But the whole argument is ridiculous. Maybe there is a choice element to being gay. So what? That is a perfectly valid choice to make. But attacking someone for that is not valid, it is completely perverse. It seems to me that the purpose of the "born with it" argument is to develop empathy among people who lack understanding. Because it helps explain why people act on their feelings, even if they are not a good idea…
I agree that it's a valid choice to make, and people should have the freedom to make such choices if they want. However, you said before that "It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours." and that's incorrect. It does make a difference, to some people. To those people, they'd oppose it if it were proven to simply be a choice, whereas they'd have more empathy if it…
>There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us
As you hint at up above, there are non-religious people who believe regulating sexual behavior is important for society. Do you have a way to counter that idea when it's based on a secular worldview which is not so alien to yours?
OK, maybe I was being a little glib. But still, the news reports I hear from that area haven't been very positive as of late, and I do wonder if the country is fundamentally stable enough to rely on hosting anything there.
You may want to consider how where you're getting news from is related to what they're saying.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Are you suggesting that Venezuela hasn't been undergoing a recent period of extreme economic and political turmoil and uncertainty?
I'm a developer on the OpenBazaar project which is a p2p Bitcoin market. Because DNMs are the most popular Bitcoin marketplaces I keep up with them and their features and trends. They're great sources for discovering security concerns.
Can you give an example of some of the security concerns you have discovered? Do you keep a formal list of threat vectors? I would have thought they are pretty much the same as regular web apps. PS. OpenBazaar seems to have received $3M funding. Interesting about change for a project started by Amir Taaki given his very anarchist professions. PPS. Desktop client seems a bad thing to develop first (in the true traditi…
The desktop client is just the GUI for the backend:
I wonder why vendors and buyers aren't using distributed markets like OpenBazaar or the like. Are those not anonymous?
The current version of OpenBazaar doesn't use Tor. The upcoming 2.0 version does work with Tor, but it wasn't built as a darknet market so it might not work well for that use case.
I agree that it's a valid choice to make, and people should have the freedom to make such choices if they want. However, you said before that "It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours." and that's incorrect. It does make a difference, to some people. To those people, they'd oppose it if it were proven to simply be a choice, whereas they'd have more empathy if it…
>There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us As you hint at up above, there are non-religious people who believe regulating sexual behavior is important for society. Do you have a way to counter that idea when it's based on a secular worldview which is not so alien to yours?
Liberty versus authoritarianism? I acknowledge such people exist, but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated. At least with the religious people, I can understand why, I just reject the silly premises (that God will smite us like in the story of Sodom). With atheists (presumably Stalinists?), I really don't get it. Besides, we've seen atheistic authoritarian societies before, and they were a complete disaster, not only economically but also as far as having a happy, functioning society. Hint: if you have to have a wall to keep people from running away from your society, and you shoot people who try to climb over the wall, then the fundamentals of your society are not worth preserving. Now it might be obvious that I'm following a fairly utilitarian philosophy here (happy = good), but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society? Generally, societies which do not value the happiness of their citizens are religious, because they claim that they need to "please God" or act in certain ways to have a better afterlife. Remove the afterlife and deity and what do you have left? Either wanting people to be happy (but still functional; not happy as in drugged-out all the time and unable to keep society functioning), or you're running the society on what makes one person happy and to hell with what everyone else wants, which is basically narcissism (which probably describes North Korea today).
>There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us As you hint at up above, there are non-religious people who believe regulating sexual behavior is important for society. Do you have a way to counter that idea when it's based on a secular worldview which is not so alien to yours?
Liberty versus authoritarianism? I acknowledge such people exist, but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated. At least with the religious people, I can understand why , I just reject the silly premises (that God will smite us like in the story of Sodom). With atheists (presumably Stalinists?), I really don't get it. Besides, we've seen atheistic authoritarian societies…
>but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated
One reason might be that they believe that having a culture which is hedonistic toward sex is harmful for society, and they believe that acceptance of homosexual behavior necessarily leads to having such a culture.
>presumably Stalinists?
That is definitely not a reasonable assumption to make.
>but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society?
It is perfectly possible to be utilitarian, non-religious, and opposed to the acceptance of homosexuality. All it takes is a belief that acceptance of homosexuality is on the whole and over time more harmful for people than intolerance of homosexuality.
Liberty versus authoritarianism? I acknowledge such people exist, but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated. At least with the religious people, I can understand why , I just reject the silly premises (that God will smite us like in the story of Sodom). With atheists (presumably Stalinists?), I really don't get it. Besides, we've seen atheistic authoritarian societies…
>but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated One reason might be that they believe that having a culture which is hedonistic toward sex is harmful for society, and they believe that acceptance of homosexual behavior necessarily leads to having such a culture. >presumably Stalinists? That is definitely not a reasonable assumption to make. >but if you're not religious and…
Which goes back to a question of individual human rights versus the collective will of society. The former is far more tangible than the latter.
It's not a semantic argument. It's important to make it plain, before having a reasoned discussion, that there are legal drugs that people use every day but wrongly categorizes as "not drugs." Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine being the main culprits. Food, exercise, and social media also cause experience-shifting changes in neurotransmitters (the drugs that are always mediating your experience). It's important to get…
Just to set the record straight can you cite where social media causes experience-shifting changes in neurotransmitters?
everything does. it's a question of individual context, individual biology, and what you define as "experience-shifting" + our ability to understand and measure the human brain.
There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn. My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment. There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physical…
> There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn. You're right that this is a very difficult topic to discuss rationally but I'm going to try anyway. > What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn? 1) Com…
For an example of this, check out Portugal that legalized and had great success. I wonder if anyone can point to place where drugs are legalized and violence increased ? Where addiction increased ? Seems absurd, yet people don't think the drug war is absurd-- they don't immediately see this takeover of Hanza as the government illegally operating a black market for weeks and thus committing massive crime, and they don…
You might be interested in the Playpen case going on now: