uriel238

uriel238, 7 days ago

As someone highly susceptible to dark patterns, I’d like to see more regulation and investigation of them in commercial practices.

Heck, some kinds of commercial fluffing are outright lies.

uriel238, 7 days ago

When you rule, you get to pick what qualities have merit, which is how we end up of administrations of The Master Race or lispy Spaniards, or ruthlesd billionaires.

We’re still trying to figure out how to get to government tha implements public-serving ideas.

uriel238, 8 days ago

I’m very tempted to choose a brain worm of your own and push that agenda at him to assert dominance, but that’s because I can be a passive-aggressive fuck if I feel someone is being overly aggressive.

Judgemental religious folk can bring out the Azathoth Hypothesis in me.

uriel238, 9 days ago

This makes a strong case on the discovery side of the discovery vs. invention controversy.

Ironically, my dad idolized Pythagoras and the notion of discovering a scientific fundamental to be remembered for thousands of years, for which the secret is not to actually do science, but raise a cult of scientists who attribute their inventions to you. Like Thomas Edison.

uriel238, 9 days ago

Too spicy for Facebook! Her apperance on a art museum Facebook page was enough to get the page suspended.

uriel238, 9 days ago

White handsome Jesus is always ironic Jesus. Like Buddy Christ.

uriel238, 9 days ago

Funny, marines and wait staff are the two work forces we point to as counterexamples when someone suggests poor people are just lazy.

The ownership class will certainly tremble when they gear up for a rumble against the Man.

uriel238, 9 days ago

Costco for a while sold large ice cream bars from their cantina. While not proportionately larger they did help with the disappointment I felt going to DQ decades later to notice the cone was much smaller than the last time.

uriel238, 10 days ago

I appreciate very much the little bit of trolling.

Sometimes daddy can’t help himself.

uriel238, 10 days ago

Someday cringe will be cringe, and sick will be sick again.

uriel238, 10 days ago

It’s all tubular.

As a kid from the 80s-era San Fernando Valley, I have legit cred to say that.

uriel238, 10 days ago

I picked up shizzle for rizzle from Tiny Tina and works as a rated G version of the shit meaning either the genuine article or the diggity dank.

uriel238, 10 days ago

Yep. But it has an unusable interface. And I’ll try the LLM, Call mom! and find that I can’t get it to place a call.

uriel238, 10 days ago

It does convey the (accurate) message that money is more important to the church than its message or its congregation.

uriel238, 10 days ago

Wait, other Gen Xers and Millennials don’t fear becoming homeless?

I have a lot of friends who were homeless at least once during life, and all the others have been on the verge of homelessness. Is this atypical in the United States?

uriel238, 11 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

The cover-your-ass scenario.

In the Philosophy Crash Course there was a scenario like this. I’ll paraphrase:

You’re a traveler exploring a semi-devloped nation in South America. Coming out of the wilderness you come across a squad of soldiers. They are forcing twenty villagers to dig a mass grave. The officer to the soldiers tells you these villagers committed the state crime of supporting a rival to their leader, and are to be executed. But as you are a guest in their country, he will make you an offer: if you shoot one of them, yourself, he will set all the rest free, and then can hike to the border and beg for asylum. (A rough trek, but the neighboring country may take them).

Do you shoot one of the villagers?

Actually killing someone is rather hard on the psyche, and most of us cannot bear the thought (and might suffer from trauma as a result). But then, perhaps this is a small price to pay for nineteen human lives.

Thomas Aquinas and Kant were happy to let the soldiers kill the villagers so as to avoid committing the sin of murder, themselves. Aquinas and Kant even would not lie to the murderer at the door, or Nazi Jew-hunters to save the lives of fugitives hidden in their home, since lying was sin enough, and they would count on God to know His own. Both had contemporaries who disagreed, and felt it was proper to suffer the trauma and do what was necessary (assuming the officer of the soldiers seemed inclined to keep to his word and actually spare the remaining villagers.)

So, the cover your own ass response has a long history of backers, including known philosophers.

uriel238, 11 days ago

I saw a headline about Mercedes offering an autopilot that doesn’t require the driver to monitor, so it’s going to be interesting to see how laws play out. The Waymo taxi service in Phoenix seems to occasionally run in with the law, and a remote service advisor has to field the call, advising the officer the company is responsible for the car’s behavior, not the passenger.

uriel238, 11 days ago

The Trolley problem is a schoolbook example of the failure of creed-based philosophy (deontological ethics), but is also used (the various scenarios) to illustrate that circumstances that don’t affect the basic scenario or outcome do affect our feelings and our response to the scenario.

It’s easier to pull a lever from a remote position than to actually assault someone or kill them by your own hand, for example.

There are other scenarios that don’t necessarily involve trolleys, but involve the question of doing a wrongful act in order to produce a better outcome. Ozymandias in The Watchman killing millions of New Yorkers to prevent a nuclear exchange, thereby saving billions of people. (Alan Moore left it open ended whether that was the right thing to do in the situation, but it did have the intended outcome.)

