Yes, but partitioning blame is not the point. Thomas Aquinas wouldn't touch the lever, because doing so may jeopardize his path to heaven.

Kant wasn't around when Nazi Jew hunters were literally scouring Europe for hidden Jewish refugees, but he did address the murderer at the door and argued it was right and proper not to lie to the murderer to protect a friend.

Sartre and Camus (and pretty much all their contemporaries) had to deal with real Nazis, so they'd pull the damn lever because ultimately it doesn't matter who set it up, even if they successfully escape to Brazil or Argentina. The situation is here and now and up to us to act. (And while there are few literal trolleys, there are plenty of instances in which a smaller mischief supports a greater good, or preventing a greater harm, sometimes involving selecting who lives and dies.)

A mother would steal medicine for her sick and dying kids, for instance, and rightly so, which is why it is necessary to create a society in which she doesn't have to, and defy the society that prevents her from caring for those children.

Countless Muslims in Spain would eat pork before their colleagues and before God so as to not be discovered and reported to the Inquisition. But then in Islam (by my limited comprehension) God forgives when you do what you do to survive.

There's no right answer to the Trolley problem. It happens to be a paradox of deontological ethics (mores defined by creed) but its point in full form is to show that there are often no right answers, and we are driven as much by what we feel is right or wrong, as by what we compute is the most rational ethic.

The Trolley problem just happens to be the one turned into a meme, and is easy to draw on a chalkboard in philosophy class.

Kant would disagree.

Many philosophers (many of whom are Kant's contemporaries,) think Emmanuel Kant can be a dick sometimes.

But Kant would argue by pulling the lever and getting involved, you are taking responsibility, but ultimatly the guy(s) who secured the victims to the tracks are to blame. And your lawyer will argue this in both criminal and civil court.

I'm sure AGI is far off and AGI is impossible is exactly what AGI wants us to think.

I thought the F117a doesn't have a2a capabilities. It acts like a hole in the sky, drops a couple of bombs and then the distant AWACS plane laughs maniacally.

It is.

We knew this was going to happen before he made the purchase.

Everyone said, the best way for Elon to keep his money was to change very little, or even take a hands-off approach.

Masnick suggested this would happen

It was that and so much worse. Moral of the story: Running a huge social media service is hard. Maybe don't assume that because you're a billionaire you're the best at doing stuff.

According to my proctologist, we Americans are cruel to our butts with over-use of toilet paper.

Never wipe but dab. Use a bidet. Start with a travel bidet, which is $5-$20, and you can fill them with warm water. Rinse liberally and dab, repeat until clean.

Don't worry about manliness. Being nice to your hemorrhoids is the adult thing to do.

I was tempted by Naval Supremacy but I didn't like the smell (which totally should have been Bay Rum).

Tactical baby carrier should be for the fun dad who uses it to make jokes about how you otherwise might notice the baby

It still can be. The fun dad with tactical gear will reveal his fun-ness quickly enough. If the baby's binky is tactical black, but the multi-tool is Barbie™ pink, it might be a clue.

Actually the woke and trans movements are emergences of what Ska and Punk was doing decades ago.

A man's music collection should consist of classic rock, country and blues

Does this give anyone else boomer vibes? Also, I suspect this is trying to invoke the Progressive Rock of the 1970s (Kansas, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Supertramp, etc.) and not Buddy Holly, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin or, you know, Elvis, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones

But then my man card expired in the early 1990s.

The enemy within rhetoric is a fascist tool used by autocrats to keep public discontent down. Heydrich, when he was running the Sicherheitsdienst realized this is what kept the common NSDAP party followers loyal.

But it only works for a while. You can prolong the effect by arresting / containing / purging / disposing of undesirables ( untermenschen or lebensunwertes Leben ) in large numbers which his why the SD hunted and arrested felonious Jews (as they were tasked to do) but any Jews they could add onto their list. Compare the ICE program to arrest and detain immigrants in the US, where they were tasked only to go after felons, but disregarded that qualifier, overwhelming their detention centers, yet allowing disease and filth to spread among the contained population.

