Jiro
6hr ago
Expressing glee over very unpleasant opinions you have about others means you’re human.
Plenty of evil things are done by humans and are part of the human condition.
Jiro
6hr ago
When I think of "Special exemption" I mean something like "I'm white and you're black, therefore I'm allowed to beat you."
"I'm the defender and you're the offender. So I'm allowed to hurt you."
Creating a category that you count yourself in that permits you to do things to people outside that category.
"Defender" is literally a category that you count yourself in, that permits you to do things to people outside that category.
And usually this category is 'arbitrary' and doesn't actually suffice to justify special status.
Of course. But everyone thinks, or at least can convince themselves that, the categories they are using aren't arbitrary. "I'm not arbitrarily saying that only right-wingers deserve to be shot, I'm saying it because right-wingers are promoting very destructive policies and left-wingers aren't."
Yes, you can fix up the principle by adding "... as long as the categories aren't arbitrary". But once you add that, you no longer have a principle that can be universally applied. You have a principle that can be applied only if you are correct at the object level (about whether the distinction is arbitrary). The whole point of stating it as a principle is that you're trying to apply it to everyone without having to look at the object level.
Also, I am very skeptical of claims of "you are really agreeing to X" about someone who isn't literally agreeing to X. No means no; if their lips say they don't agree, you must treat them as not agreeing, even if they "imply" a yes.
Jiro
12hr ago
"It's an understandable emotional response" isn't an excuse. You need to be acting and reasoning in good faith, and I don't believe that the people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death are. I'm not demanding that they be correct; good faith doesn't require correctness. But there comes a point where people are so blinded by hatred and so careless about their reasoning that good faith is no longer present.
If anything, when you're trying to decide if someone needs to die, that's when you need to take the greatest care, not the least.
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
But the issue is that you are not allowed to have a "special exemption".
If a "special exemption" is something that includes another person but excludes you, then adding the clause "unless they use it against me first" is adding a special exemption. It gives you permission to use violence against another person, while it excludes other people from being permitted to use violence against you (assuming you don't plan to use it first).
Rephrasing it as "unless defense" doesn't help either, for exactly the same reason. You've said that there are two categories, one of which doesn't apply to you ("people who use violence offensively") and another of which does apply to you ("people who use violence defensively") and allowing only the people in the first category to be valid targets of violence. That's a special exemption that excludes you as a target. It may be a special exemption that you like, but it still is one.
Just because you can otherwise justify self-defense doesn't keep it from being a special exemption under that definition. (And if there's some other definition of "special exemption", I'd like to see it.)
Jiro
16hr ago
I do. Its a simple application of the silver rule. If someone treats YOU in a particular way, then they're basically implying they agree it is fair for them to be treated that way. Unless they're carving out a special exception for themselves, which I would LOVE to hear their justification for.
This needs to be a little more nuanced than that.
The problem is that "in a particular way" and "special exemption" is doing a lot of work. What is a special exemption? It can't just be a category that includes someone else but excludes me--that would make all sorts of things special exemptions like killing in self-defense (nobody needs to defend themselves against me), jailing bank robbers (I don't rob banks), and prohibiting 6 year olds from drinking alcohol.
(And you may be tempted to respond "well, if you did rob a bank, the bank robbery rule would apply to you, so that isn't a special exemption." Which doesn't work; compare "well, if you did say something right-wing, a rule about censoring right-wingers would apply to you".)
Jiro
19hr ago
If we accept those principles, we shouldn't carve out an exception for people who don't accept those principles; otherwise, we'll just categorize everyone who we dislike as "rejecting this principle,"
There are degrees of clarity about whether someone rejects principles.
It's like punching Nazis. Punching Nazis has the same problem--people tend to categorize everyone they dislike as Nazis so they get to punch them. But we don't want to say "the US shouldn't have invaded Nazi Germany in the 1940s. After all, if you make it permissible to hurt Nazis, you'll end up calling everyone you hate Nazis".
Jiro
19hr ago
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
That's fine in theory, but that's not how people in the real world actually behave. People saying things like the above are gloating over the shooting. The statements have the grammatical form of (poorly thought out) arguments, but they aren't motivated by an attempt to reason about the things he said, and they won't be understood by their intended audience as such, except by a few weird high-decoupling quokka rationalists. They are poorly thought out in the first place because the people who say them don't care about making their arguments good; they're not doing it to search for truth, they're doing it to support the violence.
Don't parse the literal words like a computer and say "I don't see a call for violence in there, so it isn't advocating violence". Of course it is. Even if Scott never understood that.
it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event
The sort of statements you describe aren't nuanced feelings.
