EPTYou might lose out on elements like 'deserved retribution' which might influence how you view the role of the penal system, and adopting a more deterministic outlook can affect how you feel about the idea of a meritocracy (but not necessarily, as you might still believe that a meritocracy produces a better outcome through pushing more people to be the best they can be, even if you accept that its ultimately still basically a lottery) but even a staunch determinist can still favor democracy because you can argue that involving many rather than few produces a better outcome.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3970
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Now that we have a new thread, 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 complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28630 Posts
You might lose out on elements like 'deserved retribution' which might influence how you view the role of the penal system, and adopting a more deterministic outlook can affect how you feel about the idea of a meritocracy (but not necessarily, as you might still believe that a meritocracy produces a better outcome through pushing more people to be the best they can be, even if you accept that its ultimately still basically a lottery) but even a staunch determinist can still favor democracy because you can argue that involving many rather than few produces a better outcome. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria3854 Posts
On June 26 2023 07:51 BlackJack wrote: She began the video saying she found "no evidence" that McDonalds collaborated with this guy to go on an all McDonalds diet and lose weight, and then spends a good chunk of the video calling it "sus" and "fishy" and hinting that the guy was in cahoots with McDonalds the whole time. You left out the part where she reveals that Cisna then went on to do promotions for McDonald's for two years, speaking in schools to kids about McDonalds, before parting ways with the company, and that his entire diet journey was entirely financed by a a friend of his who owned a McDonald's restaurant. And the slightly more subjective fact that his documentary has a very pro-McDonald's spin, contrary to what he claims. You can't possibly argue in good faith that this man just wanted to prove the calories in calories out hypothesis. He shilled for McDonald's, and if you disagree then your whole objection with Stanford can be dismissed as a double standard. | ||
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BlackJack
United States10421 Posts
On June 26 2023 18:08 Magic Powers wrote: You left out the part where she reveals that Cisna then went on to do promotions for McDonald's for two years, speaking in schools to kids about McDonalds, before parting ways with the company, and that his entire diet journey was entirely financed by a a friend of his who owned a McDonald's restaurant. And the slightly more subjective fact that his documentary has a very pro-McDonald's spin, contrary to what he claims. You can't possibly argue in good faith that this man just wanted to prove the calories in calories out hypothesis. He shilled for McDonald's, and if you disagree then your whole objection with Stanford can be dismissed as a double standard. I do think he shilled for McDonalds. I'm pretty consistent on that point. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria3854 Posts
On June 26 2023 18:18 BlackJack wrote: I do think he shilled for McDonalds. I'm pretty consistent on that point. Ok, I didn't catch that. Maybe I'm not fully wake yet. Regarding the philosophical question of agency, I don't believe people have no free will, or no agency, or no choice. I think we have all of that to some degree, but I think it's often overstated how much of it is really our own. Our will is not entirely self-made, our agency is never uncompromised, our choices are never detached from our circumstances. We're a product and a part of the environment, not detached from it. Scientifically speaking we're just as much part of nature as any ant or leaf would be, so it's not possible that we're entirely self-driven. With that being said, we do have an elevated level of agency because we're higher functioning creatures of nature, meaning we have inherited the rare ability to mentally detach ourselves from the environment to reflect on our situation and our options. But this takes a lot of effort and it cannot be sustained at all times, so most of the time we don't operate in a higher (or abstract) mode of thinking. This is especially true when instincts (among our lowest brain functions) kick in, as well as formed habits - which they both do all the time regarding meal choices. It is advised to go grocery shopping only on a full stomach for this very reason, and to not make a habit of passing by the cookie isle. We're creatures of habit and instinct more than we're creatures of higher thinking. It shouldn't be surprising that our level of agency is being compromised by the environment at all times, even if we make a conscious effort to use our higher brain functions more habitually. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24948 Posts
