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Posts by Lanny
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2016-07-31 at 5:59 AM UTC in Need Ideas For New Lanny ThreadThis is probably public knowledge by now but I think Lanny is an alcoholic:
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2016-07-31 at 2:25 AM UTC in ATTN: pedos
…Every day she is aging and every day she loses a piece of what it is that you love about her…
…For you, with every step love fades…
…Your love will always be temporary, as will be the things that you seek…
To be fair this is a realistic characterisation of almost all relationships that last long enough. Yes there are people who stay together for 60 years or whatever but the people in those relationships are only tenuously related to the people who started them. If they do manage to love each other for that full span of time, something we would seem to have cause to expect to be rare, it's really only a matter of luck that each partner happened to develop in compatible ways.
Anything you feel attracted to in any partner (unless it's something stupid and trivial like a legal name) is reasonably going to fade and disappear over time, beauty diminishes for all people, intelligence dulls, cute quirks become tedious, route.
Which I don't think makes love meaningless, it's just that using "it's not going to last forever" to dismiss a certain category of love is ridiculous. -
2016-07-31 at 12:10 AM UTC in Manlet trump supporter goes off on a black womanlol, that outfit, good grief
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2016-07-29 at 4:49 PM UTC in AI, Immortality and the Future of Selves:
[h=1]10 reasons why human level Artificial Intelligence is a false promise:[/h]
What do you think about this?
Is this some wierd scheme to get me to watch a bunch of youtube videos? I mean he does list some problems AI needs to contend with but none are foundational. Often he's just blatantly wrong, usually around statements like "scientists don't understand X". He also seems to confuse artificial intelligence with terminators or something, even if video processing were a 100% intractable problem (it's obviously not) it wouldn't make artificial consciousness impossible any more than blindness would make human consciousness impossible.[greentext]>rights for robots[/greentext]
lol
[greentext]>human exceptionalism[/greentext]
[greentext]>endorsing slavery[/greentext]
k3k -
2016-07-29 at 6:45 AM UTC in AI, Immortality and the Future of Selves:
What's your take on Martine Rothblatt and your future robot replacement?
I'm still watching the video, I've never heard of Martine Rothblatt nor read any of her work.
I generally see futurist thought as a positive, popular engagement with notions of identity, essence are a good thing. I do think there's a trend towards undue optimism and a failure to recognize prior work, since Kurzweil there's been this trend towards putting dates on things and so far the majority of such predictions have failed. I think in a lot of ways Hofstadter's position is contrary to this idea (which Rothblatt appears to support) that markets will elevate narrow AI to the state of consciousness. Indeed, I agree with D.H. that no amount of "let's make siri better" is going to produce consciousness, in a lot of way the Turing test has been a generations-long red herring, the essence of consciousness is not the test for same.
Based only on that video I can't help but feel people are wasting their time on opaque imitations of consciousness when actual artificial agents are both simpler in composition and more complex in expansion than any statistical model will ever give us. The market faith is disheartening, the idea that "just give apple/google/microsoft enough time and it'll work out" is a waste, a slight of hand by which we equivocate on the notion of successful AI to produce a wholly false image of progress.
As for "mind clones" or artificial intelligence in general, I think the acknowledgement of the rights of such entities is paramount, but I don't think it will be a real problem, even if we had artificial consciousness today. I've never actually seen someone present the position that artificial consciousness doesn't have rights, rather the most aggressive standpoint I've seen is that no such being is possible.
Also the idea of distributed identity, that a collection of subjective perceivers can share an identity, is a misunderstanding of personal identity to me. Most likely a product of biting the wrong bullet. -
2016-07-28 at 7:08 AM UTC in AI, Immortality and the Future of Selves:I love Hofstadter, on a strangely personal level, I think he's my favorite "thinker" of any kind. In that video he describes himself as an inveterate observer of his own thinking, and I think that shows in his writing, it serves as portal of shocking clarity into his own headspace, or at least I get that impression when reading his books. I don't always agree with him (although I do far more often than I don't) but the honesty of his work is really impressive, on an artistic level beyond the technical.
