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Does it follow that philanthropy does not equal ethical behavior? Ie:

1. Corruption cannot include legal behavior in which every ("reasonable") human partakes. [Implied: because it is legal]

Therefore, 2. Ethical standards are encoded in law.

Therefore, 3. Ethical behavior is governed by law.

Therefore, 4. Voluntary actions not specifically compelled or disallowed by law have no ethics.

My point is that it is possible for something to be legal, common, sensible from a perspective of pure self-interest, and still wrong and worthy of reproach.

If a horrible accident occurs, will the rate of descent of the wreckage exceed the rate of descent of Amazon’s stock price?

All arguments of just war and the morality of self defense aside: this a disastrously foolish way to go about being a sentient species on a single planet.

> But keep believing what you believe. It won't change the outcome.

I'm happily considering your argument - holding up a "The End is Nigh" sign does not improve it.

I'll eat my hat, Simon Black, if "the Zimbabwe scenario occurs" or Texas attempts to secede because we're all desperate for their oil to sell to - well, who? I asked the Texas question because it is a bad question - because a positive answer indicates to me a distorted sense of the composition of American society.

America's wealth isn't the dollar's reserve currency status, it isn't its GDP (or conversely the debt-to-GDP measure), it is ~400 million humans and the natural wealth of the richest part of North America, combined with the easy geopolitical security of two vast oceans and two good friends. Our debt is made easier because of the strength of the dollar, just as the British debt was before the Suez crisis. But it is secured by our vast real estate, our technologically sophisticated economy, and, like all national debts, by the easy assumption of future growth in population and economy (this growth being the main reason the national debt is not analogous to household debt).

Drug prohibition is about changing addiction from being an easy choice backed by marketing (I'll take a pack of Marlboros, please) to a challenging choice that does not present itself in ordinary life. It may not stop the majority of people from getting it, if they want it - but it does reduce the number of people to whom it occurs to want it.

> One of the big warnings is that you should never take them if you took psychiatric medication last year or your family has a history of serious psychiatric problems.

By legalizing the drug, don’t we expect the user to make these sort of judgements themselves? Who deals with the consequences of the many poor judgments that will be made (besides the poor user themselves)?

I think decriminalization, not legalization + capitalism as has happened with Marijuana, is the right choice here.

Thanks for breaking it to me. I think my theory of mind is more considered, though.

Do you find no place for ideology? Perestroika and the collapse of Soviet pieties as hypocrisies - these are mere effects of economic exhaustion, and America will experience precisely the same? What about the inefficiency of centrally planned economies? Could that be why the Soviets went “broke”? In what way do you predict the United States will go “broke” and what do you imagine of its collapse? A geopolitical collapse? Do you imagine Texas will become Belarus?

I believe you analysis is simple to the point of ineffectiveness - with respect.

Despite the manifold sins of imperialism, the US remains the true vanguard of the revolution of the past two centuries - of the liberation of common folk from the twin yolks of tradition and absolutism. We should continue trying to export our social justice there, and the moral argument for confronting China remains, to me, the most compelling.

Am I missing something here? They’re outside the Overton Window, as any non-interventionist would be in America. But their funding and their membership are legit; it’s certainly not a front for China or some such.

Is the origin of the policy a desire to preserve and increase Quebec’s unique culture (“French families”), or not? If so, is it bigoted to say so?

When people talk of playing a “game” in regard to any social obligation - especially when they admit that the playing of the game is largely indistinguishable from earnest ethical behavior - they are telling on themselves, not their environment. They are saying they view their obligations and the attitude of their interlocutors as artifice and sincerity as idiocy. They expect constant, low-level deception from their peers, over-generalizing past negative experience. If a critical mass of participants adopt this attitude, the earnest among them are turned out and the imagined hostile environment becomes real.

Melting pot cultures, like Brazil and America's, do not have common ethno-linguistic substrate on which to build civic society. Overt, ostentatious displays of goodwill and trust are a selected-for meme in successful, modern melting-pot cultures.

I predict that smile incidence will vary in correlation to the ethnic homogeneity of a polity.

I think the operating culture in that experience is less Japanese and more Disney-American.

> That surprised me, since our cultural norms largely stemmed from [England].

I don't think that assumption really holds up, it's very pop-history. From the Scots of the Appalachians, the religious fanatics of New England, the garguntuan influence of African-American syncretic culture, the Nordic yeoman of the mid-north-east, the southern European urban influx of the 1900s and the new, exciting Latin American syncretism: America really is a cultural melting pot. Only, really, the Virginia gentry (Jefferson, Washington, et al) can be plainly said to have imported English norms - and still, they were ideological radicals interested in forming a new nation.

The French like to call us (English, Scots, and all the varieties of American) "Anglo-Saxons," but they're hardly right. Don't give them ammo, they're already merciless!

