This just isn’t empirically true, though. Human beings aren’t robots who are automatically compelled to obey the code that’s written in their holy books. People explicitly or implicitly ignore the stuff they don’t like all the time.

Maybe taking it out of the realm of religion makes it easier to see. Jaywalking is…

I mean, look, I don’t know you, but I’m going to assume that you’re an atheist, and you believe really strongly in the importance of rationality and human rights. Is that fair to say? I personally am also an atheist, and also believe strongly in rationality and human rights. But rationality demands that we engage with…

Yeah, well more generally my argument is that religions don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re influenced by other attributes like national culture or whatever. That’s why I don’t think it makes sense to talk about them monolithically, to talk about “Islam” or “Buddhism” instead of “chill South Korean Buddhism” and…

I think this might be the core of our disagreement:

But if you look at all that change, it shows that there’s not one monolithic thing called “Islam.” There are a bunch of different practices and beliefs grouped under that label. Some of those are widely held, some of them aren’t. And they’re all inflected differently through different national cultures, languages,…

Buddhism is definitely also a proselytizing, expansionist religion (fun fact: Buddhist monks are currently leading an ethnic cleansing campaign against a Muslim ethnic group in Myanmar). And pretty much every religious group that gets control of a state quickly turns expansionist - look at Israel, or India since Modi…

I think a lot of what you’re saying isn’t exactly rooted in the real world, it’s based on the mediated version of the real world that we get here in the US. It’s not that Muslims are any more shitty than Buddhists or Jews or Sikhs; it’s that the media feeds us a steady diet of stories about evil shit that some Muslims…

This is a bad argument, because you’re taking actions that some specific Muslims did (the fatwa against Rushdie, the attack on that French magazine, the assertion that apostates should be killed) and generalizing them to all Muslims. That’s an empirically baseless stereotype, and it ignores the fact that the vast…

It’s not actually true that Islam “hasn’t really changed since the Middle Ages”, though. In the early modern period, there were a ton of important changes - Turkish Islam became increasingly influenced by Greek Orthodox Christianity, Shia became popular for the first time after it was made the state religion of the…

That’s all true, but it’s not all of the truth. A housing downturn should only have had a negative effect on the housing industry (and closely related ones like furniture etc.). Why did it spread, and lead to massive damage in other areas of the economy? Because Greenspan actively deregulated finance, and let them get…

I am too young to have any connection with this source material, and I’ve never even heard of this guy, or his band, or the other band they apparently turned into.  But this was still really well-written and moving as a piece of writing.

I mean, maybe Greenspan did a good job of running the Fed’s monetary policy. But he did a pretty poor job of running its regulatory policy, given that much of the groundwork for the Great Recession was laid by his deregulation.

To be fair, it’s not like that was totally on him - elected officials were also pushing that…

There is so much awesome stuff that happens in those books! In one of them, Han and Chewie break into a space prison by pretending to be a circus troupe that’s there to put on a show for the warden. Another of the books has a scene where Chewbacca is trapped on a hill during a stampede. In order to avoid being…

That is a fair point! I guess I would answer that big sex pests are empirically more similar to little ones, whereas big crimes are very different to little ones. So broken windows doesn’t make sense, while this framework does make sense in a sexual misconduct sense.

Like, the same guy who rapes women at the company…

I dunno, I just rewatched the episode of 30 Rock he was on, and every single fake song the show mentions is about food.

One thing, I think, is that the little stuff enables the big stuff. If a manager (or a cop, or a media publication, or whatever) turns a blind eye to low-grade harassment, both sex pests and victims will see that and adjust their behavior accordingly. The sex pests will be more emboldened to do big bad stuff, because…

In a legal sense (in the US at least), “sexual harassment” has to be “severe and/or pervasive” in order to be legally actionable. So one really bad thing is enough, or lots of little bad things.

Him calling a pregnant woman “ripe” seems like a little bad thing, for sure. If he just did that, it wouldn’t be legally…

This is a really good piece by Linda Holmes at NPR, I thought:

Lots of people are mad about this without “MAXIMUM RAGE”, though. “Outrage” is an inaccurate, reductive way of characterizing every negative opinion into a form that can be easily dismissed by people who disagree with it. At best, it’s a lazy stereotype, which reads a few extreme responses as everyone’s opinion. At…