On June 26 2023 17:02 Magic Powers wrote: The comparison to gambling is very apt. The book "Irresistible" by Adam Alter explains this as well, I randomly picked it up years ago in Amsterdam when I was visiting my mom. It completely altered my understanding of substance abuse, behavioral addictions, etc. I'm not disputing that people have agency, but I am arguing that the role of choice in our decision-making is severely overstated. The myth is that our choices are 100% our own. Regarding the consumption of food, I believe nowadays we're quite lucky if we're predominantly self-determined. Not only does our brain chemistry tell us what foods to focus on, but the environment further assists this process and pushes us over the edge, often cutting our level of agency short. And that's all it takes. It's not necessary to brainwash us completely, we only need to get nudged sufficiently to start seeing big changes in our behavior. Here's a list of the most addictive foods as opposed to a list of the least addictive foods. It should be fairly obvious why the amount of agency people have goes down in an environment that's filled to the brim with the former. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/18-most-addictive-foods Cheers man just added that book to my wish list, an area I’m rather interested in. As to Acrofales and your point I’m one of those determinist fellows, or at the very least whatever free will does exist is largely subsumed. Which does influence my opinion on protecting the individual from society, but has little on on how to protect society from an individual. Whether say a crazed serial killer did so of their own volition, or it’s simply what they are, the end result is still that they’re a serial killer, so should be treated accordingly I might add this is more something I think than something I live, a sort of Copenhagen interpretation. Socially I still live my life as if personal choice is directed by free will | ||
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Razyda
687 Posts
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/06/23/remarks-by-president-biden-and-prime-minister-modi-of-the-republic-of-india-in-meeting-with-senior-officials-and-ceos-of-technology-companies/ "PRESIDENT BIDEN: Okay. We — I was just thanking the — anyway, I started off without you, and I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things that we shared. (Laughter.)" | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States44143 Posts
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KwarK
United States42491 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24948 Posts
The only thing that could have made it more clearly a joke would have been if Biden had said ‘Hey folks I am about to tell you a joke’. Years of such nonsense are why we have such a prominent lunatic fringe. Indeed the fringe part is highly debatable | ||
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Kyadytim
United States886 Posts
On June 27 2023 17:01 WombaT wrote: That would just have been cut as well. The only way Biden could avoid something like this is by never telling jokes and never putting words next to each other that look bad if removed from the sentence they were in.The only thing that could have made it more clearly a joke would have been if Biden had said ‘Hey folks I am about to tell you a joke’. | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States44143 Posts
On June 27 2023 23:47 Kyadytim wrote: That would just have been cut as well. The only way Biden could avoid something like this is by never telling jokes and never putting words next to each other that look bad if removed from the sentence they were in. And even still, they'd just deepfake Biden lol. | ||
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oBlade
United States5505 Posts
On June 25 2023 06:11 WombaT wrote: I’m not sure how you qualify the effectiveness of care for more complex conditions, especially mental health ones. How is that tracked? Guy I knew started to benefit from additional support, albeit from third parties, got onto a jobs program and all sorts. Then he died from an accidental OD. How would such an outcome be logged? From personal experience in psych wards I mean some people are kind of just fucked, they’re never going to be functionally independent. Sad but it is what it is. What does their healthcare provision look like? Unfortunately Reagan closed a lot of the institutions. A greater number are just part of the homeless population in cities. Though there are extraordinary abuses in the field of psychiatry, careful management of it seems necessary to caring for that segment of the population. On June 25 2023 21:10 WombaT wrote: I’m just not sure it scales. Private practices can do things here because they’re the preserve of generally wealthier folk, but the wider health service has to cover everyone. Granted that’s over here with the NHS, where private care is a layer on top, other places have different systems of course. One area that could revolutionise healthcare is tech IMO, in ways that dovetail with what you’re talking about but I feel there are too many cultural and political objections We’ve increasingly got various data collection available via commercial wearables as it is. We’ve got more and more tools to make sense of giant datasets. A few wee tweaks and you’ve got a big linked-up early warning system that could also track certain outcomes post-treatment. But considering the conspiracy theories around vaccines and big government in general, I don’t think a system where the government (or insurance providers) actually has access to health data would remotely be able to deliver on its potential as there’d be too much