direction of academic studies”

    Not so much studies as arguments, since moral philosophy is not really an empirical field, but rather a rational one. You can find them in many ethics journals. A notable paper is “Why Abortion is Immoral” by Don Marquis, and if you read any papers in favor of abortion or infanticide there is generally a paper rebutting it.


  • “How does someone not having a child threaten you”

    A serial killer that only targets blondes doesn’t pose any threat to me at all. I might even personally benefit from their actions. Why do I still want them to be stopped?

    “I see no reason whatsoever to accept that”

    But you already do. You even give vaccination as an example where it would be permitted.

    You are perfectly fine with one bodily autonomy violation to save lives (vaccination), but are against another (weaker form) violation that also saves lives.

    The logical resolution to this is to say that prohibiting abortion doesn’t save lives (i.e the fetus has no moral value or atleast insufficient moral value to outweigh personal feelings). But this renders the bodily autonomy argument worthless, because it is now the moral status of the fetus that matters not any idea of bodily autonomy. This pretty much establishes why I think the right to bodily autonomy is not actually accepted by anyone.

    “Any and all restrictions and instructions should be based on rational arguments”

    There is tons of academic papers on the immorality of abortion, of course there are tons that argue in the opposite of direction. I would consider most on both sides to have somewhat rational arguments it just depends on what premises you want to accept as true. I find the premises behind permitting abortion to be bit more far-fetched, things like mind-body dualism or continuity of mind as somehow granting greater moral value to be unsupported or impractical.


  • On what basis do you determine that my claims are not sourced? You have no information that my claims are less credible than those of the interview subjects. They are both unsupported and anecdotal at the worst; however you can actually find information on prison socialisation in academic papers and they largely support my claims. Swindlers are treated worse than sex offenders because this idea of moral code among criminals doesn’t really exist, they only care if you harm them directly.

    “Made a major effort to know how much insight you have”

    Where? Do you even understand what this sentence you wrote even means? Until this reply, I never claimed having a source of insight or argued for why my statement is correct. I merely made a statement that the common notion of “honor among thieves” doesn’t really exist, and personal stories aren’t sufficient to prove that it does. I do have personal experience with this, so technically my claims have just as much basis as the random people interviewed. However this is irrelevant because there are better sources than personal stories.

    Additionally if you think that anything in this discussion is a “major effort”, you have abysmally low standards. Writing one or two paragraphs is highly trivial.


  • Why are you using Wikipedia to speculate on my information sources? (I author Wikipedia articles so the idea that you think I source my information from them is laughable).

    “And I’ll leave you to that belief when other ex-presidents have visited Germany”.

    This is literally your only data point. There are numerous reasons why someone wouldn’t visit Germany, Bush largely retired from public life and visits very few countries. The fact that they haven’t visited Germany is easily explained by the fact that they are just not that interesting of a country. You have absolutely no basis to claim that there is a secret arrest warrant, this is simply something that you fabricated. (Possibly from Amnesty International’s attempt to get an arrest warrant {which failed}. See I can speculate on your information sources too. )

    Also the BND literally broke German law to provide the US with intelligence, the idea that Germany is somehow immune to US influence (or just straight political realism) is utterly insane. You are just so hardcore nationalist that you refuse to accept it.

    “Also this proves that you have no idea what you are talking about”.

    Actually I’m quite aware of the incident, and yes it was overblown by the media. It’s still a humourous spin on Germany’s poor readiness, which you never actually addressed. But at least you seem to have dropped any pretense that the Bundswehr wouldn’t immediately surrender, especially considering that the US has 30k troops in Germany already.

    “Godwin’s law…”

    Not exactly sure what problem you have with this reasoning. If Bush doesn’t visit Germany, it can only be because he has an arrest warrant that has never been revealed. Likewise if you assert that Germany is so special that it ignores political consequences (and is even capable and willing to fight a war with the US), it can only be because you are a fascist. Why does this reasoning suddenly become unacceptable when it’s applied to you? (It was always unacceptable you are just so hung up on “Deutschland Uber Alles” that you are willing to fabricate nonsense to preserve your image of Germany).



  • Yeah, no this is patently false. German judicial system isn’t running around jeopardizing it’s foreign relations. Germany explicitly guaranteed that Rumsfeld wouldn’t be arrested.

    Also why are you hell-bent on promoting a conspiracy theory? You have zero evidence that there is an arrest warrant or that there ever will be. Your apparent basis for this is that George Bush hasn’t visited Germany post-presidency, which might be a fair point except that Bush hasn’t visited most countries in Europe post-presidency. Germany is simply not that special, UK or France are more important on the world stage.

    “Against the whole of NATO, and the EU”.

    US armed forces dominate NATO. UK and France are the second and 3rd strongest by far. Your submarine fleet isn’t even functional, the Bundswehr is a laughing stock, you literally had to use broomsticks in military exercises because you have no rifles. If you think that France would defend you and not just invade your sad little country itself you’re delusional.

    This is a level of insane German nationalism not seen outside of an Austrian in the 1930s.