This is the crux: does it count as stealing to accept the offer of a contract which causes the offering party to lose money?
My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not is not part of the contract.
So no theft has taken place. If you want to claim that's it's unethical to take the free money that they're offering, you need to provide a justification for why that is. The onus is on you.
The only way I can see you attempting to justify it is by saying that it involves taking advantage of unforeseen consequences of the contract. But as has been pointed out, they fully intended to lose money, so that doesn't work.
"Slander" entails making false statements, whereas this was just a statement of fact, free even of condemnation. People who read it make their own value judgments.
No, sorry, false. A sentence of the form, "which is why <person> does <thing>", i.e. "<person I never met> did <thing> because <reason I impute>" is never, ever a statement of fact. It is _always_ an opinion and an attempt at mindreading. And in this case, it's ill-informed. As lend0000 has repeatedly told you, firms like these are not exposed long to the market. Hence, "likely ideologically motivated", unlikely a nefarious ploy, but again this is speculation.
> Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time.
I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verbs, for example, I now understand more information about every sentence (e.g. omitted verb subjects and tense/mood information). It will still be necessary to listen and read extensively in order to internalise the formation and meaning of the verb forms, but it skips a lengthy process of reverse engineering. Ditto for producing your own sentences, which I think is also fundamentally important for learning a language.
> Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
This is absolutely true; when using flashcards or spaced repetition, it is vastly better to have a full sentence with the target word blanked out compared to only having the definition.
It's strangely refreshing to see this particular criticism of the Enlightenment; I'm much more accustomed to hearing criticisms from the postmodernist direction. I disagree with your statement in a previous post that their arguments are incoherent, particularly the early exponents like Foucault or some of the Frankfurt school. I'd also point out that much of the Enlightenment tradition is not ontologically materialistic; in particular, German Idealism embodied in Kant, Schopenhauer etc. stands against materialism.
Based on what you're saying here, are you arguing for a kind of Scholasticism?
Finally, your criticism of a "radically egalitarian" view is somewhat perplexing to me. Would you mind expanding on that point?
In my opinion the idealistic variant of the enlightenment is conceptually not significantly different from materialism. The big thing is rejection of teleology, which also results in the radical egalitarianism since there is no longer a purposeful ordering to reality and no longer a natural law.
And yes, a teleological philosophy like scholasticism makes the most sense if we are trying to figure out the best way to live. Otherwise we just end up with the specious word game philosophy that everyone hates
> freedom of press and similar rights are a uniquely western phenomenon that are ... derived from christian values
This is incorrect. Europe is quite unique in that since the advent of Christianity there has always existed a church separate from the state acting as a counterbalance thereto, and offering an alternative foundation of moral authority. Despite this, brutal suppression of all dissent and criticism of the political structure was almost always supported by the Church, which generally allied itself with dominant regimes (i.e. feudal rulers).
It wasn't until the flurry of neoclassicist-inspired philosophising of the Enlightenment and the emergence of monied elites in a position to pressure the state to grant them rights that said rights were slowly granted. They often couched their arguments in terms of Christian doctrine, but this is just the incidental result of the dominance of the Christian religion in society at that time.
To be fair that was the Roman Catholic church, which also procecuted the former Christian communities all over Europe. It is mostly this consolidated form that supported suppression.
> They often couched their arguments in terms of Christian doctrine, but this is just the incidental result of the dominance of the Christian religion in society at that time.
I wouldn't say that it's entirely incidental. Christianity is compatible with individualism in a way that some other religions are not.
I think the problem here is that you're not seeing that 'politics' encompasses an incredibly broad spectrum of things, and the only time that something is labeled 'political' is when it reaches a certain level of controversial for the relevant society.
For example, selling a hamburger would have been an obviously political act in the Soviet Union. We don't see it as such because vanishingly few people believe that commercial transactions between private parties should be forbidden. But whenever someone advertises a hamburger, depicts the purchase of one, or leaves a review of one on a website, they are engaging in an act that we only view as apolitical because of the status quo that we inhabit.
I do see "that 'politics' encompasses an incredibly broad spectrum of things", but I also see the motte-and-bailey argument being presented. The "politics" of everyday life is quite a different thing from the "politics" we're talking here.
RE your hamburger example, yes, it's apolitical within the context of society where hamburgers aren't political. Free trade or democracy isn't required, a hypothetical restaurant in the Soviet Union wouldn't have a problem selling grilled chicken breast. And if ever the Party decided that grilled chicken is a symbol of capitalism and therefore banned, the restaurant would just switch to serving fried chicken, or something else. Living in the status quo is not the same as endorsing it.
To me, the "not fighting status quo = supporting status quo" view is anathema to civilization. It's the peace-time equivalent of treating civilians as enemy combatants just because they live in the country you're at war with. It's an attempt to get other people to fight in your war, and suffer the collateral damage for you, and most people rightfully oppose it. If you want someone to support your cause, your strategy should be arguing that your cause is just - and not trying to get them to switch by making them believe not supporting you means supporting the enemy.
I don't buy it. There are certainly times when things get politicized; when circumstances or culture invest things with political connotations they wouldn't ordinarily have. But the normal concept of "political" is, like, rants about how suchandsuch politician is evil or suchandsuch party is stupid. I'm confident most people in any culture could identify the difference between that and selling a hamburger.
I find the point about "ugly" syntax interesting, because I'm generally quite indifferent to that sort of thing, but my experience tends to indicate that it's very important to people.
Facebook created ReasonML, which is just a different syntax for OCaml (I think the AST parsed from it is interchangeable with one parsed from OCaml), purely because it's less alienating to people who are used to writing C-style code.
I'd say though, that generally, people who are interested in "niche" programming languages are less likely to be put off by syntax than people who have only been exposed to the more mainstream languages, which is why their preferences are less likely to be the ones reflected whenever mass adoption is a goal of language designers.
The idea is that if your sexuality is not innate, then it can be changed. There's long been a desire to prove that homosexuality is genetic in order to counter the claim of bigots that they can turn people straight through shame and abuse.
It's frustrating on several levels. One, there is an element of the naturalistic fallacy; many people feel that homosexuality being "natural" (e.g. occurring in many animal species or being immutably determined by genes) is a strong defence of it (as opposed to the preferable argument of "it's not hurting you, so you have absolutely zero grounds to object to it"). Two, many people want to be able to point to a single gene as the causative factor, when genetics is rarely so simple, and other prenatal factors may contribute (e.g. something that happens during gestation).
Just because something is not determined by genes does not automatically mean it is not innate. Some traits are determined by hormones and there might be many other mechanisms that determine our physical and behavioral traits.
I read the statement and to me, the future progressive seemed to be the most apt way to phrase it. When I tried to find examples to illustrate why, it occurred to me that the future progressive predominates when delivering bad news. For example:
"Unfortunately, we won't be renewing our contract with you"
or
"We regret to inform you that we will be going with another candidate"
Changing those to the simple future makes them sound much harsher to my ears, so I would venture that the progressive is a mechanism for softening the impact.
This sort of construction is reminiscent of topic-prominent languages, e.g. Japanese, but English is a subject-prominent language and phrasing it that way would sound awkward to a native speaker.
My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not is not part of the contract.
So no theft has taken place. If you want to claim that's it's unethical to take the free money that they're offering, you need to provide a justification for why that is. The onus is on you.
The only way I can see you attempting to justify it is by saying that it involves taking advantage of unforeseen consequences of the contract. But as has been pointed out, they fully intended to lose money, so that doesn't work.