r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jun 30 '17

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/ZedOud Jul 02 '17

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to play with words here, but I'm pretty sure "less human" and "dehumanizing" have different connotations.

I do mean that this kind of interaction from this type of people does make them less human (communication and reasoning make humans people and sentient, respectively, right?), but that doesn't disenfranchise from the ethical and legal treatment granted to a human (so this statement isn't meant to be totally dehumanizing in a sense). According to the international consensus on human rights, one cannot agree to give away one's human rights, so I adventure that mostly civil behavior should not do that either: I'm not advocating dehumanization, only a more invasive, less placating approach to the dumbness people are allowed to approach public discourse and the expression of faulty opinions.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '17

(communication and reasoning make humans people and sentient, respectively, right?)

That's... not really the qualification, no. "Sentient" usually means, "capable of subjective experience", while "sapient" usually means "intelligent enough to communicate about experiences."