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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s almost difficult to believe Kant wasn’t just pulling a Schrödinger and proposing a ridiculous thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of genuinely holding those views.

    The idea that morality exists only as an intrinsic quality of an action, regardless of context or consequence, is more theology than philosophy. It’s useless to the point of harm to anyone faced with a world beyond a university or a monastery.



  • Yep, but the states with sales tax get tired of getting cheated out of their tax revenue. The specific example where I saw this was a major hardware store chain in Oregon (no sales tax) right near the border of Washington (6.5% sales tax). They asked everyone “Washington or Oregon” at the register and checked ID for anyone who said Oregon.

    Quick search says that Washington considers it a “sales and use” tax, so anything purchased out of state, but intended for use in Washington is supposed to be taxed. Kinda messed up, really.












  • People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.



  • Well said.

    I get Jon Stewart’s position and agree with nearly all of his criticisms, but I think the biggest thing he’s not acknowledging in his “why can France and the UK do this but we can’t?” argument is that this would absolutely not be confined to just the Democratic Party. Literally every step of the process would be decried as election fraud, cheating, “the steal of the century” etc. by republicans. If they got pissed enough to attempt an insurrection in 2020 when there was absolutely no credible evidence of fraud, just think where things will go if there’s this whole slew of unprecedented last-minute decisions that are nearly impossible to reconcile with every individual states’ laws. I’m not saying we have to bow to repubs demands, but the more excuses they have to claim anything isn’t above board, the greater the risk that the “stolen election” narrative gains traction beyond the far right.

    We’ve spent the last 4 years witnessing how slowly our legal system works on huge matters like this. By the time the dust settles on all of the legal challenges, the resulting chaos will have already rendered the decisions nearly irrelevant.