RichardGibbons

The problem is that this stuff doesn't actually do what you want it to because it assumes a static world. The world isn't static, and in a non-static world capitalism wins (for everyone, not just the rich) because incentives matter. Suppose that a country is getting 4% annual growth from a capitalist society, but the bottom 90% is only getting 40% of the output. If you put in your socialist changes and the bottom 90% now get 60%, but it costs you 2% of your growth, then in the year you do it, the bottom 90% have a 50% higher standard of living. But in 17 years, they have the same standard of living. And in 30 years, the bottom 90% in the capitalist society have a 50% higher standard of living than those in the socialist system. So you have to be careful not to break capitalist incentives, and studies show that higher capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, and high-income taxes do that. China is a pretty good example, because you saw the CCP destroy their country for socialism, adopt capitalism in the 1990s to dramatically boost their standard of living, and now you'll see them destroy their country once more by breaking capitalist incentives. The two Koreas are similar. Or, a less extreme example is the difference in Canadian and American economic paths. I think the actual solution is massive inheritance taxes (like, 99% on amounts over $30M) combined with taxes and jail time on people attempting to subvert those inheritance taxes. Allow the brilliant risk-taking entrepreneurs to allocate capital and do their thing for their lifetime to improve everyone's standard of living. But nobody gets to be a billionaire except through their own efforts.

No big deal, I didn't take it the wrong way. I think the big problem with North American politics now is that countries prosper when there is high social cohesion--when everyone shares a common broad vision and everyone tries to act in good faith to achieve that vision. Politicians and media, however, seem to believe that destroying social cohesion is good for their careers. They seem to want wedge issues, polarization, and villainization of their political enemies because it leads to engagement. The problem is, I suspect if you destroy social cohesion, you also destroy democracy.

Yeah. But, the corruption and abuse on the Chinese side is at least an order of magnitude (and maybe two) worse that the that in the "free" world. You might want to "both sides" it, but the CCP is obviously much more evil, just like the Nazis, Khymer Rouge, and Soviets were evil. The kid who shoplifted the chocolate bar from the store was a criminal, and so was Jeffrey Dahmer. Really, both of those two were criminal. Just like poverty in the US and running people over with tanks are basically the same thing.

I don't scoff at it at all. I think it's atrocious. The government has effectively said, "Because you publicly disagree with our policies, we're going to take away your ability to feed your family." This is a huge overreach by the government. So, I think my opinion matches yours on that issue (or maybe I'm actually more extreme than you on the Emergency Act invocation. I'm against it to an extreme degree.) On the vaccine mandates, I'm on the fence. I think there shouldn't be mandates outside healthcare, but I'm on the fence whether a healthcare worker should have the option of not using proven prophylactic measures. (Like, should they have the option of not washing their hands or not wearing masks during a surgery?) I think I probably settle on exactly how proven the "proven" measures are. I believe in liberal values, but there's no doubt that the Trudeau government is authoritarian and very far away from liberal values. I think there's a reasonable chance that because of this government, I'll never again vote for the Liberal Party of Canada. (I really didn't like Harper because of his anti-science stance. But now I wish I could vote for him today.)

Do you view the CCP committing genocide against the Uyghurs and grinding peaceful protesters to a pulp beneath the treads of tanks as harmful to societal development? I suspect not, because the CCP said this was a good idea, right?

I agree 100% that we should both team up to pound that straw man into the ground. For instance, I haven't enslaved or genocided anyone this year, though human historical practices indicate it's a good idea. And I think that's the right decision (for me, at least. Don't want to judge....)

Yes and yes.

LOL, yeah, science--correlation is not causation, and it's interesting to speculate about underlying causes when you have a strong correlation. Spanking kids was pretty standard in my lifetime, though it's abuse now.

I just had another discussion with my wife about this, and she actually remembered more than she did when we chatted earlier. To ease the transition, what we did was put our mattress on the floor, and the kid's mattress immediately adjacent (after the kid had graduated from the crib.) Then, when the kid fussed at night, the parent could easily move into the bed until the kid chilled, then return their own bed. Initially, it was harder for the parent (because you have to roll off your bed onto their mattress, which is more annoying than just falling asleep right away.) But she remembers that it didn't take long before the kid realized which bed was theirs to sleep in and that having their own bed didn't mean that their parent was abandoning them for the night. And then there was just a transition to another room.

