Sounds like DEI, so I think it’s not going to fly in the current political climate.

Doubting that this is the case, seeing how they are trying to push back against protests against Republicans, is just delusional. I refuse to believe them to be so incompetent, that they constantly act against their own interests and boost MAGA message instead. Bernie gets way more attention from the public than everything they are doing right now combined, and they barely acknowledge he exists.

As an awkard person I’ll admit that it would reassure me somewhat. I mean, I wasn’t going to but I’m glad it’s an option. It’s like feeling being accepted despite messing up before potentially messing up, which allows us to skip that dreadful moment between messing up and being either forgiven or despised. And come on, imagine shitting in a closet by, uh, mistake, and not fully expecting that your entire social live is now in ruins and you need to delete all of your social media and move to different country. It could be worded better, sure, but it’s a neat gesture.

So, listen, I’m not making a case for all of them, but…

Seriously though white people fucked stuff up for native americans and africans pretty hard, and just because it’s not discussed in the slightest and everyone (white people) pretend it’s not an issue, it doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. It’s less about white people though, and more about capital class that upholds the status quo, the by-product of which is the white supremacy - and that is very parrarel to the zionist claim.

How do you reconcile the understanding of her not being a good person and doing harm to the world with being a Swiftie? That’s a genuine question, I find identifying with the group supporting or admiring the person or idea I myself am opposed to on the ideological level hard to imagine. I can understand it being the case if one is defending the lesser evil, as they are coerced to do so by implied existence of the greater evil, but while I’m not well versed in the Swift lore I believe there isn’t any evil twin running around that she needs to stop. Unless.

That’s not an attack, I believe that being a Swiftie might mean something else than what I understand by this term and I am making a fool out of myself. Still, it does seem to mean supporting what you’re opposed to. How do you resolve that contradiction?

And honestly speaking I’m not sure myself if “tankie” should apply to China, seeing how most of their bad shit happend internally with the notable exceptions of Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are a stretch. There is a distinctive difference between Russia and China, despite both belonging to same political alliance and both have a dictatorial leaderships. Hating west/USA and loving either of them would make one a campist, but I’m not sure about that qualifyng as tankie. Naturally, most campists support both, so by that definition it would make them tankies.

While your definition does describe tankies as well, I always understood it to be a derogatory term for the general authoritarian communist/pseudo-communist block more so than applying to all national supermacists.

I mean that would mean I believe that they’re imperialists supporting the case of white supremacy - I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to claim that most USA supported conflicts have the purpose of benefitting the western world, which is based on white supremacy - and most likely are either politicaly illiterate and are unaware (willingly or by ignorance) of what USA is doing, or are sociopaths. They’re not tankies by virtue of not being pro post soviet dictatorships, but when it comes to the callousness towards loss of innocent human lives, they’re uh… Pretty bad. I’m not making a comparison though, I feel that’s like asking which of two shits stinks worse, and we can clearly see that both defecators had varied and distinctive diets.

There was no “science” done to prove that washing hands had effect on mortality, until someone tested that and found that to be the case. So it’s not “old science” vs “new science” but rather “no science” vs “science”. Lead was used because it was available. Radium was used because it was pretty. Bloodletting was considered helpful strictly because of tradition of bloodletting and because no one done the rigorous testing with valid methodology to check if it actually works, or if it’s just a folk belief that it does.

You keep presenting cases where people just didn’t know something and didn’t care to figure it out, and call it “science” because someone baselessly believed in it. It’s irrational. And before you start anew with ignoring my arguments and listing more cases of people not knowing something as a proof that scientific process is harmful, I seriously don’t care. I originally commented about traditions being bad reasons for doing anything with the assumption we have some common ground in our understanding of how science work, and trying to convice someone that science does work is a fair bit too tall of a task to engage with. I’m not interested in that, sorry.

And now, the risk of the child dying during childbirth is twice as likely if the birth happens in homes instead of happening in hospitals. Almost like discovery of germs and development of antiseptics had consequences. Those pesky doctors must be tracking those homeborn children down and eliminating them in the name of science! Oops!

Your unreasonable bias against any attempts to understand the world instead of relying on traditions of unknown origin does not substitute an argument against it. Neither empirical or analitical method of scientific research is limited to some sort of elitist and corrupt academia, so your view of academia being elitist and corrupt doesn’t disprove the efficiency of those methods. And no, the knowledge doesn’t come from practice at all, if it did then ritually practiced traditions would lead to understanding of their roots and their purpose, and humans didn’t learn about spreading of diseases from burial rites, but rather from events when those rites weren’t practiced. Furthermore, we didn’t learn how to deal with those diseases from the traditions, but rather from breaking away from them and studying bodies instead of getting rid of them - which faced much backlash from the church, which wanted to uphold tradition no matter what.

The knowledge comes not from practice, but from study, from testing different approaches and writing down what worked, until you get testing sample high enough to figure out why it worked. And then, people who figured it out probably taught others what to do without sharing in enough details why it works, and puff you have a tradition. And if people do share why stuff works and publish their research data and methodology, then we have knowledge, based on which other researchers can conduct their own research, check if they get similar results and whatnot. Peer review is a rather robust standard for truth, as far as human capabilities go.

Academia being gamified in a way that only approved research gets funding or spotlight has nothing to do with traditions themselves being any good either. Most often power is legitimized via tradition, and many scientific institutes were muzzled because power following tradition found their pursuit of knowledge undesireable. The fact that many research topics are taboo is direct result of that.

