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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Linnaean taxonomy classifies apes and monkeys as two closely related groups. This is the classification system most people are taught in grade school.

    Cladistics is a style of classification that seeks to organize species and groups of species from when they branched off of other groups of species. In this style, everything is defined by novel features, but they are still members of the more ancient clade. Birds for instance, would be a novel clade emerging from Dinosaurs, and thus all birds are also dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds.

    Because there are two groups of monkeys with unique characteristics (new world and old world), and apes have unique adaptations not found in either group, we have no way of cladistically defining a monkey in a way that meaningfully does not also include apes.

    As a side note, this is where the phrase “there is no such thing as a fish” comes from. ‘Fish’ in the Linnaean sense are a huge and diverse category. Two random members of the fish class would likely be far, far more distantly related than a random mammal and a random reptile.






  • Little_mouse@lemmy.catoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comGet rid of landlords...
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    2 months ago

    Even without going full ‘free housing for everyone’ utopia, it would be nice if the rent students currently pay to landlords was recoverable when the space is no longer needed. The same way people paying mortgages can just sell their house even before it is fully paid off. We wouldn’t need to drastically reshape society in order to allow people to invest in their own futures rather than shovelling most of what they have into a landlord’s pocket.










  • “But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they “have nothing to hide”, and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.”

    Sounds like they have passwords and banking apps to hide, You should demand their bank account and credit card details to verify that they have made no illicit actions.

    If they point out that they have no reason to trust you with that information, that’s when you point out that police, government, or corporate groups are made out of people just like yourself. They might have some codes of conduct, or a vetting process, but it just takes one person malicious or careless enough for you to be severely impacted.


  • The trouble with ‘Slippery Slope’ and ‘No True Scotsman’ is that they themselves are not fallacies. Invoking them without proper justification is the fallacy. The same sort of thing happens all the time with ‘Appeal to Authority’, you can probably trust a scientific consensus about a subject in which they are all experts, but you probably shouldn’t trust an individual expert on a topic for which they are not recognized as an expert.

    For an example of Slippery Slope: Fascists will absolutely try to demonize the most available target, and then because they always need an out-group, they continue cutting at what they consider the ‘degenerates’ of society until they are all that remain. (And then they find some new definition of degenerate)

    “No True Scotsman” is valid in that there is at some point by definition after which you are no longer talking about something. “No true vegetarian eats meat” is valid, as this is definitional. “No true member of Vegetarians United eats meat” lacks proper justification, and refers to an organization, not a proper definition. This gets really messy when people conflate what group people are in with what they ‘are’ or what makes them a good example of a group. Especially when religion is involved.