Odd decision, citing bird parenting as the model to follow rather than human parenting. Human parents have co-slept throughout history. But if one is too frustrated, it's fine to ignore science. Lots of people ignore evidence and correlation is not causation. It could be that the co-slept kids are better adjusted and happier not because of the co-sleeping, but because their parents are more loving and kind. Maybe their parents are less authoritarian, when the non-co-sleepers care much more about control. Maybe co-sleepers simply care more for their kids or pay more attention to their kids than non-co-sleepers, and that's what causes the difference in outcomes. Heck, once one starts saying, "it's ok if I mess up my kid by not co-sleeping. No big deal", one could imagine similarly saying, "No big deal if I yell at my kid." Then "No big deal if I hurt my kid because I'm angry", or whatever. Maybe not co-sleeping is an indicator of which parents are willing to justify trading their kids' health for their own short-term happiness. Because correlation isn't causation, and all the co-sleeping studies seem to be correlational. (My poorly-educated bet would be it comes down to attachment parenting vs authoritarian parenting styles.)

Yep. We basically removed one side of the crib and attached it to our bed so that essentially the crib became an extension of the bed. Neither my wife nor I remember how long it lasted, but I'm thinking until about the age of three. The fact that neither of us really remembers the transition very well is indicative to me that at that point, our kids were easily sleeping through the night, weren't large enough to be annoying in bed, and that the transition period wasn't painful at all.

To not lose your mind with a baby who wants to co-sleep, I think the strategy is to remember the goal. In my opinion, the goal isn't to figure out a way to make the baby sleep. It's to raise a well-adjusted, robust kid. One thing that makes kids cry is anxiety. Essentially, the kid is telling you that they are worried, and are unable to regulate their emotions on their own. If you go with "cry it out" strategies, I think you're effectively communicating to your kid that you aren't a reliable caregiver. You're communicating that you can't be depended on for protection and support when they need it. And they're learning that at a deep level. On the other hand, if you do provide support when they tell you they need it, you are teaching them how to regulate their emotions and that you can be trusted to be there when they need you. They will be more comfortable exploring the world independently, because they know in their soul that if they run into something scary, you'll be there to help them. The outcomes of this strategy tend to be kids and adults with higher self esteem, resilience, affection, and life satisfaction. So, I'd suggest focusing on the outcome. Kids need attachment to parents, and, though it's quite annoying, by giving your child the attachment they need, you're increasing the odds they'll be happier in life. You'd likely take a bullet for your kid, so you should take solace that, to help them get better outcomes, you just need to suffer for a few more months. (Yeah, I know--taking a bullet is easier because it's over quickly, while lack of sleep is an ongoing grind that seems never ending. But I think it's worth it. And it will end.)

The really goofy thing about this speech is that Xi doesn't recognize that he's basically breaking "practical cooperation". The magic of capitalism and free markets is that it is the most efficient form of cooperation ever discovered. To create and manufacture, say, a computer, millions of people are cooperating, from the chip designers in Silicon Valley to the copper miners in Chile to the Nigerian oil producers. It doesn't matter at all that these people have never met each other--they are still working together as efficiently as possible to create a computer. And you know that that cooperation is ultimately practical, creating what's desired by people, because price signals show that's what people want. And if those resources are better spent producing a car--because people now want cars, more than computers--those resources will efficiently get rerouted to producing vehicles instead of computers.. And so when Xi says, "practical cooperation", to me, it basically seems the same as saying, "we're going to build crap that people don't want or need and destroy our efficiency because I'm the Man and I say so." That said, I understand why people buy into the idea, despite the strong, practical historic evidence of what works. Most people don't understand the magic of free markets and trade and delightful consequences like consumer surpluses. And, if one believes one can improve one's life by 20% at the small cost of hurting a million strangers by 1%, many people will take that deal.

I think it's pretty clear what side of the line Luca is on. He sprouts poetic about China's glorious achievements, and his only concession to the other side of the coin is that genocidal camps imprisoning a million people are "absurd". Rather than, say, "horrific", "atrocious", or "horrendous". There's no doubt whatsoever what side of the line he's on. That said, there's lots of people who support the horrendous, and it's convenient for us that Luca is so transparent about his passion.

