jakelafort

Simon Paynton wrote:
It’s the other way round – telling us where morality comes from tells us how we make moral choices.

Morality doesn’t “come from” a statistical or behavioral analysis. Behaving the way my group or clan or tribe expects or wants me to isn’t morality. What’s “moral” about it?

I can recognise nagging problems, I just hav…

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@ Simon

Let me put this bluntly: Telling us how we make moral choices doesn’t tell us where morality  comes from.

In order to do philosophy, you have to have a system of knowledge and information to use as data.

That’s simply absurd unless you mean something as puerile as “you need to have eyes, ears, and a sense of smell operating.” To do…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
It’s possible to follow moral rules while doing immoral things.

Then what’s the use of having such a system.

Once the Romans had decided to achieve their goals at the expense of others – you still wouldn’t expect them all to turn into thieves and liars towards each other, and start fighting like rats in a sack.

And yet, that…[Read more]

Natives are still being persecuted, its insane to think otherwise. If the Russians occupied New York somehow and invited Natives to come “share” Manhattan, heavily support them financially and with arms, and when Manhattanites inevitably resisted (as if Americans in any place would not LMAO), and then partition the Island into highly favourable…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
If the goal is a morally bad goal – think, Putin’s Russia – then some of those ideal behaviours will also be morally bad.

Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

Of course he’ll use it for whatever he likes, Big Macs, bad attorneys who embarrass themselves in court, his OnlyFans account, whatever.

Simon Paynton wrote:
I’ve been studying evolutionary ethics for about 13 years.  I’ve found that morality is both simpler and more complicated than people think.

Morality is the self-regulation within a cooperative unit or group.  So, I govern myself; you govern me; I govern you; we govern each other and ourselves on behalf of the group, in the d…

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Enco, would you support expelling most New Yorkers from Manhattan and giving it over to the Native American population of New York state, funding and arming them and supporting them when Manhattanites resist? I would be quite curious to hear everyone’s response to this (and some bullshit answer about how “it is not the same thing”).

jakelafort wrote:
As a kid i always heard Yiddish is just low German. But i did read a long scholarly article about Yiddish and its influences are diverse.

We’re a long way from the original topic but…what is Yiddish?

Well, one facile answer to where the word comes from is that it’s a corruption of the German word for “jewish” which is “jüdisch” (approximately pronounced “yoodish”). Many English slang words have been taken from Yiddish, especially ones starting with the “sh” sound (schlep,…[Read more]

Give Davis a break. I don’t think he’s a native English speaker (are you, Davis?).

There are several definitions of “scrounge” but the relevant one is to gather or round up or collect something, and one of the antisemitic tropes is that Jews are obsessed with money to the point of engaging in cheating, fraud, or usery to get money.

Jews and…[Read more]

Enco, you are wrong for two reasons:

1. Calling them “people of death” is a blanket attack on them. It is no different when people used to outrageously call Jews “money scroungers”. That isn’t directly calling an invidual a money scrounger, but the harm is still there (hence virulent voilence against Jews for most of European history). Calling…[Read more]

The real reason three university presidents embarrassed themselves before Congress

From the article:

Free speech laws generally do not prohibit generalized harassment of a group (like the Jews). They do prohibit targeted harassment of an individual member of that group. So calling for genocide, though repugnant, might be protected speech under…[Read more]

@ Enco

Get serious.

India and Pakistan’s disputes are not threatening world peace. Not even India’s and China’s border dispute seems to be threatening that right now.

_Robert_ wrote:
You know this argument is ridiculous. Pakistan was created the same year as Israel by the colonial Brits, none the less, and millions of Hindus were displaced and yet I have never heard you once complain about it.

It was a disaster that cost probably 1.5 million lives all told, but not one that has come to threaten to embroil us…[Read more]

a) I’m in Oregon.

b) If he can be kept off the ballot in several states with significant numbers of electors, that could doom his drive, but a lot depends on the way the Supreme Court answers a few key questions, which they may be forced to take up by appeals  that I’m sure will be coming their way and which they will find hard to dodge. They…[Read more]