101–110 of 193 posts
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Shouldn't hate speech should be punished?
Offending someone shouldn't be illegal. Period. Directly inciting actual physical violence, you might have an argument for. But words and ideas must remain free to maintain any semblance of a free society. As other commenters have said: who decides?
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>A unipolar world tends to be more peaceful than a multipolar one simply because there isn't much opportunity for conflict. This statement ignores the mass murder it takes to become the number one power
I guess they meant peace as the opposite of war?
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>I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest. If you truly believe that, would you be opposed to TSA style x-ray machines, genital pat downs, and strip searches any time you were to go to school, work, get on a bus, etc?
Well that would be an inconvenience because I and many others go to work and ride public transport every day. Which is why we don't see TSA checkpoints everywhere; it would be too inconvenient. People fly infrequently though, and also have a very strong desire to feel safe when flying, so they are for the most part fine with TSA checkpoints. TSA checkpoints are implemented to make people feel safe. See, it's a balanc…
So in other words, restricting your liberty or freedom of movement?
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> They wish China would be the one that takes over US as the superpower of the world. I have literally never seen this.
You should travel to China and see it for yourself. Americans are so incredibly naive. I’m not saying you’re American but you definitely should get out more.
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That's bad, but you have bad and worse. For example in the US the TSA does things the police (and nobody, really,) should never be able to, and they do it without warrants: but that alone does not mean that the US is an authoritarian police state (even though it is more of one than it could be). Likewise, there's a difference between corporate influence in government and outright, socially accepted direct bribery. Th…
Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do. I fly often and I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.
I understand the inclination to do this - I think it's natural to want to live in a meritocracy. But I just can't image this not backfiring. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Can you be more specific about these ways you imagine it backfiring? Brooker tackled this kind of thing in Black Mirror, and while his vision of it was pretty bleak, it actually seemed a lot more open to social mobility than our current system in which inequality is becoming more deeply entrenched. Presumably there's no way to live off your parents 'social credit' trust fund. The Black Mirror version of this system w…
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Don't have anything against USA, but a world with a single superpower is prone to bullying and abuse by the said superpower. Many of us just want a peaceful world, and if that needs to be multipolar, so be it
The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated. I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition. Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives p…
How so? I don't think so. AFAICS - and I lived in the US for a decade and would do so again, I have no beef with the country, just saying what I think I see/know - the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.
It's hard to prove or disprove your 2nd paragraph claim since we cannot have the experiment. I think that while you can certainly (as always) find plenty of examples in support the opposing side won't have any difficulties either. Overall the statement is way too fuzzy and broad to be either attackable or supportable.
> Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen
Sounds like a vote for a global dictatorship to me.
We in "the west" or whatnot need to watch out for the corporate equivalents of this, including credit scores, particularly coming from the financial sectors. There's just a lot of opportunities these days, with all the data floating around and our increasing ability to calculate probabilities of arbitrary things about people from large enough datasets. One side of this is disadvantage. Credit scores are an attempt to…
Is it dehumanizing when I decline a ride with an Uber driver that has 3 stars?
Say I have a FB-based profiling system that will calculate the star rating alternative. It works slightly better than uber's current rating system. Ie, it's a better measure of how much you will like the driver. It also works before the driver takes his first fare. In fact, uber's minimum star rating policy can be used as a hiring/sign-up filter.
Would you consider such a thing dehumanising? Its essentially how insurance works, and is increasingly becoming a viable business MO.
it's harder and harder to live in china now.