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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
But, like – aren't you more invested in actually accomplishing your goals?
I'm not them! I don't know how many times I need to stress it, but I really don't have that much of a stake in the Israel-Palestine fight. (I have noted that I don't like the idea that Israel gets supported in my name and with my money, which gives me moral culpability for things I want nothing to do with. I should add to this that I don't like the way the Western censorship machine often gets deployed in the cause of Israel; it peels yet another set of people off the already meagre free-speech coalition if they strongly feel that BDS proves that some censorship is good actually.) Ultimately, I argue about this here mostly because I like arguing; I would not take concrete steps beyond perhaps avoiding rabid pro-Israel activists in a professional and personal context (but I would equally avoid rabid pro-Palestine activists) and letting it influence my voting decisions a bit.
(...) This is what I find so strange about the pro-Palestine movement. (...)
All of that seems like an unfortunate consequence of how politics is played nowadays, but given the game is what it is I do not think it is necessarily ineffectual. In Germany and in the US, actions targeted against Israel-the-state have been repeatedly equated with antisemitism/hatred of and paranoia towards Jews by proponents of the Israeli cause, in order to draw from the very large repository of bad publicity that the latter enjoys post-WWII. One way to counter this strategy is to ram antisemitism itself back into the Overton window; if "all my homies want to genocide the Jews" is a mainstream statement, then "you just want to boycott Israel because you want to genocide the Jews" loses its effect. But try to tell pro-Israel Jews that they should maybe not have sacrificed the seedcorn of anti-antisemitism to Moloch.
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6hr ago
Slavery was almost universally accepted in Western civilisation up until a few centuries before the American Civil War. What do you think happened between that and the Union going into a bloody war to abolish it? Did enough people just solipsistically decide it was bad through application of pure reason with no external input?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6hr ago
I want to respond to both of your replies together, if you don't mind.
instrumental vs. terminal Goals
The pro-Palestine movement in its current form has surely not been around for as long as opposition to slavery was before the relevant constitutional amendments were passed in the US. Can you say with certainty that there was no period of 20+ years before that point, where locally it would also have looked like the anti-slavery people are only concerned with pointless symbolic actions like condemning slavery, attacking slaveowners, propagandising for the humanity of slaves and helping the odd fugitive? After all, if your plan has two steps and the first is a precondition to the second, and you have reached an impasse with the first, it can make sense to focus all your energy on the first.
To that point, a lot of people, even beyond those you would normally consider to be pro-Palestine activists (including me), find it pretty likely that all other things equal Israel would prefer not a "durable two-state solution" but the total eviction or eradication of Palestinians anywhere near its territory, and probably significant chunks of land from other adjacent countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) minus their populations as well, and barring a total victory they would still prefer a constant low-key war where they are totally in control of the situation (so no Oct 7th, but maybe occasional incidents with stray bullets hitting border posts followed by a punitive action which may even let them annex some more land) to any realistic version of permanent peace in their current internationally recognised borders (which would probably require the surrender of settled territory or full franchise for Gazans and West Bankers who would then outbreed and outvote them).
If you are pro-Palestinian, you don't want either of those two outcomes, but it's not like you have more direct actions available than those that shift Israel's own cost-benefit calculus. The most obvious way to reorder their preferences is to make their preferred options worse by imposing external costs; since they are hardly Juche Korea and therefore significantly depend on foreign trade and military aid, turning international institutions and public sentiment against them is actually an effective measure. Maybe Israel would prefer being stuck on a small, misshapen piece of land with fixed borders and forced to grapple with its internal contradictions without the unifying threat of war + foreign trade, or multicultural Salad Bowl Israel whose only lever to remain majority Jewish is figuring out the birthrate problem + foreign trade, over being Greater Israel with the foreign relations of North Korea.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7hr ago
Funny how easily all of the agency is assigned to one side or the other. Some other members of this forum would be thinking "women like powerful and rich men no matter their own SES" and complaining about hypergamy around now. Maybe they could even come up with their own saying about the conscience of a "wet snatch" or thereabouts!
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7hr ago
· Edited 7hr ago
One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. I say deBoer is wrong about white/black relations: manipulating white people's attitudes towards black people clearly does work, or slavery would never have been ended. (There's an implicit motte-bailey here, between reducing the total amount of "white hatred" and the unattainable task of eliminating all of it, as the benchmark measure being compared to feeding kids.)
On the other hand, I feel like the jury is still out on whether any direct material interventions (be they cash transfers, meals for kids or DEI initiatives) had a measurable long-term effect on the welfare of African-Americans; and either way, for the more ambitious ones of those interventions they would never have been implemented had emotional buy-in from the white ruling class not been achieved first.