At this point, it's extremely clear what's happening. 1. Stahleyp asserts that there's no morality without God. 2. Someone shows that there actually can be a morality without God. 3. Stahleyp doesn't address #2, but rather retreats to the position that morality is, by definition, only derived from God. 4. Stahleyp advances to #1 again, pretending the refutation in #2 doesn't exist and #3 implies that therefore morality cannot exist except as dictated by a deity. So really, it isn't an interesting discussion any more, because pretty well everyone involved in the discussion understands that their position is irrefutable.

Nope, that isn't my premise and isn't at all close to what my premise is, though I think it's what you would like my premise to be, since you keep returning to that. You seem to really want my premise to be that people are inventing arbitrary rules. My best guess at this point is that you want an argument that you can "beat" rather than actually understand the argument that the other people are making. But I feel like that's uncharacteristic of you, so maybe you just forgot the argument. If you want to it be expressed as 'rules', my premise remains, "there are natural rules that exist that if your society repeatedly violates those those rules in major ways, your society will be eliminated or transformed until it once again abides by those rules." Those rules become what's known as morality. Take a bowl full of plastic balls, marbles, and steel balls. Shake the bowl for a bit, and you'll find the steel balls shift to the bottom, below the glass, which is below the plastic. Your argument is that the balls could only stack in layers like this because God's hand placed them there. My argument is that you just need different masses, gravity, and randomness imparted by the shaking, and the steel balls must fall to the bottom of the bowl and the plastic must rise to the top.

Well, truthfully, I assessed the situation on its own merit and concluded that appeasement was a terrible strategy. (IMO, the optimal strategy is for the world, or a benevolent group of nations, to make expansionist wars so incredibly costly to the instigator that there is a massive incentive not to instigate expansionist wars.) With respect to Chamberlain, the most relevant example in history had a similar expansionistic dictator using similar rhetoric, with modernish weapons, similar technology, in the Europe. And that example completely refutes your point of view. So, I understand why your position is that the most relevant situation in history ought to be excluded because it's over-used. It's very hard to justify your position if someone actually points out how your strategy worked in the past. And, I used it because when someone is saying something that doesn't make sense, it seems reasonable to bring up the counterexample that everyone knows, rather than bringing in much more obscure and less relevant examples from 2000 years ago. Plus, the picture is concise, and I didn't really want to have a big discussion. Failed at that.... And that's the problem with throwing about Godwin's Law. In order to avoid the evil, we have to understand how it came about. If you start passing laws so that blacks can't own businesses... well, you can't compare that to Nazism because it's just Godwin's law. Start passing laws to allow blacks to be arbitrarily arrested or beat up--well, Godwin's law says you can't compare that to Nazism because nobody's being gassed. Don't want to minimize the evil of the Nazis. But you know, I think that the Nazis only got to the stage of putting Jews in gas chambers because they were first allowed to exclude Jews from owning businesses, and could arbitrarily arrest and beat up Jews. And that's the problem with Godwin's law. It poo-poos the idea that smaller evils can--and did--lead to a huge evil, and in fact that the smaller evils are required to make it to the point of the huge evil. Or, said another way, here's part of the discussion on the rise of Nazism from They Thought They Were Free:

So to summarize your position, learning from history is bad. What worked and didn't work in the past when it comes to authoritarian leaders with proven expansionist tendencies is irrelevant when looking at authoritarian leaders with proven expansionist tendencies today. We know this because memes.

Thanks for your response. I'm more thinking about the Canadian issues, like the storytelling in drag, than the American anti-trans hate that we're seeing these days. I'd guess very few people my children interact with are pedophiles, and my uneducated guess would be that people who do drag probably have about the same percentage of pedophiles as the overall population, because I see no obvious reason why it would be different. However, your response doesn't really help resolve my personal connundrum. Because if someone's fetish is doing drag (i.e. but not specifically pedophilia), then that doesn't imply that I shouldn't care if that person is doing a fetish activity involving my kids, or someone else's. The issue isn't the pedophilia. It's the "involving a kid in sexual activities'. Also, the "hurt the children" argument is a bit uncertain to me. I think almost everyone who hurts children, with the exception of maybe sadists, thinks they are not hurting children, and it's also not always clear when children are being hurt. To me, erring on the side of "don't allow children to be involved in adult's sexual activities" seems much safer strategy than trying to figure out which adults' sexual activities kids can safely be involved in. For instance, if there was a sexual activity between children and pedophiles that people generally thought was harmless to the child, I think I'd still be reluctant to allow children to be involved in it. That said, I agree with you that persecuting a demographic through the legal system is horrendous. (Also, worth noting that my thoughts on this have nothing to do with religion. I think one can make a coherent argument that religion has cause orders of magnitude more harm than trans people have.)