The equivalent for Floyd would be something like "Floyd wanted people like me to die. Well, it turned out to be people like him instead. Sucks to be him but that's what you get for being dumb enough to flee the police while on drugs". I presume that your feelings about Floyd were not expressed that way. Even if you had some similar ideas, sending messages that are not in your literal words is done through tone and phrasing.
In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
This is where I invoke "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". Right-wingers get cancelled over things far more innocuous than supporting violence. Supporting specific acts of violence is pretty much the only left-wing statement that can get you cancelled at all (except for inter-left conflicts, like left-wing antisemitism). I'd like a principled world where nothing you say in private can get you in trouble, but short of that it's preferable that cancellation not be one sided.
Jiro
1d ago
By the way, @gattsuru, I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
Actual demands that people say this are usually because they've been making statements that support the assassination with some plausible deniability. You don't need to say this out of the blue.
Jiro
1d ago
pro-trans inscriptions upon the magazines
I can't find this in the news articles.
Jiro
1d ago
I'm in two mostly general audience discords for reasons that are not politics, but which have a politics channel. The left in there is bloodthirsty over Charlie Kirk, and there's no social media algorithm filtering the messages.
You could say that the people there have been reading filtered messages themselves and then posting to the discord channels, but at some point this just becomes "most of them actually are bloodthirsty, filtered messages are just the cause" rather than "filtered messages make them look bloodthirsty".
Jiro
1d ago
I was under the impression that this doesn't happen nowadays. I don't think, for instance, that when the bump stock ban was imposed you were allowed to keep your existing bump stocks.
Jiro
2d ago
I immediately went out and bought an AR, thinking I might not be able to next week.
Does this ever work? If the gun actually was banned as a result, wouldn't you also need to turn in your already purchased ones?
Jiro
2d ago
Either you believe trans women are women or you believe trans women are men. Almost no one believes trans women are women when they are law abiding and they are men when they go shoot up a school.
People with such opinions don't believe trans women are women but are willing to humor them by calling them that anyway. They are not willing to humor criminals.
Jiro
2d ago
Demanding sources for something that you don't doubt the truth of is a filibuster, not an honest criticism.
Jiro
2d ago
If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice.
It also depends on how much is communalized. Even if it just goes to the needy, any poor community is going to have enough needy that you could easily take away every penny that someone earns, give it to the needy, and still have needy. And the community isn't going to say "well, the needy already got 30% of his income, we'll let him keep the rest".
Jiro
3d ago
Making things easier to do has huge effects on the addiction rate. "Anyone who would be addicted already is" turned out not to be true of Internet-based gambling.
Jiro
3d ago
Apparently one main reason for white affluence in Rhodesia was that even when blacks and whites were paid the same, social obligations to family members caused problems for blacks. If people who make money have to give it to their relatives, wealth becomes useless and it's impossible to save or invest for the future.
Jiro
3d ago
This is because of how political groups in one country feed on political groups in another.
That's why Japan has much less of this sort of thing. It's really hard to have influence when the country is thousands of miles away and speaks mostly Japanese.
Jiro
4d ago
It could be that one is only allowed to caricature that which they understand very well, and due to the West's recent ascent to power, every notable example is white.
Chinese Communists are also known worldwide.
No, that isn't true.
- You have principal/agent problems where the people working for the businesses get a chance to personally gain by promoting their politics, even if it hurts the business.
- It's not true that businesses want to make as much money as possible. Rather, businesses who don't don't compete well and eventually lose. It can take a long time before the business actually goes broke. Disney has lost a lot of money by putting woke in Star Wars and Marvel, but such losses aren't going to drive Disney out of business for the forseeable future.
- Owners spending money on wokeness (and making the business, and indirectly themselves, lose money) is ultimately no different from owners spending money on, say, baseball games and directly losing money on them. The owners gain personally. (Related to #1 and #2, if the business is big.)
Jiro
8d ago
Before Operation Chokepoint was revealed, the explanation for the debanking, at least for payday lenders and porn, was exactly what you claim is the explanation here: those industries are high risk. This wasn't true; they were debanked because the government told them to. They may have actually been high risk, but the claim that they were being debanked for that was a coverup for the true reason. The lesson from this is that you should not just say "sure, those industries are high risk" and credulously believe that the credit card companies and payment processors are only reacting to market forces.
As you note, dealing with high risk has been around for a very long time. Which means that if the behavior changes, it probably isn't because of high risk, even if someone claims it is.
Jiro
8d ago
"Politicized" in this context means for the business to act against its customers based on politics.
Both sides don't have equal access to the media. The practical effect is that the left gets to use lies a lot more than the right.
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