resistance Data and statistical monitoring are very promising tools in medicine. It can detect signals of malpractice and medical serial killers in addition to monitoring efficacy. But the resistance to data is not simply from conspiracy theories, or libertarians or people afraid of big brother or with privacy concerns. It also comes from (certain) doctors, insurance, hospitals, and big pharma. Something like 50% of what doctors first learn turns out to be wrong/phased out in 10?20?30 years? I forget the exact numbers but there's some effect like that. As an example, take lobotomies. Used to be commonplace. JFK's sister had one. Imagine what you could make by billing people for those - it's an inpatient surgery, it's brain surgery, it'll require a team of doctors, despite it only takes a few minutes to actually get the knife and cut up the patient's brain. This would be a cash cow even though it has questionable efficacy and ethics. You might say oBlade, that's over the top, they got rid of lobotomies for a reason, it shows medicine works. Medicine DOES work, but so does human greed, and so people move on to more esoteric and difficult to point out cases - take the opioid crisis, the overprescription of statins for little benefit and potential harm, probably 60% of care for back pain is just random - go to a surgeon and he'll do surgery and charge you for it, go to a GP and he'll do something else and charge you for it, another surgeon will recommend his own specialty surgery. Problem comes from doctoring (or managing, or legislating) by statistics, however. Insurances deny claims systematically as part of the hunt for profit. Researchers tend to report favorable trials. All clinical trials need to be mandatorily reported. On June 25 2023 22:15 Sermokala wrote: the problem I think is important to look at is that even with all this new tech it won't matter at all in america when the health care system doesn't care about preventative medicine and only functions well in emergency situations. the wild fact that a guy set up an online pharmacy that saves everyone money by not involving insurance in any way is just a perfect way to show that you can't run a private healthcare industry. I get the impression you would be advocating for a nationalized healthcare system. This is a fine position to have, but you might have arrived at it in a tunnel vision way. Now maybe there's some cycle for healthcare where in order to keep things honest a country has to switch from private to public to private to public over a period of decades, simply resetting in some way instead of maintaining the system they have, but that seems hard to predict as modern medicine is barely over 100 years old to begin with. Political cycles have been around far longer so we have a better idea how they work. The pharmacy you're referencing, to malign capitalism, is itself a private company. There are similar apps/networks for medical procedures - I know someone uninsured who got his foot worked on for just a few grand. The US, UK, Canada, all suffer from long wait times. One is private and two are public. Whatever system you have is not as important as maintaining that system against deterioration - You have to be vigilant to fight back the greed, bloat, incompetence, and maintain order and effectiveness. The US has public options in terms of medicare/medicaid/the VA. None of those are lauded over private insurance. The problem, rather than public vs. private, is more simply that everything is the problem. What those countries all incidentally suffer from is a shortage of practitioners. If you're waiting months to see someone, you're obviously going to be treating much more than doing preventative care because nobody can get in for a normal doctor/patient relationship because there's just no time. What the US suffers from specifically is lack of transparency, lack of competition, and lack of informed consent for patients (30-50 years ago, it wasn't like this, or wasn't as bad). Anyone who has had a hospital stay and been billed for tons of things they weren't told about, didn't want, didn't need, knows this. Every doctor who drops in for 10 seconds on their rounds gets a dip in the bill. Anyone with medicare who has been bounced around 5 specialists and tested until they're on a first name basis with every doctor in the area, for one complaint, knows this - doctors and hospitals will do anything when the government is guaranteed paying. People living in jurisdictions with nearly monopolized insurance markets can tell you they already have basically one choice for insurance on the marketplace - if the one choice were the government instead of Blue Cross, and everything was nationalized, would things really suddenly get cheaper and wonderful? Insurance profits bloating costs is one side of a die that has probably too many sides even for D&D. The idea of someone selling you a product/service that you don't get to know how much it is until after, is facially absurd in any field except medicine. Would that people recognized it as absurd in medicine also. Another issue is that medical research at companies and universities strongly comes from America - and the first best place to recoup the costs of that is in the domestic market. And the costs are higher to begin with because it's the US after all. In some ways the US system subsidizes medical advancement for the whole world - which while a nice thought poetically, is