Don't post this in lemmy.ml. You will be argued down and then banned.
balderdash9
joined 1 year ago
Shit like this makes people go back to reddit. At least there's more content and getting banned from one million user subreddit doesn't stop you from going to another big sub. Here, if you get banned in one or two of the big instances you have to become a lurker. I take pride in being able to disagree with the dominant opinion in a reasonable way, but these .ml mods are unreasonable.
True, but reddit is better for niche interests. For example, we don't seem to have any serious philosophy or history communities here. (I am happy to be wrong here, someone please let me know.) On the other hand, r/askphilosophy and r/askhistorians regularly get interesting questions answered by actual professionals.
The Communist Party is based in the Leninist principle of “democratic centralism”. This means “debate within the party, unity in action”. It is meant to make the party more powerful by allowing dissent and debates within the party, but when it comes to taking action, all members are expected to follow the consensus even if they disagreed with it.
Since China’s Congress is primarily members of the Communist Party, this means that the decision of the president ultimately originates in the Communist Party itself. After they reach a consensus, the whole party will vote for that consensus in the Congress. While there technically are smaller parties in China’s Congress, they act more as advisors, since it is not practically possible for them to overturn the vote, since the CPC always votes in unity.
Formally, China’s president is elected by the Congress. But the decision of who to elect largely comes back to the CPC itself before they come to a consensus. So the final decision largely originates in the Politburo and the Central Committee.
The president in China is harder to shift on a dime than like in the US. The president is not elected by a nation-wide vote but by the Congress itself. To change who the Congress elects, you have to change the opinions of the largest party in that Congress, you have to change the opinions of the CPC
Xi is not technically a dictator in the same way that Putin is not technically a dictator. He is in control of a governing body that could replace him on paper, but never will. And he has dictatorial powers without real checks/balances. And, to return to my original point, it may appear that this system is fine if it produces a good result, but the power of the government should come from the will of the people.
By this logic, a monarchy that keeps the aristocracy in line is better than the US democracy. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator.
I'm simultaneously rooting for the predator while rooting for the prey to get away
Sadly, a lot of them voted for Trump because they think he's going to "fix it". The sad thing is they just trust him to figure it out once in office.
Pecan pie is very calorie dense and I don't have the self control
The vast majority of people reading this right now subscribe to Presentism. Presentism is the view that only the present time exists and so only present objects exist. Every moment, as time passes, objects that come to be in the present come to exist and objects that fall out of the present cease to exist. The past and future, as well as past and future entities, exist no more than fictional characters or the objects in dreams.
One problem with presentism is it becomes difficult to make sense of assertions about other times. How can I make sense of the claim that, "Socrates was taller than Descartes" if neither person exists? How can I make sense of the claim that, "The sun will come out tomorrow" when there is no tomorrow? We might be tempted to say that claims about non-existent entities are meaningless in that they do not have a truth-value. But to say these claims are meaningless seems to go against our intuitions about our own speech acts.
Another objection comes from physics. According to special relativity, simultaneity between objects or events depends on the frame of reference that you use to view them. Events happening at the same time from one perspective will be happening at a different time from a different perspective. The popular example is that the people riding in the ambulance hear the sirens earlier than the people standing on the sidewalk. Special relativity tells us no frame of reference is privileged. Therefore, there is no fact of the matter as to whether two events are happening at the same time. This seems to imply that there is no fact of the matter about what counts as the present.
In response, we could adopt a different ontology of time. The Growing Block Theory argues that the past and present exist. More precisely, it argues that, as the present moves forward, the past and past objects continue to exist (and the future does not exist). So every past instance of you exists just as much as you do in the present. You are "spread out" in time, so to speak.
Another popular theory in the metaphysics of time is Eternalism. This theory says the past, present, and future all co-exist equally. Hence, past, present, and future objects, events, and relations all exist. On this view time never passes; we live in a frozen universe. Differences in time are only perspectival (like how people seem smaller when you look at them from far away). Eternalists do, however, admit that events are structured by temporal relations such as "before" and "after".
There are other theories (such as rejecting the existence of time entirely) but this is enough for our purposes. Given these considerations, what is your metaphysics of time?
Basically the title. The fact that we can read an encyclopedia entry on the economic history of the Netherlands from our phone is crazy. Scrolling over to a random island in the middle of the Atlantic to experience a virtual street tour is insane. There are even websites that let you see live security camera footage (shoutout to EarthCamTV). We have so much information that we take for granted.
Maybe we should copy the French. They seem to have the right idea.
Another reason to like Tim Walz. He has openly supported RCV: https://www.rcvbloomington.org/supporters
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Really like GunSmoke. Old-timey western. Use it to go to sleep sometimes.