Calling him a "cognitive scientist" is interesting. I wouldn't say it's wrong although people in my field tend to think of him more as a mathematician than anything, although maybe that does more to reveal an embarrassing truth about computer scientists than it does to characterize Hofstadter. Still, I think calling him a scientist is interesting. I don't strictly agree with it but I think more than any public figure his work blurs the lines between philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Philosophers of the analytic tradition, the one I was educated in, tend to see his work as system building which is something of anathema, but then his ideas around mathematical formalism work in the other direction, they're seen as crystalline, deterministic, explicit in assumptions, exactly what analytics seek in a knowledge-generating system. And then his ideas on- creativity are seen as pretty, inspiring, and firmly confined to the rational which again is very appealing to that faction.
But just as system-transcendence is a favorite theme of Hofstadter I can't help but feel like there's more to his work than formalism and a vague, confined aesthetics. I think part of his charm is the way he gets a pass with analytic thinkers despite his deeply entrenched romanticism. I read some article on him a few months ago, it was reasonably written but had an obvious "autistic genius" spin and I was kinda meh about the piece but there was this quote, not from the author but maybe from Guy Steele, called him "a phenomenologist in the truest sense" or something similar. That really resonated with me, I think that is the best characterisation of Hofstadter's philosophical facet I've ever seen, it captures the spirit of his work as vaguely batty, radical, and yet unflinchingly carried out from first principles, as well as giving light to his methods, his Jamesian quasi-confessional introspection and generalisation.
An interesting meta-question about his work: the presentation of recursivity in his work is transparent. That talk highlighted it, of his written work GEB probably was the most prominent example (I think he withdrew from that trend afterwards because it was so frequently misunderstood. I think the idea of Surfaces and Essences was in a real way an examination on the popular surface of GEB and what Hofstetter took to be its essence). So there's this question that comes up: is the recursive element of his work supposed to be purely didactic (demonstrating a thing in its presentation merely for the sake of better illustrating it to the observer, or perhaps this is done purely for the sake of extracting mirth from the attentive observer), intrinsic (the ideas are literally incoherent without self-demonstration), or is the appropriate take on such questions "mu", or "zen mode" (both Hofstadter's terms), meaning the question itself misunderstands the fundamental framework upon which the subject is built?
My personal take is that it's more or less the latter, the purpose of such presentation is to draw the reader to such questions, to ask cause us to ask "what level is this intended on", and in so doing trigger an intuitive appreciation of some underlying idea. That interpretation would of course make the work "cheating" on his own foundation of formalism but the subversion of framing-systems is obviously a theme, almost a fetish, and asking "is this a presentation of the frame-subversion theme" brings about what is isomorphic, in our consideration almost identical, questions. Perhaps even asking such question is what he would think of as a "strange loop".
Well whatever, /fanboyrant I guess. I just found his work really interesting, it made me question a lot of things, and there are a lot of questions that were posed directly or indirectly, that I still don't know the answer to yet I feel like I know something more for the understanding of uncertainty around them. D.H.'s legacy is, in my mind, a work of art before it is anything else and one can become entire lost in it in the best possible way.
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2016-07-28 at 6:05 AM UTC in -SpectraL... A Man Among Champions.boo
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2016-07-28 at 6:03 AM UTC in ATTN: Space Cat Ronaldospace cossacks can suck my ssack
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2016-07-28 at 6:02 AM UTC in ATTN: Space Cat RonaldoEternal galactic empire or bust nigga
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2016-07-27 at 3:21 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
[greentext]>lots of libertarian-flavored freedom leads to happier people[/greentext]
That's not even my argument
Then can you elaborate on this:there is this idea that when we incur duties in accordance with our capacity, and assuming duties are undesirable (which seems reasonable) this motivates purely self-interested agents against participation, competency.
That's an excellent argument against having a command economy with a welfare state based on utility.
Why is that and argument against having a command economy if not because it produces a poor outcome? Is non-participation in the economy inherently bad or something?and the "consequences" of freedom are only subordinate as long as it doesn't encroach upon anyone's freedom not to be hurt/raped/killed etc.