Lastly, your idea that the academia is isolated from the “feedback” of the “real world” is completely nonsensical. Nothing that’s not peer reviewed isn’t treated as particulary valuable, and you peer review the research by repeating the tests with the same methodology. That’s specifically the feedback from the real world. Any sort of feedback that shows some parts of tradition should be changed is commonly met with resistance however, so it stands to reason that the opposite of what you claimed is actually the truth, and it’s tradition that suffers from lack of the “feedback from the real world”.

Well seal clubbing is pretty bad for one. But the point isn’t whenever there are bad traditions, but whenever tradition is a good or bad reason to do something. Rites themselves do nothing, burying or burning the body does. Understanding why you’re doing something is vastly better than doing it because of some (possibly reasonable but unknown) ancient reason no one is able to point out. Taboo of incest is less related to traditions, and more to biology which causes people not to be attracted to their siblings in most cases. There is no ceremony or ritual to prohibition of incest, so I’d say it’s not a tradition. The tradition that have existed, however, was inbreeding of royal families, that wanted to keep their blood pure, which led to copious amount of incest and genetic defects. Many traditions rose from the dominance of one group over another and existed to legitimize this dominance further. Tradition of women being unable to vote, earn money or chose their spouse was born from the many generations of oppression. Tradition of black people being segregated away from white in USA was born out of dehumanization of slaves. There are many cases of traditional honor suicides (like seppuku) or honor killing (like stoning of women accused of adultery) in different traditions as well.

I could keep listing “bad traditions with bad reasons” but that’s not the point I’ve originally made, more of a reply to your point about traditions being born out of useful or natural/survival reasons, which I believe those examples should disprove. The point is still that doing something solely because of tradition is bad, you need knowledge to do that well and in current age there is absolutely no reason not to seek that knowledge. In the past, when people were illiterate an easily digestible oral tradition was useful thing, but we’re way past times when we have no good way to ensure the complicated reasons for doing things are preserved. What if some tradition results in oppression of some people and it’s source is unknown or so ancient it’s no longer applicable, should it be upkept? Conversely, should the ritual blood sacrifice be kept in the celebration of plentiful harvest to appease the gods, or should you only keep the parts like dancing around the bonfire and socializing, because those things are fun and healthy for the community?

If there is wisdom hidden in the tradition, then you want to figure it out, but if it’s kept cryptic, unknown and attempts to research it are met with disdain because someone tries to compromise your tradition, then it’s probably better to fuck around and find out what would happen if you didn’t perform the tradition. And if something bad happens, then at least you can write it down and pass to the next generation as the actual reason for doing things. I seriously doubt there is anything left in human traditions that was figured out in the past, and is currently impossible to decipher or comprehend just by analysis, without even doing empirical tests. And if for some reason something isn’t, then do those tests and find out. If you’re worried about some arcane knowledge of the ancients that is too enigmatic for us to understand just by looking, you can try doing something differently in isolated environment, with various precautions and on limited sample. No reason to keep it as “tradition” instead of “reason”, especially since the underlying reason could have been good, but due to no one knowing what it was, the method could have degenerated over the generations to the point of being ineffective.

You’ve disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it’s justified in your eyes and you’d do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them “the worst” in some way.

Only thing I can promise you with somewhat high degree of certainty is that you won’t stay that way for long. 2-3 years tops.

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But that would only work under assumption that in any group of people at least one of them has to be a ghost, or at the very least the chance that there is a ghost in a group of people is greater than 0, right? Is it something about the chance of someone being a ghost being truly unknown, and thus all possible values of probability being taken as equally rational, and with infinite number of possible values for probability of someone being a ghost for infinite number of them observing that no one in a group of people you’re in is a ghost… No, that wouldn’t work either, because it would require an assumption that this specific group of people might have a ghost among them. Assuming anyone can be a ghost with unknown probability still only works when the group you’re observing is entire population, does it not? Limiting it to specific group of people relies on it being representative of entire population, and random groups are not. Especially if you were to be a ghost, that would already make a group you’re in rather unique. Or not, depending on what’s the unknown value of probability of someone being a ghost.

I mean, what???

I don’t understand, please explain

He looks like he commented to someone doing this sport professionally that it look easy and now, with a bit of disdain and irritation, he had to show them what he meant by that

Oh, trust me, it’s not a coincidence that ALL wolves decided to sit away from that uncouth beast.

Right, sorry, it was his wife that outed him for having Hitler speeches book “My New Order” back in 1990, which he apparently kept in a cabinet next to his bed. In the interview he also admitted having a copy of Mein Kampf, though he never openly claimed to read that book often. When he quoted Hitler in 2023 he said it was just a coincidence. Which caused no one to feel uneasy, no one at all. His former chief of staff claimed that Trump praised Hitler for doing some good things, like rebuilding the economy.

So right, sorry, I mixed the “Mein Kampf” for “My New Order”, and it was his wife that outed that, he only confirmed.

I see republican voters shooting republican candidates as pretty much reasonable outcome rather than some newly emergent threat to democracy. Trump made his image himself, it was him who decided to harass miniorities and brag about reading Mein Kampf often. It was him who made republican message extreme, provoked an insurrection, had all those criminal charges and appointed obviously corrupt judges. He groomed americans into feeling insecure and threatened and radicalized a lot of them. I think random depressed kids trying to suicide by shooting him is the least he should expect, especially seeing that USA has a gun cult focused around right to bear arms against threats to democracy. Also a child rapist, which alone is enough for millions of people to pull the trigger. You’re seriously blaming his bad image on anyone else?