97 karma · joined January 27, 2022
The U.S. is ran by wealthy elites, who run the U.S. in such a way to make themselves more wealthy.
Of course they would outsource every job and business related resource mining operations if that meant more profit in the short term. It’s just good business!
Yes, obviously yes. If someone can’t pay for food, we clearly have enough to go around.
The car market is a great example. The US market has decided it doesn’t want EVs from the biggest EV producer in the world (China), so people are indeed buying cars with older technology than what the new global standard has become thanks to China’s successfully state-sponsored EV market.
It may very well be that the US leads globally in AI, while some markets handicap access and development for internal reasons.
It is possible to accept that things happen that you don’t endorse or control, horrible things, without providing a justifying reason for those events.
Unless, of course, you are the one knowingly carrying out those acts. In that case, a level of nihilistic justification is necessary from both leadership and those doing the dirty work.
Death, vile and evil behavior are a part of life. This doesn’t justify their existence.
Nihilism promotes the idea that life is meaningless. Perhaps an attractive idea in a complicated world with countless examples of suffering, horror, and death. I would urge you to consider an alternative conclusion when faced with these realities: The presence of death is necessary for life itself to have any distinct meaning. Once you accept that death is a necessary element for any “life” framework ever evidenced or argued for, vile behavior like systematic genocide can be understood as an outgrowth of the intertwined nature of life and death.
This still doesn’t justify a nihilistic conclusion. For example, if I dropped my cup and it broke, I might be tempted to provide a reason for the destruction of that cup (I was distracted, the coffee was hot, etc.). These explanations might be appropriate, or they might not. Since we are examining the event after it happened, we won’t ever know the exact causal reason (though we might get really close!).
The post-hoc rationalization of past events can only go so far. The causal reasons cannot be fully sussed after an event. (You can get pretty darn close! So it’s worth rationalizing explanations for the possibility of prevention of something like that.)
Regardless, these explanations are not necessary to accept the reality of my broken cup. I may dearly want to know why my cup broke. Perhaps because I liked that cup, or because I simply don’t want to break another cup in the same way, but knowing the reason my cup broke is not a necessary or sufficient element for me to know that I miss my cup and, all things considered, would have rather not had it break.
In the same way, the suffering you see in the world does not need to be justified for it to be condemned.
So, because nihilistic beliefs are (a) unnecessary for condemnation of suffering and evil (bad things are bad, A = A), (b) highly useful for justifying suffering and evil (as you noted), and (c) naturally lead to (at best) inaction in the face of suffering and (at worst) acceptance or even endorsement of suffering (“Well, life has no meaning, so I may as well accept the suffering, and maybe even go so far as to fuel a bit of it for my own benefit. After all, there isn’t a meaningful moral difference between those two options.”)
With those three outcomes as just a few of the natural consequences of practicing nihilism, I fail to see either the logic or utility of nihilism in anything other than providing a very shallow justification for the suffering in the world. It’s an easy puddle to splash around in, but I would encourage you to keep thinking through it: You don’t need to reject morality and ethics simply because immorality, unethical behavior, and unethical people exist.
As a final note: If you want to keep your nihilistic beliefs, you must reject the stated premise above that bad things are bad (A = A in symbolic logic). However, I’d suggest you be very careful about rejecting what you feel to be true (i.e., that destructive and horrible events are indeed destructive and horrible).
Hope this helps. Try not to get trapped by nihilism. It doesn’t lead to anything meaningful, as it’s logically impossible to do so under that framework.
Additionally, tuition aid isn’t given directly to school: It goes to the student, who pays the school.
What I find fascinating is the neurological resilience that can be observed at cellular and behavioral levels to bounce back after an event like that.
Non-chemical interventions, like adaption wearing special glasses that flip vision(1), are quickly accounted for by a healthy brain.
1:https://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167255705/a-view-from-the-fli...
It further says “In times of high inflation…real wages go down, meaning that workers see (and feel) the purchasing power of their income decline.”
Sounds like parent poster and your link are in agreement.
This does work ok for long distance competitive running, since the factors at play are time and metabolic rate and is missing the strategy present in team based ball sports like football, soccer, basketball, etc.
Here’s one from 2012 that rebuts the Libet interpretation directly:
All those Disney movies with singing fish and the like has lead to anthropomorphizing and assumptions that are still being reckoned with scientifically.
Might be better to just make it illegal to hit children?
I disagree with cynicism of the OP however. Many people are just tied up in a movement, without a conniving pathos driving their support. If you look at the historical context identity arguments arrive from, it is very much reactionary to past oppression. And society tolerates reactionary swings for only so long before seeking homeostasis. It is possible (likely, even) that the junior professor behind the vitriol is doubling down due to self preservation. However, I don’t think her supporters are as interested in her self interest so much as they are interested in supporting the movement as a whole. She’s more or less an ideological soldier; yes she may have violated her enemies in atrocious ways, but she is fighting for home team, and thusly retains support regardless of abuse of basic logic.
Hopefully we out grow this phase soon because the ignorance inherent in that support does seem culturally toxic.
If you bankroll false data and your career benefits from them, you’re culpable.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592645/pdf/wps...
(Compare the black bar under ‘antidepressants’ to the placebo bar.)
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t take antidepressants if you have MDD; it’s worth a shot. However, it should make us curious as intelligent consumers of research of what the actual remediation of depressive symptoms is caused by(in both placebo and AD groups).
Personally, I’d say it’s likely that the individual is the one making a difference in recovery from MDD, not the chemical.
All that said, this post is absolutely not meant to shame antidepressant use: Depression is a potentially life threatening illness. I’m very happy for those who have over come it and I am not against antidepressant use in any way. It’s the best we’ve got (and they works quite well in conjunction with therapy btw! Far above placebo).
But from a scientific perspective, it’s experimentally unclear if antidepressant drugs are anywhere near as efficacious as major pharmaceutical companies (with major financial incentives) say they are.
It’s worth noting this is being currently debated in the field. There does seem to be a somewhat consistent effect of AD drugs performing slightly above placebo (see study linked above). However, it’s not clear if that effect is due to recognizable side effects that antidepressants have (allowing participants to ‘unblind’ themselves), or if antidepressants are indeed slightly more effective than a place I. Due to the nature of the illness, it’s been assumed that it’s worth it to keep prescribing these drugs to those who suffer from depression.
Edit: If you are dealing with depression, please seek help. Doing so will improve your life, and the lives of those around you. Life is too short to suffer without help.