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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I would argue that what rights there are is inherently a moral argument. “Murder is not a right” is a moral statement, for example. The government doesn’t change what rights it thinks there are without some kind of moral basis for it. Even if it’s primarily done in the legal sense, we still generally act in the legal system based on a system of morality. Another example: “Compelling people to testify against themselves is wrong.” It would be really useful for the state if they could do that, but legally speaking, the US recognizes that there is a right against self-incrimination.

    Laws are written because someone, somewhere, found a moral fault in the law. It’s just that some people believe that the only morality is power, and thus anything they do is justified. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights: it’s meant to stop people from simply saying “the government needs this power so we’re going to give it that power.” It isn’t about creating rights, it’s about recognizing and protecting rights that have existed all along.


  • But if the government can decide what rights there are, then anything they do is morally correct, no? Unless you’re going to hold the government to a higher moral standard than themselves, in which case the government doesn’t actually grant rights; it can only protect or violate them. If we have a higher moral standard than the law, then human rights do not come from the government, they are defined by whatever that higher standard is.

    I think the Nazis were an insane and utterly contemptible political party that destroyed a struggling nation to slake their own thirst for power. But if the government decides what rights there are, then they can simply legislate out of existence the rights of anyone under their jurisdiction. Thus, anything the government does to them is justified.


  • And my point is that it isn’t the government that decides what rights are. You started this whole “can the government decide what rights are” discussion by dismissing out of hand the right of a person to defend themselves. I’d like for you to go up to a sexual assault victim, especially one who defended themselves with a gun, and tell them “um ackshually you didn’t have the right to defend yourself because guns are evil 🤓”. Or would you only do that after the Second Amendment is deleted from the Constitution?



  • I know it doesn’t lead to any particular right being set, but your argument that rights are set by the government still leads to the conclusion that, because the Nazis were in power, they had the right to decide that Jews, gay people, other ethnicities, etc. no longer had a right to life. It would also lead to the belief that the Nazis had the right to protect those people if they wanted to. It would open the door to whatever oppression, discrimination, protection, liberty, and whatever else the ever-fickle government decided. Nobody would be right to resist it because “the government sets the rights, therefore it’s okay”.






  • First, Alex Jones’s trial was a civil matter. The families of the Sandy Hook victims took issue with him and took him to court of their own initiative. This is a criminal matter. This involves people being tried and jailed by a foreign country over laws of which they were potentially unaware. That is a significant escalation of the situation.

    Second, no country has the right to tell citizens of other countries what they can do in their home countries. That’s nonsense. Allowing the UK to extradite random people over Internet comments would set an awful precedent for the future. If a right-wing extremist became PM and made it illegal to promote gender-affirming therapy online, would it be right for him to extradite US citizens for “causing physical or psychological harm”?


  • Here’s a longer excerpt from the interview. In the words of the police chief at about 1:40: “And whether you’re in this country, committing crimes on the streets, or further afield committing crimes online, we will come after you.”

    “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offences of incitement, of stirring up racist hatred. There are numerous terrorist offences regarding the publishing of material. All of those offences are in play, if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the folks who are causing the problems for communities.”

    I didn’t pick up on the word “extradite,” but the wording means either they’re going after anyone in the world who commits a crime against their laws, or they’re only going after UK citizens. Either way, this nonsense is what you get when there is no First Amendment.




  • I had my Sonata stolen last year. The problem is that, by default, there was neither a key checker nor a steering immobilizer built into the vehicles. These are industry standard features for every car manufacturer… Except Kia and Hyundai. These are required features in every car sold in every Western nation… Except the United States. To have excluded this literal 90s tech from their vehicles when they’re so common that no one would ever stop to think about whether their car has them constitutes a serious lie by omission on the part of Kia and Hyundai, in my opinion. If I knew that all you had to do was rip off the ignition and shove something onto a peg to screw off with the car, I would have told the dealer to stick it up his butt.

    For those wondering: I had comprehensive insurance, so I was paid the full value of the vehicle after it was totaled. I bought a Toyota Camry with the money and it’s a great car. I am never buying Kia or Hyundai cars again and I recommend everyone else avoid them from here on out. Like, if this is what they’re willing to do to save $30 per assembled vehicle, what else might be lurking in their newer vehicles that we won’t know about until it’s too late?


  • I’ve played about 150 hours of ESO. One of the big problems, IMO, is that the surface-world PvE story content is so unchallenging it’s boring. They made it so that someone with an intentionally atrocious build can solo everything that’s required for story progression, which means that anyone who puts the slightest thought into their character will steamroll the game. If I thought that’s all there was to the game, I wouldn’t have played it more than an hour.

    Honestly, even the default-difficulty dungeons are lame. There’s technically a story in it, but everyone just rushes through it so fast that you have no idea what’s happening. All you know is that you and your party are sprinting from room to room, wiping out huge groups of enemies just by spamming your most efficient area attack. I play a healer character, a Templar in light armor, and when I do standard difficulty I think I pop a basic heal once the entire time if I’m lucky. Sure, the fast pace is exciting for the first few times, but you catch on at some point to the fact that you’re just mindlessly spamming AOEs every time.

    If you actually want a challenging game, you need to do the world bosses, veteran dungeons, and trials. World bosses are technically group content, and there is usually a group running a schedule for the world bosses in each zone, but if you hate those people you can kill them yourself. Veteran dungeons are roughly on the same level of difficulty that WoW dungeons are. I actually have to pay attention to my positioning and resources when I’m in one, which is refreshing. Also nice is that the targeting system works seamlessly with my heals; all I need to do is point at my teammate and hit the spell key, no specific targeting required. It feels like I’m in a combat with magic I can control instead of playing with a UI. But anyway, it’s such a different experience from the default difficulty that I really recommend you try it out. You’ll be fine, I sucked my first few times and I never got vote-kicked or even flamed.

    Trials are the one thing I don’t have experience with, and to my knowledge it’s the most challenging content by far. Someone else could tell you more about it, though. I also don’t have a ton of experience with PvP, other than getting ganked in Cyrodiil a few times while looking for delves and a match where I just ran around spamming heals and running away from enemies. My team didn’t win and I didn’t get so much as a single kill, but I got the highest score of anyone in the lobby. Good times.