OBJECTION!

The three words?

• Git reckt bozzo

Curiously, written in English.

The other person was being sarcastic.

“If you were a doorknob, I’d start drinking heavily… so that way we can get turnt together.”

If trends continue, everything will be like it is now, but slightly worse in every way.

You’re just attacking me, not my argument

No, I’m pretty clearly attacking your argument. Your argument rests on this assumption that if allowing denial of service based on race only affects minorities <5% of the population, that that makes it acceptable somehow. It’s a horrible position but the fact that it reflects very poorly on you to voice it is beside the point.

You skipped the whole counter argument (comparing to scabs and unions) that this lacks the social structure to support that behavior. If you tried to open a business that wasn’t racist then the racist people would come and threaten you, this isn’t happening with the Uber situation.

Regardless, the Civil Rights Act applies to all businesses. It doesn’t matter if you think one particular business model makes the Civil Rights Act unnecessary - it is still the law. And opening up exceptions to it would set a dangerous precedent.

The thing is that Uber is not performing any discrimination, they are enabling other people to discriminate against each other and attempting to still provide service through it. Claiming that Uber is discriminating is functionally not true.

It doesn’t matter either way. “Discriminating” and “enabling discrimination” are both illegal. I have no idea why you’re so attached to this legal technicality of “contractors” that Uber uses to skirt labor laws, because it doesn’t even change anything here. Declaring someone a contractor does not magically repeal the Civil Rights Act.

The scale at which you would have to be a minority for this to impact you significantly is somewhere in the 1-5% range

OK, so you need to reach a threshold of 5% of the population before you’re allowed to have rights, got it.

with the assumption that the other 95-99% are opposed to you.

That assumption isn’t actually necessary.

Let’s say there’s a small town where 65% are non-racist (or less racist) whites, 30% are racist whites, and 5% are black. If your diner decides to serve that 5%, the 30% of racists will refuse to eat there, and you’ll end up losing a lot of customers. So, rather than “95-99%” needing to be opposed to you, it only needs to be the case that your population is outnumbered by the people who hate you - which is the case for many minority groups in many places in the country.

A diner not serving black people is impactful because a handful of people are the business owners and are effectively gating you out.

That’s not really true. If if was just a matter of a handful of business owners being racists, then those racist businesses would be out-competed by non-racist businesses that appeal to everyone. The problem was wider and more systemic, being welcoming to everyone would cause racists to boycott the business, so even if a business owner wasn’t racist themselves, they would be incentivized to ban the people who the racists hated.

This also goes both ways and is potentially international, Japanese could choose not to serve non-Japanese, a black person could choose not to serve white people for comfort or security.

You’re fundamentally not understanding why Uber allowing people to make this decision is not the same as 1960’s segregation.

Because it isn’t! The scenario you described is literally the exact sort of thing the Civil Rights Act exists to stop! You are literally advocating for allowing denial of service based on protected classes!

So long as the option goes both ways this only hurts the people who opt into the program, not everyone else. The only way this could hurt others would be if those who choose to opt in (as in they only want a certain thing) get priority in the scheduling or if you live somewhere where you are the overwhelming minority.

So the only way it could hurt anyone is if they’re a minority. Yes, that’s exactly why we have the Civil Rights Act and why what you’re suggesting is illegal.

In the second example, if you are still living in a sun down town then getting Uber rides is probably not your biggest problem.

Next you’re going to tell me that black people in racist towns should just eat at home if restaurants don’t want to serve them. And if the bus driver makes you sit at the back of the bus, just drive a car.

Even now, Uber drivers are independent contractors

This is a bullshit legal category that exists primarily to exploit loopholes, but even that does not give anyone the right to discriminate and violate the Civil Rights Act.

If the driver pulls up and thinks you’re sketchy they can cancel the ride, there is no obligation.

Strictly speaking, if a driver cancelled every ride that a black person booked, they could be sued for it, although such a suit would be very difficult in practice because you’d have to have enough records of that driver (or the company, if that was the target of the suit) to show a consistent bias.

This is the case in every business. Denial of service based on protected classes is illegal.

So you disagree with the Civil Rights Act then? Because one of the things it did was force businesses to serve customers, regardless of things like race or sex. And before we had it, there where large parts of the South where black people would be refused service, and if someone did serve them, they’d lose a bunch of white customers.

That’s the very good reason why it’s “not already an option.”