Another method to prolong the effectiveness of enemy within rhetoric is to expand the list of undesirables that are persecuted, to discover that opposing ideologies have penetrated into newly-suspected populations (see also the McCarthyism era, circa 1950s) which is why most Christians are ultimately in danger even in a Christian Nationalist movement, once a state religion is established, those denominations that count as acceptable will narrow until there is only one left, and even then some parishes will be determined to be insufficiently pious.

Similarly, after the July 20 plot failed to kill Hitler, about 7,000 arrests and 5,000 executions followed, though few of them were actually associated with the plot itself, rather were gadflies of the NSDAP party and the SS, ( society offenders who might well be underground / and who never would be missed / who never would be missed ) since politics in the German Reich was conducted with long knives.

Eventually there are more people in the population who are hiding an aspect of themselves from the state and their neighbors then are people who have nothing to hide, which makes a society fecund for organized criminal syndicates to arrange for protection from the state. (The Sicilian Mafia started as a counter to the Holy Inquisition, for example). But hopefully before it gets to this stage the Allies storm Berlin and the genocide engine is shut down.

I still hold to my hypothesis that self-proclaimed alpha-males experience the same kind of body / identity dysphoria experienced by some folks in the trans and enby communities, specifically they feel less masculine than they want to be, and are possibly unable to feel adequately masculine no matter how much they express themselves.

Part of the problem is the failure of patent offices to do due diligence. Granted, this was exacerbated by the lack of an electronic database that tracked prior patents, public domain stuff, and things declared too general to be patented by the courts.

The project in the US to transfer old patents to digital and make them searchable is way underfunded and understaffed, and still is expected to take decades to finish.

The thing is, big companies like being able to win IP cases just by outspending their opponents, so they lobby to keep IP law byzantine and draconian, and to install judges who are either ignorant or just will side with the bigger company.

WTF?

After about fifteen minutes in the sun I feel like something's wrong. Depending on if it's nice and overcast, or a bright summer day, I have from ten minutes to an hour before nausea takes over.

I also have a crazy, almost fetishistic thing about consent.

I might be a vampire.

In the aughts George W. Bush signed an executive order instructing the IRS not to enforce the restrictions on churches regarding political speech non-profits are not supposed to endorse parties or specific candidates, though they can talk about issues).

After that dozens of right-wing political action committees and activism organizations redefined themselves as churches, what are now called parachurch organizations that are tax-free and political.

So yes, it is already a laundering business taking advantage of Christian nationalist leadership who believes in loyalty over principle.

Wow. Is this normal behavior for you?

If England is gone, Imperial France would have prevailed. Heck the war of the first coalition might have gone to Napoleon.

Granted, buggery and interracial marriage would have been legalized sooner.

Public equality and public liberty are the responsibility and purview of government. If they are not, we can't really have government by consent. Instead we have hegemony in which the lower strata are governed by force.

Here in the states, the social norm of taking personal responsibility for all our misfortune and lack of career opportunities allows our industrialists to take credit for propelling themselves to greatness (even when their inherited wealth did the heavy lifting).

So yeah, a latchkey kid childhood (in which I was home alone, because all the adults in my house had to work) figures largely into my lifelong major depression. I suspect our intergenerational mental health epidemic here in the states is informed not only by intergenerational dysfunction (each generation taking the abuse of the previous and then abusing the next) but also by the isolation created by nuclear families without strong communities.

Then there's the matter that we humans tend to blame ourselves for trauma, as seen by studies of mothers who endured a miscarriage, and the disproportionate tendency to blame themselves for circumstances that could not have been affected by behavior (diet, attitude, whatever). Also people who survive the recently deceased often will look to themselves to see how circumstances of the death might have been changed.