I agree. Some of the posters say that software would have been better if the people he made uncomfortable weren't made uncomfortable by him and thus continued making software. That is extremely implausible. People who do software because it is something they are passionate about would not be so fragile, and that is necessary to make ground breaking changes.
I sometimes hear people say "if tech wasn't stereotyped as a bunch of nerds, there would be more women in it". This ignores the fact that there is a strong causal relationship between being perceived as a nerd and having a serious interested in software. It's like saying "if I didn't hold people who do software in contempt, then I might have done software!".
The doctrine of disparate impact is plainly immoral and flies in the face of freedom of association. Society should punish companies which display behaviors they do not approve of using the market instead of the government.
Were we to take the second sentence seriously, we would have to conclude that the general idea of prohibition of discrimination of whatever kind in non-governmental action (whether employment or public accommodation) was immoral, not merely the specific doctrine of disparate impact.
I agree to the general idea that the government should try to do as little moral arbitration as possible. The concept of "separation of church and state" would be best modernized and secularized as the "separation of morality and state".
My thought is that it is because humans are prediction machines, and death is the most unpredictable event possible. Many cultures try to make death predictable by introducing concepts of heaven, which does seem to work for people who believe it.
I agree, but we must remove all government social programs as well to make that dream come true. You can't have one group experimenting at the expense of another.
The non-existence of free will has no direct policy implication. Since people are deterministic, the knowledge of punishments would create different behaviors.
The non-existence of free has huge policy implications. There are many discussions of this. For example the top result on Google for me looking for "free will justice punishment" was this:
If a criminal has no free will, then they are not responsible for their actions since responsibility is dependent on moral agency. I disagree with that author's conclusion though, that you have to let every criminal go. I think that when someone is apprehended and determined to have committed the crime the decision to be made now comes from a different perspective. What treatment of this person will produce the best (or least bad) outcome for society on the whole? In one case that could mean letting the person go if every indication is that they will not commit another crime regardless of any punishment. In another case it could be locking them up and never letting them out, even on a first offence, if it is very likely that they will commit serious crimes if freed.
Of course there are still discussions to be had weighing the impact of the sentencing decision on the victim, the perpetrator, and the rest of society. There's also how much trust to place in the scientific models of likelihood for recidivism. But accepting that people have no moral agency undercuts the most basic premise of laws and the justice system.
The direct participants in the justice system are not the whole picture. Society is not just affected by the judgement against the defendant, but by the logical precedent of the judgement. Making fair and consistent rules has widespread impact, allowing other people to understand the consequences of their actions and respond accordingly.
A deterministic universe does not mean people do not have moral agency. It just means some people are predetermined to behave immorally. That does not mean we should not do what we can to prevent that behavior.
Because over the long run policies adopted by your country should be scoped to help the members of your country. If politicians/corporations can make a decision that harms our young, and then dig us out by saying there should be a fair playing ground with foreigners, then the consequences of those decisions are externalized.
> Because over the long run policies adopted by your country should be scoped to help the members of your country.
I am fairly convinced that economic protectionism is bad for economic growth, particularly in the long run. And even if I'm a direct beneficiary of a certain protectionist policy, I'd like to think I will oppose it, because it's essentially equivalent to the government taking resources from a non-protected job sector and giving them to the protected job sector.
Even rich societies require some function which controls the population. The more you shield people from natural forces, the more you will stress the system as impact of those forces builds up.
It seems like the brunt of your statement is that we should be fighting human nature itself. No wonder the problems seem so unapproachable. If you don't want to discuss reality, that is fine, but you lose the moral and intellectual high ground that you seem to think you so unquestionably have.
My argument is clear: some ideas carry no weight and deserve no recognition. Debate is for reasonable people with reasonable positions.
We've heard the same arguments from white supremacists in 1991 when Christopher Hitchens graciously hosted John Metzger Jr. (and Sr!) on his show. It was the same line then that these wet alt-right nationalists are using today: pride, freedom of speech, censorship. It didn't work on his show then and I'm not going to be fooled by this petty idea that we need to include every voice in the discussion. That's not the case and we need to maintain an "us versus them" attitude when it comes to defending ourselves against such abhorrent ideology.
The problem is not unapproachable. It takes time to change hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized behaviour.
It's not a very high ground. It's more like a sunny hill. I think you protest too much.
Who are you to determine which ideas carry weight, especially without debate? The moment you use political leverage to win intellectual battles, you are embracing corruption.
> Who are you to determine which ideas carry weight, especially without debate?
I'm just an average, under-achieving person who tries really hard like most people here.
In a word, the thing that tells me which ideas are worth debating and which to ignore? Ethics.
Immigration policy is already a hot topic for many reasons. There are reasonable positions to take on various questions. Should we increase the number of allowed refugees this year in order to meet our international disaster relief commitments? A reasonable position would be, "No, the recent economic downturn has forced us to cut funding to essential services that are already operating at peak capacity; allowing more refugees in might put them into more harms way as we struggle to find out what we can do with them." What about the question, should we incarcerate and mass-deport people of X ethnic minority because they're taking our jobs and using our under-funded healthcare system? That's not even a debate worth having: the question is based in nationalist protectionism and racist ideology. It is unethical.
How about the "all lives matter" debate? Bunk. The only reason to argue against BLM is to continue stealing the spotlight from a very noble and necessary cause.
Don't even get me started on the anti-feminist rhetoric of MRAs. "Debate," there is just a trollish tactic to harass people.
There isn't a leg to stand on for these ideologies and positions. They're ethically and morally reprehensible and completely unreasonable. There's no debate to be had. The people who insist on debating in favour of them do so without a credible argument or position. They only want to continue the "debate" to keep attention away from the real arguments. It's a waste of time.
The only reason the Metzger interview was interesting to me was as a demonstration of just how weak and pathetic these people are. There's no reason for anyone to take the Metzger's of the world seriously at all. Rather we should take the proliferation of their ideas seriously and should stamp them out everywhere we find them.
