Forest Plotter

@liliceberg1of1 @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas Does it impose the duty of impartiality on private citizens?

@forest_plotter @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas Ok so we should repeal the CRA?

Full pod out now, @JerusalemDemsas and I debate affirmative action — if you expressed an opinion about yesterday's teaser clip you are morally responsible to watch the whole thing now. I don't make the rules, sorry! youtube.com/watch?v=5plXNN…

@latenotlost @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas x.com/forest_plotter…

@forest_plotter @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas So bring back WASP country clubs and Jewish banks?

@liliceberg1of1 @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas Governments must be impartial. Private citizens, either individually or collectively, should have no such obligation.

@forest_plotter @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas So discrimination is alright?

@BasedEugenicist @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas Of course. I’m making a normative claim here.

@forest_plotter @mattyglesias @JerusalemDemsas The CRA disagrees

@pmddomingos Wait'll you hear about taxing that which no one creates.

Taxing income instead of consumption is punishing people for saving money.

@Tcell_bodyshot @IterIntellectus No argument, brother!

@forest_plotter @IterIntellectus “In general” = horny people in hedonistic mode. There are other modes of living.

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate" my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations. poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

@BigBrainPhiloso "All truths of normative ethics are relative." Well, that's not a normative ethical statement, right?

Thomas Nagel dismantles relativism in one paragraph. In a 1995 talk on reason, the philosopher exposes a fatal flaw at the heart of the relativist position: "Claims to the effect that a type of judgment expresses a local point of view are inherently objective in intent. They suggest a picture of the true sources of those judgments which places them in an unconditional context." In other words, the moment you say "all truth is relative," you've already made an absolute claim. Nagel sharpens this into a precise logical trap: "The judgment of relativity or conditionality cannot be applied to the judgment of relativity itself." The relativist wants to stand outside all perspectives and declare that no perspective is universal. But that declaration is itself a universal perspective. He then drives it home: "To put it schematically, 'everything is subjective' must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim including the claim that it is objectively false." The argument is elegant in its completeness. If "everything is subjective" is an objective truth, it defeats itself immediately because it would mean at least one thing is objective. But if it's merely a subjective opinion, it has no power to challenge objectivity at all. Either way, relativism collapses under its own weight. What's striking is how often this self-refuting structure goes unnoticed in everyday debates about truth, culture, and morality. The person who says "that's just your perspective" is quietly assuming their own perspective is the correct one. Nagel's point isn't that objectivity is easy to achieve, only that abandoning it entirely is incoherent.

@Noahpinion Sell immigration slots to the highest bidder. We get the best and brightest from around the world, and all of these silly assimilation issues fade in the rearview.

Assimilation should not mean giving up religious practices. What it means is that those religious practices don't separate you from Americans of other religions on a daily basis. (The worst assimilators here by far are the ultra-Orthodox Jews, btw, not Muslims)

@RoKhanna 1. Free market health insurance only 2. Price transparency 3. Continue EMTALA 4. Let individuals decide how much health care they want in the context of their other priorities.

The U.S. spends far more on healthcare than other rich countries. $15,000 per person (almost double), 18% of GDP (nearly twice as high), and healthcare inflation is 7% (roughly double others). Yet outcomes are worse. Life expectancy is lower, infant & maternal mortality higher, and chronic disease like diabetes and heart disease higher. Canada with single payer has far lower costs than the US, and even than Germany & Switzerland, and provides better, universal coverage. Most important, in an AI world, people's healthcare must not be dependent on their job. Every doctor should be in network. Medicare for All is needed for our time. It is a moral and economic imperative.

@promethurious @EU_Commission If your daughter is seriously injured on the way home, you certainly don't want the ER personnel to be calling around trying to secure payment prior to initiating their massive transfusion protocol. Your daughter has a right to emergency care, and mine does, too.

Healthcare is a basic right. Not a privilege. Not a luxury. This World Health Day, we stand for access, protection, and care for all.

@soncharm ER personnel have a duty to provide care for patients with emergency medical conditions. That is, patients have a right to that specific type of care.

Every time something like this pops up we get a round from the libertarian fraction making the ‘if it requires labor of others it can’t be A Right’ point. Which, to be clear, I agree with!, but gets kind of old (and many just *will never* buy into) I think really what we need is a word different from ‘right’ to refer to such things. Okay, so health care isn’t/can’t be ‘a right’. But it’s still good! And we want everyone to have it! At least to some basic level. That would be good, right? We all agree? Maybe ‘social good’? Health care is a social good.

@StatisticUrban Market liberalism is the way.

At a certain point you simply have to say to the libertarians "no, wrong." An orphaned baby does in fact have the human right not to starve to death in the street. Any form of society that can't guarantee that right is bad.

@Jesse_Leg Price and quality -- Those should be the only factors considered in contracting.

“Who cares?” Racial favoritism in government contracting is the most costly, egregious form of DEI that exists. When the government wastes tens of billions of taxpayer dollars by illegally requiring firms to discriminate on the basis of race in contracting decisions, it undermines merit not just in school lunch programs, but in infrastructure, national defense, disaster relief, and more—all while doing nothing to help the truly disadvantaged. This does far more damage than imbecilic mandatory DEI trainings—or even affirmative action in college admissions, which affects only an elite subset of Americans. I care about that! Many other Americans do as well.

@MariaBa98139293 @FeserEdward Interesting! What would count as a betrayal to you?

@FeserEdward Nope because I knew it when I voted for him. I am in construction business and full of people like him. I am not shocked by his decisions.

There appears to be a hard core of MAGA (not all, but a core) that ultimately doesn't care that Trump has betrayed them over and over. That he causes their enemies distress is enough for them to be satisfied with him. They are driven by ressentiment, just as the woke left is.

First they came for the em dash and I did not speak out. Then they came for the Oxford comma…