sheepfilms
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
almost home
blake kathryn
Discoholic 🪩
Cosmic Funnies
Cosimo Galluzzi
ellievsbear
$LAYYYTER
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Product Placement
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
roma★
Mike Driver
@theartofmadeline
Game of Thrones Daily
Keni
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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@feotakahari
I’ve decided to stop pretending to be moderate. If you think you can use someone’s kinks to predict whether they’re a sexual predator, I think you, the person making the predictions, are an active danger and should not be trusted.
In fairness to King Kong, if I had a tiny adorable primate in my hand I would also be very resistant to someone taking it away from me.
We all assume it was romantic, but maybe when King Kong looked at her he was seeing this:
Imagine Luke and Leia ending up in the clone wars era but all of their force abilities are “what the actual fuck?” levels of bullshit, and neither of them ever realized that the things they could do with the force were considered extremely high level techniques.
that is one of my FAVORITE things to imagine yes. To me this is less about ‘Skywalker bullshit’ (though there is some of that) and more about the training they (didn’t) receive.
The high-Midi-chlorians-actual-descendents-of-the-force thing makes it easier to tap into the force, makes it more possible to do so without accidentally exhausting yourself. But, in universe, under the right circumstances and with the properly channeled belief anyone can do anything. That’s why Palpatine had to make the galaxy want an empire, why his first strategy was misdirection and his top priority was crushing hope. Chirrut was supposedly force-null and he walked through an army. Han navigated that astroid field because he had to. The force is everywhere.
In an amusing but possibly unintended turn of events, 6-12 weeks of training in a swamp with an elderly frog who only talks in riddles without ever being exposed to Jedi culture except as a myth is actually IDEAL if you’re looking to maximize a Jedi’s raw strength. Most Jedi training that we see in the prequels is explicitly designed to put the breaks on a force-users raw power (for honestly very valid reasons). Channeling all violence through a single weapon that will start screaming if you get too violent, training to use it defensively, is definitely the soft-ball alternative to just squashing people like meatballs.
Meditating, wearing beige, the code, shunning attachments, all that stuff is built around making sure force users never run above first or second gear even in stressful situations (again valid, when you run your jedi in the red sometimes they become murder monsters). The downside of this is that when they’re forced to maintain that placid pace for years at a time (i.e: prolonged war), they’re much more likely to burn out.
When Yoda told Luke do or do not, told him a luminous being was he, told him size matters not, the amazing thing isn’t that Luke believed him. That was karking objectively provable. Yoda lifted a spaceship, so now Luke knows he can too if he just thinks he can. So he does. Vader and Palpatine conquered a galaxy. Luke believes he can stop worlds, crush armies, conquer planets and so he can.
The incredible thing about Luke is what he doesn’t do despite being tapped into the Force utterly free of mental restraint. Luke’s op character trait is his compassion, not his strength.
I assume at some point Luke puts Leia through a similar 2 month meditation class where he convinces her that her only limitations are the ones she imposes on herself. She has a complete meltdown when she realizes that she actually could have boiled Tarkin alive with her mind and saved Alderann. This causes a volcano to go off, devastating the ecology of a small moon. On the flight home, both of them slightly charred, she tells Luke that she wanted to focus on politics and didn’t really want to be a Jedi anyway. Luke nods quickly, supporting her decision, and resolves to seek out some Jedi texts about how to teach people they can do anything but also…maybe…not…anything.
And thus the Jedi order is reborn.
- - -
In the time travel version of this, it means that Luke is assuming that all of the Jedi are restraining themselves like he is. And they are, but they also aren’t, because their breaks are subconscious, built in since childhood, and have a lot of failsafes so even if they turn darkside they still restrain themselves pretty good (a la Dooku).
Leia is, again, less interested with the Jedi-specific aspects of the war (especially now that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about being one of the only people who can pick up that mantle) and more interested in the diplomatic side. Again, Palpatine can only succeed if the galaxy at large accepts this, and from where she’s standing they’re fucking moving in that direction. If being a Jedi is tapping into the mystical energy field that binds all living things together to channel it through one specific person in one specific place, then politics is manipulating that same power for a diffuse impact on as many people as possible.
This status-quo lasts until a major clone wars battle where Luke’s like ‘wait- the entire other side is sub-sentient droids? No living beings, and no droids with complex personality matrices? And they’re currently, actively killing living, sentient humans? Well kriff, come on! This is a no-brainer!’