In more concrete terms: if you accept that Israelis and Palestinians are primarily competing for the same limited resource (sovereignty over a strip of land) and so their utility is zero-sum, and believe that "purely symbolic" acts and attitude shifts for the Palestinian side do nothing, then why do they bother you so much? If meals > UN condemnations, then shouldn't a pro-Israeli be happy that pro-Palestinians waste their time on UN condemnations instead of providing them with meals (or all-expenses-paid drone pilot internships in Ukraine)? Being simultaneously pro-A and against anti-A acting ineffectually seems like an inconsistent position, unless you are not actually engaging in object-level discussion of policy but just trying to load anti-A with negative affect or demoralise proponents (which is waging the culture war, not discussing it).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21hr ago
There's still the option a large negative-sum drone world war that destroys supply chains and puts the genie back in the bottle for long enough while also making humanity desperate enough to enable a Butlerian jihad.
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21hr ago
If a nation can defect, why can't a nation just defect to "kill all humans except for a narrow self-selected elite"~"kill all humans"? Surely that option dominates the UBI one. Fewer mouths to feed and house. On the other hand, if you expect its competitors are sufficiently aligned that they will crush such a nation in retaliation, they could do this to one that defects from the make-work scheme too.
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22hr ago
Rust's way is not to make things they don't like impossible, but instead to make them deliberately cumbersome. I was following the language pretty closely in its early days, and the approximate moment they lost me was when they decided to do away with the ~ syntax and instead introduce the Box<T>/box for inline heap allocation and destructuring of heap-allocated data, thus irredeemably encumbering standard functional programming idiom involving ADTs. The stated explanation was that it was a deliberate decision, because they considered this idiom to have bad performance and did not want programmers to use them. I think the variety of escape hatches using unsafe blocks also counts as this.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
It's not clear to me if you can disentangle this from the entire Western "universal culture" package that the dominant world cultures downloaded. As in, maybe rationalising modernism is necessary to make cultures dominant, and the first inventors of rationalising modernism happened to like kissing, and so those who adopted one and became dominant also adopted the other and started being into kissing.
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1d ago
I know this reeks of pop sociology, but I really can't shake the feeling that it's a natural temperamental fit. Rust is a high-barrier-to-entry language beloved of academic experts, designed to force or at least strongly incentivise you to follow what they consider best practice, and its constraints are sold as being there to keep you (the programmer) and people around you safe from yourself. Aligned against it are C/C++ programmers who aren't entirely joking when they say real men program in assembly, admire Duff's Device and on some level tend to believe that segfaults are a force of natural selection acting on weak programmers. (I say this as a proud member of the latter class.)
Rust has the vibes of COVID measures, mandatory child seats and ski and bike helmets and emissions limits on your car. It's only natural that the status-conscious care foundation neurotic demographic would flock to it.
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1d ago
Would you be willing to share some screenshots?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Is there public interest in arresting people for them? There's already way too little supply to meet demand for this sort of media-legible oppression; if word gets out that sending those can get you in real trouble, what little there is might also collapse and then how are we going to raise sympathy for figures who upset the outgroup?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
And notice how the left wingers would never, ever, even once, encourage someone to stay home or vote for a Republican.
Not true. In 2016 there was a nontrivial push among the Bernie left to stay home. There might not have been much of that in the press, but Hilary and Kamala were the media establishment candidates, so of course they wouldn't; in real life, like at universities, it was a very common sentiment.
But of course, any left winger who wants to smack down another left winger advocating for a more cooperative or long-termist strategy can nutpick right-wing posts like yours to in turn argue that right-wingers would never even once encourage someone to stay home or vote for the left-wing candidate.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
On one hand the footage I've seen on it looks beautiful, and I absolutely wish there were more of that sort of campy power projection in the world (and the Mechanicus BGM people put on it is chef's-kiss). On the other, my late grandmother (most fanatically Orthodox member of the family) would for sure have called the whole thing a demonic monstrosity, what with the numerology of various metrics of the building encoding "1945" (on the meta level, a very heathen practice - the set of sacred numbers is closed) and the ambiguously idolatrous focus on military trophies. In a way it feels like the building is not so much dedicated to God as it is dedicating God and the church to War.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
I'm not a deontologist. I'm closer to a Platonist, if you couldn't tell from me quoting the Plato books.
Could you please explain what that entails here, beyond, again, the "textbook"/folk understanding that you believe that everything in the real world is an imperfect reflection of some "perfect" (whatever that means - is it just a matter of having a simple definition?) abstract entity or concept?
(...) One is a dog, the other is a rat. Prior to anything else, you decide the dog is legitimate (as your pet) and the rat is illegitimate. (...)
Do I? I don't think I need to blegg the rat or the dog. I will give any animals that happen to be in my house whatever degree of care, engagement and quarter I decide in the moment is appropriate to optimise for my preferences. If I feed the dog, it's not because I have decided that it is "legitimate (as my pet)", but because I thought I want the dog to stay in my house and not starve as it doing so brings me joy. I could do the same thing for the rat.