not fiscally tolerable. The medicines researched by US firms and the facilities built by US contractors who charge too much to build things, the hospitals who partner with the government so the taxpayer can help fund things, filling the hospitals with state of the art equipment that needs to be replaced with the regularity of an e-influencer's iPhone... The US is not at a point in history right now where the government does anything cheaper or better. Whether it's space exploration, unprofitable Amtrak, the post office - the private sector usually does it better, the government never does it better. The most expensive is when the government and private sector team up, like the DOD. How about a nice $10,000 tire for your Humvee. But we can maybe fix the private sector first, but not if we eschew practicality and argue among each other just to keep alive a pipe dream of generally socializing industry in a revolution in the US while monolithic corporations and crony politicians are laughing all the way to the bank and back. | ||
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Introvert
United States4721 Posts
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf There are ways around it and the schools are already working on it, but at least for a today a good opinion with the right result. And based on polling, the overwhelmingly popular one too. Last year Roe, this year AA. The decades of legal groundwork are paying off on two of the top five issues conservatives and originalists have been working on. Pretty good day And of course we're not done, had one religious liberty case today (unanimous) and still a free speech and student loans one waiting. | ||
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Simberto
Germany11458 Posts
On June 29 2023 23:26 Introvert wrote: So affirmative action is finally gone, at least the state sanctioned version. Excerpts that I saw look like there was no wishy washy-ness by Roberts. Should be sound and I'm sure Thomas's long concurrence is good. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf There are ways around it and the schools are already working on it, but at least for a today a good opinion with the right result. And based on polling, the overwhelmingly popular one too. Last year Roe, this year AA. The decades of legal groundwork are paying off on two of the top five issues conservatives and originalists have been working on. Pretty good day And of course we're not done, had one religious liberty case today (unanimous) and still a free speech and student loans one waiting. It is amazing that you feel the need to come here just to brag about your conservative court (We still remember how you got those judges) blatantly hurting lots of people. That seems to be literally the only situation where you still turn up. Is your goal just to make people angry? Because you have to recognize how these topics are viewed here. | ||
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Mikau
Netherlands1446 Posts
On June 29 2023 23:49 Simberto wrote: It is amazing that you feel the need to come here just to brag about your conservative court (We still remember how you got those judges) blatantly hurting lots of people. That seems to be literally the only situation where you still turn up. Is your goal just to make people angry? Because you have to recognize how these topics are viewed here. Yes, pwning the libs is the entire platform for most of these people. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Introvert
United States4721 Posts
On June 29 2023 23:49 Simberto wrote: It is amazing that you feel the need to come here just to brag about your conservative court (We still remember how you got those judges) blatantly hurting lots of people. That seems to be literally the only situation where you still turn up. Is your goal just to make people angry? Because you have to recognize how these topics are viewed here. Wasn't bragging, people post like that all the time. Update on something important, that's lots of people talk about combined with an opinion and commentary. And the idea that it's the only type of thing I post nowadays is wrong. Just because my opinion is the minority one here means I'm supposed to... what exactly? Your last two lines are odd. Edit: in particular wrt the court, I've always posted stuff about court decisions. On June 29 2023 23:53 JimmiC wrote: This one is different than roe in that it is not amazingly unpopular. It would be nice if race didn't matter, but pretending like it does not is not going work. It's at least 60-40 with every demo that isn't Democratic politicians. CA banned it by ballot years ago and has repeatedly rejected attempts to reintroduce race into things like state hiring. Race based preferences are unpopular, which is what makes simberto's post even stranger. Of all the posts to get annoyed at... | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10670 Posts
I don't really see why this should be a rightwing position. Make universities more affordable and improve schools (in low income areas) and much of the problem would probably go away whiteout the need for such arbitrary rules. It probably falls apart once it's clear that the Reps have absolutely no interest in doing the other stuff tho... | ||
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Silvanel
Poland4725 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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