TheVat

Yes, a lot of the positives that veganism (which surely represents a range of perspectives, as most Isms do) offers the future is just the capacity to spark conversations and reflections on multiple issues: carbon footprint (and arable acres per person), human health from a nutritional angle, the ethics of using animals, the question of whether or not we NEED to use animals given the techniques of modern food science, and so on. A lot of veganism seems to settle around two major loci: human effect on the planet as a whole, and human effect on the lives of animals as sentient creatures. IOW, either the focus is on planetary ecological engineering and control of greenhouse gases, and the other is the deeper ethical concerns with animal rights and what suffering is imposed. They both address the ethics of how personal choices ripple outward through the world. I know there are now enough vegans in the world that when I go to the egg section of the supermarket, there are now cartons that contain a faux egg mix composed of plant proteins. This means there are enough people who are either outright vegans or think veganism is cool enough to try some vegan options, to merit production and distribution of the stuff. Personally, my digestion always does well with more fiber, so the plant-based options are usually a plus for me (if palatable).

As someone with a bit of Classics education back there, I feel it's worth mentioning that arete is a Greek term for excellence and the aspiration to fulfill one's highest potential as a person. It is NEVER "safe to assume..." Also, lest your assumptions go ranging wildly again, please know that I am not actually a vat, or a brain in a vat. I do tap into vats, now and then.

I am reminded of the words of famous New York senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Sadly, I don't have 17 meme placards to buttress that with.

Bit of a confusion here. Comorbidities are not the cause of death. Death certificates may show a chain of events, but the cause of death is that which sets in motion a cascade of organ failures that otherwise would not have happened. A patient with treatable T2 diabetes and COPD and some CV disease may be more susceptible to certain organ failures, but those are not the COD. Pretty much every study I've seen finds COVID-19, when listed as the COD, as the primary cause and not something that just happens to be hanging out in the throat while the patient had pneumonia followed by respiratory failure followed by heart failure. I think Reuters recently had a useful fact check on this. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-comorbidities-coviddeaths-idUSL1N2TU22X

As it happens, we watched a movie last night we had missed when it was released in late 2015, Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman and a fine ensemble struggling with the ethics and legalities of making a drone strike in Nairobi on a house full of terrorists who are getting ready to do two suicide bombings. Without going into all the complexities (one of the most cerebral political thrillers I've seen), I'll just say it comes down to a choice: strike immediately and kill the bomb-vested ones before they leave (this is the only way to intercept them), while also likely killing a young girl selling bread right outside, or wait until the girl has sold her bread and leaves. If they wait, it is certain the bombers leave and dozens, maybe hundreds, will die in a shopping mall or marketplace. (a surveillance "beetle" is inside the house, so they can see the bombers strapping on vests and wiring up) A similar problem to this thread's - the proposal is to do something morally wrong to do something right, to save many lives. The generals are all pretty much okay with it. The government ministers are more resistant (not all for the best of reasons). The drone pilot, seeing the little girl, is horrified and puts up resistance and throws some procedural wrenches into the machinery. The film is almost a "must see" for an ethics thread like this one.

There is some evidence LUCA would have been an extremophile, found around hydrothermal vents. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/looking-for-luca-the-last-universal-common-ancestor/

Yes, you really saw that: a Senate candidate shoots at the President, the Speaker of the House, and (ulp!) Gabby Giffords husband. Not sure you can go much lower than this without hitting magma.

If you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' -- Doug Adams

It's worth considering, given the OP question, and that we are in a philosophy thread, that one could have thought experiments (much as ethicists do with the famous Trolley Problem) which are highly unlikely. The question posed is, after all, "is it EVER right?" in any possible sense of "right." I agree with much of @joigus analysis as to why torture is not scientifically supportable (plus one for that) and very likely to always present itself as a barbaric and unimaginative choice where some other bit of finesse might be better. But the scripted thought experiments, like the nuke in London scenario, are meant to make a philosophic incision into the nature of ethical decisions, rather than be a realistic and scientifically documented event in the real world. (hence my earlier point that an actual bomber would have some mechanical contrivance to assure detonation and evade interrogation)(as a couple others posters pointed out). Just as looming trolley accidents, with that special ethical dilemma as framed in that famous conundrum, do not really happen in the real world that way, so too is the case with many a torture thought experiment. In some respects, the Trolley Problem and the London Nuke scenario are both ones that invite the philosopher to consider the merits of Bentham's utilitarianism, and ask what, in theory, promotes the greatest general good for the most people.

