dickie

If humans receive rights because they possess logic and reasoning, then there should be a test. Pass it and you get rights. Fail it and you do not. That would exclude infants, people with severe cognitive disabilities, advanced dementia patients and probably a fair number of ordinary adults.

It would also mean that a superintelligent alien should receive rights, perhaps more rights than we do. At some point, a sufficiently conscious and self-aware AI would qualify too. Refusing rights solely because something is not biologically human would expose the standard as species loyalty rather than logic.

Nonhuman animals do not need every human right. A cow does not need voting rights, just as a toddler does not need the right to sign a mortgage. Rights can correspond to relevant capacities and interests. An animal capable of pain, fear and suffering has an interest in not being tortured or killed unnecessarily.

The secular position cannot scientifically prove that human rights exist. Rights are not visible in nature, measurable in a laboratory or encoded as physical laws. Nature does not grant rights to humans, animals, aliens or computers. Nature grants whatever you can possess and defend. Everything beyond that is a moral claim created and enforced by someone.

My answer is easier because I believe in God. Human beings have a distinct moral status because they are made in the image of God, not because every individual human passes an intelligence test. That preserves the rights of infants, disabled people and people with dementia without pretending they all possess equal reasoning ability.

It also gives humans duties toward animals. Animals may not have identical human rights, but they are living creatures created by God, not disposable objects whose suffering is meaningless.

Without God, you still have to draw the line somewhere, but you cannot call your preferred boundary scientifically proven or objectively natural. You chose it. Someone else can choose animals, aliens or conscious machines. The argument then becomes whose moral preference has enough power behind it.

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dickie · 7/16/2026, 11:17:51 PM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

3 bumps

dickie · 7/16/2026, 5:18:16 AM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

16 bumps

dickie · 7/15/2026, 11:12:17 AM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

I am arguing because you keep calling a personal moral preference “Natural Law” and then treating criticism of the label as support for lying, theft and murder. That is a dishonest false choice.

Calling it Natural Law is itself false. It is not natural, because nature contains cooperation, deception, theft, killing, parasitism and domination. It is not law, because there is no objective authority, consistent definition or universal enforcement behind it. It pretends something exists outside human judgment when it does not.

The lifeboat, consent and aggression questions are not “gotchas.” They test whether the principle actually resolves difficult cases. Your answer is that you need more information and other people may decide differently. Exactly. That means it is human judgment, not an objective natural law.

You also keep retreating between two different claims. First, Natural Law and the NAP should govern human conduct. Then, when challenged, they are merely “good words” that might make life easier. Fine. “Try not to fuck people over” is useful advice. It is not a law of nature.

I do not need a perfect system, a promise of streets of gold or a threat of hell to avoid robbing people. You invented that argument because it is easier than addressing mine.

And spare me the libertarian lecture. I am probably more libertarian in practice than you are. I do not send my children to public school. I do not take government handouts. I have never chosen to live in, or buy property in, a town with zoning in the last 20 years. I have structured major parts of my life around avoiding state control rather than merely posting slogans about freedom.

The difference is that I do not pretend my choices were dictated by the universe. They are my values, my judgments and my responsibility. Calling your values “Natural Law” only disguises human opinion as something objective.

8 bumps

dickie · 7/15/2026, 4:34:40 AM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

You are arguing with religious beliefs I have never stated. You know only that I follow Jesus. You do not know whether I believe the Bible is literal, inerrant or dictated by God, so most of those questions are aimed at a Christianity you invented for me.

Nothing about “do not lie, cheat, steal or murder” bothers me. What I reject is pretending those rules are objective laws of nature. Natural Law is neither natural nor law. It is a human moral theory.

Your morality is also narrowly human-centered. You keep talking about duties toward humans as though nature recognizes a special moral category called “human rights.” It does not. Humans are animals, and rights are constructs humans create and enforce.

The NAP also stops being simple as soon as real cases appear. Who owns the last seat in a lifeboat? At what age can someone meaningfully consent? Is pollution aggression? Is neglect aggression? What level of threat justifies force? What counts as legitimate property in the first place?

Saying lying, theft and murder are generally destructive is reasonable. Saying disagreement means I enjoy those things is just moral grandstanding. You are still taking your preferred values, giving them an authoritative label and suggesting anyone who questions the label must be immoral.

