tetrometal

I'm not going to engage with you in this violence score-keeping exercise, but I will say that it should be apparent to anyone capable of popping their media bubble that you are cherry-picking.

I disagree. I see a narcissist and a buffoon when I look at Trump, but none of his behavior validates anything close to the crazed response we see from the primarily left-leaning mainstream media.

It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years. It was like this during the Bush years as well, though they do seem to have perfected it.

I empathize more with your right-leaning friends. The extremes of the right (racists, nazis, white supremacists, etc) are kept very much in check by taboo. The extremes of the left (socialism, communism, collectivism, and the new Woke cult) are not.

Anecdotally, I not only do not work with any of the former, but can't imagine a workplace that would suffer them. At the same time, I work with multiple people that are proud, self-proclaimed members of the latter group.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't just wish free healthcare into being. Nothing of value is free.

Redistribution of wealth is not promotion of liberty. Quite the opposite.

Help your fellow man. Do not force others to do it for you at the point of a gun.

I think the point is fair. From the perspective of liberty, there's no government using aggressive force against you; this is a perfectly free-market phenomenon.

That said, that doesn't mean it's always moral. For example, I don't feel comfortable saying at my place of work (software engineer) that women are biologically different than men and this probably has a large impact on why the field isn't 50/50 men/women.

I think this is a perfectly reasonable position, yet there's no way I could say this at work. I'd lose my job, just like James Damore.

So, I don't think that what is being done is wrong in the political sense, but I do think unfair cancellations are unethical. I think it's fine to "cancel" people/businesses/organizations that cause or allow unfair cancellations to take place. I already quietly decline to do business with and lobby against companies that adopt "woke" postures.

I'm part of a silent majority that votes with their wallet, I suppose.

I think the "type of person you want to become" is not static. It changes as you attempt to become it. It changes because you learn more about yourself and the universe _as_ you try to change.

So while your knowledge and perception of the universe is always imperfect, it can also always improve. Pursuit of your better self is the means by which you both improve yourself and your knowledge of what that better self is.

I'm not so sure how false it is. If there were a better option, wouldn't people be using it already? And since they're not, aren't we just... firing them and leaving them to figure it out? Seems heartless. Honestly it comes across as "F the little guy, give me the policy I want." (I'm not accusing you of that, your tone came across as quite polite.)

> If the economy cannot support enough reasonable paying jobs with adequate health insurance

I don't see why anyone other than the person doing the work gets to define what "reasonable" or "adequate" is. It also seems completely heartless to me to put people out of work in order to push a political agenda.

I genuinely don't understand this position. I don't see how replacing a "bad" option with no option helps anyone, especially the people that were willing to take the "bad" option.

> It sounds like your suggestion would lower the bar for both these aspects, and only catch issues after the fact - something which could have fatal consequences.

The other side of this is:

1) Since the FDA is a monopoly, it's entirely possible (and probably demonstrable) that they've set the wrong bars, which could have fatal consequences.

2) It's arguable that the costs imposed by the FDA may have fatal consequences themselves, in the form we're seeing today, where life-saving drugs (antibiotics, in this case) can't be developed because of them.

I'm interested in hearing your response to the above two points. I'd also be interested to hear what you'd think of a "de-fanged" FDA wherein they are able to approve or disapprove medications, but are not able to enforce those decisions. People would be allowed to do with their own bodies as they please, but they'd be able to reference the FDA to make those decisions.

Well, I have to make some assumption about your use of a word. In this case, the options I perceived were literal force or hyperbole. In the interest of responding to the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of your comment, I assumed the latter.

Since you reject that assumption, I'll respond to the former instead:

There's a clear difference between the two scenarios - one uses physical force (the stolen bike example), the other (Google) does not. For this reason alone, they are incomparable.

Regarding "aggressive force": I never claimed you used the phrase. I'm merely characterizing the stolen bike example. There are two kinds of force that can be used in this context - aggressive and defensive. Aggressive force is force used against a person or their property against their will; defensive force is force used in prevention of aggression. Stealing a bike is clearly an example of the former.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interpreting your comment charitably, I assume you intended hyperbole when using the word force here, and in your comparison to actual force with respect to theft of private property.

Still, I think we should be careful with our words, especially lately as words are being redefined out of apparent expedience.

So, tedious or pedantic as it may be, I feel obligated to gently push back and point out that no force is being used in this circumstance, and that this situation is indeed not comparable to one in which actual aggressive force is being used, as in your bike theft example.

Piggybacking on your comment to respond to the quote, not your interpretation...

First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to).

Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone.

I'd love to hear any theories about how/why this decision was made.

If it aids the discussion, here's a list of her policy positions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Kamala_...

To this day I find the focus on income or wealth inequality to be perplexing. I literally just don't get it. Why should I care whether or not some crazy rich person can buy a yacht? It does me no harm.

> There was an awkward silence. I expected him to offer a feeble excuse. Blurt out that the woman was crazy, or that she was talking nonsense. Get defensive, say he used the had-rub solution outside her room or washed his hands at the sink by the nurses’ station. But he did none of that. “Tell her I’m sorry,” he said instead. “I’ll ask my colleague to take over her care.”

I wish behavior like this was more celebrated. It's incredibly rare and incredibly difficult.

> I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!

I don't understand this take. You can use DuckDuckGo right now, without having to invoke a predator politician.

The last thing I want is for government to become even more involved with managing what information I receive or how I receive it. We need less of that, not more.

Also, please use competitors such as DuckDuckGo. It's not hard, and they're not bad. It's unconscionable to me that we would resort to government force before taking the obvious step of just not interacting with Google.

One could probably dream up a thousand theories about why capitalism was developed, but it really doesn't matter to me. What matters is what the theory is and whether or not it's true.

And history has borne it out: societies that adopt strong individual property rights coupled with economic freedom have delivered unprecedented wealth to their people at all levels, while societies that focus on the collective at the expense of the individual and upon outcomes instead of opportunities flounder and regress.

Capitalism is property rights and economic freedom. There's nothing inherent to it that requires monopoly. Natural monopolies can occur but are perpetually unstable provided there are no artificial barriers to entry. Of course, those barriers exist (one form is regulatory capture), but they are not capitalistic. Absent those artificial barriers, even natural monopolies must behave over the long term as though competitors exist, or they will be created.

I'm very, very pro-mask; I'm optimistic that getting people to wear them could drop R0 << 1 and bring an end to this. That said, it seems unethical to me to mandate (read: enforce with fine/imprisonment) it for the purpose of ... what sounds like virtue signaling?

I think a lot of people are rightly sensing a shrinking of the Overton window[0]. For example, I think the following is a perfectly reasonable position to hold: "It would be a remarkable happenstance if, in a perfectly free society, men and women were found in equal proportion in every industry. Indeed, the default expectation should be that there will be variability in this regard."

Saying that in today's environment with my name attached would get me fired, so I keep my mouth shut. A perfectly reasonable position, and I cannot speak it for fear of losing the ability to care for my family.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

IMO the problem is that the government meddles with the market to begin with. I know I'm in the minority, but I believe a clean separation of government and market would remove the incentive for regulatory capture without damaging free speech rights.

Indeed. Additionally, CAR-T therapy and vaccines are peeking over the horizon.