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SamuelS

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Everything posted by SamuelS

  1. SamuelS
    Doesn't consent imply that one has some knowledge of what they're consenting to? The term "informed consent" comes to mind. Frankly your example reads to me as theft, which is immoral. If you and I agree to exchange my apple for your dollar, and I don't get your dollar but you get my apple, you're a thief. There may be some obfuscation of that truth, but that doesn't change it any more than a shower door makes me blurry.
  2. SamuelS
    Mind blown. I hadn't ever considered this, I don't think I've ever heard it before...isn't it odd, that we find ourselves to be the most advanced on our planet, yet we expect to be in infancy compared to others...my mind is reeling over this, I think I'll be chewing on this one a bit. Surely there's a psychological basis for this, maybe similar/same as that for socialism, religion....thanks for the insight!
  3. SamuelS
    My city recently added a line on the utility bill, "Capital Integration", its a fixed fee but accounts for between 20 and 35% of my bill. They had a nice full color printout explaining how they need this money to keep doing what they've been doing all along...all I could understand about the whole thing is they're integrating my capital right into their account.
  4. SamuelS
    Picture this: he starts up ads, everything is going great, bringing in $10k/month...then, over time, nobody wants to have their ads on his channel. What happens then? Lose that revenue stream or change the message to bring it back in order to keep up w the new bills that'll surely be generated...there's no winning in that scenario. Now, its not certain to happen, but it's certainly not going to happen without the ads. Why invite the possibility?
  5. SamuelS
    As long as there are three people, one will attempt to communicate privately with another. With open source and the internet, they'll never stop people from accessing tools to protect their secrets...but, they can sure make it difficult enough that people that just want privacy for everyday conversations will find the cost (pain in the ass factor) prohibitive, while people with real secrets will still go to the effort. It's almost like these people do critical thinking in reverse.
  6. SamuelS
    I think the article has three main takeaways -- firstly that polio will never be eradicated because any mad scientist worth his salt can whip it up in a lab, secondly that the vaccine used in that program was more harmful than polio itself, and third that even if the vaccine was fine a paltry $5mil donation from Gates got India to waste a billion on a program that was wasteful and shouldn't have been a priority. In a nutshell, polio wasn't a priority for India (and arguably should not have been) until Gates came along w a vaccine that is worse than that which it seeks to cure.
  7. SamuelS
    And there's the horrific story of what happened when Gates tried to eradicate polio in India. http://www.issuesinmedicalethics.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/110/1065
  8. SamuelS
    I think the problem here is in how the interaction is framed. If I have -- through my choices and actions -- lost my capacity to be a rational actor, I don't think it's proper to assign responsibility to that temporarily irrational self that has been created but rather to the rational actor that chose to imbibe. If a drunk were to kill someone, we would call that negligent homicide and a tragic accident but not likely murder. So, in this case, I'd say they accidentally had sex w each other.
  9. SamuelS
    What good is it to avoid a pothole if you end up on your roof in a ditch in doing so?
  10. SamuelS
    "external bodies over which you exert control" sounds like "might makes right"...if I'm raping you, I have that right, because I'm doing it? and you see this as consistent w/ NAP? did you hit your head and forget what forum you're posting in?
  11. SamuelS
    I'm not calling you evil, I'm saying that the position you advocate is evil, or rather that it would mislabel the innocent bystander as evil, opening him up to aggression simply for not acting. The bystander is little more than a slave to the whims of the schmuck and the populace. I'd also like to point out that if you're going to reject principals, then claim slippery slope when I ask where it all leads...well, that's downright hilarious. I reengaged because you sounded reasonable in the call-in show, and maybe a conversational format is more suited to the topic...but, this comes off as extreme trolling -- I don't think for one second you were confused as to the subject of my prior comment.
  12. SamuelS
    Gee, you should have provided your definition up front. I reject your definition as well. Actually, I'll go one further, I not only reject your definition, I assert that it is wholey untenable, largely unactionable, and frankly entirely evil. Not an argument, I know, I've no more interest.
  13. SamuelS
    This reminds me of something I've heard both Joe Rogan and Rhonda Patrick talking about -- the benefits of stress. Rather than do a poor job of explaining it, here's a video where Dr. Patrick goes into this stuff. This covers heat stress, but it seems reasonable to me to assume that it may have wider implications. Regarding mental stress, I do think it can become unhealthy, taking the form of hypervigilance, but that may just be a matter of degree...you'll build muscle curling 20lb weights, you'll tear it curling 200lb weights...
  14. SamuelS
    And this is why your pool example gas nothing to do with moraltiy/ethics. Unless you're working w a different definition which I'm unaware of, ethics deals with the subset of behavior which is enforceable. I can force you to stop, I cannot force you to start. You're still going to need objective value to get to "negligible risk", better get cracking on that. Self ownership, like a lot of things we're talking about here, is interesting in that it seems we accept the conclusion first and try to come up w an explanation later...the conclusion has been around for centuries but the only decent explanations (IMO) were developed in the last couple of decades. I don't understand how you get self ownership from might makes right, though your exercise of self ownership can certainly be explicated that way. I think Kinsella has a very good explanation of how self ownership comes about and even how that extends to children. My understanding of his arguments is that we own ourselves because we have a direct link between our minds and bodies, that we are the only one that even can homestead our own bodies. I don't think this is much different from Stef's approach. Frankly, I accept self ownership as self evident. You can call that bias, and I can call your endeavours a waste of time.
  15. SamuelS
    You're really just highlighting the difference between philosophy and law, which does nothing to weaken philosophy. Philosophy tells us what rape is, law attempts to determine if it happened.
  16. SamuelS
    I just heard Peter talking about his dad's situation a week or so ago. What an absolute nightmare. This is a sad day, indeed.
  17. SamuelS
    I think it would be helpful to either use quotations or hypenate "in group"...I stumbled over that a few times. The grouping thing is interesting, something to think about for sure...my first thought is that for a lot of folks its just a way to save time, and for some they're not smart enough to understand nuance so find a leader and take the groups as presented by that leader. Agreed on the flagpole thing. It can actually be an interesting thing to dissect but it's hardly a challenge to UPB or any propertarian system of ethics that I'm aware of -- the homeowner would not be immoral to defend his home, the man on the flagpole only has the prerogative to save his skin...you can batter it around til the cows come home but you're just avoiding the performative contradiction of denying the validity of property rights.
  18. SamuelS
    Other than a veiled argument ad populum, you're not adding anything either and evading the question. If ethics are to be binding, how can we have a binding standard of "reasonable" without an objective standard of value? I repeat, what one man deems a negligible cost another may find intolerable for a myriad of reasons...without an objective standard of value there's no way to even judge the cost:benefit other than to allow each man to do as he wishes with regard to saving the schmuck. You say the cost is wet pants, but you omit opportunity cost entirely.
  19. SamuelS
    What you might consider a negligible cost, in this case wet clothes, another person may find intolerable and more so when compared to what they would have chosen to do had some schmuck not fallen in the water. You don't get to have "reasonable" objective value, its a bullshit equivocation and just gives wheels to your goalposts.
  20. SamuelS
    To deter is not to stop. I can stop a violation of property w a bullet, I can only deter one with a law. In order to hold the second you're going to need to define "negligible cost" in reference to some objective standard of value. Or is the cost in relation to what one would have otherwise been doing? Does a firefighter get a pass if there's two+ lives at risk in the fire he was heading to? What if he doesn't know how many people are in the fire?
  21. SamuelS
    Yes, and that's one reason they do not fall into the category of ethics. Not only is effort better applied in solving the problem yourself, but shooting the person wouldn't do anything to solve it at all. Also, if one were to accept your position, where would it end? Should I be required to put all my efforts toward the good of others, or is it an enumerated list? Does the drowning person have any obligation to not get into that mess in the first place which detracts from my own good? Is there any consistent methodology to follow here or how does one know how one can act ethically in such a system?
  22. SamuelS
    The thing w moral prohibitions vs prescriptions is that I can -- actually, really -- theoretically employ force in order to stop that action from occurring. You cannot, however, force me to act. You can compel my action, but you cannot force it. In the case of the drowning person, it is aesthetically negative to not intervene perhaps, but if you shot me for not doing so, that wouldn't solve the problem...which it would in the case of rape, theft, assault, etc.
  23. SamuelS
    If a wrong has been done, what can be done to correct it? Can we force the man to swim out and save the child? Hardly!
  24. SamuelS
    I'm ambivalent about engaging here and likely will not respond further but there's an element of UPB/ethics that your example omits. If you are acting contrary to UPB, my shooting you can be an effective remedy, however if you are refusing to act, shooting you won't get you moving.
  25. SamuelS
    If the same things that got me going as a teenager still got me going, that'd be a bigger problem, IMO. I think (mental) desensitization, to a degree, in this area is a good thing. The idea of masturbating w only physical stimulus doesn't even sound fun... I think you've been listening to some wacky ideas.
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