Sure, some of it is in good faith, but there are also those who just don’t want any form of welfare or any immigrants or any labor laws who won’t say that, but just point out edge cases.
He was willing to work though. To me that’s very different than heading to Korea deliberately to beg with a sign you copied off the internet.
This is because they want things to be neat and orderly psychologically. You need a rule, and people need to follow the rules, and that’s that. It’s an approach that works in some context, like in the army (usually), and is psychologically more satisfying than admitting things are messy. But it’s a messy world, and we need to look at the genuine cost-benefit of policies and broader consequences, not just what seems good to handle a specific situation. As the legal saying goes, “hard cases make bad law.”
Korea could require that you need at least $1k to get a tourist visa or whatever. I mean, going to another country to beg seems like a crazy edge case. Just as we don’t need laws against people punching themselves in the face, I doubt laws are needed to handle this situation.
What Irish runner said… The Liberal Party are centrist… And Labour is left (except the Blair years) and Torys are right leaning.
I’m on board with you as far as what I think the more common cause is. I’m just thinking of racists pretending to have reasons on the one hand and people like the Koch Bros on the other who use edge cases as propaganda. Those may not be the things in the minds of the average conservative voter, but they have a big impact and they are going to be more represented among the loudest voices.
My post was just to point out that these people suck. I never called for laws against them.
This whole issue goes also to the psychic appeal of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. People want simple rules to follow. It’s psychologically satisfying. That it makes everything worse is just an inconvenient fact of reality, and only wusses let their ideas be dictated by reality. Need to be a man! MAGA!
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Yes… We have a number of partys, you could come over and start 1 if you like/have the funds… No support needed. 
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This hurt to read.
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I think the Koch brothers genuinely think their ideas are best for everyone. Their sincerity is the problem. That their ideas actually immiserate people, enrich themselves, and help destroy the world, is an inconvenient side effect, a blemish really.
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I was just talking about this on the other forum and you may agree or not - but since you are a philosophy (specifically history of philosophy iirc) dude — a lot of the conservative/Ben Shapiro people talk about logic and reason and The Enlightenment, but they aren’t really doing Englightenment thinking. They are more like Plato. The new thing in the Englightenment and the leap forward in science and technology wasn’t logic. That was old already. It was empiricism. (which wasn’t new to like farmers who had to figure out what kind of irrigation worked, but didn’t have the final word in science/philosophy before then)
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On the one hand, kinda. They are hardcore believers and were raised by a founding member of the John Birch Society. On the other hand, their firmly held beliefs haven’t stopped them from taking corporate welfare or other things that should supposedly violate their principles.
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My speciality is/was more contemporary philosophy of science and cognitive science, but I basically agree with this characterization. I also think Aristotle is a massively better philosopher than Plato, but that’s a more complex issue.
As a rule of thumb, I tend to tune out people who mention “logic” in discussions of public policy. They are generally just misusing a word.
It’s kind of interesting how much the framers of the US constitution were tuned into contemporary philosophy and people like Hume and Adam Smith (the philosopher, not the caricature), and how much more they looked to history than the ideas of ancient philosophers. Hume’s History of England was published from (1754–61). Smiths major works were The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). (And Hume and Smith were best friends.) Also, many philosophers around that time and after were heavily involved in law and were often lawyers (eg, Leibniz, Locke, Bentham).
I don’t know Plato that well, but I’ve read some of his stuff. I only know Aristotle though what people have said about him. I think I agree with you on that though. As I understand it, although Aristotle wasn’t very good at science, he did try to do some empirical study. I think there’s a reason Plato in particular is quite popular with these assholes.
Well, if Aristotle wasn’t that good at science, it’s mainly because he invented it. Galileo wasn’t that good at physics on that criteria. I would say that Aristotle’s conception of the world was more complete and empirically adequate that Plato’s. He had more of an emphasis on the empirical, but is system reigned for 2000 years mainly because of its non-empirical features. It basically offered a broadly sensible conception of an ordered universe in line with human experience.
He famously claimed women had fewer teeth than men. Never thought to check despite marrying twice. I assume at least one paper on the subject has been written with The Unexamined Wife in its title.
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Nah I feel like there was a lot of low-hanging fruit back then, really. Not knocking Aristotle, just saying.
Like the greeks to the Romans, when the Islamists discovered Aristotle, like most other peoples, they were like, “Oh, this guy is smarter than us and basically right about things.” I don’t know about the teeth thing, but that’s not something one would regard as a significant defect in the broader aristotelian philosophical system.
"Since this natural variation is so well-known to anthropologists, I was intrigued to find in a comment to a post at Gene Expression that Aristotle believed men had more teeth than women. I went in search of the essential citation, and found it in “The History of Animals,” book 2, part 1 (translated by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson):
Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made: but the more teeth they have the more long-lived are they, as a rule, while those are short-lived in proportion that have teeth fewer in number and thinly set.
Part 4
The last teeth to come in man are molars called ‘wisdom-teeth’, which come at the age of twenty years, in the case of both sexes. Cases have been known in women upwards. of eighty years old where at the very close of life the wisdom-teeth have come up, causing great pain in their coming; and cases have been known of the like phenomenon in men too. This happens, when it does happen, in the case of people where the wisdom-teeth have not come up in early years.
There may be no accounting for Aristotle’s claim that men have more teeth than women, since on average they are the same. On the other hand, with the variation in third molar eruption it is quite possible that the women available for Aristotle to examine might have – by chance – had fewer teeth. The idea that there is a systematic difference between men and women would appear to be belied by the following section, where Aristotle clearly discusses the presence of the wisdom teeth in both sexes. This part is a vivid illustration of the problems of the posterior dentition in general – ancient Greeks and modern Americans alike.
I was similarly fascinated to see that “wisdom teeth” was a translation from the ancient Greek. Here’s the entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary:
Wisdom teeth so called from 1848 (earlier teeth of wisdom , 1668), a loan-translation of L. dentes sapientiae , itself a loan-transl. of Gk. sophronisteres (used by Hippocrates, from sophron “prudent, self-controlled”), so called because they usually appear ages 17-25, when a person reaches adulthood.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/history/aristotle_wisdom_teeth.html
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