mooseburger

> But it will be interesting to see how it grapples with new discoveries in neuroscience.

Which new discoveries in neuroscience affect the idea of Brahman?

Both the brain and a chair are made of the same fundamental particles, following the same physics. Yet, no one believes the chair experiences anything. The core problem of the materialist frame is why the atoms that make up the brain are able to experience anything.

I'm not sure I understand the people claiming you should use server side session tokens instead. How am I supposed to make that work with Angular? I have to be able to send to the client the user privileges somehow.

A talk about how the collapse of industrial civilization is a physical inevitability at this point.

Nice! You're pretty smart. But you think me being a jerk is somehow relevant to anything? Hmm. A-.

It does not matter that I am a jerk. I guess Dyatlov would have thought Akimov was a jerk if Akimov had just beat him up instead of following his orders.

And Akimov would have taken the morally correct decision if he had beaten him up.

But the US is Trantor. Trantor is the last place the decline starts to hit. The decline is already hitting me on Terminus.

Even discounting the feedback loops, an energy transition only in the developed world would do very little.

Suppose the US oil industry had not engaged in science denial then. Does this somehow mean that the rest of the world's emissions would now be at the level they need to be?

Yeah, and their only choice is to stop, because the US and Europe alone cannot solve global warming.

Yeah, and still the fact is that if US GHG emissions drop to 0, it won't do much for global warming. It was good that Biden brought up in last night's debate that the US produces 15% of global GHG emissions. Which is disproportionate to their population, but also small enough that unilateral actions by the US will not solve the problem.

@krapp

I just don't fear violent rhetoric. It's not something that merits a reaction, in my view.

Basically, if an author can say it in a book, then random citizens ought to be able to say it on the internet.

@krapp I don't believe anything deserves to be targeted for canceling. It's basically the main thing that polarizes me against progressivism, the obsession with speech control.

More fundamentally, it's a problem with secular society. Really, if the only goal of life is achieving material prosperity, and you're not achieving it, there's no particular reason not to kill yourself, other than holding on to hope, which is quite irrational in some circumstances.

> Where did I get the idea that popular people were malevolent?

They were the primary bullies growing up? That's where I got the idea, at least. And suffering seems like a more authentic emotion than happiness, as there are all sorts of heavy social incentives to constantly project happiness. There's a lot more people out there faking happiness, than there are faking suffering.

This sounds kinda nice. Certainly better than a sandwich, or a lunch. You have to give it points for originality at least.

Yeah, it's something that gives me pause about political action against global warming: how many people who want such political action are willing to never ride a plane or a cruise ship ever again? I think few have processed that a real effort to address this problem would involve real personal sacrifice, it can't be conveniently resolved just by building a ton of solar panels and windmills.

No it's not, that started around 2010 with the Great Awokening. It's being driven by the mainstream media:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1133440945201061888.html

I would expect the child sexual exploitation scandal would have been the main thing leading to Brexit. Do British posters agree?

This is very true, and I actually enjoy reading Slate Star Codex. I was pretty shocked at how insightful the Socratic dialogues are, when I tried reading them recently.

> Can you elaborate on why you think the people of Puerto Rico are not to to be trusted taking care of their home?

Not him, but I am puertorican. There's nothing unusual in someone being unable to take care of their home, it happens with some frequency. By the same token, it should not be surprising that several nations fit this bill. I would probably toss most of the southern hemisphere in that bin, Puerto Rico included.

> But that was colonialism!

I tried this thought experiment once: imagine the people of the wealthy global north just disappeared today. Does this mean the problems of the global south are fixed? The answer to this is self-evidently 'no', at least to me. It's useless to ruminate on the past, it is not the global north that create and maintain our current situation. It's ok to admit that it's us that haven't put in a good performance.

No, there are no current day U.S. equivalents to the Uyghur reeducation camps, the ethnic cleansing of Tibet, and the extreme censorship.

What's more, there is no evidence that China is even capable of changing course on these matters, given that their reaction to all these is to deny that they're even real, even suppressing the merest mention of them.

Notably, this is not what the US does with its own wrongdoing, as even extreme anti-government sentiment is allowed to be freely expressed.

If it's up to me, doing any business that aids the Chinese government is unethical.

That's just a tu quoque fallacy, as venture capital being indifferent to making the world a better place does not mean it is ethical to do business with China.

Yes! Everything must be done to preserve a life. Imagine instead of starving herself, she had slit her wrists. Do you believe the correct case then is to allow her to bleed out? Because that would be the exact same situation, only with the tiny, inconsequential detail that a different method was chosen.

You don't consider it arrogance to believe you know for sure how that girls life would have developed?

No, not even they. A good thing is something you would visit upon all humanity, and while they may potentially wish to do so to all infidels, they would not wish to do it to their faithful.

This is the most aggressively anti-human thing I have ever seen, possibly even more than ISIS or cartel executions, because at least the perpetrators of those atrocities know that they are doing evil, even if they're unrepentant, which is more than can be said of the doctors in this situation.

I have been suicidally depressed, institutionalized. I'm better now. I suppose if I actually attempted to kill myself, but failed, paramedics that find me ought to let me go, or perhaps even finish me off if, say, I am in agony due to the method I used? Why wouldn't they, since after all, I've clearly chosen to die of my own free will? Yet, I now know that I was mistaken during my depression. Life is not about hedonism, not about maximizing pleasure experienced, which inevitably, inexorably, leads one to the conclusion that if there's just not a lot of enjoyment in one's life, and this has been persistent, then perhaps checking out is a good idea?

The path an individual life may take is unknowable, both to society and to an individual themself, even if the individual has attempted suicide. Negate this, and all human rights are instantly negated, as now all there is, is predicting who might be better off dead, as there is after all, no point in prolonging their existence, and they should be encouraged or gently nudged to at least consider the path of least suffering, because this will end their pain and decrease the overall suffering of the humanity. This is all because we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we and they know how their lives will play out. We do not, and no one knows, and therefore they must have certain rights, to maximize the near infinite potentiality of the individual human.

Society and government must not ever approve of this. I didn't believe euthanasia (and this is euthanasia, the real case is even worse than the original story) in the case of the terminally ill was a slippery slope, but then we get this case, seemingly out of nowhere, from an ostensibly enlightened, progressive, European country. I now see that making exceptions for the terminally ill is not safe, it just won't stop there.

And why is the approval of the laws and society sought anyway? Suicide is a mechanically trivial action. You can literally order poison hemlock off Amazon, no assistance is needed, and anyone committed to kill themselves obviously has no regard for their society, as they plan to deprive their community of any benefit they could have given it. Therefore, they should not expect society to sanction their ill-considered desires.

Dostoevsky predicted all of this 150 years ago. Read Crime and Punishment if you disagree with me, yet deign to consider yourself an intelligent, educated person.

They only take that long due to red tape, not due to any intrinsic reason. France did not have this problem. The U.S. could do like them, create the one standardized design for a nuclear plant, build them all the same way, which of course will help with construction, safety and maintenance.

If we weren't here, there would be no such thing as 'good', as that is an entirely human construct.