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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Alice and Bob. Alice wins. She says that Bob can only blame himself for neglecting his training, but Bob blames Alice and says that if she wouldn’t have ran so fast, he could have won.

    Who is right and who is wrong?

    While it is true that Bob would have won if Alice was slow enough, it doesn’t mean that Alice should be carrying any blame here. She wanted to win the race. Bob is the one who did something wrong, because he did not want to lose and still didn’t do what he can in order to win.


    If candidate A gets elected, his voters don’t need to blame themselves for getting him elected. That’s what they wanted to do. Or, at least, that’s what the realistic option they preferred over the other realistic options.

    If he does something they don’t like, and it’s something that the other candidate wouldn’t have done, only then should they blame themselves for getting him into power. And even then - they should balance that against the bad things (in their opinion) candidate B would have done that candidate A wouldn’t.

    But for the very act of him getting their candidate elected? They should not feel guilty for that. They should feel pride - or at least, as much pride as casting a vote into a ballot can entitle.

    The ones who should feel blame are the ones who wanted candidate B elected and did not vote. They could have done something to contribute to the outcome they prefer - they could have voted. By their inaction, they have contributed to a result they did not want.



  • Fascism is more of an approach than a specific ideology. Its only core value is Strength Through Unity - but to achieve that it needs some populist values to unite the people over - which is how you get different flavors of fascism. The original Fascist Party was using nationalism. Racism is also a popular choice (fascism + racism = Nazism), and it seems like rightist values are more prune to it - but leftist values are not safe either, like we have seen in the USSR which based its fascism around socialism.

    Conservatism can be a base for fascism, but like all these other values - it doesn’t have to be fascist. The rule is simple:

    • If you want The Gays™ to just stop - that’s regular conservatism.
    • If you want a strong leader to “stop” The Gays™ - that’s fascist conservatism.




  • I too drink 3-4 cups a days, which I make at home (or, much more often, at the office. Which means I save more money because I don’t pay for the ingredients. At least not directly), but every now and then - say, once or twice a week - I buy a cup of coffee. Now, it’s mostly a matter of convenience (I don’t go out specifically to drink coffee, I buy it because I’m already out for other matters) but if I was financially struggling I could make that coffee at home (or at the office) and take it with me. But if wouldn’t be that significant. If we use your numbers, that’s about $2-$4/week - or about $156/year (I don’t calculate the price of the jar because I already need it for the 3-4 cups I make myself, and yes I will use them up more often but at this point it’s small change). Not much.

    You drink 3-4 cups a day, and because you make them at home you imagine that these people who buy their coffee buy 3-4 cups a day. But is this really the pattern? I mean, I can say that I drink 3-4 cups a day and that I can say that I buy coffee, and both of these statements will be true. So maybe my pattern is the more common one? It would be enough to fill the cafes with people that only drink out once a week…


  • What “person in question”? There is no “person in question” here. We are not talking about the financial problems of anyone specific. We are talking about the problem in general.

    When a person comes to the hospital with a knife popping out, you want the medical crew to focus on taking the knife out while preventing the patient from bleeding to death. When there is a public debate about how so many people are getting stabbed, the debate should be about preventing them from getting stabbed, not about the specifics of how to safely pull a knife out of a living person’s flesh.