11 bumps

dickie · 7/14/2026, 8:45:11 AM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

16 bumps

dickie · 7/13/2026, 4:05:56 AM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

You are proving my point. If Natural Law is just “good words smart humans wrote down so we could have a society,” then it is not a law of nature. It is a human moral theory, written and interpreted by fallible humans, exactly like every other political and religious doctrine.

Natural-law thinking predates Christianity, but Christianity absorbed it and gave it divine authority. The Stoics and Roman philosophers argued for a universal moral order rooted in nature and reason. Aquinas later made natural law explicitly part of God’s eternal law. The modern non-aggression principle is much newer and comes mainly from libertarian political philosophy, not from an ancient universal consensus.

I do not believe every statement in the Bible must be literally true, and I do not need biblical inerrancy to judge a moral teaching. My reference to Jesus was about the standard attributed to him: reject worldly power, refuse retaliation, associate voluntarily and do not compel belief. Saying he was the only person who ever met that standard was rhetorical, not a provable historical claim.

But questioning the Bible does not rescue Natural Law. You are still asking people to accept an objective moral authority that cannot be physically observed and whose meaning must be interpreted by humans. You can call it nature instead of God, but the structural problem remains.

The NAP is more defensible because it is openly a chosen ethical rule: do not initiate force. It does not need to pretend the universe wrote it down. Even then, humans will still argue over what counts as aggression, ownership, consent and self-defense.

So yes, government is a fallible human construct. So are churches, Natural Law and libertarian philosophy. The label does not eliminate the humans.

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dickie · 7/12/2026, 2:16:33 AM · permalink

on Multi-culturism in trolls

“Natural Law” is often religion with the serial numbers filed off.  
  
You cannot complain that religious people impose an invisible moral authority on everyone else, then turn around and say an invisible moral order called Natural Law should rule everyone’s life. That is the same structure with different branding.  
  
The non-aggression principle is at least honest about what it is: do not initiate force. It does not need a priest, politician, philosopher or bureaucrat interpreting the universe on your behalf.  
  
And humans are the problem in every system. Government is a human construct. Churches are human institutions. Natural Law is interpreted by humans. Even libertarians will twist “freedom” until it conveniently protects their choices and restricts yours.  
  
Ironically, Jesus may be the only human who actually lived up to the standard people claim to believe in. He rejected worldly power, refused to force belief, associated voluntarily with outcasts and accepted the consequences rather than using the state to crush his enemies.  
  
Everyone else seems to want freedom for themselves and authority over their neighbors.

23 bumps

dickie · 7/9/2026, 6:57:03 AM · permalink

on How to fire 'Full Auto' legally........ in freethinkers

4 bumps

dickie · 7/7/2026, 11:15:09 AM · permalink

on Seedless fruits and vegetables, what's the end game? in everythings_a_conspiracy

Seedless watermelon is not really the central mechanism here.

Seedless watermelons are sterile triploid hybrids, so you generally cannot save viable seed from the fruit. But plenty of ordinary hybrid garden plants also will not reproduce true from saved seed. Monsanto is not even an independent company anymore. Bayer completed its acquisition in 2018.

The larger concern is real, but it is much bigger than whether a watermelon has black seeds.

Most people are not actually food-independent even if every grocery-store melon came with a thousand seeds. They depend on electricity, diesel, fertilizer, machinery, irrigation, farm labor, cold storage, trucking, warehouses, clean water, sanitation, and a functioning retail system.

The fruit is modern society. The vine is the industrial supply chain.

Cut the vine and the fruit dies.

Nobody has to ban backyard gardens or genetically engineer every cucumber to control the food supply. We already built a system where most people could not feed themselves for long without the grid, fuel, transportation, and millions of workers they never think about.

Save heirloom seed. Grow food. Support local farms. Those are sensible ways to build resilience.

But the Mad Max watermelon grind does not begin because a seedless melon cannot be replanted. It begins when the diesel, power, clean water, or trucking stops.

8 bumps

dickie · 7/6/2026, 1:45:38 PM · permalink

on He makes amazing Jubilee Watermelon! in watermelon

2 bumps

dickie · 7/5/2026, 9:53:36 AM (edited) · permalink

on Twilight Sleep: America’s MKUltra-Style Experiment on Birth in mindwave

![image](https://us-lax-1.linodeobjects.com/sojooo/comments/2835/1783245214993-04d70f0898a80534.png)
I helped my wife deliver three babies unassisted.  
  
