personally yes, that kind of choice should belong to the individual not the government. besides that though the laws are nonsensical why is a seatbelt required in a car not not in a bus, why are motorcycles even allowed at all?
This argument falls apart for countries with socialized healthcare.
As long as all people are paying for your dumb decisions, it is reasonable to expect the government to reduce the frequency of dumb decisions by adequate means.
I notice that these sorts of justifications for increased paternalism as a consequence of socialized services come up in public discourse all the time but never seems to be mentioned by advocates when proposing these socialized systems. It should be mentioned up front as a significant cost as part of the package, it comes with strings attached like the government telling you how to live your life. Interesting that people don't seem to want to mention that up front.
I support socialized medicine and I completely agree with you, we should be honest about the fact that it requires some level of regulatory coercion to work well.
Enforcing a healthy diet and exercise would have a vastly larger impact than any seatbelt laws in terms of reducing health care costs. Seatbelts and smoking always seem to be about as far as the advocates are willing to go though.
It wouldn't have the same appeal if they reported seeing "larger than average size squids we didnt know existed". Every story was embellished in a world without pocket cameras. And the further you go back, the more grand the fiction was. Tales of men splitting the sea and walking on water.
if I'm not mistaken some human populations have neanderthal DNA which indicates that humans had reproduced with them and created fertile offspring. outside of that example there are a ton of species that can produce viable offspring like dogs, wolves and coyotes.
Remember the good ol' days when people just didn't discuss politics or religion out of decency? There was a reason for that, both bring out the worst in people.
Suddenly I'm reminded of the decent (grown) people who yelled in six year-old Ruby Bridges' face when she was merely attending elementary school. So if that was 1960, I'm just wondering when those good ol' days you're referring to where.
That’s not what whataboutism is; it requires the “what about when” to be followed by a change of topic, to distract the other party from the original topic.
The problem is that living life is inherently political. Being able to ignore politics, not having to feel the need to discuss them, is a sign that you are inherently better off than a good chunk of this country.
A lot of people spend most of their waking hours having to deal with or at least keep in mind the fall out from regressive politics. Asking people to not discuss politics is like asking someone living in fear for their safety to not try and improve said safety. You're asking to not have to be bothered by something that annoys you to talk about in exchange for someone not being able to advocate for their life and livelihood.
I agree with the sentiment. My point was more people used to have a common understanding that there was a time and place for political (and religious) discussion - and that those beliefs were deeply personal, shaped largely by experience, and not meant to be held against one another in the broader judgement of their character.
Somewhere along the way we lost that idea, not all cultural changes are for the better.
I see, so from this reply I gather that your parent post was not “just an expression” as you claimed elsewhere, and you just got snippy when someone pushed back against your obviously out-of-touch assertion of fact.
Do you honestly think that falsely calling out an (informal) fallacy counts as “intellectual sparring,” whatever the fuck that is? What is wrong with you?
For a simple political disagreement? Absolutely; I completely agree. But to believe that a certain class of people shouldn’t exist is not a run of the mill political belief, and treating it that way normalizes the behavior and contributes to the problem.
Not sure why you're downvoted. The disagreement was not on tax policy or where to build what. I don't understand why both this and "some people shouldn't exist" are both labeled with the same word "political".
Despite how much they would have you believe it, human rights are not a political issue. Politics are used to expand practiced rights (or abused to reduce them), just like politics are involved with providing you access to water.
Sorry you don’t get to say “Well this person doesn’t think I have the right to exist and be respected as a person. But I’m sure glad he saved a puppy once.”
I'll admit I'm quite anxious for Children of Strife. Children of Time is an all-time favorite, but each subsequent book in the series was a bit of a disappointment. Fingers crossed this one turns the tide
I kind of agree with you on that... and I kind of understand why.
The first book was an exploration of humanity in the stars. While there was contact, it had more the traditional science fiction footing that we're familiar with.
The second book was getting into the exploration of the mind and other minds. While the first book touched on the mind - with spiders being more relatable to how we think... the 2nd book presented us with something more alien in how the octopus thinks... and something even more alien.
The third book was downright confusing until the end and was more of a philosophy book about the mind. Can one mind be in two bodies? What entails thought? What is identity? ... and for that matter, what is reality?
The 2nd and 3rd books are good (and interesting) science fiction, but they go much deeper into exploring philosophy than many other science fiction books and use the scaffold of the universe to explore the mind rather than technological advancement. The upgrade of technology and how that changes things isn't the focus of the story - as one would expect in more traditional science fiction, but rather an exploration of a new mind. That change in the expectation from the first to the second (and third) book has some wish for more of that first book with the challenges of humans (as we can understand them).
Book 1 is a first contact story with survival. Book 2 is a psychological mystery about alien cognition (and a bit of horror to it too - "we're going on an adventure" gives me shivers). Book 3 is much more of a puzzle around unreliable narration and reality.
For me, I enjoyed the first book. I was confused by the 2nd book because of the change in the "it's not about the technology and survival anymore...". The 3rd book confused me on the first pass through it. The second time going through it and understanding where things were leading and being able to pick out the changes made more sense... even though I was expecting a book about the mind rather than science (the first pass through I thought it was more about the crow's minds).
For me, not so much a decrease in quality but more of an evolution as the landscape of sentient beings expands. The paired covids in the last book, were a great addition.
Don’t normally buy a hard cover or kindle (I like the paperback) but I may do that for book 4 “Children of Strife”
Agreed, the first one is a masterpiece and every sequel feels like a step down. It's a real pity because we do need more good SF writers, there are already too few of them.
if a user uses a tool to break the law it's on the person who broke the law not the people who made the tool. knife manufacturers aren't to blame if someone gets stabbed right?
This seems different. With a knife the stabbing is done by the human. That would be akin to a paintbrush or camera or something being used to create CSAM.
Here you have a model that is actually creating the CSAM.
It seems more similar to a robot that is told to go kill someone and does so. Sure, someone told the robot to do something, but the creators of the robot really should have to put some safeguards to prevent it.
one time is perhaps excusable as the robot's creators didn't know that would happen. If it happens and the creator then advertises the robot can kill people, of course he's now a criminal
Text on the internet and all of that, but you should have added the "/s" to the end so people didn't think you were promoting this line of logic seriously.
If a knife manufacturer constructs an apparatus wherein someone can simply write "stab this child" on a whim to watch a knife stab a child, that manufacturer would in fact discover they are in legal peril to some extent.
I mean, no one's ever made a tool who's scope is "making literally anything you want," including, apparently CSAM. So we're in a bit of uncharted waters, really. Like mostly, no I would agree, it's a bad idea to hold the makers of a tool responsible for how it's used. And, this is an especially egregious offense on the part of said tool-maker.
Like how I see this is:
* If you can't restrict people from making kiddie porn with Grok, then it stands to reason at the very least, access to Grok needs to be strictly controlled.
* If you can restrict that, why wasn't that done? It can't be completely omitted from this conversation that Grok is, pretty famously, the "unrestrained" AI, which in most respects means it swears more, quotes and uses highly dubious sources of information that are friendly to Musk's personal politics, and occasionally spouts white nationalist rhetoric. So as part of their quest to "unwoke" Grok did they also make it able to generate this shit too?
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