Luke takes a deep breath. The air- it doesn’t disappear or anything- but it- it stops moving. It’s hard to explain…but breathing has an odd…resistance. The hair on the back of every clone’s neck stands up. Several get vaguely sea sick. One pukes a little. Plo Koon stumbles back, head ringing and afraid.
Luke Skywalker stands up and clenches his fists. 10,000 droids crumple like flimsi in the hands of a child. The battlefield is eerily quiet for a moment, then that imperceptible hum (which no one noticed until it stopped) fades and the air returns to its normal density. A few of the shinies start whooping, then the whole battalion is cheering.
Luke massages his temples, smiling wryly at Master Koon. “I guess I can see how that would get exhausting if you were doing it everyday.”
Plo Koon just stares.
Han, unimpressed, inside a prison cell, watching Dooku throw things around in a show of power: Yeah, but can you do that while doing a keg stand? My Jedi can do that while doing a keg stand.
>me with my European-American mutuals
Hey so the trolley problem is dumb because the real person at fault for any of the deaths is the person who designed the trolley without an emergency braking system, the people who put in the purchase order for a trolley without an emergency braking system, the people who approved a PO for a trolley without an emergency braking system, the people who delivered a trolley without an emergency braking system, the organization that inspected and certified a trolley without an emergency braking system,and the operator who did not make a huge stink about being assigned to a trolley without an emergency braking system.
Whether you pull the lever is irrelevant, because a whoooole mess of people fucked up for you to be in that hypothetical situation.
Seriously, like, as a professional engineer, I find the premise of the trolley problem offensive. Cause like, so many safety regulations have been violated that it's just... insane.
"But, Cody, what if there was an emergency braking system, and it failed?"
Failure to perform regular maintenance and inspection. So, it's still someone else's fault.
"What if maintenance and inspections were done correctly, and it still failed?"
Some engineer somewhere failed to design a failsafe with the necessary redundancies. Again, it's someone else's fault.
"What about sabotage?"
The saboteur is obviously to blame.
"What if it's just a freak accident?"
Once again there's that engineer failing to place redundancies.
"What if it was just an act of God, and the engineer and everyone else did everything right?"
Then God is to blame. Duh. Not sure why this is so hard to get.
Any accident investigator will tell you that an accident is caused by a chain of incidents, and there were always several places the disaster could have been stopped.
Trolley problems are just philosophers being cruel to their audiences.
I would look at whoever is tying people to trolley tracks. That might be the issue right there.
Maybe the real trolley problem was the OSHA violations we made along the way.
Okay, you completely missed the point.
The very premise of the trolly problem, which is designed to be a realistic and practical demonstration of a person’s philosophy and value of human life, does not follow reality or practicality.
In reality, this problem is so astronomically unlikely that it reaches into the absurd. You can’t accurately gauge a person’s view on human life and what they value on this because it’s such an extreme and unlikely scenario that it’s not representative of who the person is. This shit works best when concerning day to day scenarios that the person will face, showing a repeating pattern in relation to common occurences.
For example, someone making a disingenuous, emotionally manipulative response to a post in a way that decreases the likelihood of their target seeing it. Usually says the person is insecure of their position so they feel the need to go on the offensive but in a way that reduces the risk of a counter attack while also playing to the biases of their audience.
And practically- The person with the lever is not responsible for the deaths of the people. With how responsibility is defined- the person can’t be at fault. They didn’t tie down the people, they didn’t run the faulty trolley, they didn’t fail to check the railways. They did NOTHING to cause the situation. And causing the problem is what a person needs to be accountable for. There’s a reason WHY ‘self defense’ is a concept.
Philosophy is about how a person reacts to the world and the problems within it. And because of that- it needs to work within the constraints of the world in order to work properly. A philosophy that can’t do that is fundamentally broken. And a philosophical question, like the trolley problem, doesn’t work if it doesn’t function in the world we live in.
But hey ‘hur dur meme!’ amirite?
“They did NOTHING to cause the situation. And causing the problem is what a person needs to be accountable for.“
If I keep posting James Rachel over and over, it’s because nobody ever gives a good response to him: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~bleier/Rachels_Euthanasia.pdf
—
Part of my point is that the process of being "allowed to die" can be relatively slow and painful, whereas being given a lethal injection is relatively quick and painless. Let me give a different sort of example. In the United States about one in 600 babies is born with Down's syndrome. Most of these babies are otherwise healthy -that is, with only the usual pediatric care, they will, proceed to an otherwise normal infancy. Some, however, are born with congenital defects such as intestinal obstructions that require operations if they are to live. Sometimes, the parents and the doctor will decide not to operate, and let the infant die. Anthony Shaw describes what happens then:
...When surgery is denied, I must try to keep the infant from suffering while natural forces sap the baby's life away. As a surgeon whose natural inclination is to use the scalpel to fight off death, standing by and watching a salvageable baby die is the most emotionally exhausting experience I know. It is easy at a conference, in a theoretical discussion, to decide that such infants should be allowed to die. It is altogether different to stand by in the nursery and watch as dehydration and infection wither a tiny being over hours and days. This is a terrible ordeal for me and the hospital staff - much more so than for the parents who never set foot in the nursery.