Well your notion of hurt is imaginably a lot more narrow than mine. If a person has to work a demeaning job in order to maintain a poor quality of life while there is no necessary reason for that being the case (there are classes of non-productive people who enjoy significantly higher qualities of life, there isn't even an economic justification for that) I consider that being hurt.
But let's put that aside. Presumably you acknowledge that free markets can produce very large disparities in wealth of individuals. Perhaps such disparities are purely a function of individual merit or participation or whatever it is that justifies some people having massively more than others. This is still a failure to maximize utility, in fact we can easily imagine it resulting in very unhappy yet free people. Surely you can acknowledge this trade-off of libertarian economics with all the noise made about "communism doesn't werk", I'm not even touching all the myriad cases of irrational agents or unequal opportunity due to genetic/parental lottery, I'm just pointing out that agents can opt for patterns of behavior that don't make them happy. Even if you totally blind yourself to the real-world issues with anarchal economics, at least this case you would seem to have to acknowledge is a possibility. So in our free/unhappy world (one I might dare say qualifies for "oligarchal hell", i.e. one in which most the capital in a society rests with few participants) I don't see what grounds you would have to criticize it, all the participants in such a world arrived there by their free choices, and yet it still sucks.
Now that I'm saying here is that you can easily bite this bullet and just say "yeah, that sounds maybe not great but if people freely chose it then no one has the right to tell them to do otherwise" and that's fine (although obviously not everyone buys into it), BUT it demonstrates how the argument from utility (whether you advanced it or not, it's a stock argument in ancap circles) is disingenuous. -
2016-07-26 at 6:21 AM UTC in Whats your favorite ROM-COM?Mystic River is pretty good. I watched it as a kid and didn't really get it, then rewatched it several years later and realized it was actually pretty hard hitting.
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2016-07-26 at 6:17 AM UTC in No tolerance is the best tolerance.That comic got a genuine chuckle out of me. I honestly can't tell if it's supposed to be a joke or not.
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2016-07-26 at 5:53 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
[greentext]>jealously guarded dogma of the rightness of a specific, narrow conception of liberty.[/greentext]
The amount of contempt in this statement is staggering and frankly, insulting. What's more, adjectives aren't arguments.
I don't mean to direct it at you specifically. It's kind of frustrating because it comes off pretty convincingly but the people delivering it aren't actually convinced by it (or they logically could not be). It seems hypocritical. Kind of like that cute christian argument that posed that biological evolution defies the second law of thermodynamics. People making such an argument believe nither that biological evolution happened nor in the inviolability of the second law so to them it wouldn't even matter of the two came into conflict or if they don't. You could conclusively knock down that argument and you wouldn't change their mind. Same thing here: we should show the empirical premise (that lots of libertarian-flavored freedom leads to happier people) is simply false but it wouldn't change your mind about the conclusion.[greentext]>You don't really care if your system makes people happy[/greentext]
I only care insofar as no one is being coerced into making other people happy at their own expense.
Right, the consequences of freedom are irrelevant in libertarian moral theory, or minimally subordinate to the necessity of freedom itself. That's fine but making an argument from hedonic consequences is disingenuous when you don't think those consequences are morally relevant.[greentext]>devolves into mad max,[/greentext]
Anarchy is defined by it's lack of rulers not it's lack of rules.
Yes, sure, we can conceive of fairly cooperative anarchal systems. The idea is that if an oligarchal hell were to emerge from such a system (I know you don't think that's what would happen, but let's just assume it does for this hypothetical) you'd still be committed to defending it.[greentext]>your moral commitment does not depend on the supposed facts you trot out[/greentext]
Which facts would that be?
That a large degree of the libertarian notion of freedom leads to generally high levels of happiness, utility. As stated, if that turned out not to be the case you would not reject the conclusion of the argument,. -
2016-07-25 at 6:14 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Lanny, any pleasure/utility experienced by a child fulfills a need/desire that had no need to exist. Nobody has ever been hurt by non-existence. Why is it so hard for non-anti-natalists to grasp and accept this concept?
