flomble

Antihumanism is an edifice wrought of unsubstantiated assertions, self-contradictions and wilful ignorance of evidence.

Because it's almost the same thing copy-pasted repeatedly; textbook boilerplate. I know it's a matter of taste, but the last one also looks by far the best to me.

This is a frustratingly common but utterly confused viewpoint stemming from the naturalistic fallacy. Facts about our evolution do not entail that we should strive to embrace every human tendency which it has imparted to us.

People are appalled at the suggestion that we have innate tendencies toward aggression, for example, because it clashes with narratives about all social ills being caused by culture, and if you suffer from utopian notions of humanity in its natural state, it seems like endorsement of violence to acknowledge that it is an evolved behaviour, as opposed to a brute fact which we can use to better understand and combat the problem.

"Social Darwinism" is a misleading label, because it refers to the idea that we should allow the weak to perish because it improves the quality of people in society, but this principle does not follow from the fact of human evolution. It is deriving a highly questionable "ought" from an "is", and it's a line of thought which long predates the discovery of evolution. Socrates argued against Callicles' belief that the strong dominating the weak was the justice of nature more than two millennia before Darwin was born.

The linked article is about how despite those services obviously having value to their users, they aren't accounted for in economic statistics, e.g. in measuring productivity, because they are "free" (i.e. paid for by subjecting oneself to advertising/tracking).

Heroin and meth addicts regularly commit violent crimes in order to procure more heroin/meth. The only reason they need to is because prohibition makes those drugs orders of magnitude more expensive than they would otherwise be. The only reason the drug cartels engage in ruthless violence is because they operate outside of the law and thus outside of the government's monopoly on force. Criminalization is the root cause of the crime.

I'm sorry but I can't let this one slide. Yes, children have been subjected to a slew of execrable sitcoms but at least in the realm of cartoons children's there is much that is of high quality. Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Steven Universe roundly refute "universally terrible". Even the 2000s had Avatar, Samurai Jack, early Spongebob and Fairly Odd Parents. Other than nostalgia and smugness, I can't find any justification for claiming that none of it was as "mentally stimulating" as the 90s given how equally rife with garbage the 90s were.

I'm not wholly on one side of the fence or the other on the fork. But since the decisions made by the community involved can affect your holdings, it's reasonable to advise people to choose the community that has similar values to them.

Unless they're interested for purely speculative purposes, in which case it was a good bet that the non-Classic version would be more remunerative.

The dev team for Classic is much less likely to attempt to do so, and the miners less likely to adopt such a fork, since they declined to accept the fork the first time it happened.

If a fork happened in Classic to protect some party's financial interests, I think the more likely scenario is the great majority of miners opting to stay on the original branch.

I get that it's not a complete guarantee, but neither is the legal system. Contracts can be invalidated based on a judge's perception of their unfairness, on a technicality, or even on a whim.

Your Solidity contracts can run on Ethereum Classic, which you can be confident won't be forked since its users tend to believe in the principle of the immutability of the code.

Because your brother shares around 50% of your genes. Helping your brother reproduce therefore helps to propagate some of your genes.

The principle behind this is that evolution operates at the level of genes, rather than individuals. I recommend Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a fuller explanation.

This is a very thorough and informative post, and there's nothing in it which I would outright disagree with.

I was under the impression that Mao's unorthodox approach to revolution built on peasants rather than the industrial proletariat was and is seen, by the CCP itself, to be vindicated by their accession to power, and that that particular Maoist tenet was never really overturned.

I've never studied Marxism itself in depth, only come into contact with it in studying history, and it seems that you have a more in-depth understanding, but I thought that what Historical Materialism held about the necessity of capitalism as a precursor to communism was that in concentrating property and the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie, it oppressed the proletariat, giving them an incentive to revolt if they ever developed class consciousness, and caused conflict between different bourgeois groups (e.g. governments), causing capitalism to be completely unstable and necessarily bringing about its demise.

That is a very different chain of events to a communist government deliberately allowing a capitalist economy to flourish under its aegis. Capitalism leads to exploitation and thus unrest, but the most unwavering ideological pillar of the CCP is that the Party fosters social harmony and that it has an absolute mandate to rule and should not cede power. Deng himself made that clear when he decided to crush the Tiananmen protests, and the modern CCP has not budged on that front either.

Did Marx ever consider what a communist government who came to power before the full development of productive forces should do? Given that the reality Deng found himself in was at odds with the orthodox prediction of historical development, was his dialectical approach actually in line with Marxist orthodoxy?

The reason Deng Xiaoping had to use a coy phrase about cats to avoid admitting to his policies running counter to communism is that communism is at the core of the Party's identity and history, and that abandoning it openly would seriously undermine their legitimacy. The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The "socialist market economy" allows private ownership, even of means of production and allows the private accumulation of capital. If you want to argue that it's actually communist because the transition was slow and the leadership still claims to be communist with a straight face, I'm not going to bother rebutting that.

The reason China's system is not more like the countries you listed is that it is autocratic, and the reason Zhao Ziyang was arrested was his excessive and open sympathy for a people's democratic movement.

Yes, since Mao's death and the complete reversal of his economic policies and embracing of capitalism by Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy, the economy of China has rapidly developed. There is a reason this article lays the blame for the senseless waste of life at Mao's feet and not the CCP leadership as a whole.

Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology?