huey_m

People have a legal location of residence in the US.

In California, if you’re homeless, you typically have to set your mail up as “general delivery” to your nearest post office where you go to collect mail every few days. You probably don’t have any other address.

Not sure how this interfaces with this specific law otherwise, but using a post office isn’t a bad idea generally because it isn’t a totally unexpected thing. A homeless person would probably list that as an address.

There’s also a lot of mail services that will give you an address in that state and will open/scan received mail for you… not sure if California specifically has one, though. But yeah, this doesn’t establish legal residency at all, but many entities don’t look too closely either… might be worth a shot.

I mean, I am using adult conversation as you can see. I can do two things at once.

Nope, one undermines the other. You can’t actually engage in good faith adult conversation while being reductive and childish… the latter precludes the former. If you’re being childish by definition you aren’t being mature.

I also have not conflated civilian and military populations. I drew an explicit distinction. There’s nothing wrong with targeting military personnel as targets themselves; I’ve already said attempting to target civilians directly as a reprisal, I wouldn’t support. Non critical civilian infrastructure that also supports military, however, I think is far less morally questionable.

The example was purely to point out that normally immoral actions can in some situations be moral. Not all war crimes are created equal… shoplifting is more easily justified than murder. Similarly, targeting warehouses for consumer goods in the way least impactful to life possible is far more easily justified than targeting schools; equivocating these just because they’re both crimes is imo not being honest.

anymore than getting punched by a man would justify punching his cousin.

You see, you are equivocating here. If what Russia did is punching, Ukraine’s action is not punching. It was pretty clearly not even an attempt to kill civilians.

This is more like punching the business partner who (knowingly) is in business with someone who killed your family in order to put pressure on them to stop doing business with him. When there’s no police to help you legally find justice, importantly.

Yes, that’s pretty justifiable in my view.

Nah, you can’t go calling well thought out positions childish and silly and expect to continue conversation. Learn a lesson on how to conduct yourself and kindly piss off.

Literally justifying crimes against himanity with the moat silly and childish reasoning.

You can disagree with it, but this is just bullshit. That is a very well reasoned and difficult moral analysis. Stop being a baby and use big boy words and maybe consider for 5 seconds that some moral questions are actually really fucking difficult and not everyone will agree on.

I can just as easily argue you’re being a literal child by refusing to engage in serious and difficult moral questions by equivocating explicit bombing of schools and civilians with bombing commercial warehouses, at night to avoid casualties (that are also providing some supplies to military by the way) as both being “crimes against humanity”. One is a very clear crime against humanity, the other is a lot more unclear, they are not equivalent and being unsure about the latter (as a response to the former, by the way) does not at all give logical cover for the former.

You know what, screw it, blocked.

Try to keep a level head here. I explicitly am not providing logic to cover genocides as reprisals, I’m not even arguing eye for an eye here; I’m arguing that putting economic pressure on a civilian population by targeting commercial infrastructure, in response to brutal war crimes such as the targeting of children’s schools, is a pretty reasoned and limited response. I would not excuse them targeting Russian civilians directly.

A Nazi would not be putting this level of thought into the morality of war crimes, and you know this. Might simply makes right for them.

I think the world isn’t black and white in morality, and I think it’s naive to act as though it is. Immoral actions are sometimes warranted, I think. Do you agree with that principle at all? If not, we just have different moral views.

I think the exact context of the response matters a lot here. I don’t think deliberately targeting civilians or life critical infrastrucrure would be excusable. I think targeting consumer infrastructure, at night to limit casualties, in response to serious war crimes, is much more excusable and a context that matters and is dishonest to remove. Crucially, particularly when there’s no justice available to the victim to find a legal solution.

This is what made Balkan genocides and responses different, that was in a process of justice that ultimately resulted in literal international police action to enforce the law on war crimes being perpetrated. There’s a responsibility there to let justice take its course.

You can’t, in my view, tell victims of war crimes that they can’t respond in any meaningful way when you aren’t willing to enforce the law against the perpetrator. Another context that’s important. You can only morally tell people to let rule of law work when rule of law is being enforced; you can’t tell them to rely on a justice system that is non existent. If we want sides to respect war crimes, we need to put our money where our mouth is and be willing to put ourselves at risk too to see that done, beyond milquetoast sanctions.

Are you going to be reductive and childish like in your edit rather than use adult conversation? In that case, I’ll answer in kind and ask you to answer my point first before I respond…

Are you saying it is wrong for an abused slave to murder his master, who has tortured him and killed or sold his family, when he escapes? Is it wrong for an abused woman to kill her rapist in the act? Or are there cases where a morally wrong action is sometimes warranted?

I actually do have a thoughtful response to your question that isn’t a pithy meme, but I’d like to see some good faith from you first and see you actually address the core moral question of my point first.

War crimes are war crimes exactly because you don’t want to open the can of worms exposing your own people to reprisals. That can was opened by Russia, and as reprisals go this is a very, very mild response that’s clearly attempting to target infrastructure not people (and consumer infrastructure at that, not even things like power and water).

I think targeting consumer infrastructure in response to having your schools targeted is pretty damned reserved. We consider the abuse received by someone murdering their abuser in how we respond, I think even war crimes need to be considered in the context they’re committed. I’d similarly say tortured POWs escaping and murdering their torturers should have that context considered when judging what if any punishment should be received.

I think it’s hard to take a hard-line stance here against Ukraine when there’s no real international response to stop war crimes being committed against them. I think if the UN or Europe was putting boots on the ground in response to Russian war crimes explicitly, you can better make the argument that there’s a responsibility to let justice take its course… it’s hard for me to say someone can’t respond by, if we’re being honest, a far more minor crime when on the receiving end of far, far more brutality.

I think there’s a point where abstract morality conflicts with practical situation. And in a situation where there is no “police” enforcing the law, it isn’t reasonable to say only one side must strictly adhere to it, likely at the cost of their survival, to have a moral high ground in death.

I can’t think of a more humane way to put civilian domestic pressure towards political change in Russia, can you?

I live in Hungary and supported the sanctions and halting of EU funds on us for the same principle; yes, it sucks for us and we badly needed the money, but people were going to keep supporting Fidesz until the wallets of the middle and upper middle class started to hurt more, and I think it really did contribute to political change.

In this case the action is more severe because it’s an active war that many Russians are at least apathetic about, and this kind of thing starts to hurt enough that even apathy is untenable.

I can empathize with people being in a hard spot having to stand against an authoritarian regime, but pressure really does help push populations towards that end. And this is better than, say, schools being targeted to create that pressure to end the war.

E: that’s a pretty childish edit considering a well thought out response imo.

I’ll literally change banks over that kind of thing now.

You can see the ruins of the old blown up bridge under the Danube in Budapest. Pictures are wild. Cargo barges aren’t running at all now as far as I know. Hungary has to shut down the nuclear plant that provides something like 40% of the nation’s power during this heat wave.

Just continuing a conversation you started. It does at this point sound to me like your behavior might have played more of a role in your ban than you might be crediting.

Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?

Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?

In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist") when one does not have expertise.

This isn’t analogous, though; consensus is a category reached through reason and proof. Expert consensus is by definition a reasonable position (can still be wrong, of course, but it’s a reasoned consensus).

Centrism just means a relative position between two others. It is not definitionally reasonable, so your analogy of what I’m doing doesn’t hold any water.

Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say?

But just because they say it doesn’t make it a valid argument in their case.

My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn’t necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you’re a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That’s really all my point was.

That seems to be just hoping for no critical mass though. If it ever grows large enough, you’ll definitely get people willing to put the time in to disrupt things for their own entertainment.

I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.

I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.

Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.

again: I’m a frigging centrist

I’m not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn’t always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.

And just logically, some issues don’t have a valid centrist position. There’s no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn’t make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.

I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.

But what about the problem of trolls just continuing to create new instances to circumvent bans and defederation? Is there really a solution to this beyond hoping we don’t reach a critical mass where this becomes a real problem?

Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.

I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.

That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.

I often lose track when people jump into conversation like that…

I was appreciating what you added to the conversation at first, but man… giving a bad faith one line response to a long, well thought out comment, now being unable to admit a mistake without passive aggressively implying it’s the others person’s fault you didn’t read thoroughly…

I guess I do appreciate knowing who to block before I need to personally interact with them.