Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.

  • 0 Posts
  • 1.25K Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle


  • I’m Canadian so I’m not a voter in the contest you’re presenting, but if I were I would vote Democrat. And of the trio you present for the Democrats, I would say that the position I’d compromise on would be gun control. Not because American gun culture isn’t bananas and it’s not a serious problem, but because I can’t see any plausible way to fix it in the short term. So might as well let it go for now and deal with the more important stuff that affects more people.

    I think a more reasonable compromise would be to give Republicans most of what they want on immigration reform. That seems to be something they consider to be of critical importance, but that I think can be allowed without it causing significant harm. If the American economy starts to suffer as a result of not having illegal immigrant workers then that will be motivation for further reforms. I think it’s important to have the laws try to reflect the realities, though, and having the economy literally depend on large-scale lack of adherence to the law of the land is a bad place to be. Just make sure not to be monstrous about it - don’t do the concentration-camps-for-children thing, try to maintain basic asylum access for those who truly need it, and so forth.


  • Yup. I would personally love it if the electorate studied the various policies of candidates that wished to be their representatives, decided which ones’ positions were the most beneficial to themselves and to the country as a whole (which is indirectly beneficial to themselves, after all) and then selected that one on a rational basis. If we lived in that world then each candidates’ campaign would ideally focus on debating issues and presenting their views.

    We don’t live in that world, alas. I’ve become cynical about democracy of late because the electorate are a bunch of sports team fans who just want “their guy” to win. Well, so be it then. It’s kind of an emergency right now so play whatever strategy keeps the regressive loons out of power.















  • “Believe or not believe” seems to be an opinion of yours that I’m personally not bound to. I’m fine just accepting I don’t know something that is clearly outside of the grasp of my rational thought or logic.

    Whether you believe something or not is not outside the grasp of your rational thought. Just… answer the question. That’s all it takes to know if you believe something, you take a moment to introspect and you say whether you believe it or not.

    There’s also a difference between lacking a belief in a proposition and believing in the negation of that proposition. Lacking a belief in something (for example, any particular god) is not the same thing as believing that that god does not exist. Both are atheism, they’re just different kinds of atheism. “Strong atheism” and “weak atheism” are the usual terms to distinguish between them.



  • There’s others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it’s a suborbital tourism vehicle that’s basically just a toy. They’re working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that’s like a souped up Falcon 9 but it’s still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who’s actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.