Delta1212

I'll admit, this actually made me laugh.

Zing. Although you've raised a point I hadn't thought of. If Putin is one of, if not the, most prominent white world leaders right now, does that mean that the falling price of gas is having a corresponding effect on the IQ of white people everywhere? Should I stop celebrating?

So if pure might is equivalent to intelligence, and the intelligence of a race is based on its relative might in the world, and the person currently occupying the most powerful position in the world is black, are you arguing that black people are clearly inherently smarter than white people?

I personally created all life on Earth. This, I think you'll agree, is a position worth investigating since no story exists without some basis in reality.

Eugenics isn't about who lives longest. It's about who reproduces most. By and large, the rich are not having the largest families. The more money you have, the more children you could support, but the more access you also have to medical knowledge and technology that will help you restrict the number of unplanned children you have. As a result, the wealthy tend to reproduce less, not more, which is the opposite effect of that you'd expect from a eugenics campaign.

You're saying this based on what? It still sounds like you're treating speciation as something that happens, and suddenly you have a new species. That's not how it works.

I don't know how to assemble a tumbler lock but I know enough to argue with someone who claims that the locking mechanism is dependent on tiny elves living inside the lock.

This is a distinction without a difference.

Like irregardless, racialism is a word with a couple of extraneous letters that in no way change the meaning of the word.

Incidentally, my comment wasn't a description of the imbalance between us and them technologically. I was referencing the fact that the introduction of the machine gun drastically altered the state of warfare and what tactics could be expected to work, but the "best and brightest" kept ordering headlong charges at the positions because that's the kind of warfare they knew, even though it was patently obvious that old ways of fighting had now become incredibly stupid and ineffective. America, in this scenario, is the one on horseback, not the one with the machine gun.

Just arrogance? Of course not. But there have been enough examples throughout history of military leaders failing to adapt to changing circumstances in how wars need to be fought and generally falling into the trap of "All I have is a hammer so ever problem lookalike a nail" that I'm not going to discount it as a major contributor.

Why charge machine guns on horseback?

Virginity isn't an real thing that you can actually lose. Someone will consider you to have lost your virginity when you do something that they consider to invalidate your virginity. Different people will have different opinions of what constitutes losing your virginity, and none of them are wrong. Because, again, it's not a real, physical thing.

Oh, I didn't think it was, and didn't mean to come across as if I had interpreted it that way. I think it's important to remember that if the rules we wish the world worked by were the easiest and safest rules to follow, those would already be the rules to game. The only way we're going to see the rules change is if enough people are willing to put in the effort to play the game (be it financial, political or otherwise) according to the ideal instead of just perpetuating the system as it currently stands. In many cases, that does mean taking on a handicap, but it is rarely a truly insurmountable handicap, and if no one ever takes it on, nothing will ever deviate from the trajectory it's already on. I don't fault people who play by the rules as they exist, but I reserve my respect for the people who play by the rules as they'd like them to be. So good on you.

The world is what it is regardless of what any group of people believes it to be. And no, there's no way for you to ever directively experience objective reality outside of your subjective reconstruction of it.

Most people don't expect to actually find the singularity predicted by GR at the center of a black hole, but to have whatever actually happens be governed by a quantum theory do Gravity which we do not currently possess.

No. Whether something qualifies as a species is decided by taxonomists. While there is a level of arbitrariness to categorization in this many, it's not completely arbitrary, and is based upon on reproductively isolated two populations are. Based on that reproductive isolation, taxonomistss decide whether a population qualifies as a separate species, but the "speciation event" is whatever lead to the population becoming reproductively isolated in the first place, which is something that actually happened in nature rather than the moment a labelled was applied. Whether an event counts as a speciation event or not certainly depends upon how taxonomiats have decided to classify the populations involved, but it's still an event that took place regardless of how it is classified. It's like having a name for the formation of a planet "the planet formation event" and saying that, since taxonomiats of a sort vote on whether something is a planet, if the decision on Pluto ever got overturned and it is reinstated as a planet, that would be the real "planet formation event." That's nonsense. Pluto's formation happened regardless of whether it qualifies as a planet or not, and if it does, that is a "planet formation event." Similarly, whatever event lead to the traits which lead taxonomiats to classify a population as a species happened regardless of whether the label is applied. If it is applied, that is the speciation event. If it does not get applied, that would still be an event that happened, it just wouldn't count as a "speciation event" because it didn't lead to enough reproductive isolation for taxonomiats to classify the result as a new species. In no circumstance is the application of the label the "real" event.

Your brain is just as part of the objective world as everything else part of the objective world, and your subjective experience of interacting with your brain (and other people's brains) is just as much a part of your subjective world as everything else. It's not really all that complicated.

And just in general, Wikipedia tends to be a pretty decent resource when it comes to most subjects in science.

Ok, but some people think the death penalty is cruel and gratuitous. You are trying to understand why people who think that but have trouble articulating why think that way. So in the same vein, I'm asking if you can articulate why this is cruel and gratuitous while capital punishment is not.

I hope this doesn't come across as flippant, but why shouldn't we amputate all of a violent criminal's limbs? I know you've said that would be cruel, but heartening back to your point about why people draw a line at the death penalty, why do you draw a line there?

In fairness, that's a false dichotomy. It doesn't come down to either "God is punishing the innocent" or "God is helpless to stop their suffering." God could also be perfectly capable of ending the suffering and simply choose not to, for example.

Well, that's my problem, actually. I could define quite a lot about the way the justice system presently works as being cruel. The way that it not only does not provide much in the way of resources for rehabilitation but often actively strips away opportunities for such, essentially turning one mistake into a lifelong source of punishment is rather cruel. Solitary confinement is cruel. Forcing someone to sit on death row awaiting their inevitable execution is cruel. Continuously asking for postponements on court dates due to lack of preparation because you are in an understaffed district so that someone can sit in detention for years waiting for a "speedy trial" to start without ever having been convicted of anything is cruel. Heck, you could make a case that even just locking someone up in a cell, surrounded by criminals with inadequate supervision of social interactions is cruel. Cruelty is the point at which we find the discomfort inflicted upon another person to no longer be tolerable. That threshold is going to vary between people, sometimes considerably. The only way to ensure that a given punishment is impossible to be interpreted as cruel is if it does no harm to the person being punished, but inflicting harm in response to an undesirable action is pretty much the bare definition of punishment. So we draw a line and say "the harm inflicted on this side of the line is acceptable" and "the harm inflicted beyond this point is cruel." Some people draw the line at torture. Others at execution. Others still at even lower thresholds. They are all essentially arbitrary lines. I have no problem with you asking why confinement is on the table but execution is not. That is an entirely fair question. By the same token, however, you can ask either "If execution is on the table, why isn't torture?" or, in the other direction, "why is confinement on the table?" And these questions are just as valid. If you can answer why one is acceptable to you but not another, you can answer your own question: Capital punishment is off the table for some people because they draw the line in a different place than you do.

I don't mean to quibble over semantics, but that defines cruelty as a quality of the person or persons inflicting a punishment, rather than being a feature of the punishment itself. By that definition, it would be impossible for any punishment to be cruel as long as it was carried out by someone who felt bad about doing it. I was looking more for some parameter that defines what about a punishment makes it cruel or not.

Can we establish a definition of cruelty for the sake of the discussion?