Well, I absolutely agree with all that you just said. But still, knowing what sentences the judge can dole out is important. The problem with mob-rousing stuff such as apostasy... or Frankenstein-monster raising, or being Black, or a Hugonot, or an adulterer, depending on context... is that you could easily be subjected to "mob justice", and there would be impunity for your murderers: Pontius Piwatus keeps his hands cwean, and evewyone is happy (the dead can't compwain).
Argue against? I can't find a single thing here that I disagree with. Except the bits where you argue in favour of mercantilism, but I never argued against that. I would (mostly along the lines of "freemarkets need specific cultural memes specific social and political infrastructures to function well: it's a great engine but you can't put it in just any car or in the hands of just any driver, otherwise people will die, and even in the right conditions it's still massively dangerous, but it's just so much more awesome than other crappier engines...&quo...
Many countries have laws which are widely broken and selectively enforced, or which are easy to frame people for. In those cases, whether you are targeted and punished is a judgment call made by certain people in power, which in practice means that it depends mainly on not pissing off or threatening the wrong people, and on how effectively you would be expected to defend yourself (ie wealth and connections).
Many of those governments ardently desire their intelligent, rational people leaving, and will even facilitate that movement. They get in the way of a stable tyranny.
More importantly, the more they appropriate a foreign culture, the more the locals will see them as "foreign". A "Return of the Elites" might not be welcome: see Iran after the Shah was deposed,
Capitalism as the source of a nation's prosperity might also be a red herring: notice how America and Africa are full of perfectly capitalist, utterly miserable nations.
Being afraid of being sent to hell for eternity is no more "evidence" that god exists than is being afraid of tigers evidence that there is one in your back yard.
That was beautiful.
In my opinion, the best advantages rationality can gain is a totally reasonable intelligent well spoken blond woman wearing sleeveless dresses smiling and explaining with devastating clarity just how much sense atheism makes.
That was oddly specific.
I am a "typical" american grew up in New York. When I was 18 and my sister was 17, my sister and I visited my father for a few weeks who was working in Esfahan. The shah was still in charge, it was the late 1970s.
My sister was a beautiful young woman with blond hair. Despite being warned by other non-Iranians that when we went in to see Esfahan she should dress modestly, she went out in a sleeveless dress because it was warm and sunny. Angry old men spat at her (at least one anyway) and the young men brushed up against her and copped feels....
I don't think that question's going to give you the information you want - when in the last couple thousand of years, if Jews had wanted to stone apostates to death, would they have been able to do it? The diasporan condition doesn't really allow it. I think Christianity really is the canonical example of the withering away of religiosity - and that happened through a succession of internal revolutions ("In Praise of Folly", Lutheranism, the English reformation etc.) which themselves happened for a variety of reasons, not all pure or based in rat...
Now that you mention Rushdie, another topic comes out: how not to appear to be a Westernized sellout? I don't know much about Rushdie himself, but the image I got of him from popcultural osmosis is that of a professional traitor attacking Islam for the sake of getting accolades from Westerners. Regardless of how much of that is true, this is obviously an image one needs to avoid at all costs.
I would compare it to the amalgamation of "Socialist" and "Servant of the USSR" that took place during the Cold War.
People can have interesting pe...
That is the conclusion to which I had come, though I was hoping for an alternative. Now the question remains:
How can a rationalist pretending not to be a rationalist help spread serious rationalism without them and the people they inluenced getting caught (in early stages) or triggering a witchunt (supposing they were somewhat successful)?
You pick the people you want to influence, and you make yourself like them in all ways EXCEPT a carefully chosen few that are your most important targets of change. You might seriously consider publicly espousing a moderate version of Islam no matter what you believe if you are committed to the Islamic people of Morocco. You could even do it pretty honestly I think, isn't the essence of Islam submission to the will of Allah (as opposed to a believe in Allah)? If you made this choice couldn't you honestly say "I have deliberately and rationally chos...
Oh. So it does work, the propaganda.. Morocco is only a consitutional monarchy on paper. The power resides in the Palace, and it is absolute. Parties have been proven, time and again, to be utterly impotent before the King. That is why people don't even bother to vote. That is why you will often spot people sleeping during parliament sessions: those simply don't matter.
People have picked up on this. Now, when they make protests, they address the King directly, ignoring the Ministers. Their tone is very deferential, but that's one fuse that's burned out.
