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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • We are indeed more sexually fluid than most species and given it’s “most” and not “all”, this isn’t unprecedented. It’s also not a new phenomena, in Ancient Greek and early-mid Ancient Roman societies queerness was quite common. In fact homosexuality was so prevalent that that the Romans didn’t even have a word for heterosexual/homosexual; instead one was either dominant or submissive (e.g. giving or receiving) with the assumption being that most were bisexual and would take partners as they saw fit.


  • The UN taskforce report clearly states that there are more slaves now than ever before.

    His comment clearly doesn’t go against that. He specifically states that that statistic arises from the fact that there are far more people alive today than ever before and the percentage (he also bolded that word) of slaves is lower than in the past.

    Capitalism is inhumane. The profit margin somehow justifies the human cost.

    There is no manifesto of capitalism which states that profit margins justify human suffering. Nearly all capitalist countries ban slavery altogether, while some few have it de jure banned but de facto legal (at least in some cases), and I don’t know of any that have it fully legalized but I’m sure they exist.

    In the end, slavery isn’t caused by capitalism; slavery had been a thing for millennia under various controlled markets, state or otherwise. With how prevalent it has been since the dawn of time one could only conclude that it’s human nature that will exist under any economic model and must be constantly fought against with every tool we have.

    For example of other modern economic models that have benefitted from slave labor you can look at the USSR, that had obligatory labor written right into their constitution from the very beginning. On top of obligatory labor they forced 14+ million people into forced labor via the gulag system from the 30s to 50s. Most people think that the gulags were primarily to control political dissent, but released soviet documents from the time period shows that they were specifically devised by Gosplan for slave labor.






  • I don’t understand your reply; I think you misunderstood my comment. OP is from Ireland (Europe), I’m saying that he is the one with Euro-identity bias, not you. From his locality within Europe, American shops appear ‘rundown’ in presentation, and there’s an implied suggestion that this is a uniquely American thing (within the global North-West). With that comes the bias that since he’s in Europe, the rest of Europe (or global North-West in general) would share this perspective.

    I’ve had this same bias myself, having grown up in Italy I had assumed that was generally representative of Europe and there were many things I thought of as purely American that were actually common in parts of Europe.


  • Based on your and the other guy’s comment this sounds like European/Old-World identity bias (and a bit of availability bias); Assuming that other countries within one’s group-identity are very similar and [non-European country] is a lone standout when it comes to some aspect that one just learned they differ on. It’s so common to see these kinds of comments on posts of the form ‘why do American’s do this one weird thing different than everyone else’.


  • It’s like saying ‘you might think this engine is broken since it can’t run on the water that it is filled with, but if you simply remove the water and replace it with petrol suddenly the engine is fixed.’

    The post seems to approach the paradox as if it meant to show that tolerance is inherently broken when in reality it just points out the possibility of problematic aspects if incorrectly applied, like in the above where it is obvious the engine itself was never broken. The paradox doesn’t disappear, it simply doesn’t apply to that particular application.

    The main idea from OPs post is often ascribed to Yonatan Zunger as some huge revelation, but really this idea has been about for quite some time as its not exactly hard to come up with. For example, K. R. Popper 1945, and E. M. Forster 1922 both wrote about this.






  • If by ‘String/Quantum’ you mean String Theory and quantum physics then you are wrong on the latter (and somewhat even the former). Quantum physics doesn’t replace classical physics nor are they necessarily in opposition, and quantum physics is as much a theory as classical physics; so bashing one for being ‘theory’ is just as true for the other. And quantum physics is certainly in common use as you simply cant do anything at the atomic level without it. For example, any modern computer would not be able to function if quantum physics wasn’t used to inform their design; in the same vein a modern computer would not function if classical physics was used to design them. It’s important to remember that the word ‘theory’ in this context doesn’t mean unproven, rather it describes a collection of confirmed, falsifiable, explanations of the natural world.

    As for String Theory, it shouldn’t be thought of as equivalent in scale to quantum physics, it’s really just an optional framework within quantum physics that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of particles in a way that supports quantum gravity. Due to this its usage is confined to theoretical physics and is dependent on which aspects of a system is being investigated, but it’s still used in some situations as its one of the best supported tools available.

    I guess my main point is that quantum physics isn’t fringe theory that shows up only in theoretical work, it’s very much a requirement for all fields and is thereby prevalent and very much in common use. I have a CS degree and many of my courses touched on quantum mechanics, from pnp/npn transistor design to quantum-annealing/gate proof cryptography, without getting too into the mechanics/math as we were not physicists.