I can understand why some people are opposed to all euthanasia, and insist that such infants must be allowed to live. I think I can also understand why other people favor destroying these babies quickly and painlessly. But why should anyone favor letting "dehydration and infection wither a tiny being over hours and days?" The doctrine that says that a baby may be allowed to dehydrate and wither, but may not for given art injection that would end its life without suffering, seems so patently cruel as to require no further refutation.
if disney guys had blogs
youre postin political opinions on the internet too, dumbass
Yeah, but mine are right.
Also its really important to point out "rich people dont use more carbon" is straight up not true. In developed countries top percentile uses around 5 times more carbon than bottom percentile and mostly linear between those two points. Even if you don't give anything back carbon taxes are progressive.
Rich people do of course use more carbon, because they consume more of everything and everything is tied to carbon emissions. That paper I linked to earlier has this graph showing emissions by income percentile on p. 18:
The horizontal line is the average per capita emissions. Looks linear from around 5th percentile to 70th, and then it goes up quite sharply. (Data is from 2012-2014, so it’s a few years out of date but I doubt the distribution has changed shape much.)
But before we declare that a carbon tax is progressive, we need to be careful about what progressive means. A carbon tax would, obviously, take more from rich people than from poor people, generally speaking. But “progressive tax” usually means something that takes a larger proportion of income from people with higher incomes, and in that case, a carbon tax, by itself, isn’t progressive. This is because poorer households spend a larger share of their incomes, and richer households spend a smaller share while saving more. What’s more, just looking at spending, poorer households proportionately spend more on very carbon-intense things such as fuel and heating than rich households do.
This table is from p. 22 and shows how various income deciles would fare under a $50/ton carbon tax with various uses for the revenue.
It compares different methods of redistributing the revenue, either offsetting income taxes, offsetting payroll taxes, or just giving it back as a per-capita dividend. But if we just want to see the pre-distribution effect on households, the third column, No Revenue Recycling, shows that the poorer deciles end up paying a larger share of their expenses, never mind income, than richer deciles.
For that reason, a carbon tax by itself would definitely be regressive, and the data above show that if you want to have a carbon tax but avoid proportionately taxing the poor more than the rich, a carbon-tax-plus-dividend program is the way to go.
Thinking about that point @dingdongyouarewrong made in her most recent video about how a lot of people (mostly young people) online seem to view media exclusively through the lens of representation with no regard to the actual content of the story and it's tricky because it's clear that a lot of people are SO desperate to see themselves in the media they consume that representation alone is a selling point but we have to consider the potential downsides because there are limits to what representation alone can accomplish.
Like imagine if someone made a show that went REALLY far out of its way to have lots of representation and pitched itself as having lots of representation and everyone clamoring for more diverse media got really invested in it and then the show sucked ass. Like can you imagine what a NIGHTMARE that would be? Can you imagine the discourse? The bitterness? The down-badness of it all?
If someone ever made a show like that it might just produce one of the worst fandom experiences of all time
oh wait
Under a Rock 12 - Spirit Animals
My problem with utilitarianism is that since "good" and "bad" are averaged out over the entire population you frequently end up with a situation where no individual has moral worth or any clout because anything that might hurt or help a specific person is swamped by effects on everyone else.
And actually deeper than that is an often implicit assumption that the best way to create the greater good is to empower an impartial, disinterested, rational management class to make decisions for large populations.
My feeling is that you then get very weak feedback because you can simply dismiss any specific complaint with, "Our policies create the greater good, unfortunately their detrimental effects on you personally are irrelevant compared to the good we're creating" and if that gets bad enough you have an unaccountable leadership that has completely lost the ability to see the actual results of their policies.