It's not hard to grasp at all, I understand the position just fine, I just don't agree it's true. I think pleasure is intrinsically valuable, I'm not saying anyone is hurt by non-existence but non-existence produces no value whereas existence does have the potential to produce value, thus existences which are likely to produce value are themselves extrinsically valuable and ought to be brought about.What's your viewpoint of the endgame of utilitarianism, to create a universal (perhaps even trans-dimensional) utility monster? There are so many critical problems that will build when attempting to model it to a full (based on human limitations and pragmatism) theorem that retains consistency that it's simply absurd.
The endgame is the early and mid-game, just keep maximizing. Imagine a world where everyone is really happy all the time, really glad to be alive and going about activities they really find pleasure and meaning in for as long as they want. That's the end game.
Let's say heat death really is inevitable: any end game of any system is the end of state change. What in the world could possibly be a better way to spend now until then than all sentient life being happy and fulfilled? Why is non-existence preferable to that?
You might say "yeah, but that's never going to happen", which sure but you asked what the goal is, and that's it. Is it feasible? Probably not, but the closer we get the better, a world where most people are mostly happy most of the time still doesn't sound so bad, and for every possible world on the spectrum between here and the described utopia we have reason to pursue it. -
2016-07-25 at 5:57 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Yeah we have established as much.
I typo'd there, I meant "maximizing liberty". I'm pretty sure your notion of liberty doesn't include things like "freedom from hunger" which could be used to justify a wellfare state. Thus you need a framework of positive and negative rights, which I will argue is incoherent on any formulation.Because it is unfair to me as an individual.
Why? Beyond your intuition of what makes fair, why is it unfair?Is selfishness still wrong if it promotes the maximum amount of utility?
I mean if working in your own self interest maximizes utility then it can be justified non-selfishly. Like if you look at the extreme poor they spend 100% of their income on themselves, but that's obviously OK because buying food when you're malnourished produces a lot of utility for few resources expended, vs. me buying some a latte or whatever just makes me fat and provides brief passing pleasure. Like I said before, I don't have any dogmatic commitment to socialism or any particular political theory, my support of a system is contingent upon its ability to maximize the utility, so if working in your own self-interest satisfies the maximization of utility then i'm all for it.It's a belief based on facts.
Yes, I know you think that.That's an excellent argument against having a command economy with a welfare state based on utility.
Wrong, it's a disingenuous argument which is highlighted perfectly here:I'm not a utilitarian so yes, even if it were proven beyond a doubt that command economies are the ,most efficient and provide the most utility. Then that still does not justify the incursion upon any liberties.
You don't accept one of the premises (that we ought to do what maximizes utility) that the argument is founded on. You don't really care if your system makes people happy or if it devolves into mad max, your moral commitment does not depend on the supposed facts you trot out. It's a post-hoc argument to defend a jealously guarded dogma of the rightness of a specific, narrow conception of liberty.Meh, the argument may not be pitched at people who do not accept moral truths but they still have moral agency therefore they are subject to the consequence of not doing what is morally right or is that what you were saying?
I mean yes the conclusion, if you accept it, does still apply to nihilists and such. It's a secular ethics though, so there's not really any inherent consequence to not behaving ethically. We may set up some system where we imposes such consequences to create a more ethical world but it's not like someone is tallying up your moral actions and you get reward or punishment in the end or anything.Also i don't understand how determinism has anything to do with it. But i will say that i do not subscribe to such a notion either.
I mean deterministic in the general sense not like physical determinism, you could also use the term "referential transparency" but that's more form CS land. So logic has this property where it's generalizable, the success or failure of a logical argument is a function of its content, same input same output, it's "deterministic". Another way of saying that is "what's logically true for me is logically true for you". Perspective does not change the logical truth of a proposition. Ergo if the statement "I should have a high quality of life" (this is presumably a maxim almost everyone operates under) is true when I say it then you must also affirm "Lanny should have a high quality of life", and of course it works the other way too. -
2016-07-25 at 4:53 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Maximisation of liberty without infringing on someone's 'freedom not to be hurt' is our moral duty, as you know in my thinking liberty does not extend to animals insofar as they're property.