This sounds like it assumes democratism?
Huh? To be clear, I'm only talking about shared values between the speaker and the listener, that is, you and me.
If you tell me something like "one should ensure that raw metal is always processed into wires of 2mm diameter", because you are actually a paperclip maximiser and have concluded that preparing metal in such a way makes it easier to proceed to make paperclips, then this statement is completely meaningless to me, because I am not a paperclip maximiser.
Well I think you are wrong here, although I'm not exactly a virtue ethicist either -- to me your textbook is itself flawed and you ought to read the classics directly. I'd prefer not to have this conversation filtered through such a glass, darkly, and I'm mildly perturbed that this sort of exposition is needed
Unfortunately, you can't convince me to read hundreds of pages of ancient texts (that I, based on my limited interaction with written philosophy of any degree of antiquity, strongly suspect to be incoherent and intellectually unsatisfactory) before I engage with your post. Such a requirement is so heavyweight that it should be taken to go against that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" rule we have.
Is it really that you and the others have not understood what I wrote in the slightest, that the concept of judging a state is completely confusing to you all?
I would like to think I'm not so naive, nor do I intend to pretend to be, that I don't have any idea about how you engage in "judging a state". It's just that the bases of our moral systems are fundamentally sufficiently distinct that I don't think there's a productive discussion to be had. I mean, what sort of thing do you actually want to see? Someone coming at you and proclaiming their own notion of state legitimacy, backed by nothing than emotional assertions and well-written words? Would you adjust your own understanding, if their paean to legitimacy based on the height of the tallest building the state managed to construct (for example) were sufficiently beautiful?
And not just that the word Israel is a mind killer
I don't think I showed any signs of being mind-killed to you mentioning Israel. It seems wholly orthogonal to the question at hand; we may just as well be talking about the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany contra the Reichsbürger movement that asserts that the German Empire was never properly dissolved, or the legitimacy of Sealand, or of the Cherokee Nation.
the last paragraph
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying here. I'm not religious, and if I against all odds wound up being captured by a deity who at smite-point forces me to to guess His definition of some concept, I would hope that at least some contextual hints will be available to me regarding the nature and preferences of Them.
We can, of course, play this sort of game as a hypothetical scenario - if you do in fact sketch out which deity you are imagining running this trial, I can speculate about a wrath-minimising answer. Perhaps a Mesoamerican deity would want me to say that a state can establish legitimacy by creating and maintaining a pipeline of human sacrifice, with the proper attendant rites. If we want to package this notion as something that is parseable in the Western philosophical tradition, we could even say something like of course the highest symbol of the state's authority over men is its power over life and death, and the very circumstance that the exercise of this authority is recognised as ritual rather than banditry and thereby accepted by the subject population without complaint proves that it is legitimate.
Taking a step back, is it so hard for you to write out what it is that you specifically want this notion of "legitimacy" for? If you just were willing to unpack it - say, by saying something like "I hold that it is morally imperative (1) for any legitimate state to not invade the territory held by another legitimate state and (2) for people who are subject of a legitimate state to accept violence upon themselves that is sanctioned by the legitimate state" - then we could have a productive discussion about different notions even without having the same ethical language. Or, perhaps, as a related question: if the Son of Man, or the Platonic ideal of Plato himself, descended on an exquisitely shapely cloud and told you that in fact no country past, present or future on this planet is legitimate, what would you do differently going forward?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
rather it implicitly denies that there is any question to be had at all
Let me explicitly deny, if not that there is any question to be had at all, then at least that you have properly asked any valid question. You sound like a textbook deontologist: for you, the wording "what type of state should there be?" is self-explaining and self-justifying, because should is an atomic element in your conception of the world. A large number of your interlocutors, including me, are not deontologists†. For us, the assertion that something should be in some way is on its own a pointer into nothing, an error of language that makes an actually meaningless phrase sound meaningful in the vein of the trope of the "sound of one hand clapping".
There are values, simple numeric assignments or at least ordinal comparisons that say that one hypothetical world is better than another, and a general preference that those values should be reducible to a simple set of generating principles if possible (less death, more freedom, more variety, more beauty). If one of us non-deontologists says that something should be, this is to mean that we expect that it being so will lead to a world that is better according to that notion, and it also implies that the improvement is along a generating principle we think we share with the listener. We understand nothing else. So if you want to ask whether Israel "should be" considered legitimate, or what the notion of legitimacy should be, you need to not only unpack what you want being "considered legitimate" to entail (add its flag to the drop-down when programming Javascript slop with country selectors? Buy products made there? Refuse to aid concrete efforts aimed at the entity's dissolution?), but also what shared values you think we may want to further by setting up and applying that notion.
