WatDabney @ WatDabney @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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So CBS is likely going to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump because they need approval for a merger and that approval comes from an agency overseen by Trump.

By any reasonable standard, that's extortion, and a crime.

We live in such a foul and loathsome timeline.

No.

(A quick search later)... Ah... yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.

Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.

It's something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.

My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam's first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he's a tedious putz who can't even manage to make a barrel, but that's another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - "The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!" - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they've shut him out.

Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who's reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.

I'm not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but...

That'd be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

That too.

I should've clarified that the near certainty that "housing" is a deliberately misleading term there is more in the nature of adding insult to injury.

I guarantee that by "housing" they actually mean "private estates."

There's no way they let us peasants live on former parkland.

And what that means too is that it will accomplish absolutely nothing to combat the housing crisis. It'll just be even more land owned by rich fucks, and just one step closer to the neo-feudalism of which they dream.

Cutting taxes for the rich, raising taxes for the poor and increasing the national debt is an economic plan in the same sense that sitting on the couch eating frosting from a can is a diet and exercise plan.

I grow more convinced all the time that the Republicans and their wealthy cronies and patrons are actively and deliberately destroying the US.

The actual plan is to steal as much value as possible, ultimately triggering economic collapse, which they'll ride out in security and privilege somewhere else (Greenland, for instance). Probably engineer a war or two along the way too. And between the economic collapse, the wars and the destruction of the healthcare system, they'll cause the deaths of many millions of people.

Then, when things are at their worst, they'll move back in, with mercenary armies, claim literally everything, and rebuild the US as essentially a feudal state, with the wealthy few owning everything and everyone else reduced to the status of serfs.

Presumably his advisors determined that he needed to Overton more and faster if he wanted to ensure that he'd be the neolib weasel the DNC shoves down our throats in 2028.

I doubt that.

I expect that, if pressed, they'd register some mealy-mouthed quasi-criticism, simply because there's no possible way to even convincingly pretend that it's justifiable, let alone acceptable. But that's just mouth noises - they're never going to actually take a meaningful position against it or against anything elseTrump says or does, simply because, at this point, continuing to support Trump requires so much dishonesty and misrepresentation that if they start questioning any part of it, there's too great a chance that the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down, and they'll be revealed as angry, toxic fools, and they can't allow that.

I think that the focus on the violation of the will of one by another defeats relativism.

The killer's expression of his will is not simply something he is doing, but something he is doing to another, and the will of that other must have priority.

If the will of the person upon whom the act is committed isn't held to be paramount, then the entire concept of interpersonal morality collapses. So an act that brings harm to another contrary to the will of that other must be seen to be wrong entirely regardless of one's personal views on the matter

Note though that that's subject to the essentially "mathematical" concept of morality I addressed elsewhere. That an act that brings harrm to another contrary to the will of that other is necessarily and without exception wrong does not preclude the possibility that it might be justified, if it serves to prevent a greater wrong or bring about a greater right - if it's such that the negative value of the act in question is offset by a greater positive value, such that the "sum" of the specific "integers" that make up the entire course of action is positive.

That actially gets into the second thing I mentioned.

My view is that morality is best seen to function in a sort of math-like way - individual acts have a fixed moral value, and the moral value of an entire course of action is the "sum" of all of the relevant "integers" that make it up.

So, for instance taking the life of another contrary to their will has a negative moral value always. There are no exceptions - the value of that individual act is always negative.

However, protecting people from a known predator has a positive moral value, and similarly always has that value.

And depending on the severity of the threat and the severity of the response, it's possible for the "sum" of those two acts to be positive, which is to say right, and even as the value of the individual act "taking the life of another contrary to their will" remains negative.

That's not to say or imply that I believe that acts can be assigned actual numerical values - rather it's just a way to conceptualize the matter - to hopefully provide the absolutism that morality needs to be even-handed while still allowing for the flexibility it needs to be useful.

So to your question - in and of itself, taking the life of another contrary to their will - even if that other is a serial killer - is wrong. However, protecting people from a known predator is in and of itself right. So the two need to be weighed against each other, and I would say that if the risk the killer poses is sufficiently great (certain or near enough to it to make no meaningful difference) and if there are no other at least equally certain methods to prevent future killing, then execution would be justifiable. Which is to say, executing him would have a positive moral vaue, in spite of the fact that taking the life of another contrary to their will always has a negative valie in and of itself.