That does not make me anti-hospital. Hospitals are where you go when birth becomes dangerous: hemorrhage, fetal distress, infection, prematurity, surgery, or a newborn who needs immediate intervention.  
  
But it does mean I know birth is not automatically a medical malfunction that requires an institution to take ownership of everyone in the room.  
  
And the timeline is revealing.  
  
In 1900, almost all U.S. births happened outside hospitals.  
  
In the early 1900s, Twilight Sleep arrived: morphine and scopolamine, marketed as painless childbirth. In practice, it could produce amnesia, delirium, prolonged labor, forceps use, and greater danger to newborns.  
  
By 1940, hospital births were already the majority. Only 44% of U.S. births still occurred outside hospitals.  
  
By 1969, only about 1% occurred outside a hospital.  
  
Then came the Baby Boom, 1946 through 1964, right in the middle of this takeover.  
  
And circumcision was part of that same institutional model.  
  
A national survey of boys born from 1949 through 1958 found that more than three-quarters had been circumcised. In other words, for a huge share of Baby Boom boys, the hospital birth package did not just mean being separated from mom, put behind nursery glass, and placed on a feeding schedule. It also meant an irreversible surgical procedure before they could even leave the building.  
  
The government’s reliable national hospital data begins in 1979. It shows newborn circumcision was still routine: 64.5% in 1979, 58.3% in 2010. More recent hospital data found the rate fell from 54.1% in 2012 to 49.3% in 2022. So it is declining, but it is still treated as normal for roughly half of male newborns in American hospitals.  
  
Drug the mother.  
  
Take the baby.  
  
Put the baby behind glass.  
  
Feed the baby when the hospital schedule says.  
  
Tell the mother formula is modern convenience.  
  
Then, for boys, add an elective and irreversible surgery before the child can consent.  
  
Then call it modern care.  
  
Formula is not poison. Bottle-fed babies can be deeply loved. Circumcision does not automatically create attachment disorders. Hospitals are not evil. Medical intervention is not automatically abuse.  
  
But the old hospital model was not built around maternal autonomy, bonding, dignity, or the assumption that families should remain together unless there was a medical reason to separate them.  
  
It was built around control, liability, schedules, efficiency, and the assumption that birth was too painful, too unpredictable, too female, and too inconvenient to trust.  
  
Hospitals save lives when something goes wrong.  
  
They should not be treated as the automatic owner of every birth, every newborn, or every decision made in the first hours of a child’s life.

6 bumps

dickie · 7/4/2026, 7:46:33 PM · permalink

on 1 in 8 in america

McDonald’s says 1 in 8 Americans has worked there, which feels correct. It was the national teenage apprenticeship program for learning customer service, grease burns, and why the ice cream machine is legally classified as folklore.

But Walmart deserves recognition too. Walmart employs so many people that every town has somebody’s aunt, cousin, ex, neighbor, or former classmate who can tell you exactly when the rotisserie chickens get marked down.

Also, notice how the workforce has aged.

McDonald’s used to be where you worked at 16 until you got fired for giving your friends free fries. Now it is often adults trying to pay rent, manage childcare, and survive a schedule designed by an algorithm with personal contempt for humanity.

So McDonald’s may be the former employer of 1 in 8 Americans.

Walmart may be the current employer of everybody you know who owns a lanyard.

But the actual McDonald’s news is that the fried apple pie is back.

Not the baked pie. The real one. The crispy molten lava rectangle that removes the roof of your mouth and then makes you immediately want another one.

Limited time only, while supplies last, which means it will be gone approximately eight minutes after somebody posts this in the local Facebook group.

5 bumps

dickie · 7/3/2026, 9:42:19 PM · permalink

on Are You Living in a Cave? Plato’s Timeless Warning in mindwave

**The Man, the Melon, and the Telephone From Tomorrow**  
  
There was once a man who worried about making bad decisions.  
  
Not ordinary bad decisions, such as buying the wrong brand of mayonnaise or trusting a stranger who owned more than one sword. He worried about the larger kind, the decisions that Future Him would remember with a long silence and one hand over his face.  
  
So he built a machine.  
  
It had a sixteen-key telephone keypad, because the ordinary keys were not enough. The numbered keys could dial the future, but the extra keys, A, B, C, and D, were reserved for anxieties, bodily warnings, coincidences, and dreams.  
  
The tones passed through a strand of natural silver wire, which the man could not explain but considered too beautiful to leave out.  
  
They then passed through a double-terminated enhydro quartz crystal containing a tiny bubble of ancient water.  
  
Finally, the signal entered a watermelon wrapped in a magnetic coil.  
  
The man called this arrangement the Tachyon Antitelephone.  
  
His neighbors called it something else.  
  
One evening, after several drinks, the man entered a sequence on the keypad:  
  
A-B-C-D.  
  
The machine hummed. The silver wire trembled. The crystal caught the light. The watermelon became warm and judgmental.  
  
Then the telephone rang.  
  
The man answered.  
  
On the other end was his own older voice.  
  
The older voice told him that the machine was dangerous, that the crystal was not helping, that the watermelon was innocent, and that he should stop before he created a problem that would require a second watermelon.  
  
The man listened carefully.  
  
Then, being drunk, he forgot every word by morning.  
  
Years later, older and sober, the man built the machine again.  
  
He entered the sequence:  
  
A-B-C-D.  
  
The machine hummed. The silver wire trembled. The crystal caught the light. The watermelon became warm and judgmental.  
  
Then the telephone rang.  
  
This time, the man understood at once that it was himself calling from the past.  
  
He remembered that he had once received the same warning.  
  
He also remembered that he had forgotten it.  
  
So he tried to explain everything to his younger self.  
  
But the younger self was drunk.  
  
And the older self realized there was no message, no matter how urgent, that could make a drunk man remember what he was determined to forget.  
  
The man sent another warning.  
  
Then an acknowledgement.  
  
Then an acknowledgement of the acknowledgement.  
  
Then another, because he could not know whether his younger self had received the last one.  
  
The silver wire grew hot.  
  
The crystal continued holding its tiny bubble without comment.  
  
The watermelon split open.  
  
Inside, the man found no answer.  
  
Only seeds.  
  
He sat quietly for a long time.  
  
Then he wrote a note for himself and placed it beside the machine:  
  
When anxiety speaks, listen, but check the facts.  
When your body warns you, pay attention.  
When coincidence appears, do not confuse it with proof.  
When dreams trouble you, write them down before they fade.  
When you are drunk, do not answer the telephone.  
  
**Moral**  
  
No warning can save a person who is unable or unwilling to receive it. But a wise person still leaves the warning, because someday the listener may become sober enough to understand it.

4 bumps

dickie · 7/3/2026, 10:17:04 AM (edited) · permalink

on Are You Living in a Cave? Plato’s Timeless Warning in mindwave

![image](https://us-lax-1.linodeobjects.com/sojooo/comments/2835/1783073823537-a12e97ae292616a4.jpg)
Plato left out the most important part: the watermelon.  
  
The cave exists because everyone is staring at shadows instead of asking the obvious question: why is there not a watermelon in the middle of the room?  
  
A watermelon is reality. It is round, heavy, inconvenient, perishable, and impossible to debate into becoming a policy paper. You can project shadows of it on the wall, write a think piece about its social construction, appoint a committee to study its rind-to-flesh ratio, and argue over whether the seeds are oppression. But eventually someone has to pick it up, cut it open, and deal with the facts.  
  
That is enlightenment.  
  
The prisoners defend the cave because the cave has climate control, familiar shadows, and a comment section. The person who leaves comes back sunburned, carrying half a watermelon, saying, “You people are not going to believe this.” Naturally, they call him insane. He is dripping melon juice on the floor and talking about the sky.  
  
Critical thinking is not endlessly debating whether the shadows are real. It is asking who built the projector, who benefits from the fire, why everyone is chained up, and whether the answer might be to smash the puppets, leave the cave, and eat watermelon in direct sunlight.  
  
The watermelon is the answer. It may not solve every problem, but it is at least a real object, unlike most of the things people spend all day defending.  
  
![image](https://us-lax-1.linodeobjects.com/sojooo/comments/2835/1783073968115-1f673b9104ead882.png)

10 bumps

dickie · 7/2/2026, 11:45:55 AM (edited) · permalink

on The best socks I've tried in my life.......... in freethinkers

These are my go-to boots: the "Danner Tachyon 8-inch Black Hot" [https://www.danner.com/tachyon-8-black.html](https://www.danner.com/tachyon-8-black.html)  
  
I first bought them because I needed a wide boot. That was the non-negotiable requirement. They also had to be lightweight, comfortable, and usable in hot weather, but “comes in wide” was the first filter. Once you need wide boots, shopping gets less like browsing and more like checking whether any company remembers that feet can be different shapes.  
  
