The 'detrimental' aspect is entirely due to social climate.

Come on man, that's bullshit. Dysphoria would be commonplace among transgendered people regardless of social climate.

This thread disappoints me, Door. You need to switch the record over.

Quote from: Snake Wilson on July 04, 2015, 09:01:01 PM

...would that make the consumption of animals moral?

of course not

^basically this

Unless the animals were killed totally painlessly. But that's probably where I differ from Verb.

Thomas Sowell.

Article:

The political Left has come up with a new buzzword: “microaggression.” Professors at the University of California at Berkeley have been officially warned against saying such things as “America is the land of opportunity.” Why? Because this is considered to be an act of “microaggression” against minorities and women. Supposedly it shows that you don’t take their grievances seriously and are therefore guilty of being aggressive toward them, even if only on a micro scale. You might think that this is just another crazy idea from Berkeley. But the same concept appears in a report from the flagship campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana. If you just sit in a room where all the people are white, you are considered to be guilty of “microaggression” against people who are not white, who will supposedly feel uncomfortable when they enter such a room.

At UCLA, a professor who changed the capitalization of the word “indigenous” to lower case in a student’s dissertation was accused of “microaggression,” apparently because he preferred to follow the University of Chicago Manual of Style, rather than the student’s attempt to enhance the importance of being indigenous. When a group of UCLA law students came to class wearing T-shirts with a picture of one of their professors who had organized an intramural softball game, those T-shirts were protested as a manifestation of “white privilege.” Why? Because that professor had written a book critical of affirmative action.

“Microaggression” protests have spread to campuses from coast to coast — that is, from California’s Berkeley and UCLA to Harvard and Fordham on the East Coast, and including Oberlin and Illinois in the Midwest. Academic administrators have all too often taken the well-worn path of least resistance, by regarding the most trivial, or even silly, claims of victimhood with great seriousness, even when that involved undermining faculty members held in high esteem by most of their students and by their professional colleagues on campus and beyond.

The concept of “microaggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them. This tactic reaches far beyond academia and far beyond the United States. France’s Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited — if that is the word — with calling social conditions he didn’t like “violence,” as a prelude to justifying real violence as a response to those conditions. Sartre’s American imitators have used the same verbal tactic to justify ghetto riots.

Word games are just one of the ways of silencing politically incorrect ideas instead of debating them. Demands that various conservative organizations be forced to reveal the names of their donors are another way of silencing ideas by intimidating people who facilitate the spread of those ideas. Whatever the rationale for wanting those names, the implicit threat is retaliation.

This same tactic was used, decades ago, by Southern segregationists who tried to force black civil-rights organizations to reveal the names of their donors, in a situation where retaliation might have included violence as well as economic losses. In a sense, the political Left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. But this is just one of the Left’s ever-increasing restrictions on other people’s freedom to live their lives as they see fit, rather than as their betters tell them.

Current attempts by the Obama administration to force low-income housing to be built in middle class and upscale communities are on a par with forcing people to buy the kind of health insurance the government wants them to buy — Obamacare — rather than leaving them free to buy whatever suits their own situation and preferences. The Left is not necessarily aiming at totalitarianism. But their know-it-all mindset leads repeatedly and pervasively in that direction, even if by small steps, each of which might be called “micro-totalitarianism.”

i could still make the ethical argument that it would be wrong

like, easily

You'd have to demonstrate that it was a net negative to human well-being then, which seems like rather a tall order.

The former.

Unions can benefit "insider" workers at the expense of non-unionised workers by pushing the wage rate above the equilibrium rate, they can fall prey to corruption fairly easily, they engage in socially disruptive activities.

The evidence isn't exactly clear on the effect of trade unions, but that's why I support works councils. We don't really know whether or not trade unions are a net-negative or -positive, whereas works councils are fairly clearly beneficial to labour interests.

in my opinion, it's not that less people should be getting degrees--it's that getting a degree shouldn't be essentially mandated by the state if you want to be well-off in your society

I agree, which is why I think primary and secondary education should be sorted out before we start handing out a degree to anybody who can hold a pencil. If you're just relying on an inflated supply of degrees, you're essentially pushing the problem down the line.

When I look at the 46 million people on food stamps in this country, I question our standard of living a little bit.

A 15.3pc participation in the food-stamp programme isn't unexpected, given the anemic growth at the moment.

I'll respond in about half an hour.

What if you gave the natives actual time?

The Industrial Revolution is barely understood in economics as it is. We pretty much have no idea why it happened in Britain, or why it happened in 1800 as opposed to some other time like the great information explosion of the 1500s.

Essentially: time is no guarantee of progress, not at all. It's just an enabler.

OT: I've always just thought it was because an infinitesimal wasn't zero.

This would've been my answer. I was afraid to say it, in case I sounded stupid, though.

God bless our soldiers for murdering all those Indians and kicking them off their land..

A couple of issues:

I) Disease was the primary killer.
II) Natives were murdering each other long before the Europeans got there.
III) The Natives had no concept of private property.

If you want to paint the American military as a bunch of murderers, at least put some fucking effort in.

So what's the point?

That you're a hypocrite. Given the fact that you don't give a fuck, I have no idea why you feel the need to don the sanctimony and throw around the Standards of the Serious Board™ every time somebody does something you don't like.

Whether you give a fuck or not, at least be consistent. And if you're not going to contribute to the discussion, stop wasting your own time.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on July 04, 2015, 08:58:33 AM

There's a lot of faggotry surrounding the idea that "You shouldn't be proud of being born in random circumstances". Fuck you.

Gotta disagree with you there. I applaud being proud of something that you have accomplished or somehow contributed to, but being proud of the fact that you just so happened to be born in some part of the world? That's just pointless, in my opinion.

The point is that nobody is proud of being born in a specific set of borders in the first place. When people say "I'm proud to be an American", they don't mean they start welling up because of the line separating them from Mexico.

Pride in one's country comes from your own ability to contribute to its development, and that country's pre-existing capacity to produce a civil society in the first place. People are proud of being born into America, Britain, Canada, Sweden--whatever--precisely because their countrymen have figured out a relatively decent way of moulding relatively decent people. I'm proud to be British because my country has a comparatively solid record at maintaining a decent social ethos.

Cause at least I know I'm free

And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.

Stop oppressing me.

OT: You should be proud of being American, if you aren't. There's a lot of faggotry surrounding the idea that "You shouldn't be proud of being born in random circumstances". Fuck you. You can and ought to be proud of contributing to a country which has been at the forefront of the world since the 1930s, and you should be proud that your countrymen of all stripes have a comparatively brilliant record on tolerance, liberty and free expression. Is America perfect? Not by a long-shot, but pride comes from the process of development; the journey of improvement, if you want to be a romantic about it.

America doesn't need to be perfect for your pride. Who the fuck takes pride in being handed something perfect, anyway? At the very least you should be fucking grateful and willing to make an effort to contribute to its improvement.