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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On December 08 2017 03:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2017 03:28 kollin wrote:On December 08 2017 03:11 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 03:04 Plansix wrote:On December 08 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 02:52 Introvert wrote:
Gillibrand was out compaigning with Bill Clinton not that long ago. Then a few weeks ago they were going have an ethics committee look at it (where nothing ever happens). but now that polls show Moore winning again and the magical number of 7 accusers was reached, now we must stand strong!
They obviously get some credit, but not too much. Hilarious. I don't really agree that they get any credit. If you do something for political reasons that happens to be ethical, that's not at all the same as being ethical.Granted, that's certainly better than what the GOP's doing, but I don't look at see a choice between a conman and a murder and think to myself "Man, thank God we have this conman so we don't have to pick the murder. The conman is so ethical by comparison!" This means that there can be no ethics in politics, because doing the right thing might be seen as a positive and therefore politically advantageous. I can’t tell if you are really cynical or just didn’t think that one through to the end. Or maybe the ethical value of one's actions depends on one's intent? Revolutionary stuff I know. Admittedly, it's hard to ascertain one's intent in practice but this discussion began under the explicit assumption from KwarK that the resignation was politically motivated. Humans are unfortunately not omniscient enough to ethically judge anyone in this way. That's a better justification for not being judgmental than for passing moral judgment on people based on the consequences of their actions, though. Intent clearly matters for some 'evaluating morality'- purpose (as futile of an endeavor as that generally is), but it's also much better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. And this is the best possible framing for republicans of republicans supporting Moore while democrats distance themselves from Franken.
I would argue intent is a critical component to assessing morality. I interpret morality to relate very closely to decision making, where intent is clearly a big part.
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On December 08 2017 03:44 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2017 03:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:On December 08 2017 03:28 kollin wrote:On December 08 2017 03:11 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 03:04 Plansix wrote:On December 08 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 02:52 Introvert wrote:
Gillibrand was out compaigning with Bill Clinton not that long ago. Then a few weeks ago they were going have an ethics committee look at it (where nothing ever happens). but now that polls show Moore winning again and the magical number of 7 accusers was reached, now we must stand strong!
They obviously get some credit, but not too much. Hilarious. I don't really agree that they get any credit. If you do something for political reasons that happens to be ethical, that's not at all the same as being ethical.Granted, that's certainly better than what the GOP's doing, but I don't look at see a choice between a conman and a murder and think to myself "Man, thank God we have this conman so we don't have to pick the murder. The conman is so ethical by comparison!" This means that there can be no ethics in politics, because doing the right thing might be seen as a positive and therefore politically advantageous. I can’t tell if you are really cynical or just didn’t think that one through to the end. Or maybe the ethical value of one's actions depends on one's intent? Revolutionary stuff I know. Admittedly, it's hard to ascertain one's intent in practice but this discussion began under the explicit assumption from KwarK that the resignation was politically motivated. Humans are unfortunately not omniscient enough to ethically judge anyone in this way. That's a better justification for not being judgmental than for passing moral judgment on people based on the consequences of their actions, though. Intent clearly matters for some 'evaluating morality'- purpose (as futile of an endeavor as that generally is), but it's also much better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. And this is the best possible framing for republicans of republicans supporting Moore while democrats distance themselves from Franken. I would argue intent is a critical component to assessing morality. I interpret morality to relate very closely to decision making, where intent is clearly a big part.
The problem with that is that intent is never be truly known. Intent is unknowable. That is why good faith is so important.
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Norway28736 Posts
On December 08 2017 03:44 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2017 03:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:On December 08 2017 03:28 kollin wrote:On December 08 2017 03:11 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 03:04 Plansix wrote:On December 08 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 02:52 Introvert wrote:
Gillibrand was out compaigning with Bill Clinton not that long ago. Then a few weeks ago they were going have an ethics committee look at it (where nothing ever happens). but now that polls show Moore winning again and the magical number of 7 accusers was reached, now we must stand strong!
They obviously get some credit, but not too much. Hilarious. I don't really agree that they get any credit. If you do something for political reasons that happens to be ethical, that's not at all the same as being ethical.Granted, that's certainly better than what the GOP's doing, but I don't look at see a choice between a conman and a murder and think to myself "Man, thank God we have this conman so we don't have to pick the murder. The conman is so ethical by comparison!" This means that there can be no ethics in politics, because doing the right thing might be seen as a positive and therefore politically advantageous. I can’t tell if you are really cynical or just didn’t think that one through to the end. Or maybe the ethical value of one's actions depends on one's intent? Revolutionary stuff I know. Admittedly, it's hard to ascertain one's intent in practice but this discussion began under the explicit assumption from KwarK that the resignation was politically motivated. Humans are unfortunately not omniscient enough to ethically judge anyone in this way. That's a better justification for not being judgmental than for passing moral judgment on people based on the consequences of their actions, though. Intent clearly matters for some 'evaluating morality'- purpose (as futile of an endeavor as that generally is), but it's also much better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. And this is the best possible framing for republicans of republicans supporting Moore while democrats distance themselves from Franken. I would argue intent is a critical component to assessing morality. I interpret morality to relate very closely to decision making, where intent is clearly a big part.