There's much more nuance to all of this - issues with the necessary unreliability and potential deliberate misrepresentation inherent in predicting the future, differences of opinion regarding the relative values of various acts and thus potentially the final value of the course of action as a whole, different methods for resolving disagreements on those things, and so on and on. But that's grist for other mills.

Wrong, IMO, is defined by the violation of the will of another.

That's the common element to all things that are broadly considered wrong.

For instance, if somebody chooses to give you something, that's a gift and it's fine. But if you take that same something from them against their will, that's stealing, and wrong. In both cases, the exact same thing happened - a thing went from being their possession to being yours. The difference - the thing that separates the right act from the wrong one - is that one was done according to the will of the other person, while the other was done contrary to their will.

And the same holds true consistently - assault, kidnapping, rape, even murder - none of them are characterized by what happens, but by the fact that it happens contrary to the will of the "victim." And in fact, that's what defines a "victim" - whatever has been done to them was done against their will.

And it should be noted that there's an odd sort of relative aspect to this, since the exception to the rule is the violation of the rule.

What I mean by that is that if one decides to violate the will of another, one is instantly wrong, which essentially negates the requirement that ones will not be violated. Your will to violate the will of another not only can be but should be itself violated.

I also have an idea for reconciling the need for an effectively absolute set of moral standards with the fact that morality is necessarily subjective and relative, but that'd require another, and likely even longer, essay.

For the first, I think that white meat is in fact superior breaded and deep fried, because flavor really is irrelevant at that point. You don't bread and deep fry something to enjoy the flavor - you bread and deep fry it to make it satisfyingly crunchy and chewy (and use a dip for flavor) and white meat has a better grain for that.

For the second - I'm just saying that though I otherwise agree that dark meat is better, I don't dislike white meat. I guess I felt some need to stick up for it a bit...

I'd disagree on one count - white meat is better breaded and deep fried. It has a better grain for that, and its lack of flavor is irrelevant.

And I don't dislike white meat in soup or the like, though I do think that dark meat is superior.

In fact, for lunch today I made chicken and rice with a leftover whole chicken that was mostly white meat. I started by boiling it until the meat fell off the bones, then adding spices and vegetables and cooking it down until it was thick, at which point the chicken was in shreds. I like that, but at that point, the chicken isn't so much chicken - it's just protein and a carrier for the spices.

This is a good example of what I believe to be the basic dynamic going on in the US.

Trump isn't really leading this autocratic coup. He's a tool of the people who backed and made up the Heritage Foundation and the like.

None of them want to, for instance, suspend habeas corpus because they actually consider immigrants to be an invading force - that's just rhetoric to stir up the base and provide cover for their real goals.

Both Trump and his handlers want to suspend habeas corpus so that they can imprison whoever they want whenever they want.

But while his handlers want to do it for the standard autocratic reasons - so that they can disappear dissidents and political rivals and the like - Trump wants it just because he's thin-skinned, egotistical, petty and vindictive, and he wants to be able to punish people who piss him off.

So they share a goal, but for different reasons.

That's how we end up with a relatively nuanced coup apparently being led by a delusional moron - the Heritage Foundation and the other conspirators have arranged things so that the toddler in chief can be allowed to basically run free, telling his lies and throwing his tantrums, and it ends up benefitting them.

Not necessarily.

Trump doing his thing 2016-2020 met with a lot of obstacles and pushback.

Then he was out of office for four years, and while he was crashing around spewing nonsense and vitriol, some very intelligent and very evil people were working behind the scenes to secure some significant Supreme Court rulings and to draw up a step-by-step plan for instituting fascism in the US.

And now Trump doing his thing is met with almost no obstacles or pushback - virtually the entire government is bending over backwards to enable him.

And it must be noted that he's not particularly smart or sane, but he is a childishly greedy and selfish narcissist. That means he's incredibly easy to manipulate. All anyone has to do is frame something in a way that appeals to his crippled emotions and drop a few hints to get him going in the right direction, then just stand back and let him do his thing.

Not saying that that's certainly what is happening, but...

I’m guessing you think

You don't have the foggiest idea what I think, so don't you fucking dare mansplain it to me.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard." - H.L. Mencken