And the most popular contenders, were the regime to change, are the Islamists...
Edited that mistake out. It might also be a matter of external perception. When one sings "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or "We Are The World", people treat it as fake fuzzy drivel that tastes like diabetes at best. "Darned Beatniks (or insert some other inaccurate label here), they don't understand how the world works!".
Religious people, on the other hand (especially those belonging to very popular religions or religions you are supposed to believe in), seem to be exempt from this perception: no matter how outlandish and naïve they ...
I think he did the right thing there. He did it badly and clumsily, but had I been in his place I'd have had a hard time getting a grip on my emotions, and we know how sensitive and emotional he is.
Rational Wiki are great guys. We try to watch our own step, but it's nice to have someone else watching us too, who can understand and sympathize with what we do.
1.You mean they incur in the exact same kind of legal practices as private groups, with the same frequency? Given the difference in position, methodolgy and resourses, I doubt it, but I don't have any evidence pointing to either side about the behavior of Universal Health Coverage systems. I'd need time to ask a few people and find a few sources.
2.I don't think it's a matter of "layers" so much as one of how those layers are organized. The exact same amount of people can have productivity outputs that are radically different in function of the al...
Well, given that the government's allledged goal is to provide the service while the private organization's alledged goal is to make a profit, one would expect the State (I like to call the organization the State or the Adminsitration: the Government should simply mean whoever the current team of politically appointed president/minister/cabinet are, rather than the entire bureaucracy) to be less likely to "weasel out of" paying for your treatment, a risk I (in complete and utter subjectivity and in the here and now) deem more frightening (and frustrating) than the disease itself.
And yes, risk mitigation is always negative sum, that's kind of a thermodynamic requisite.
Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of "imagining", of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care o...
This theory seems to debunk the classical "people need an economic incentive to do their jobs": it seems to imply that imposing and economic reward on the tax detracts from the intrinsinc enjoyment of the task by making the task performers think the task is for the sake of the remuneration rather than for its own sake. It also seems to suggest that, were this reward system be removed (but what would it be replaced with, practically speaking?) people might be happier by enjoying their own work.
^Hm. That'd be some very near-sighted companies and people, don't you think? The Defending Your Doorstep fallacy etc. etc. Still, with some education fo the public ("Dear viewers, THIS is what would happen if everyone decided all the money should go to the Army right after a terrorist attack") and some patches (I can't imagine why people would put all their money into whatever they think is most important, rather than distributing it in an order of priorities: usually people's interests aren't so clear cut that they put one cause at such priority...
Well, at least the bureaucratic inefficiencies are entirely incidental to the problem, and there's no decisive evidence for corporate bureaucracies to be any better than public ones (I suspect partisanship gets in the way of finding out said evidence, as well as a slew of other variables), so that factor... doesn't factor. As for the higher taxes... how much are you ready to pay so that, the day you catch some horrible disease, the public entity will be able to afford diverting enough of its resources to save you? What are you more afraid of, cancer and ot...
I have left it ambiguous on purpose. What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.
IDEALLY: Universal means everyone should have a right to as much health service as is necessary for their bodies and minds functioning as well as it can, if they ask for it. That would include education, coaching, and sports, among many others. And nobody should ever be allowed to die if they don't want to and there's any way of preventing it.
Between "leaving anyone to die because they don't have the money or assets to pay for their treat...
So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?
Yes, it's amazing how many bad decisions are made because it's heartbreaking to just say no.
Here are two excellent examples of what you just explained, as per the Fiction Identity Postulate:
*Doom, Consequences of Evil as the "bad draft", and this as the done-right version.
*Same for this infuriating Chick Tract and this revisiting of it (it's a Tear Jerker)
*And everyone is familiar with the original My Little Pony works VS the Friendship Is Magic continuity.
What, you mean like in Gangs of New York?
Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I'm very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation's youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it's irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that's wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the wa...
I dunno man, maybe it's a confusion on my part, but universal health coverage for one thing seems like a good enough goal in and of tiself. Not specifically in the form of a State-sponsored organziation, but the fuction of everyone having the right to health treatments, of no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money at a given time, I think that, from a humanistic point of view, it's sort of obvious that we should have it if we can pay for it.
More importantly, it forces constant, exponential economic growth. Jormungard has to grow faster than he eats himself, or the world collapses.