I agree. Evaluating morality without factoring in intent is pointless. But then seeing as how we're rarely in a position to know the intent, the conclusion of this should be to stop trying to evaluate morality rather than to try to judge morality based on outcome instead.
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On December 08 2017 03:44 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2017 03:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:On December 08 2017 03:28 kollin wrote:On December 08 2017 03:11 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 03:04 Plansix wrote:On December 08 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 02:52 Introvert wrote:
Gillibrand was out compaigning with Bill Clinton not that long ago. Then a few weeks ago they were going have an ethics committee look at it (where nothing ever happens). but now that polls show Moore winning again and the magical number of 7 accusers was reached, now we must stand strong!
They obviously get some credit, but not too much. Hilarious. I don't really agree that they get any credit. If you do something for political reasons that happens to be ethical, that's not at all the same as being ethical.Granted, that's certainly better than what the GOP's doing, but I don't look at see a choice between a conman and a murder and think to myself "Man, thank God we have this conman so we don't have to pick the murder. The conman is so ethical by comparison!" This means that there can be no ethics in politics, because doing the right thing might be seen as a positive and therefore politically advantageous. I can’t tell if you are really cynical or just didn’t think that one through to the end. Or maybe the ethical value of one's actions depends on one's intent? Revolutionary stuff I know. Admittedly, it's hard to ascertain one's intent in practice but this discussion began under the explicit assumption from KwarK that the resignation was politically motivated. Humans are unfortunately not omniscient enough to ethically judge anyone in this way. That's a better justification for not being judgmental than for passing moral judgment on people based on the consequences of their actions, though. Intent clearly matters for some 'evaluating morality'- purpose (as futile of an endeavor as that generally is), but it's also much better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. And this is the best possible framing for republicans of republicans supporting Moore while democrats distance themselves from Franken. I would argue intent is a critical component to assessing morality. I interpret morality to relate very closely to decision making, where intent is clearly a big part.
But who's the judge of this morality in the end? We cannot actually know the intent of anyone who makes decisions, because we are not God. Every single ethical system that is deontological relies on some transcendent being eventually rewarding those whose actions are good.
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Which story did you hear more about this year – how climate change makes disasters like hurricanes worse, or how Donald Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans?
If you answered the latter, you have plenty of company. Academic Jennifer Good analyzed two weeks of hurricane coverage during the height of hurricane season on eight major TV networks, and found that about 60% of the stories included the word Trump, and only about 5% mentioned climate change.
Trump doesn’t just suck the oxygen out of the room; he sucks the carbon dioxide out of the national dialogue. Even in a year when we’ve had string of hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires worthy of the Book of Revelation – just what climate scientists have told us to expect – the effect of climate change on extreme weather has been dramatically undercovered. Some of Trump’s tweets generate more national coverage than devastating disasters.
Good’s analysis lines up with research done by my organization, Media Matters for America, which found that TV news outlets gave far too little coverage to the well-documented links between climate change and hurricanes. ABC and NBC both completely failed to bring up climate change during their news coverage of Harvey, a storm that caused the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the continental US. When Irma hit soon after, breaking the record for hurricane intensity, ABC didn’t do much better.
Coverage was even worse of Hurricane Maria, the third hurricane to make landfall in the US this year. Not only did media outlets largely fail to cover the climate connection; in many cases, they largely failed to cover the hurricane itself.
The weekend after Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, the five major Sunday political talkshows devoted less than one minute in total to the storm and the humanitarian emergency it triggered. And Maria got only about a third as many mentions in major print and online media outlets as did Harvey and Irma, researchers at the MIT Media Lab found.
When Trump visited Puerto Rico on 3 October, almost two weeks after Maria assailed the island, he got wall-to-wall coverage as journalists reported on his paper-towel toss and other egregious missteps. But after that trip, prime-time cable news coverage of Puerto Rico’s recovery plummeted, Media Matters found, even though many residents to this day suffer from electricity outages and a lack of clean water, a dire situation that deserves serious and sustained coverage.