Because other Americans smile back, and it imbues a philadelphic feeling. That's valuable when your society is not an ethnostate, but a mix of immigrants.

I very much appreciate that this whole thread is suffused with the assumption that interlocutors are making their arguments from stupidity or illiteracy.

Are you sure about that etymology?

“Reading the literature on the word for ‘Cannabis’ in the languages of Eurasia soon puts one in mind of what one is told frequently happens when the authorities conduct a raid to confiscate Cannabis and attempt to identify to whom it belongs: everyone involved says it belongs to someone else, generally someone conveniently not present at the moment.” [0] Some dictionaries claim a Scythian origin.

0 - Miller, R. A.: Korean Evidence for Three Eurasian-Altaic Wanderwörter Scenarios, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 51/3: 296.

We call "latin" numbers "arabic" in English, because Europe received them from the Maghreb. "Latin numbers" is actually closer to "Roman numerals," what we call the old Latin system (V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, &c)

Also, Hanno the Navigator's journey is slightly better attested and includes traversing the cape north and south. Here is a commented translation of the account, from a Phoenician temple by way of Greek translators: https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-navigator...

I'm trying to visualize the sailing conditions the Phoenicians would have faced at Bojador - and not really succeeding, because I don't know enough about their vessels.

But I'm sure the challenge would be different, and potentially less scary, from Henry the Navigator's bane. The Portuguese were in high-freeboard open-ocean sailing carracks, with no effective recourse to rowing. And Bojador, coming from the north, presents a terrifying lee shore: the winds and current push vessels towards it, with shoals extending from the coast. Sailing close to a lee shore is a bit like walking on a slack line: one mistake and disaster is inevitable. You need to accurately predict your drift over the whole transit, you need hope the wind doesn't veer, and because there's a ferocious current too, the wind must not die. In short, it takes a skilled captain and navigator (and the much better strategy is just to sail offshore, which is what the Portuguese eventually did). Even a modern Bermudan yacht would be challenged attempting to transit Bojador southerly and close to shore.

A Phoenician trireme-type-boat would not be able to sail upwind at all - rowing would have been required for this part of the journey. Maybe on a lull day they could out-row the current? In any case, the challenges were different - and they would have had the additional motivation of not being able to turn back for home.

[0] Source: I'm a sailor!

Footnotes so formatted are a shibboleth of this community, not a practicality.

Give to Caeser what is the Caesar's.

“Whataboutism” gets my goat because:

* It generally has no context. Yes, the West did something similar. It does not follow that the West will engage in the same type of systemic evil, that argument must be made on its own.

* Whataboutism often implies that naughty behavior is ok; that the hypocrisy of the West is justification for some further evil. One is at best making the argument that everyone is evil so just do it

* It consistently assumes the ignorance of particularly Americans - that if you just tell the dumb American that his government did something bad too, the scales will fall from their eyes, they will accept everything is evil and meaningless, and they will stop criticizing you

* the West is just plain better, on the historical record, at admitting and correcting hypocrisy. It’s a kind of meta-hypocrisy for these countries that never actually implement a liberal system to do such a great job of helping us improve ours, by pointing out flaws we’re secure enough to fix and they’re not.

Moreover, whataboutism does not prove that only power exists. Much the opposite: it proves that, at least in the West, moral norms can have force. Else why would Easterners bother with it?

Poster mentioned it because it happened and I presume they don’t agree it was constitutional. And because it is an example in which the sort of people hoping regulate social media’s free association prove themselves to be hypocrites rapidly.

Can Christian Mingle require that I assert I am a Christian? Should they be allowed to ban me if I start advocating Satanism?

To risk dropping my objective ideological stance in this thread, you allude to an important point. Public fora belong to their participants as a society, not as individuals. It is reasonable and required for societies to define taboos and proscribed opinions. It is inherent. That is why speech free from government interference is a powerful idea: it avoids the tendency of societies to perform a sort of regulatory capture and enforce their taboos with ultimate power.

Here on Hacker News there are complex taboos around how we may express our opinions and the type of posting that is deemed detrimental.

While it is important that the government not enforce these taboos, it is neither wrong nor necessarily evil for a society to enforce them through its use of free association - and exclusion.

If they built a roller coaster would it serve as a big enough loop(hole)?

Because the railroad can't be used to turn my favorite social media into the haven of trolls, fools, and reactionaries. If you accept all speech without any boundaries - ie, with no defined "hate speech," the internet will swiftly become the domain of the loudest haters.

Your arguments apply to Twitter banning Trump - but they also apply to dang banning a poster who trolls everyone.

Ok. Let's talk it through.

Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.

Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.

The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party!

To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information.

When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.

To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.

Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech. It is the government being allowed to control discourse even among private citizens on private property; the steps from such a law to a society in which the truth is only what the government says it is are few.