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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • Depends on what class you are, which I think a lot of comments in this thread understandably seem to assume from a middle class perspective, even assuming “wage” as the main source of wealth.

    Real estate is one major source of capital gains, but for a lot of the 1% and investors, capital gains is primarily from financial instruments, i.e. stocks, bonds, etc.




  • Thanks for sharing that idea! I appreciate what you’re getting at: that basic care (food, clothing) embodies the tenet of equality in socialism. However, the example of a parent feeding a child doesn’t quite capture the power-relations, freedoms, and systems aspects of socialism. I don’t think we really want to say a master feeding/clothing their slave or a king feeding/clothing a favorite court jester is really “demonstrating socialism”. Socialism is about how society as a whole arranges ownership, production, and resource distribution (i.e. collective ownership of the means of production). It’s a counter to capitalism.

    Parental relationships are, ironically, a special case where limiting freedoms and greater power disparity are justified in most egalitarian systems. We usually don’t give children ownership over the means of production.

    Good formal description: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism




  • The comparison I’m making is to Nazi Germany’s war for global domination. So yes, there was Jewish armed resistance in occupied Europe. Now, I don’t condone Hamas’s massacre of civilians and hostage taking. I do believe Palestinians have a right to armed resistance in the face of Israel’s control over Palestinian sovereignty and the continued extreme injustices they’ve been inflicting on Palestinians collectively.

    I was pointing to a distinction in the logic of “rightness”. If you ignore morality, then yes, eradicating a population will effectively stop groups within it from continuing to attack you in the future. However, with morality, genocide is wrong. It’s the same reason why wiping Israel off the map would finish things and end the IDF’s war crimes. However, it would still be morally wrong.







  • It’s up to you if it helps you to think of it that way. However, if everyone is on the spectrum, then “autism” is less useful as a term for categorizing a group of people with a shared condition that may need help/accommodation in specific ways. How do you provide special services for autistic people when everyone is “on the spectrum”. There’s a solution, but requires a different way of categorizing people.

    “spectrum” is a useful analogy to the EM spectrum, which is a literal spectrum. The autism spectrum is not a literal spectrum, we call it that because it’s a useful way to understand neurodiveristy. However, like any analogy, it eventually falls apart as you go deeper into applying it. It’s not the complete way to understand autism nor is it the only applicable analogy.

    Autism is not fully understood, but it is characterized by several dimensions that each involve variation from the norm due to a complex of causes. This is why the “spectrum” analogy falls apart–it reduced autism to one dimension. Another analogy might be a crystal that grows in multiple directions, with more growth from the centre being divergence from the norm. Some crystals grow a little bit in all directions, some grow only in a couple directions, and every other combination of amount x direction.







  • Sure, I don’t disagree with what you said. Some will say Applied Science is a category of science, others will say it’s distinct from capital “S” Science. I don’t really care either way, the distinction I was making was: Science is a process of developing knowledge that explains the natural/observable universe, including the humans/societies within it, i.e. a way of understanding what is. Engineering is the application of scientific knowledge, principles, and methods of inquiry in the construction and development of technology–it does not seek to explain things about the world.