The Tachyons fit the job well. They are light, comfortable, breathable, and good in heat. They are also tactical boots, which means they look ready to rappel off a municipal building while mostly being used to go to the store, walk around town, and occasionally make poor footwear decisions outdoors.  
  
They are not true hiking boots. The tread is fine on normal ground, but slick rocks, wet roots, mud, and mossy nonsense are not where they shine. They are more of an urban tactical boot that can tolerate a trail than a hiking boot that wants to spend its life in the woods.  
  
I learned this during a hike that was less “wet trail” and more “walking directly up a stream with occasional archaeological evidence that a trail had once existed.”  
  
Early into the hike, I realized I had made a tactical error of my own. I was about 200 miles from home, had no other footwear with me, and had a Wesleyan University campus tour with my son a few hours later.  
  
My first thought was that I was basically fucked for the rest of the trip.  
  
At first, I tried to avoid the water. This was foolish. The trail was water. There was no elegant route around it. Every attempt to hop from rock to rock just added the possibility of slipping, soaking the boots anyway, and arriving at Wesleyan with a campus-tour story that began, “So I fell into a stream while trying to save my tactical shoes.”  
  
Eventually I committed.  
  
The Tachyons got fully soaked. Not damp. Not “a little water got in.” Fully soaked. Portable-aquarium soaked. Every step made that disturbing wet-boot sound, like two watermelons in tactical nylon bags being carried through a drainage ditch.  
  
They are not waterproof. To their credit, they do not pretend to be waterproof. Water entered immediately, efficiently, and without requiring a warranty claim or a press conference.  
  
After the hike, I changed into dry socks, put the same soaked boots back on, and went to the Wesleyan tour because there was no other option. I was prepared to spend the afternoon squishing around campus, trying to look interested in academic buildings while quietly resenting my own footwear.  
  
But during the tour, I noticed something strange.  
  
The boots were not bothering me.  
  
My feet were comfortable. Nothing felt cold. Nothing was squishing. I was not distracted by damp socks or mentally calculating the distance to the nearest shoe store. At some point, I had simply forgotten that I had hiked through a stream in them.  
  
After the tour, I remembered.  
  
I checked the boots.  
  
They were dry.  
  
Completely dry.  
  
That was the impressive part. No boot dryer. No newspaper stuffing. No heater. No hair dryer held at an unsafe angle in a hotel room. No emergency tourist sneakers. I changed socks, kept wearing the boots, and within a few hours they had dried while still on my feet.  
  
That is where lightweight, breathable footwear can beat waterproof boots. Waterproof boots are great right up until water gets inside. Then you are walking around in two leather-lined bathtubs. The Tachyons take the opposite approach. They get wet fast, but they also dry fast enough that the whole problem can disappear before you have time to become truly miserable.  
  
The only thing missing was a watermelon. Had I been carrying one, it would probably have been the driest object in the entire watershed, sitting on a rock judging my footwork.  
  
I used to buy them for around $90. The last pair I bought cost $180, which is kind of absurd. Even at $90, I thought that was a little high for what is basically lightweight synthetic tactical-running-shoe material with an ankle collar. At $180, I am paying a premium price for boots that could probably be described as “aggressively ventilated sneakers for people who own flashlights.”  
  
Still, I keep buying them. They come in wide, they are light, comfortable, and good in hot weather. They are not my first choice for slick hiking conditions, but they passed a very specific real-world test: surviving an accidental stream hike, then quietly drying themselves in time for a campus tour 200 miles from home.  
  
The watermelon remains untested in this footwear system, but I have confidence it would have been comfortable.

3 bumps

dickie · 7/1/2026, 6:44:19 PM · permalink

on I am planning to be homeless again! in freethinkers

1 bump

dickie · 7/1/2026, 6:40:20 PM (edited) · permalink

on I am planning to be homeless again! in freethinkers

3 bumps

dickie

​AI Coding Agents Need a Driving Test, Not a Beauty Pageant

Ballmaxxing

Eight-day old baby dies shortly after circumcision

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AI Coding Agents Need a Driving Test, Not a Beauty Pageant