Scientists have been telling us that climate change will make hurricanes more intense and dangerous, an unfortunate reality made all too clear by this year’s record-busting hurricane season. “These are precisely the sort of things we expect to happen as we continue to warm the planet,” climate scientist Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, told Huffington Post.
But while nearly three-quarters of Americans know that most scientists are in agreement that climate change is happening, according to recent poll, only 42% of Americans believe climate change will pose a serious threat to them during their lifetimes. Too many still believe – wrongly – that climate disasters are just something that will happen in the future. They are happening now.
In the first nine months of 2017, the US was assailed by 15 weather and climate disasters that each did more than a billion dollars in damage – in the case of the hurricanes, much more. The combined economic hit from Harvey, Irma and Maria could end up being $200bn or more, according to Moody’s Analytics. And then in October, unprecedented wildfires in northern California did an estimated $3bn in damage.
Climate change can be hard to see and intuitively grasp. It’s a relatively slow-moving scientific phenomenon caused by pollution from all around the globe. It’s not usually dramatic to watch like a candidate debate or the fallout from a White House scandal.
But an extreme weather event is a moment when people can see and feel climate change – and if they’re unlucky, get seriously hurt by it. When those disasters happen, media outlets need to cover them as climate change stories. And when a number of them happen in quick succession, as they did this year, the media have an even greater responsibility to report the big-picture story about climate change and help the public understand the immediacy of the threat.
If we are to fend off the worst possible outcomes of climate change, we need to shift as quickly as possible to a cleaner energy system. We could expect more Americans to get on board with that solution if they more fully understood the problem – and that’s where the critical role of the media comes in. As the weather gets worse, we need our journalism to get better.
Source
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On December 08 2017 03:52 kollin wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2017 03:44 Mohdoo wrote:On December 08 2017 03:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:On December 08 2017 03:28 kollin wrote:On December 08 2017 03:11 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 03:04 Plansix wrote:On December 08 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On December 08 2017 02:52 Introvert wrote:
Gillibrand was out compaigning with Bill Clinton not that long ago. Then a few weeks ago they were going have an ethics committee look at it (where nothing ever happens). but now that polls show Moore winning again and the magical number of 7 accusers was reached, now we must stand strong!
They obviously get some credit, but not too much. Hilarious. I don't really agree that they get any credit. If you do something for political reasons that happens to be ethical, that's not at all the same as being ethical.Granted, that's certainly better than what the GOP's doing, but I don't look at see a choice between a conman and a murder and think to myself "Man, thank God we have this conman so we don't have to pick the murder. The conman is so ethical by comparison!" This means that there can be no ethics in politics, because doing the right thing might be seen as a positive and therefore politically advantageous. I can’t tell if you are really cynical or just didn’t think that one through to the end. Or maybe the ethical value of one's actions depends on one's intent? Revolutionary stuff I know. Admittedly, it's hard to ascertain one's intent in practice but this discussion began under the explicit assumption from KwarK that the resignation was politically motivated. Humans are unfortunately not omniscient enough to ethically judge anyone in this way. That's a better justification for not being judgmental than for passing moral judgment on people based on the consequences of their actions, though. Intent clearly matters for some 'evaluating morality'- purpose (as futile of an endeavor as that generally is), but it's also much better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. And this is the best possible framing for republicans of republicans supporting Moore while democrats distance themselves from Franken. I would argue intent is a critical component to assessing morality. I interpret morality to relate very closely to decision making, where intent is clearly a big part. But who's the judge of this morality in the end? We cannot actually know the intent of anyone who makes decisions, because we are not God. Every single ethical system that is deontological relies on some transcendent being eventually rewarding those whose actions are good.
I guess I am saying whether we can answer the question or not, the ultimate truth of the matter still relies on intent.
I can say I killed a guy to keep him from killing someone else, but maybe I actually did it because I hate his scarf. I may have just taken the opportunity to kill that ugly scarf wearing shithead because I saw him about to shoot someone.
In the case of democrats and Franken, I really do think core ideology of democrats is significantly less forgiving of sexual assault than republicans right now. I think this is both internally true and also true because of constituencies. It is very possible Franken was going to get primary'd after all this.
It is of course true that democratic leadership feels pressure, but it is really hard to argue that is the entirety of the matter. No matter how you slice it, democrats are way more aggressive in fighting sexual assault of various forms in the past year. A big part of that is inspired by Trump. He has been quite the lightning rod for sexual assault awareness.
But that is NOT the same as this being motivated to discredit Trump. It's the same reason any story about an illegal getting arrested is a HUGE deal in light of the "build a wall" stuff on the right. Republicans are way more intense about illegal immigrant crime because of that one dude who crossed like 6 times and shot that woman. An insanely clear case of injustice that they are rallying behind now.