I think this is the most compelling criticism of utilitarianism, that the implementation its proponents envision generally fails to account for the fact that the people being governed (to borrow from @argumate) will just go all chimp on each other from time to time (and that this is often optimal for non-obvious reasons!) Not only does your utilitarian policy need to produce to greatest good, it needs to do it in a way that people genuinely believe it is doing that, and that means it can’t be too technical to understand at a high level.
this is an obstacle for any system of governance, that the people must buy into it as if it is perceived to be illegitimate then it does not really matter how well it works in practice, it won’t last.
this critique takes down the bright ideas that tend to get reinvented every few days on Twitter, like restricting the vote to people who pass a civics test, or just handing over the reins of power to a small bunch of high IQ people who have absolute power; these proposals have much bigger problems as well of course but the simple fact that they lack legitimacy is enough to damn them.
the fundamental problem with utilitarianism is aggregation: how do you add up two different quantities and get a single score that isn’t hopelessly subjective?
for example if you try to maximise a single quantity like “percentage of the population with access to clean drinking water” or “average daily calorie consumption” or “life expectancy at birth” then that’s relatively straightforward, but all of these quantities are linked together in complex ways, how do you decide how to weigh knee surgeries against remedial reading lessons? zoo animal enrichment against public opera consumption? people dying of cancer against use of nonstick cookware?
the simplicity of utilitarianism is deceptive in that it is presented as if you can simply check a number and do what makes the number bigger, but choosing how to calculate that number in the first place is an intensely political decision, just as political as the notionally technocratic decisions made on behalf of the financial system or the housing market.
you can’t circumvent politics by promising the greatest good to the greatest number because deciding what you mean by “good” is politics.
I really don't understand why people keep conflating utilitarianism with the idea of a technocractic managerial class. That's a step that brings in so many additional assumptions, like 1) said class will act in the interest of the population, 2) they are better at optimizing the welfare of the population than the population themselves. I don't see why people see utilitarianism and immediately assume it's equivalent to this particular political philosophy.
Like, it seems straightforward to argue that direct democracy is the clearest expression of priorities you can get. You don't have to evaluate those different measures against each other, people will evaluate for themselves and tell you!
Honestly my post wasn't the clearest thing I've ever written, but it was prompted by someone saying that questioning the premise of the trolley problem is dodging the question because it's not supposed to be a realistic problem, it's supposed to be an attempt to distill morality down to bare essentials.
The protagonist in the trolley problem is a member of the "technocratic managerial class!"
If you talk about the trolley problem that way you're both claiming that the most fundamental and interesting moral actors are members of the technocratic managerial class, and even more than that you're arguing that this is so obvious and undebatable that to question it is to ignore the important questions.
Utilitarians frequently pose ethical quandaries or even real world problems with the form of "What should a well informed technocratic manager do in this situation" and that's why people relate them to technocratic managers.
I want to dig this up, because I’m not convinced there’s a useful morality that can’t be called “managerial.” I mean, if nothing you do affects anyone, then your actions are pointless, and if anything you do affects anyone, then you can arbitrarily choose to call that “managerial.”
In this context I mean someone who acts as a disinterested third party.
The trolley problem as popularly repeated on tumblr posits that you have no personal connection to the people on the tracks nor to the construction of the trolley system.
You, personally, stand to gain or lose nothing and the question is how you parcel out the goods you have to a group of strangers when confronted with an extremely constrained situation.
I’m all for that under the principle of “no takebacks.” “You already decided how this would be adjudicated in a situation where you gain or lose nothing.” “Yeah, but this time, I do lose—” “No takebacks!” Like the famous violinist problem—if you say it’s okay to kill the violinist, you don’t get to take that back just because you are the violinist this time.
Cat’s Nightmare by Louis Wain, 1895.
@argumate
your innocent post, my infinite series of annual reblogs, etc.
Before I got sick, I asked my mother if her backaches had gotten better. She had to explain that her backaches would never get better. They’d just get more or less painful some days.
After I got sick, my mother said she thought I had gotten better. I had to explain that I would never get better. I’d just have fewer symptoms for a while.
Being wrong about disability isn’t exclusive to abled people. I think a lot of stuff is like that.
TBC, anything I post is okay to reblog.
every time someone says “i cant believe anyone would fall for this 🙄” im one of the people who did and its because i believe people when they say things. also im autistic
this and sometimes even if something sounds strange my default is to assume im not right even if i have all the evidence to say i am so i just shrug and say Huh i guess so maybe i dont know what im talking about and i move on with my life. unless its something im autistic about in which case i will kill you expeditiously
just pirated my ethics textbook. was this wrong of me? who’s to say. i’ll find out soon enough
update: apparently i was right to choose to actively pirate this textbook because otherwise five textbooks i don’t know would’ve gotten run over by a train
Will they won't they is cheap writing, because few writers can make it more than spinning wheels, but it's also funny because so few works can make "won't they" a satisfying conclusion to the arc and stick to it
