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VagabondSpectre

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No. Evolutionary psychology tends to treat minds and brains as black-boxes, where it seeks to explain the practical or evolutionary purpose of behavio...
June 06, 2019 at 20:07
Don't believe everything you read. She was denied her request for euthanasia. (translated form the article): "Six months ago, a 16-year-old girl from ...
June 05, 2019 at 00:25
But what would Hippocrates say? From what I've read about her situation, she had already been emotionally scarred by being forced into various institu...
June 04, 2019 at 22:08
I should probably also mention that this 17 year old dutch girl was not euthanized. She applied for euthanasia but was denied. In her own words (trans...
June 04, 2019 at 21:44
Lots of the early supporters of euthanasia have since recanted after seeing a cascade of questionable cases in and around the Netherlands It's a slipp...
June 04, 2019 at 21:11
Lasers don't work against mirrors. Make the rockets shiny, and it's game over for lasers... Regarding M.A.D, the rub is that whoever disarms first is ...
June 04, 2019 at 08:13
Because it will just evaporate and then get pissed back into the sea. We would only need to extract it on an as-needed basis, and that costs electrici...
June 01, 2019 at 06:41
I wouldn't underestimate catharsis, but could we in the nascent throes of something completely different? Since before Trump was elected I've been hop...
May 30, 2019 at 00:15
It's not so much economic inequality as it is fear of economic inequality. We're no longer in recession, but the market failures of the last decade (e...
May 27, 2019 at 23:42
This is definitely an apt description. To add to this, in some of the more populated rooms the chaos is extreme, where a team of party-loyal lieutenan...
May 21, 2019 at 05:58
But the fascists aren't yet in control. For all of Trump's harmful stupidity he is still being checked by a liberal system and the rule of law. I'm wo...
May 20, 2019 at 22:33
Posing as an alt-righter, no; but debating alt-righters on alt-right Discord servers, yes. It's a grotesque affair given the rabid nature of internet ...
May 20, 2019 at 21:34
Good rhetoric is more or less the rub in all of this. In the political climate of today, the gloves only protect the knuckles (e.g: anonymity as prote...
May 20, 2019 at 21:00
Yes, as I remarked earlier, some proponents of change embrace much more radical and violent methods than others, up to and including inciting terror. ...
May 20, 2019 at 19:40
Unfortunately, they've immunized themselves against particular sources of shame. Getting called a racist is a badge of honor for them because to them ...
May 20, 2019 at 19:08
They very much rely on aesthetic appeal. In fact, over the course of hundreds of debates against them on alt-right platforms, in dozens of cases they ...
May 20, 2019 at 18:58
People like Shapiro and Spencer have been able to build significant followings despite the lessons of history, and willingness to debate them hasn't c...
May 20, 2019 at 17:33
We were speaking in the context of Shapiro, so it was about Shapiro. Willow said that they want to live in a world where Shapiro's views aren't respec...
May 20, 2019 at 09:49
You're juxtaposing Shapiro's conservative beliefs with murder and pedophilia? Isn't that a bit of an overreaction? Is considering Shapiro's beliefs is...
May 20, 2019 at 02:45
But we're also talking about Shapiro. If we banned Shapiro from all platforms under the justification of anti-Fascism, the naive 17 year old won't und...
May 20, 2019 at 00:36
How is the average 17 year old supposed to learn why Fascism isn't worth considering if they're not allowed to even consider it?
May 20, 2019 at 00:12
This still isn't a coherent ask, and it's strategically self-defeating (because rallying against Shapiro with emotion and force causes others to rally...
May 19, 2019 at 23:57
I've been reading James Defronzo's Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements lately, and I've been quite surprised by the numerous similarities between ...
May 19, 2019 at 22:41
There is definitely a time and a place for violence, and on the societal level there's also a time and a place for genuine revolution. But when we go ...
May 19, 2019 at 22:17
I don't know... Richard Spencer still seems to get a lot of attention on social media like Youtube, and he was never really that popular (but he's bec...
