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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It’s definitely harder after college, but not impossible. You’re just going to have to put in a bit of effort. The two best recommendations I can make are:

    1. getting involved in some kind of hobby that’s either inherently social (board games, team sports, etc.) or puts you together in the same place with other hobbyists (I’ve done a lot of socializing at rock climbing gyms, despite it technically being a solo thing)

    2. working a job that forces you to socialize in small doses (hospitality, customer service, etc). Being thrust into micro interactions dozens of times a day makes it a lot easier to approach people in casual settings.




  • You’ve just a conceded that enforcing said laws don’t actually prevent the crime

    Except I didn’t concede that? I said enforcing laws doesn’t totally eliminate crime, in the same way that putting a soda in the fridge doesn’t drop the temperature to 0K. Enforcing laws reduces crime.

    I would say enforcement never prevents any crime

    I would say you’re demonstrably incorrect.

    and enforcement is about punishment not prevention.

    Punishment is the method of prevention. Additionally, incarceration is in part about removing law breakers from polite society so they do not continue to break laws. We quarantine the murderers so they don’t keep murdering people.

    So when is it worth it?

    As with most things in life, we decide on a reasonable compromise. Putting a soda in the fridge is beneficial, putting it in the freezer is too much, and causes more problems than it solves. We decide these things collectively as a society, by electing representatives to draft laws. When they overstep, we elect new representatives to change the laws.

    How much abuse and Injustice is necessary to assuage your fears about the other?

    What’s abusive and unjust about trying to prevent murderers? Where’s the justice for victims and their families if as a society we just say “Golly, sorry this guy killed your children, but if we punished him we’d be just as bad”? How do you recommend reducing the injustices people enact against each other?

    Surely you’re not going to sit here and tell me only fear of punishment is what stops you from murdering people?

    Me personally? Of course not. But obviously some people want to do crimes. You can’t build a society based on everyone behaving just like you all the time. Some people are more violent, or greedy, or deceptive. We are barely domesticated apes, jungle impulses course through us all. Some more than others. Without some mechanism to curtail that, consequences that outweigh the benefits of selfish behavior, you wind up back at might-makes-right anyway when the selfish behave selfishly with no recourse.


  • That doesn’t prove that not enforcing them would somehow make murder disappear, it just proves that you can’t absolutely eliminate a behavior. Every action has diminishing returns.

    I can remove some of the heat from an object by putting it in the fridge. I can remove more by putting it in the freezer, but that requires more energy. I can remove even more by using more and more sophisticated scientific equipment, but I can never reduce the temperature to absolute zero. That doesn’t mean the soda in my fridge isn’t colder than one on the counter.

    Perfect results aren’t obtainable except in trivial cases.






  • one thing he said was that he didn’t consider belief a binary as in that you either believe something or don’t. He viewed all beliefs as a continuum. You can believe one thing 10% and another thing 90%, but he wouldn’t let me pin him down as to whether he “believed” any particular thing or not.

    That seems pretty reasonable. The only thing I believe 100% is that my consciousness exists in some way. I’m about 99.9% certain that reality is roughly as I experience it (I have a physical body, the things I witness correlate to an external world, I’m not a brain in a box or in some kind of simulation, etc.). Every other belief carries some higher degree of uncertainty.

    I think of how much evidence I’d need to believe something. If someone told me their dad was childhood friends with Bill Clinton, I probably wouldn’t believe them, but all it would take to convince me would be a yearbook and a couple old photos. If someone told me they had a tea party with Sasquatch, they could show me a video and I’d still assume it was faked.

    This seems like a healthy perspective, to me. The problem pops up when you start assigning high confidence levels to unlikely claims, or spend too long obsessing over low confidence claims. I suppose aliens could run the government, but even 10% confidence is way too high.




  • China considers themselves socialist because they equivocate the people with the state.

    Isn’t that kinda the line between socialism and communism? That communism has no state, but that a socialist state can act as a sort of intermediary.

    Not that it’s the only socialist model, mind you; a market economy composed entirely of individual private worker co-ops is another model, for example. Then there’s the issue of implementation, whether the people actually democratically control the government.

    But ideologically, while not communist, I don’t see how that structure can’t be considered socialist.


  • I think that really depends on how you define “religious” and “Marxist”.

    When you say “religious”, do you just mean belief in a higher power, or dogmatic adherence to a specific church, or something in between?

    When you say “Marxist”, do you mean someone who thinks his hypothesis of class struggle inevitably leading to a classless, stateless society is accurate, or someone who totally agrees with everything he ever said, or something in between?

    My personal belief is, roughly, that every consciousness is a manifestation, or reflection, of a universe-spanning cosmic consciousness that you may as well call “God”. Not only does that not conflict with the end-state of Marxism, but I’d argue that it’s particularly synergetic. If we’re all aspects of the same “thing”, it only makes sense that we should aspire to cooperate freely. Even the teachings of Jesus center around mutual aid and cooperation, and there are claims that the early Christians operated under borderline communism.

    On the other hand, the institutions that arise nominally under the pretense of divine mandate tend to be extremely hierarchical and exploitative. Those institutions pretty clearly prioritize adherence to church dogma over individual connection with the divine. There’s your opiate: people blindly following orders because some guy in an impressive hat told them God would punish them if they didn’t.

    So yeah, you need to clearly define your terms, and confirm that the people claiming to be “religious” “Marxists” are using those terms the same way you are.