Well there's the classic positive/negative rights issues here when we start talking about "maximizing liberty". But without digging into the metaethical issue, we still would seem to need some reason that animals and certain children, both lacking agency, would fall into different moral categories.
Utilitarian ethics feel dirty and incomplete as well, because if what i personally do to maximize my own utility even if i do so without directly hurting anyone i am still morally in the wrong if i negatively affect net utility.
And that can't be right.
Why can't it? It's simply tantamount to saying selfishness is wrong, which doesn't seem so unreasonable. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need and all that. I suspect the reason it seems like an unacceptable conclusion is your belief in the efficacy of market systems: there is this idea that when we incur duties in accordance with our capacity, and assuming duties are undesirable (which seems reasonable) this motivates purely self-interested agents against participation, competency. Quotes like this:[FONT=inherit]And are we not the most able to maximize our own pleasure if we are the most free in doing so?[/FONT]
seem to indicate as much. To a utilitarian such a question is secondary, that may be the case and if it is we ought to commit ourselves to freeing each person so as to maximize their utility. A typical libertarian argument follows the lines of "imposing burden in proportion to value/excellency/talent/whathaveyou is wrong because there's this market thing and it dictates action so it's going to lead to bad outcomes" which is a reasonable argument in form. If we can substantiate it then a utilitarian would be committed to those conclusions. The issue is libertarians aren't usually committed to the utilitarian premise that makes that argument, if we were to find ourselves in a world (no matter how alien, inconceivable it may seem to some) where command economies were successful, more so than capitalist markets, then such argument would needs commit us to the former system while libertarians would typically hold to notions of liberty in such cases.Also why do we need to maximize pleasure of all things? And are we not the most able to maximize our own pleasure if we are the most free in doing so?
I mean, if the question is "why ought a utilitarian maximize the pleasure of all things rather than simply the pleasure of humans" then it's right there in the principle of utility: there is no species distinction. Insofar as we accept lower animal pleasure is commensurable to human pleasure (and it does seem to be, they feel pain in very similar ways to how we do) and that we ought to maximize pleasure then it seems obvious other animal pleasure is included in such calculus.
If the question is more generally "why should we accept the principle of utility" then it becomes murkier, as all arguments do when one strays into the murky realms of meta-ethics. There are a number or arguments for why the principle of utility is justified, my favorite, but perhaps not the strongest on strictly rational grounds, is motivational. If we are not nihilists then we must accept, by definition, that there are some normative truths that guide our actions and among non-nihilists almost everyone accepts rationality governs such truths. The argument is not pitched at people who don't accept any moral truths or who don't think moral truths are subject to rational exploration. So then one is asked to look at their own action: we certainly work in our own perceived self-interest, we do this instinctively, we accept this is justified. If there is any valid line of reason that justifies us in acting in our own interest, then by merit of it being valid reason, it ought to be deterministic. That is to say, if acting in my own self-interest is rationally justified for me then unless I have some substantive moral difference with respect to other humans the same argument must also apply to them. If defending our own interests was justified in the first place then it must be justified in the case of others, if that's not the case then it becomes both true and untrue that some things ought to work in their self-interest. I can not affirm my own justification in seeking utility without affirming the validity of all morally considerable beings interests. The obvious objection is that I wasn't justified in pursuing my own interests in the first place, or that ethics are relative and thus agent-perspective contradiction is a non-issue but again, if you think that then the argument wasn't aimed at you in the first place. -
2016-07-25 at 1:49 AM UTC in I like math more than coffee.Right, which is why I intend to install a adderall dispenser in every university math department in america. Think of how much we'll accomplish in so little time!
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2016-07-25 at 12:38 AM UTC in I like math more than coffee.Which is why I can't tell my coffee cup apart from my doughnut.
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2016-07-24 at 10:58 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
In a normative sense? Nigga, facts are facts, they don't depend on consensus or what is considered to be normal.