Neither drivers nor Uber have the right, or should have the right, to refuse service based on categories protected in the Civil Rights Act.

This is such an individualist framing.

I’m glad I grew up watching Scooby-Doo where the believers are just being duped by scammers and there’s always a rational, scientific explanation for everything (except in the movies).

This sketch was about Facebook but it’s also relevant to Twitter

Strange that Biden won in 2020 despite 2/3 of the country “effectively voting for Trump” by not voting for Biden🤔

I won’t feel bad about not voting for Kamala even if I were sent to El Salvador, or marched into a gas chamber. I made peace with that before I voted PSL.

Y’all fundamentally misunderstand us. You think we’re simply misinformed, that we don’t appreciate the threat, that if only we saw the facts of what the Republicans are like, we’d immediately see things your way. What you don’t understand is that we do see the facts, we’re just operating under a different ethical and political framework from you. The point of disagreement is not about the facts on the ground, it’s about the best way to respond to them. So merely pointing to the awful shit the Republicans do has no chance of swaying, well, I can’t speak for everyone, but certainly me, and anyone who thinks like me.

There are definitely similarities, but China has its own fascinating history there, with a lot of traditional beliefs resurfacing as weird, sanctioned versions of themselves after the cultural revolution had mostly suppressed them.

I think you’ve got it backwards. One of the lesser known, positive parts of the Cultural Revolution (which was primarily a horrible clusterfuck) was the Barefoot Doctors program, in which medical students were fast-tracked in education and sent out to the rural regions of China, which had never before had access to modern medicine. It was a very basic level of care, but it increased the number of doctors per person tenfold in the span of five years, and access to vaccines had a significant impact, increasing life-expectancy and reducing child mortality. However, because medical supplies in those regions were limited (and the scale of the program), the doctors were instructed to supplement care with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). This allowed the program to be rolled out more quickly, and the partial reliance on TCM may have helped with public acceptance (since it was what they already believed in), but it had an unfortunate side effect that it legitimized TCM.

This program was phased out in the 80’s with China’s broader economic shift, towards privatization, while also moving away from TCM. The new policies made care less accessible and focused more on curing serious ailments rather than preventative care. China has made some efforts to address these issues, though I’m not well informed enough about their current system to weigh in.

A lot of the modern popularity of TCM likely comes from the time of the Barefoot Doctors program, because people remember their quality of life improving during that time and then declining later when the focus was shifted away from TCM, incorrectly attributing it to TCM’s effectiveness rather than the accessibility of care and focus on prevention. Which is to say, many of the people who believe in TCM may actually be nostalgic for the healthcare system implemented during the Cultural Revolution.

It’s sad because for most people school is about the only time anybody cares enough about your thoughts to actually read an essay and respond to it intelligently.

I specifically disabled my watch history to get this. If I want to watch something, I’ll go to my subscriptions. Why would I want to interact with YouTube’s algorithm?

Alright, you know, if you won’t use reason, then whatever your faith tells you I guess.

OK, so returning to the original point, if you agree that our senses our subjective, then the difference between a scientist reading a scale and me remembering whether I turned the oven on is just a matter of the degree of reliability, and both are evidence-based.

When you say I believe I turned off the oven, you are subjectively recalling something. You aren’t looking at the oven, you’re remembering it.

You’re also relying on your subjective memory when you look away from the scale to write down the number you read.

There is an accepted protocol on how to read a meniscus in a graduated cylinder for this reason or any scale for that matter.

Oh, now this is fascinating. Tell me, does this “accepted protocol” mean that you don’t have to rely on your subjective senses at all? If so, then how, exactly, does the information end up reaching your brain? I would love to know.

This is essentially just, “When someone wears a lab coat, that means it’s objective.” Even within “accepted protocols” there is still plenty of room for human error.

You are completely wrong about basically everything you’ve said, and your wrong ideas seem to be a product of the disdain you seem to have for the humanities - a common ailment of people with just enough knowledge of science to be very confidently wrong about things.

That’s incredibly dumb.

My observations about turning off the oven are just as objective and evidence-based as any other observations. I saw whether I did it or not very clearly with my own two eyes. If you want to get into, “Senses are inherently subjective,” fine, but that includes using your eyes to read a scale during an experiment. You’re trying to draw an insane distinction between reading a scale and reading a dial on an oven, it makes absolutely zero sense, and you don’t understand anything about science, epistemology, or philosophy in general. You’re going full Dunning-Kruger here.