Is anyone else distressed by the fact that, at the time of writing this comment, all of the "Recent Comments" displayed on the front page of the site are on a topic called "How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy"?
I'm not usually the kind of person who worries about "marketing" considerations, but....
Discussion section, ffs!
Racism as it's presently conceptualized isn't a simple matter of fear or hatred of ethnic others, unfortunately.
Of course not. That would subject accusations of racism to falsifiability.
I find this a complete non-sequitur. If you stay alive and become a bum, you will consciously experience a (potentially large) loss of status. Whereas if you commit suicide, you won't.
Maybe being dead is low-status too, but at least you're not around to experience it.
Ironically, Obama is exactly the kind of person to whom that term should refer, if it means anything at all. Descendants of African slaves taken to the Americas a long time ago should have another term, such as "American blacks".
Despite his lack of membership in it, Obama self-identifies with the latter group for obvious political reasons; after all, "children of foreign exchange students" is not an important constituency.
No, I didn't
Yes, you did. Here is what you said:
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I'd still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
This clearly implies that you didn't think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written "I'd still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape" or something similar.
I don't want to have a mind-killing argument
Then don't just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn't want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It's what we might call a "hot-button issue".
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I'd still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you'll pardon... (read more)
I don't agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting "moral equivocation" of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex "rape".
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word "racism", which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don't want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Drugging I would consider physical violence, so that falls within my definition; blackmailing, no.
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
I was saddened to learn of the recent death by suicide of Chris Capel, known here as pdf23ds. I didn't know him personally, but I was an occasional reader of his blog. In retrospect, I regret not having ever gotten into contact with him. Obviously, I don't know that I could have prevented his death, but, as one with mental-health issues myself, at least I could have made a friend, and been one to him. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that I'll never get that chance.
Having said that, I must say that I take his arguments here very seriously. I do not consider it to be automatic that every suicide is the... (read 487 more words →)
Or actually: a "law" in the sense of "predictable regularity", not "rule that one will be punished for violating".
In which case the post exemplifies it, rather than violating it.