Sanjeev, the one I've been struggling with is that I think a reasonable percentage of drag performers are doing it because they are transgender or non-binary, but I also think a reasonable percentage do it because it turns them on. Essentially, drag is a fetish for a non-negligible percentage of people. If that's the case, the thing I've been pondering is, to what extent is it ok for people to practice their sexual fetishes in ways that involve kids? And, if the kids don't know that it's a sexual fetish, does that mean it's OK? Like, would it be acceptable to play a game with kids, involving, say, the kids tying up and whipping a fully-clothed adult while call them a "bad boy"? And if that bdsm fetish is not OK to practice with kids, is why is the drag fetish OK to practice with kids? Is it just a matter of degree? Broadly speaking, I'm fine with homosexuality and transexuals. Really, pretty well everything that happens between consenting adults or involving consensually changing one's own body seems fine by me. As I say, I've been struggling with this. I do know I wouldn't want a 45-year-old with a foot fetish massaging my daughter's foot, even if my daughter believes it's totally innocuous. So I'm curious how you reconcile all this.

Math isn't the absolute thing that you seem to suggest, because it includes statistics. It's unlikely you will flip a coin five times and have it always come up heads, but it's possible. And, if I give you another flip, you will not be able to predict the result of that flip more than 50% of the time, even though you probably have a pretty good understanding of the math behind the coin flip. Morality is like that--if you break the rules of morality, you're increasing the probability that your society will die. The more you deviate from the rules of morality, the less likely it is that your society will continue. In fact, there's a simple experiment you can run, that can help test these things. Take your family, and try shoplifting. Maybe you'll be arrested. The probability of your family being destroyed by that is probably fairly low, though there is some small chance they'd take your kids away for doing this experiment. Now take your family, and try having each one of you brutally torturing and murdering as many people as you can catch in your town square. (Go ahead! I'll wait here until you're done!) From this simple experiment, I think you'll fine that the small society you've created--your family--is much less likely to survive because you've deviated from morality in a much more extreme way than simple shoplifting. That said, I think most of your arguments still amount to "A morality derived from God can't exist with a God", which frankly, seems kind of pointless.

This one (and others that said variants and expanded on the idea. I just quote myself because....) That said, if your actual argument is, "A morality derived from a God does not exist if a God does not exist"– which seems to be the direction in which you're now heading–then I'll agree with you, and I suspect almost everyone on this thread will be convinced.

This argument was already refuted on this thread. You might want to revisit it.

This doesn't make much sense to me. Sounds to me like you're basically saying, "I'll make up my own morality by thinking hard about it, but pretend that the answers I come up are coming from God." That said, there's nothing wrong with that, unless one actually acts like one's morals come from God. Nope, as I said, it's largely about deciding who counts as "part of society". War rape falls into that. Most types of sexual relations are practiced today, as well. So, not far different. Also, though I'll admit that most Christians seem to view sex as the most important moral aspect of their religion, I think it's a relatively small part of morality Like, if you were to arbitrarily create, say, 10 religious commandments, I bet only one would be related to sex. And really, I think sex is probably less than 1% of morality. (In fact, I think I'd probably just have the simple, "don't do anything during sex that your partner(s) don't want you to do.") On the other hand, "You must ensure that this religion grows" might take up, say, 40% of the commandments. The relative smallness of sexual morality compared to all morality is worth noting, because my argument is that morals are largely the same for all successful societies, with minor tweaks around the edges, and you're saying that sexuality is mostly the same, with tweaks around the edges. And it's worth noting that the sex-related commandment isn't the stuff Christians shout about today, but clearly related to social stability. Hard to have a stable society if everyone's screwing others' spouses. Again, evolutionary morality.