Lurker123 [he/him]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2022

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  • I think you are confusing yourself by thinking of a typical burglary - I.e. a burglary where the burglar has done what they can to make sure people aren’t home (e.g. struck during work hours, saw the mail piling up and came when the person was on vacation, etc.)

    But that’s not the situation being contemplated here. The OP specified a nighttime break in. This is the opposite of your standard burglar - they’ve struck when people are the MOST likely to be home.

    Of this subset, what percentage have doing something bad to you in mind? Or more to the point, at what % are you morally obligated to not take actions against them? Let’s say 49% of the time does the nighttime breakin burglar actually intend you physical harm. Do you have to eat it at those numbers? (I’m asking genuinely, since you seem to have a strong moral intuition here. From your other post, you said you couldn’t put a value on human life, so the only other value I have here is the resident’s life. In the 49/51 example, since it’s more likely than not that there’s no harm intended, this maximizes the amount of lives).





  • Lurker123 [he/him]@hexbear.nettomemes@hexbear.netDot
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    2 months ago

    I don’t think descriptivist is really operating on a normative level. It is not taking the position people/society ought not try to shape the language. It is simply recognizing the reality that the meaning of a word in language is (*insert specific branch here - but often it is something like “common usage”).





  • It’s so odd to me that anybody is putting much thought into this without knowing what the narrative purpose of the choice is. Take shogun, for example - this has a British protagonist (although arguably Mariko is the protagonist). But this serves a strong narrative purpose - at the very least, it is a convenient (albeit common) device which allows you to spell out the culture, background, etc. for the audience under the auspices of that stuff being told to the character who is also unfamiliar with it. And from a plot perspective, that white character also helps fill out the christianization of Japan subplot.

    It could very well be the same with AC. That they picked a black samurai outsider could be a relevant plot point. That it is this one in particular - who had close contact with Nobunaga - may also be central to the plot and story they want to tell.




  • I’m not sure there’s a person who really believes both of these. I think people who believe premise one actually believe this to be a generally true statement about people (or a generally true statement about some racial subset of people) rather than a statement about all people. This dovetails nicely with their love of billionaires due to them being “hard workers” because it shows the billionaire is somewhat unique and better than most people in that regard.



  • Was China not a country prior to 1971, because Taiwan had the Chinese seat in the UN (it meets the international observers standard(?)) and the entirety of China was “disputed”?

    As for recognized authority, isn’t it the case that for certain areas of Israel (e.g. certain areas within the 1948 UN partition plan, or 1967 borders) it meets the test you laid out? I.e. people living there agree that the Israeli government is the one that they identify with and international observers agree to recognize the Israeli government’s control over those areas? In that case, Israel would be a country with some disputed borders (I.e. everywhere outside that area with recognized authority).


  • What does “recognized authority” mean?

    Also apologies if I’m misreading your statement, but you seem to be saying that having disputed territory/borders renders you no longer a country. Surely that can’t be the case. For example, various island nations (e.g. Philippines, Japan, Brunei) have disputes with China (and each other) over whether certain islands are part of their territory. Yet these 4 entities are countries.