Philosophical Vegan Forum

brimstoneSalad wrote:a selfish person can enact good policy to be rewarded for that. Make your constituents happy, reduce crime, improve the economy: you can point at that stuff later to secure your political career and rise to more power.

Electing a selfish leader would come at a risk. Someone in a position of such tremendous power doesn't necessarily have to enact good policy to please his/her constituents. S/he just has to make them believe that s/he is. Also, a selfish president is likely to go with the will of the people rather than his/her advisers, particularly on questions that entail short term benefits and long term harm.

Jebus wrote: Electing a selfish leader would come at a risk. Someone in a position of such tremendous power doesn't necessarily have to enact good policy to please his/her constituents. S/he just has to make them believe that s/he is. Also, a selfish president is likely to go with the will of the people rather than his/her advisers, particularly on questions that entail short term benefits and long term harm.

If the benefit comes after four years, this may be true. Although such a politician would be willing to go against their wills for a benefit that comes in three years to prove him or her right.

Ultimately, we have to ask what kind of selfishness it is. Is it an ego gratifying narcissistic selfishness? If so, maybe the politician is playing a longer game, and wants to go down in history as the greatest president ever, and have monuments built after him or her.

He or she may only need or want to see returns before death.

For somebody substantially wealthy, money isn't what he or she needs anymore; it's power, fame, adoration of the masses. A long sighted and intelligent person after this could perform near optimally.

Sure, it's a small risk, but it's a much lower risk than electing somebody who is known to have very poor reasoning, and who is known to be stubborn about it, regardless of motives. A well intentioned person with very bad reasoning is very dangerous: every suicide bomber ever, basically.

brimstoneSalad wrote:This is the equivalent of Christians saying that Atheists just hate god so they pretend not to believe in him.
Militant vegans can say the same about meat eaters, that they all secretly enjoy animal suffering, and if they didn't (like a vegan who used to be a meat eater) they would convert as soon as informed (and no matter what form that information comes in).

This goes against all of the evidence, and everything we know about human psychology; it's a massive conspiracy theory.

I think you're using the word conspiracy too loosely. Saying that pedophiles know raping children is wrong isn't on the same level as 'Bush did 9/11' (which is the connotation you give it by calling it a massive conspiracy).

Even if a pedophile rationalizes, that's way worse than the rationalization of meat-eaters, because it goes out of its way to deviate from a standard bad element of society.

brimstoneSalad wrote:That's he said she said. Maybe she's crazy, and she accused him of rape to get a big settlement. We don't know what happened, or why. Just like the accusations against Shermer, or... Laci Green:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX226DyzEo4

An accusation is not a conviction. You know enough about criminal rights to respect that. If he was convicted of rape and there were evidence, that would be another matter, but still not enough to indict his honesty or dependability in the political sphere.

We know based on his policies that he'll be a worse president than Hillary. We also know she has more experience than he does, and Trump is an unknown since he has no track record. That should be enough to tell us who to support.

There are plenty of skeletons in the Clinton's closets too. The race shouldn't be about that.
Voting based on some notion of behavioral purity rather than actual policy is a profoundly bad idea.

I never said it was a conviction. I agree with innocent until proven guilty in terms of the justice system, but when it comes to what probably happened, I think most people who say they were raped are being honest, given how difficult it is to come out with that, and particularly when there's no obvious motive to lie (as there isn't with Trump's ex-wife).

brimstoneSalad wrote:Why? Should we take every accusation as a mark of guilt against somebody and just throw out the criminal justice system, ruining lives based on the claims of anybody with an axe to grind?

In a fair system with properly administered justice it should not affect him. Not at all. Media that mention it should be dismissed as rags of yellow journalism. Attack ads are the worst of political rhetoric, and they circumvent the issues which is dangerous.
His policy choices and demonstrable beliefs or claims about reality should be the only things that affect him in this race. Likewise, Hillary's should be the only things that affect her in this race.

I think it should be the opposite. It is the job of the media to report the facts. Reporting a rape case is good journalism. Reporting it as if Trump definitely is a rapist would be terrible journalism, but just reporting the case is important.

EquALLity wrote: I think you're using the word conspiracy too loosely. Saying that pedophiles know raping children is wrong isn't on the same level as 'Bush did 9/11' (which is the connotation you give it by calling it a massive conspiracy).

It isn't on the same level; saying all pedophiles know it's wrong is larger, because you're making an assertion about millions of people colluding in a conspiracy of feigning delusion, rather than a select few in the Bush administration.

EquALLity wrote:Even if a pedophile rationalizes, that's way worse than the rationalization of meat-eaters, because it goes out of its way to deviate from a standard bad element of society.

What? I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Pedophiles have an innate, incurable, and ultimately insatiable urge to have sexual contact with children. That's far more understandable than a carnist, who has no innate compulsion to eat meat and only does it for social convenience and taste. Resisting a sexual urge like that takes a herculean act of will.

They are not going out of their ways to do something harmful in the way carnists do when they make the casual choice to eat meat -- they didn't ask to be how they are, and they didn't want it. This is not a casual choice; it's effectively life long abstinence from the sexual behavior they are compelled to engage in, and a constant and unending battle of will.

A more fair comparison would be a carnist who suffers from Prader-Willi syndrome.

EquALLity wrote:and particularly when there's no obvious motive to lie (as there isn't with Trump's ex-wife).

Well, she was paid off. So, money? Huge piles of money. That's a very good motivation.
She was also his wife, and got to know him pretty well and his personality, so intense seething hatred is another one. Revenge, too, for whatever non-rape psychological torment and emotional abuse he subjected her to.

EquALLity wrote:but when it comes to what probably happened, I think most people who say they were raped are being honest, given how difficult it is to come out with that,

The only people's it's difficult for to come forward are those who have been raped. For people who are lying, it's very easy to do, since they suffer nothing by being disbelieved.
We have no idea what percentage of rape accusations are false. 10%? 90%? We don't know.

If you just believe people who say they've been raped, you increase the motivation of people to lie for sake of malice, and the efficacy of those lies in destroying lives. This is why we have due process. It's not OK to destroy somebody's life or reputation on a maybe or an unknown.

EquALLity wrote:I think it should be the opposite. It is the job of the media to report the facts. Reporting a rape case is good journalism. Reporting it as if Trump definitely is a rapist would be terrible journalism, but just reporting the case is important.

So, if somebody says Obama is a pedophile, or Hillary is, all of the news stations should run that story about how some random person accused them of pedophilia?
Do you realize how bad that would be for them? Even without any evidence, the accusation itself is damning. We live in an era of a pedophile witch hunt. For better or worse, all it takes is somebody pointing a finger to destroy a person's reputation, and when news agencies report on that hearsay they amplify the accusation and the damage millions of times over.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Does it matter if a candidate is a pedophile?

I'm worried about the policies and how they affect the world -- hundreds of millions of children, more so than a small few.

His blatant disregard for the value of sentient life should be a concern. If we are to believe that the way we treat animals that produced animal products is wrong surely his conduct here is equally wrong, and while he may have ideas that could be beneficial, if these ideas indeed do hold merit, they should stand on that not on the back of one person who happens to be voicing them. I have to wonder if he views certain human beings as disposable, human beings whom, as president he would be sworn to sworn to serve, what informs his opinions on issues on which his policies might have a positive impact. I think that other people could promote the policies he favors without such blatant disregard for sentient life and additionally if we are to respect the authority of the law and continue to debate and amend it to make it more in line with what we believe to be good, we have to enforce it fairly, because corruption of this could very well be the beginning of the end of objectivity and thus society in a certain sense.