† I'm not going to work with the textbook taxonomy that considers e.g. "virtue ethics" its own thing; to me those are just deontologists with a particular class of rules. To begin with, all ethical systems are interdefinable anyway, so I'll just define deontologists as those who use "should" as the most basic predicate of their ethical vocabulary and define everything else in terms of it.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
The cycle has been ongoing for as long as I have been able to read enough English to follow US politics, certainly at least around 9/11. I remember the crass flash animations with Sarah Palin squeezing out babies onto a conveyor belt to be sent as soldiers into Iraq, and the absolute derangement Obama's existence induced in the protestant demographic ("Obongo", FEMA concentration camps, Kenya, "death panels", something about him being a secret child of Malcolm X who was raised in a secret communist facility and programmed to take over America). ODS came first and was a perfect template for TDS.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Really shows that "freedom of navigation" is just some made up word that actually just means the US running the seas.
Once again, pro-Americans act surprised when the "rules" being nothing more than a LARP of their own making finally comes around to affect their own interests negatively. Where was "freedom of navigation" for Venezuela or Russia these past years?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Divorce is pretty standard in Islam, with sole parenting rights passing to the father by default.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
I can understand the mod twitchiness here, if nothing else because we live in a Lovecraftian universe and the bulging-eyed stranger suddenly bursting into your town square and screaming "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!" is a different trope from the loony old Miskatonic professor who compulsively injects non-Euclidean geometries into every discussion. We don't know what exactly the boundary is after which all webhosts and banks mysteriously start refusing to do business with you giving a variety of vague excuses, but it's too late after we find out; and this particular stranger behaved as if he was aiming for that boundary and knew more than we do, or at least was quite determined to learn.
That being said, I do find these sorts of edgy hypotheticals much more fun to discuss than the nth iteration of "I am tired of having to pretend that our Lord Jesus Christ is okay with trannies", and wish we could have more of them instead.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
(1) Well, but there's little else that is so universally despised in public and sought after by powerful men in private that it could serve as a one-size-fits-all blackmail operation. If all the less risky ways have been ruled out but you absolutely need to do something, you wind up doing it the risky way.
(2) I've been saying for a long time that if I ever am in charge of a conspiracy, I will make sure that we light some candles and chant a prayer to Satan before every meeting. That way, anyone planning to leak the proceedings will make themselves sound like one of those people, and be immediately bingo-boarded into oblivion. This schema is in fact very general: any conspiracy that has a conspicuous (im)moral component tends to become its own antimeme, unless it is established beyond all reasonable doubts very quickly after it is first revealed, because lingering in ambiguity for any amount of time attracts boosters who are more concerned about the immorality than about the conspiracy, until the movement becomes indistinguishable from a generic moral panic.
Hence, I don't think seemingly risky/overly brazen/morally dubious intelligence operations are actually anywhere near as risky as they naively appear to be. (They might still be implausible for other reasons, such as difficulty, low cost/reward ratio or the existence of easier ways to achieve the same goals.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
This may or may not be the case; I just wanted to amend the parent poster's depiction of the progressive view, not relitigate its correctness (as has already been done on this website too many times).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
This is a correct statement, but also I think that by invoking "punching up"/"punching down" you are making the average right-wing reader cross out an entry on their bingo cards, shut down their thinking and dismiss your argument.
Instead, perhaps, a more visceral depiction of the progressive view of the situation: imagine, if you will, a school class in which one kid is viciously bullied. The teachers and classmates look away and do nothing about it, and even if someone reports it they just dismiss it as "kids will be kids" or "they are just playing". Maybe they half-heartedly break it up if some of it happens right before their eyes, or interferes with class. One day, the bullied kid, while being beaten up again, lands a lucky hook and gives one of the bullies a blue eye. Immediately, the bullies run to the teacher, and all the kids who were sitting around and doing nothing happily testify that the bullied kid indeed threw the punch. The bullied kid's parents are summoned, it is dragged before the principal, permanent mark on the record, the works. Any objections it or its parents raise are met with a firm "we understand the kid is struggling socially, but you have to understand that violence is never acceptable". The others started the fight? "That's not what we are talking about right now. Your kid gave Brad a blue eye and he had to get it checked out at the doctor." "That does not give you the right to use violence yourself. Be the bigger person and walk away." "You keep complaining about this. Don't you think it's hypocritical that [bullied kid] is also violent but you never have a problem with that? All parents think their own kid is innocent."
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
It's also relevant that the bougie senator lady more likely than not never once had to adjust her own diet to adapt to economic circumstances. Compare to the ancient "learn to code" narrative, which was particularly loathsome because it was spread by journalists and professional twitterati much more than by working programmers.
Hey, don't shoot the messenger. In r*ddit terms, I personally really just want to say ESH.
Huh, I didn't even realise he was that old. Based on pictures I'd have pegged him around early 50s at most. Guess the rich can even play this kind of midlife crisis on another level.
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