We like the trolley problem because you can draw it easily on the blackboard, but other situations are much better at illustrating how subtle nuance can drastically change the emotions behind it.

Try this one:

The Queen of the land dies. On the day of her sister’s coronation, she declares that Anglicanism is now the faith and Catholics are now unlawful — a reversal of the old order — Catholics are to report to a town or city hall to convert or be executed. You are Catholic. Do you obey the law or flee? And if you obey the law, do you convert or perish at the hand of the state? Do you lie about your faith to state agents or to the national census?

To a naturalist like myself, I’m glad to lie or convert to spare my own life, but to the devout, pretending to be another faith, or converting by force was a terrible sin, so it’s a very sober (and historically relevant) look at religious principle.

uriel238, 11 days ago

IRL we typically do what we feel and justify it later, but then IRL there is no right or wrong, except what we construct in the process of organizing with each other to cooperate against outward threats such as predators and the elements. We have agreed to poor conditions because our lords were kinder than the winter and the bears, but then we’ve also overthrown our lords when we worked out they need us more than we need them.

But yes, if you want to pretend that moral philosophy is just cerebral masturbation, that’s valid. All of our philosophy is about the opinions of past thinkers about the perimeters of right and wrong. It will give you a clear answer about as well as religious philosophy might tell you which patheon of gods is the true one.

These scenarios are less about what is right or wrong, but about how you, individually and personally, decide ad hoc what is right or wrong. You might distrust the soldiers, but then if they were inclined to betray your trust with a lie, they might have never intended you to go free either, and the whole story becomes irrelevant.

Another Trolley-like features a stranger come to town who is a perfect match for five transplant patients waiting organs. The surgeon / hospital administrator has a friend in organized crime who can abduct the stranger and harvest his organs quietly and cleanly so that the authorities won’t notice he disappeared. Although IRL, having a transplant is a mortal condition. Having the organ buys more time than not having the organ. Also this doesn’t get into the risks of other complications of transplant surgery that can occur even when an organ is a good match.

These scenarios are not about real life, but about becoming more self aware of how you’d consider these. And yes, this may mean looking for third options, hoping to find one better than the two obvious ones.

uriel238, 10 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Firstly, if we’re talking about the Trolley Problem, that’s not a behavior paradox, that’s a morality paradox. Animals, including human beings, commonly act first and rationalize their behavior later. We can decide after the fact it was ethical after all, decide that it wasn’t but was justifed due to circumstances, decide that it wasn’t and wasn’t, but we’ll reconcile it after the fact. Examples like the Trolley problem are not meant to reflect real life and how we behave, rather are contrived in contemplation of the logical mechanisms we use to determine ethical options can become problematic. (Utilitarianism has its own paradoxes.)

Secondly, in fact, human beings are susceptible to paradoxes that can cause decision paralysis, but they tend to be about either survival or high-stakes situations with incomplete information. A common one is when a green, low ranking enlisted person is given a direct order that is illegal. In the US army, our soldiers are educated as to the rules of war, and what constitutes a war crime, and while they are legally obligated to not act on illegal orders, they also know well before they get out of boot they’ll be jolly sorry if ever they do disobey an order. Command them to commit an atrocity on the field and they lock up by the dozens. Hence squad commanders know that if they issue an illegal command – even one based on incomplete information – it risks unit cohesion. Getting caught in a SNAFU like this is still common, and the enlisteds seldom come out of them well, so it’s on the list of counter-recruitment bullet-points.

The same kind of thing also appears in game shows (where its contrived) and in the strategic command chain of command, because a lot of officers do not ever want to be a guy who nuked two million people, even if they’re the enemy. And yet those officers routinely got to serve as key-turners to arm (or launch) our nuclear arsenal. (I don’t know how the situation is since the new century, if those stations are even manned at all times anymore.)

In the end, we are animals, and typically when we’re confronted with moral choices, it’s a matter of survival or high stakes, in which case we often don’t have the time for measured contemplation on what we’re doing. Moral philosophy questions what behavior may be right or wrong according to a given standard, but it doesn’t get into how people actually behave. For that, consider psychology and sociology.

uriel238, 10 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

We’ve seen a similar phenomenon in some of the red states in the ideology conflict here in the US. There are people eager to kill someone just to have the experience, and who volunteer to hunt targeted groups (trans folk, lately) or as participants in an execution by firing squad. I remember in the John Oliver’s first segment on the death penalty (he did a second one recently) executions were stalled due to difficulties obtaining the drugs used in lethal injections, and firing squads were brought up. The expert pointed out the difficulty finding one executioner, let alone seven. The officials suggested recruiting volunteers from the gun-enthusiast citizenry, which the expert saw as naïve.

I can’t speak to firing-squad executions during the German Reich and the early stages of the holocaust, but I can speak to the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with evacuating villages (to mass graves) who harbored Jews, harbored enemies of Germany or otherwise were deemed unworthy of life. The mass executions were hard on the troopers, and as a result Heydrich contended with high turnover rates.

