There’s always some place that’s worse. What you’re arguing for here is a race to the bottom, where everyone tries to be worse than their neighbours in order to get the undesirables to go there instead.

In essentially “the tragedy of the commons” but in an opposite sense. If everyone gets worse in an attempt to get rid of “undesirables”, you just end up with everywhere being worse, and the “undesirables” still being around. What we need is for everyone to build safety nets together. That might actually improve the situation.

Honestly, I kind of wish crypto hadn’t gone to shit with the whole speculation thing… It was just this fun thing where obscure websites would let you buy random shit for laughs sometimes. Then suddenly investors had to try making money off something with no inherent value and ruined it :/

On a hard drive? I remember a bunch of people messing around with bitcoin when it was new, relatively unknown and considered a niche nerd thing. There were online competitions with money prizes where the “last winner” (eg. third place) would win like one bitcoin.

Fast forward 15 years and the stuff you mined for fun in high school and forgot about on some dusty old computer is worth thousands of dollars.

It’s completely common in most countries that some high-ranking government officials live on state-owned property. Among the reasons for this are security, and the fact that official visits, press events and other official events are held at that property.

My personal tale on this is that given that the brain contains chaotic circuits (i.e. circuits in which tiny perturbations lead to cascading effects), and these circuits are complex and sensitive enough, the brain may be inherently unpredictable due to quantum fluctuations causing non-negligible macroscopic effects.

I don’t know if the above is the case, but if there’s anything like free will out there, I’m inclined to believe that its origins lie in something like that.

I’m perplexed: How do you go from someone saying “gender is a social construct” to them being trasphobic? I got the “spot the vegan” vibes that they were trying to suddenly make this about trans rights…

I love pedantry <3 I got the “three medals per event” from some Wikipedia page, and I know they love pedantry over there as well, so maybe you should make a contribution?

We have divided a bunch of sports into “open class” and “women only” (some sports use “men only” and “women only”) because the difference between men and women is large enough that

1. Women would be unable to compete at a professional level otherwise

2. A lot of sports would be directly dangerous for women (see: contact sports without weight classes)

Nobody argues that it’s pointless to have weight classes. How is that different from having classes based on (a proxy for) levels of testosterone?

One of the best male 1500m runners today, Jacob Ingebritsen, beat the current women’s WR by almost 4 seconds when he was 15 years old. Women can be amazing athletes, and watching women compete at the top level is amazing. That’s why we need a class where they can compete, just like we need weight classes in many sports.

In 2020 there were 448 events at the Olympics, let’s round up to 450. Each event gives 3 medals, for a total of 1350 medals. The Olympics are held every four years, so that 337.5 medals are awarded in an average year.

There are about 8.1 billion people in the world. On average, 0.000004 % of the worlds population receives an Olympic medal each year.

If this were a completely random yearly lottery, and you lived for 100 years, you would have about a 0.0004 % chance of winning an Olympic medal in your lifetime.

I would count myself lucky if I won that by the time I was 50.

Well I guess that still has the same effect of removing anonymity, but if it gets more people voting it’s still a net positive. To my knowledge the US has a concerningly low turnout rate for elections, so anything that helps…

I guess what I’m most concerned about is a situation where people are forced to vote for a specific candidate, and it doesn’t really seem to me like there’s any mechanism in place to prevent that (?)

I wasn’t implying anything here, no need to be a dick about it. Like I said: I’m my country we don’t have this system.

The kind of possibilities I was thinking about were more along the lines of an abusive spouse forcing their partner to sign a ballot, someone stealing a neighbours ballot out of their mailbox and forging their signature, or some family member doing the same to other family members.

Signatures can be forged quite easily if you have access to other signatures from that person, so I was honestly wondering what kind of system they have in place to ensure the kind of things mentioned above don’t happen.

Also, I guess I was kind of assuming ballots weren’t signed, in order to protect the anonymity of the voters, and that there was some more sophisticated system in place.

Honest question: With this kind of system, how do you verify who filled in the ballot? In my country we have “mail in” voting, which consists of going to a polling station in some other district than the one your from, filling in a ballot in the normal way, and then they send it for you.

Also: I’ve seen people talking about how you have to vote in person on election day, don’t the polling stations open before that? I usually vote a couple days before election day, the polling stations open like two weeks before…

The US supreme court judges are appointed by politicians: They are political appointees. In a lot of other countries supreme court judges are selected by a non-political committee, like every other non-political appointee.

You may be joking, in which case: Fair game.

If not… come on. In what world do you write “(…) I’ll find you. Mark my words.” In that kind of context without being (at least humorously) threatening?

I can’t post my memes on the much room bulletin board for everyone to see unless I print them :/

It’s true that a lot of peoples (maybe most?) today live in a place which they took by force from someone else, though you don’t have to look far to find areas that are still inhabited by the first people that arrived there. Still, for a fair comparison you need to separate between those that took areas by force either from necessity (e.g. they were displaced themselves) or otherwise before any kind of international regulation existed.

You cannot compare a tribe or small kingdom taking land by force 2000 years ago to a modern state annexing land, just like you cannot compare the sacking of a city 1000 years ago to a modern genocide. The world has changed.

No I didn’t mix it up, I included the Amish, could have included Romani, and specified that I was talking about geographically dispersed ethnicities in general.

Yes, some Jewish people have ties to what is Israel today, and no it really doesn’t open a can of worms. I was very clear that displacing any group of people is wrong: Hence, the state of Israel should never have been created, but now that it exists, we need to figure out a solution that doesn’t involve displacing any more people.

To answer the “how far back” etc: Quite simply put, everyone today (sans a couple hundred thousand stateless Palestinian refugees, and a few others) have some citizenship and live on some land. Nobody has the right to displace others to claim that they have “more” of a right to that land. Thus: If you have ties to some land, and someone else lives there, you’re shit outta luck unless they want to negotiate with you. If, like the Kurds, your living in the place you have ties to, but don’t have your own state, you have a decent case.

It really isn’t that complicated: Don’t displace/murder people. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

Exactly: I am antizionist because Jews getting a place of their own implicitly means that some other group, which currently has that place, must be displaced.

Saying that Jews should have a place of their own is not comparable to saying that Italians should have a place of their own, because being Italian is tied to having hereditary ties to the place that is Italy, whereas being a Jew has no tie to a specific piece of land. It is rather comparable to saying that Christians, Muslims, the Amish, or some other group of people that are dispersed and unified by beliefs not tied to a place should have their own place, and that if such a place does not exist it is legitimate to displace others to establish it.

I firmly believe that Israel should never have been created. As do many Jews (often ultra orthodox ones). However, I recognise the reality on the ground, that the state now exists and that many of those that moved there have now lived there for up to several generations. I do not believe that two wrongs make a right, and as such, I’m not a proponent of dissolving the state of Israel and displacing the Jews that now live there to make room for those displaced following 1948. However, I do believe that the displaced Palestinians should be allowed to return and have equal rights within the now existing state of Israel.

It honestly feels like we somehow have to take back the (very loaded) word “antisemitism”, as Israel and its supporters seem intent on making it mean “anything the Israeli government disagrees with”.

I’m not an antisemite, and have no hate whatsoever for anyone because of theirs religious beliefs or where they come from. My views are antizionist and antigenocide. Which are strictly political views, not tied to any specific demographic of people.