Thank you. Had a bit of trouble extracting the jpg.

People seem to be talking past each other. There is no real conflict between torture is generally wrong and torture might be an option where many lives are at stake. There are many ethical rules that are shut down where great peril exists. To do so doesn't make one immoral, it just means one has moral priorities -- violence is wrong but I might stick my foot out and trip a fleeing mugger who attacked a pregnant woman. Vandalism is wrong, but I might smash open a soft drink machine to rescue a hypoglycemic slipping into unconsciousness (if I had no money, and no one was around who did). As for London nuker guy, I suspect he would plan ahead and carry a Deadman switch, so as to avoid torture scenarios that would foil his carefully orchestrated plan. The realworld moral choice would probably be protecting WG plutonium caches and border crossings at the cost of some civil liberties so as to nip such conspiracies in the bud.

https://t.co/LfXqcR2bN6 https://twitter.com/AIGisBS/status/1490896225776078848

Fair point. Torture has some ethical parallels to meatpacking - most of us only imagine someone else doing the dirty work while we keep our distance. (and a chuckle for "nice bloke")

Sounds correct, on the differential being due to who gets what jobs. Many fields where men are still preferentially steered towards higher pay management positions. Or fields where women dominate in numbers and society hasn't recognized the full value of that work. Getting firm figures on this is a moving target, given the changes happening and the current rate of college enrollment of women (around 60% of students are female, per a recent reading). An example I would offer is the relative pay of primary school teachers and lawyers. I would suggest teachers are of more value to society, and a shortage would have more dire consequences. Pay scales may not reflect this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning Enough sardines!

I say, if the human bound to the chair is that evil, then the things you are doing to him to save an innocent are not evil. Some humans don't deserve the rights that most others do Though I earlier carved out extreme exceptions to laws against torture, it seems to me the law, and civilized life, would be in peril if we formally define classes of people who don't deserve the human rights that the rest do. Again, that's why torture must happen outside the law, as a last ditch effort to, say, find the suitcase nuke in Penn Station. (So sorry...how does one get rid of a messed up quote box?)

Might it be helpful to separate out the legal implications of torture (a society that legislates torture as okay) and the realworld implications of some rare and extreme emergency situation. I mean, clearly there's a strong case that a civilized nation should ban torture and not make its citizenry complicit in brutal sadism. But it is also quite sensible to say "this terrorist knows where a nuke is located in Manhattan, which will kill millions of people if detonated, so we will step outside the law in this extreme moment and do whatever it takes to get him to reveal the location." Torture still might not work, but even a low probability of getting an accurate answer, with millions of lives at stake, might be worth it. This action would not be saying that torture is generally right, or that a nation as a legal entity should ever support it. Millions of lives at stake. I feel this example might be less clouded by emotions than pedophile scenarios where the focus tends to be on revulsion for the sicko monsters.

Seriously, see a physician. If your partner was lubricated and had two children (not Caesareans, I assume?), and you are a young man, then pain would be unusual. Most young newbies to the act of coitus report the entry experience to be pleasurable, and you definitely would want to get a clean bill of health so as to have no further concerns about pain. If you are using a condom, you should also be sure and rule out any allergic skin reactions to latex. Good luck!