This figured largely into the movement towards the industrialized genocide machine that pivoted around the Auschwitz proof of concept. Earlier phases included wagons with an enclosed back in which the engine exhaust was piped. The process was found to be too slow, and exposed to many service people to the execution process. The death camps were staffed to assure no-one had to interact with the prisoners and process the bodies, so no-one would have to confront the visceral reality of before and after. They were staffed so that anyone who engaged a mechanism was two steps away from the person authorizing (and taking responsibility for) the execution. The guy who flipped the switch was just following orders.

Interestingly, we’d see a repeat of this during the International War on Terror, specifically the Disposition Matrix which lead to executions of persons of interest on the field by drone strike (Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone). During the CIA Drone Strike Programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the drone operation crews suffered from high turnover rate, with operators suffering from combat PTSD from having pulled the trigger on the missile launches. It didn’t help they were also required to scan the damage to assess the carnage, and identify the casualties.

Interestingly, this also presented an inverted demonstration of how the human mind can tell the difference between violent video games and the real thing. Plenty of normies play Call of Duty without dealing with the mental after-effects of war, but even when we conduct war operations from continents away, our brains recognize that we are killing actual human beings, and suffers trauma from the act. War continues to be Hell, and video games not so much.

uriel238, 11 days ago

Arden Arcade, Sacramento, California

I miss the Bay Area, but was pushed out via gentrification.

uriel238, 11 days ago

Spy vs. Spy went through six artists and the last comic was in 2021.

It may resume.

uriel238, 11 days ago

One of the fundamentals I’ve learned in a hobby study of moral philosophy (unaccredited. I just read stuff and watch videos.) is the English language is not great for talking about wrongdoing.

We have the words sin and crime

Sin is a wrongdoing against God or against the divine, as asserted by organized religious ministries, who often do not agree. (Here in the States, some churches assert that gay sexual behavior is a sin, whereas others assert that judging others for being gay is a sin.) None of this is true. As Pope Frances observed, Only God knows the mind or intent of God, and Protestant faiths operate by the doctrines Sola Fide (By faith alone) and Sola Scriptura (By scripture alone) does one find salvation. Your favorite minister can only advise with opinions, and often they do to serve their own agenda. You and you alone get to decide what parts of the bible are valid in your life in the 2020s, and which parts are allegory, which parts are out of date (e.g. slavery, genocide, human sacrifice) and whether God will understand you’re doing your best in the circumstances He threw at you.

Crime is an offense against the state, which is, in turn, the organization that defines and enforces state law and is supposed to provide governance, often typically serving only the plutocrats and oligarchs that define what kinds of policy will be enacted. The state is not the community or the land, hence we see routine pushes to roll back environmental protections so that the community has clean air and drinking water, instead allowing industry to dump its soot and pig farmers to let their poop lagoons leak and poison the water table.

As a younger adult, seeing the CIA extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program kidnap people and torture them, including innocent Americans, without judicial review or due process was one of my first steps into realizing the illegitimacy of the United States. None of that served the people of the US (we have much more effective non-pain-driven ways to interrogate POWs. Torture only happened because rich people wanted brown people to suffer). Since then we’ve seen our own rights stripped away peacemeal, and noticed a disparity in how the rule of law applies to those with wealth, and those without. So the state is very much an entity other than the public or our society.

Neither sin nor crime reflect wrongdoing against the self, the community, the society or the commonwealth, and English doesn’t have names for such wrongdoing. We have to modify sin and crime such as crime against humanity or sin against nature

And this, then leads to what we imagine sin and crime to be, mostly wonton (unlicensed) sex, bank robbery and serial killing. Our songs of sin and remorse talk about killing neighbors or fucking neighbors. They don’t talk about war profiteering, or pushing addictive pharmaceuticals, or capturing the government of the people, or actively obfuscating the effects of mass fossil-fuel use on the ecology, collapsing the ecology, extinguishing biodiversity and possibly the human species. Elite deviance (e.g. white collar crime) causes more death, more destruction and more cost than all the petty sins and crimes _by multiple orders of magnitude) and yet God (God’s alleged voice) has nothing to say about them, and the state says very little, while it’s instead looking to abolish drag queens reading to children at the library.

So not only is there no sin, but sin and crime are irrelevant, except for those things that are enforced by law enforcement institutions that mostly want to rob citizens and / or shoot them. But this is to say you will be hunted for self publishing your music or whistleblowing a company for balking safety regulations as you will robbing a bank.

So not only are we truly free from moral obligations, but we might actually be ethically bound to consider for ourselves what we opine is right and wrong. When religious ministries are asserting violence against gays, Palestinians and immigrants is right and proper, obedience to divine command theory is no longer safe or right.

uriel238, 10 days ago

The next step is a launch loop, and even that will require materials with extreme tensile strength that we do not yet have.