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Before we discuss morality and strategy, shouldn't Franken be out for much more basic reasons, like logic and consistency?
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The problem with this discussion of intent and ethics is that it is completely besides the point. Politicians are like lawyers, they have no principles, but in order to represent an interest group they temporarily adopt them. Every decision they make, especially as an organisation, is strategical in nature. Getting rid of Franken because of pressure from their female consituency is actually a victory for democracy, it shows that public opinion matters to some degree and that the Democratic Party feels pressured to respond.
If the Dems score electoral victories and contribute to reforming the endemic sexual misconduct that runs rampant within certain circles, that is actually very important in a way that goes beyond personal ethics. But you cannot run on that platform with people like Clinton and Franken representing you.
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What's up, Oregon? You really thought practicing math without a license constituted illegal activity?
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That is really dumb. Engineering is licensed in a bunch of states and traffic patterns are a really complex form of engineering. But the dude wasn't charging for it, which is how most jurisdictions would define practice,
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What the fuck is this shit? Russia gets banned so Trump is going pretend he can make the US stay home too?
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United States43510 Posts
Jesus Danglars, for once will you just read the article. They were trying to argue that engineer should be a protected professional designation and that he couldn't refer to himself as one without being a member of their club, not that he wasn't allowed to do maths.
It's similar to how the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics don't care if you tell people to avoid gluten and go paleo but they care very much if you call yourself a dietitian.
He wrote a letter to the engineers club in which he signed off as an engineer and they were mad about him signing himself as an engineer when he wasn't even a member of their club. It was nothing to do with the traffic lights or his theories about how they should be optimized.
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Somehow I had a feeling that clicking on the twitter link leading to another link would lead to a wildly differing interpretation of the events than the one originally presented.
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The law seems poorly written if it can be applied to someone simply using the word to describe themselves, but not attempting to charge for their services and a professional capacity. In the case of practicing law in my state, it is strictly defined as providing legal advice or setting legal fees. Anything else isn’t the practice of law, even saying you are an attorney when you are not licensed in the state. If the guy was charging people for his engineering expertise without being accredited, that would be something completely different.
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On December 08 2017 04:43 kollin wrote:
Somehow I had a feeling that clicking on the twitter link leading to another link would lead to a wildly differing interpretation of the events than the one originally presented.
Feels like I've had this discussion with Danglars before. He posts an opinion of a twitter post that's an opinion of a twitter post that's an opinion of an article that, if you're lucky, links to the original article that's being commented on.
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United States43510 Posts
Sure, I don't agree with the law. I'm not a CPA but I should be fine with calling myself an accountant, for example. If Oregonian engineers want to make a name for club members I don't think it should be engineer, that's too generic.
But you can only conclude that "maths without a license is illegal in Oregon" if you don't read any part of the article. If he'd submitted a selection of nude self portraits and signed them as an engineer he'd have had the same issue.
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On December 08 2017 04:30 Grumbels wrote:
The problem with this discussion of intent and ethics is that it is completely besides the point. Politicians are like lawyers, they have no principles, but in order to represent an interest group they temporarily adopt them. Every decision they make, especially as an organisation, is strategical in nature. Getting rid of Franken because of pressure from their female consituency is actually a victory for democracy, it shows that public opinion matters to some degree and that the Democratic Party feels pressured to respond.
Isn't there a valid argument in the present-day that public opinion potentially matters too much? I'm not sure we're exactly blessed to live in an age where our politicians are making decisions primarily based on a combination of the whims of Twitter mobs and the advice of for-profit electoral strategists.
It's funny that such a sentiment is generally considered undemocratic nowadays but (Jefferson not withstanding probably) most of the Founding Fathers would have agreed I think.
Before someone misinterprets, I'm talking about a general principle. On this specific issue, I agree effective public pressure to remove creepy guys is a good thing.
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Listening to the Twitter mob is honestly far closer to actual democracy than anything the founding fathers had. Sure, people and twitter are in general are dumb, but there is absolutely nothing "undemocratic" about vocal citizens having the means to communicate with their elected officials.
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I think you misunderstood me and that's probably my fault. I'm questioning whether "actual democracy" is preferable to a more Republic-leaning system and asserting that Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Washington (despite their present-day popular representations) would have likely preferred that latter.
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United States43510 Posts
Actual democracy is definitely preferable to the system the Founding Fathers preferred and put in place. Because of the whole letting women, slaves, and people other than rich landowners vote thing.
The whole slavery issue would have been solved exceptionally quickly had anyone taken the time to get input from the slaves themselves. But instead y'all had to fight a war over it.
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EPT