A 2013 paper by Shakun and colleagues examined a network of 80 climate proxy records around the world during the end of the last ice age. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10915 They found that while CO2 generally lagged temperatures in the southern hemisphere – consistent with Antarctic reconstructions – the same was not true for the rest of the world. Both the northern hemisphere and overall global temperatures actually lagged CO2; in other words, for the world as a whole, warming happened after atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased. The reasons for this are complex and are driven in part by changes in ocean currents as ice ages end. Specifically, Shakun and colleagues argue that changes in orbital cycles triggered initial melting of ice sheets in the northern hemisphere. This caused large amounts of freshwater to pour into the oceans as ice sheets melted, disrupting the AMOC, which, in turn, cooled the northern hemisphere and warmed the southern hemisphere. This southern hemisphere warming caused ocean releases of CO2, which, in turn, warmed the entire planet. Shakun et al suggest that the vast majority of the global warming at the end of the last ice age occurred after CO2 increased, though this warming was driven by a combination of albedo (reflectivity) changes and the greenhouse effect. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-the-rise-and-fall-of-co2-levels-influenced-the-ice-ages#:~:text=Both the northern hemisphere and,currents as ice ages end. Also. this study of Antarctic ice cores may be relevant... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1226368 No Leader to Follow Changes in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and surface air temperature are closely related. However, temperature can influence atmospheric CO2 as well as be influenced by it. Studies of polar ice cores have concluded that temperature increases during periods of rapid warming have preceded increases in CO2 by hundreds of years. Parrenin et al. (p. 1060; see the Perspective by Brook) present a revised age scale for the atmospheric component of Antarctic ice cores, based on the isotopic composition of the N2 that they contain, and suggest that temperature and CO2 changed synchronously over four intervals of rapid warming during the last deglaciation. Abstract Understanding the role of atmospheric CO2 during past climate changes requires clear knowledge of how it varies in time relative to temperature. Antarctic ice cores preserve highly resolved records of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the past 800,000 years. Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the last deglacial warming, using data from five Antarctic ice cores. We infer the phasing between CO2 concentration and Antarctic temperature at four times when their trends change abruptly. We find no significant asynchrony between them, indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.

I find the argument confusing when it sounds like everyone agrees a black woman would bring a fresh and valuable perspective to the supreme bench, but some feel having Biden say it out loud was naughty. Presidential administrations are always looking for certain criteria, and they wish to please their voting constituents in the choice of criteria they use. If you object to this, you really object to representative democracy and the concept of political appointment in its present imperfect form. There's probably a whole thread there.

A couple thoughts. One, the meaning of torture is usually pretty clear to a person on the receiving end. I invite anyone troubled by definitional issues to undergo waterboarding or electrical shocks and report back to us. Torturers use methods that leave little ambiguity as to what they are doing to another person. Second, I think the negative effect of torture is not only on the recipient and on their consequent willingness to say anything to please the torturer, but also its effect on the personality and mental health of the torturer and those in the group and larger society who are supporting the torturer's actions. Ask yourself, who are you and who do you become when you torture, and who are we as a social community when we approve the torture? The pedo example is problematic, given that there may be more effective options than relying upon intel given under extreme duress. It's a tough call, but I think torture degrades mankind far more than it helps children trapped with pedos.

Scaffetta, the "climastrologist"? https://skepticalscience.com/scafetta-widget-problems.html As for polling meteorologists, this strikes me as too much of a "Scoreboard!!" argument to merit discussion from the perspective of scientific evidence.

You were misrepresenting. My reply began with my two word response reflecting my thoughts: palaeoclimate evidence. Terse, but a shorthand that was accurately reflecting my thinking which is: palaeoclimate evidence makes a compelling case for anthropogenic GW driven by a rapid rise in GHGs. I replied in good faith, but with very limited time yesterday. You seem to be trying for some ad hominem tack that suggests a brief comment that points to a vast body of peer-reviewed research can only show the member has no thoughts of their own. This is a cheap shot, bad faith approach and I will waste no more time with you.

You asked for a quote. I was agreeable to this, not having time to carry bricks for you and compose a lengthy discourse. The link provided contained this quote, which reflected my own thinking based on years of following the research: NOWHERE IN MY POST was it suggested that "these people think so, so you should too." I offered the summary as a possible path for your own research and followup, in hopes you would see for yourself the vast body of evidence just from this one area of climatology. I reversed one of your downvotes, as I feel the DV option is detrimental to civil discussion. (See Stringy's new thread in feedback)

I said much the same in another feedback thread some months ago. Hear, hear.