Ah, "normative" here is a technical term. It doesn't refer to consensus or anything, the point was that you can mean "the fact X is wrong" in two ways, you can be saying X is not the case (like if I said "2+2=5 is wrong") or you can be saying X is the case but it ought not to be (as in "it is wrong to steal"), the latter is normative and what I was trying to say is that I meant it the ethical rather than descriptive sense.The sun is the closest star to earth; fact. It has no moral/ethical value, it's an objective fact based on observation and measurement. I don't mean to say someone's understanding of something cannot be right or wrong. All i am saying is facts have no moral/ethical value.
Sure, but there are other statements which are potentially facts which do have ethical value. For example "it is wrong to steal" is a statement of fact (although it may not be true) about what is ethical. Further some statements of undisputed facts can, if we admit a realist system of ethics, also have an "ought/ought not" value. Like if you accept that stealing is wrong then the fact that I stole in the past has moral content: it was wrong for me to steal. In short true facts can be ethically wrong (which is to say they ought not to be the case) and statements about what ought to be or not be the case have truth values.Also, you can only say rape is bad; fact. If you're not a moral relativist.
I mean I don't hold the position but I feel like I've seen people argue rape is justified, sometimes in limited cases and sometimes in general. It seems kinda dumb but it does seem to be a valid position (as in well formed, as opposed to true) at least at first blush.No a child without moral agency cannot be killed on a whim, and it feels wrong to say it' s just because they' re the property of their parents. It raises a lot of questions about the nature of parent-child relationships.
It does! There are a number of interesting problems around pre-agents (young children without moral agency, fetuses).
I've held a pro-abortion viewpoint for all my life but just a year ago or so I got into an argument about, like, delayed gratification, how we're justified in forgoing immediate reward for greater rewards later (e.g. pursuing education at any level generally represented as short-term decrease in quality of life (less play, more work, usually debt) but is justified by long term rewards (deeper understanding of the world, higher pay/quality of life, greater ability to participate in society)), but in the ethical sense so like maybe I'll allow a trivial evil today to reap a greater moral good later. Anyway, if you accept making such trades is valid (and I do) then you run into this problem where you've said future moral goods are of roughly equal value to present moral goods. So in the case of considering abortion, you can't simply say "mother's right to her body trumps everything", you have to ask what disutility a mother suffers from child rearing against the net utility of the child. And I can't help but imagine cases of affluent mothers with a strong support network to whom the present utility of raising a child, even if it amounts to 18 years of servitude, might be lesser than the net utility that child is likely to experience. I think the lives of many people are worthwhile, net positives, and thus there seem to be cases where I'm committed to saying abortion is immoral, specifically when the expected pleasure of existing a child will experience is greater than the expected burden to their caretakers.
Anyway, that seems a bit rambly, it likely doesn't have much bearing on you since you don't buy into the utilitarian premise, but the point is that there are a lot of interesting/unintuitive issues around non-adult humans.How would you answer the questions you posed to me, if you'll humor me and play the devil's advocate as it were.
I'd say there is no inherent relationship between moral considerability and moral agency. Maximization of utility (pleasure) is our only moral duty, we have this duty because we're moral agents but there are many things capable of pleasure that are not moral agents, thus there are morally considerable things (e.g. farm animals) which are not agents (killing is commonplace in nature and it would be absurd to call a cat morally culpable for killing a bird). I take it as trivially evident that lower animals are capable of suffering, but there are articulate arguments to be made there if you disagree, although I think their range of suffering/pleasure is likely less than our own (a cow is unlikely to ever experience existential dread nor the joy of an amazing work of art). As such we have a moral duty to animals, I really love a fatty ass hamburger at like 3am but even that sublime moment of meaty ecstasy I don't think is comparable years of suffering, intense physical pain, a cow needs to endure for my fast food, so fast food is impermissible. There are other cases like honey, milk, and possibly eggs where it's conceivable that you could produce an animal product without causing greater suffering to animals than humans would derive from the thing but as you look into it it's generally economically difficult to do so. -
2016-07-24 at 7 PM UTC in Alex Jones raises hell at The Young Turks set.My opinions on policy generally align with TYT but I've never liked them on an aesthetic level. It was a dumb stunt though, I guess it's not news to anyone that shillex jones has the mentality of an angry 12 year old but such a belief is this day reaffirmed.
