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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.



  • I think the argument you are making makes sense. Harm reduction and rehabilitation is the way, not this dumb prison system we have.

    I believe you mistake an aspect of his argument. I don’t believe he meant to insinuate that prison and harm reduction are mutually exclusive, rather he says that the question is whether prison is punishment or harm reduction. If there’s no free will there’s no reason to punish, but there’s certainly reason to reduce the possibility of harm, and jailing an individual that is causing harm (and will continue to do so) is one way of doing that.

    As someone else in this thread put it, if we could jail hurricanes to prevent them from doing harm, we would.