May 19, 2019 at 20:27
I'm not trying to generalize all conservatives as contributing to this. To be fair, Shapiro can be almost wholly excluded from what I mentioned above,...
May 19, 2019 at 09:02
Quote one line where I alleged or stated that 'anything other than speech amounts to violence'.
May 19, 2019 at 08:56
I'm not condemning anything that isn't speech, I'm condemning violence and intimidation through force (at least in the context of a Shapiro event). Th...
May 19, 2019 at 08:51
Oh yes you can. Anything indexed by the google search engine counts as a platform, and as click-baity provocateurs, there are an unfathomably large nu...
May 19, 2019 at 08:46
I would hardly describe my objections as hysterical (certainly no more so than what I'm criticizing). And to thrice clarify, I'm not condemning anythi...
May 19, 2019 at 08:00
You're missing the point: it's not about who deserves to be heard, it's about who is influential, what they are saying, and responding to it directly....
May 19, 2019 at 01:14
As long as the bullhorns and barricades of the former don't crowd-out the benefits of the latter, then absolutely. And this is how we've always done i...
May 18, 2019 at 21:46
Because either: Shapiro's rhetoric is meaningless, persuades nobody, and need not be protested whatsoever, let alone censored. OR Shapiro's rhetoric d...
May 18, 2019 at 21:28
There are two errors in this formulation: The first is that Shapiro's views are already out in the wild, and regardless of our whack-a-wing-nut high-s...
May 18, 2019 at 06:26
It really doesn't matter who or what he is if he is able to win followers. We do need to challenge his rhetoric (or at the very least question it), or...
May 18, 2019 at 04:46
I mostly agree, but I think the left can actually gain from earnestly engaging with him (although not many let wing pundits are well prepared to do so...
May 18, 2019 at 04:29
You're grossly mischaracterizing my position, yet again. I condemned violence as a means to censorship, and apparently that makes me a howler worthy o...
May 18, 2019 at 02:29
The standard marketplace of ideas line is an oldie, and it's still in many ways a goodie, but my practical argument has yet to be addressed: censorshi...
May 18, 2019 at 00:01
Unfortunately, how we look does matter, but so does what we say and what we do, especially in the eyes and ears of young university students. That Sha...
May 17, 2019 at 02:05
The joke is that Shapiro is a meme of your own making, just like Trump. Who needs debates or voting booths when you have undying righteous indignation...
May 17, 2019 at 00:33
I don't see the asymmetry of means between political camps that you do. Corporations invest in both sides to subvert them as best they can, old and ne...
May 17, 2019 at 00:17
Because of the existing "social contract" between Berkeley and its students. What I mean by this is that it's an unwritten agreement which, when broke...
May 16, 2019 at 22:24
So you're arguing that because moneyed interests are supporting Shapiro, and because ideological merit has nothing to do with politics or democracy th...
May 16, 2019 at 21:48
You're right that what counts most is determined in the field (voting booths mostly), but we embrace the use of force at the expense of the use of sen...
May 16, 2019 at 04:09
Short of declaring Spencer an enemy of the state, how to we defeat fascism, and does protesting Shapiro contribute to that fight? I'm willing to accep...
May 16, 2019 at 03:21
I'm reluctant to go into specifics because I'm not looking to tit-for-tat justify violent actions from either side, I'm saying that embracing violence...
May 16, 2019 at 01:14
It's not "fair" because banning conservative views on campus would be gross political favoritism. Conservative students are paying customers, and as l...
May 15, 2019 at 20:50
Then my argument is that one political faction of Berkeley U's students should not be able to control the platforms of an opposing faction through for...
May 14, 2019 at 20:03
As far as I can gather, you're a socialist leaning anti-fascist. In any case, the views of the Berkeley students who use force to shut down conservati...
May 13, 2019 at 21:23
There's no such "right to block entry" in this context, except to one's own property. By barricading doors to interfere with others, we're approaching...
May 13, 2019 at 09:34