Drinniol
7d ago
Not off the top of my head, in regards to painting. I was just giving an example of conservative subject matter that would not fly far in contemporary art circles. You raise a good point that one of the issues is the constant drive for novelty, which I think comes at the cost of alienation from more universal experiences and values that could reach a larger audience.
I'm more familiar with Christian music. POD is an example of a Christian group that was very contemporary and found wider market success when I was younger. I like Alive and Youth of the Nation by them. Looking them up, I hadn't realized they were still going, I need to check out their recent stuff.
Is it sad that I don't recognize that a set can both have members and be empty? That two could be the same as one? That yes could be the same as no?
It is in this sense that I do not recognize that "good" and "bad" are things that exist outside of moral agents.
Those things would indeed be sad to believe if they were false, and furthermore that believing the false thing stunted your capacity to properly engage with the most important aspects of existence.
Do you ever meditate?
But you are imagining it. It would be literally impossible to "morally sense" something you do not imagine.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Yes, it's impossible to consider a thing without... considering it. I can't consider the truth of falsity or a proposition without thinking about it. This is just tautologically true, Cogito ergo sum level stuff. I don't understand why you're bringing it up.
I'm aware. Curiously, in all societies I've seen including the most robust ones, children are deliberately taught to discern right and wrong in the correct way as described by the society, often significantly differing per society.
The ways in which they differ are less than the ways they are the same, but I already know your explanation for that. Cultures that practice horrendous human sacrifice are rare, (and unstable - though I suppose that explains their rarity).
You seem to either be bluntly reasserting your belief or pointing out a contradiction. I see no contradiction. Wicked men feeling shame is good for others, not them. Of course the shamed person is not supposed to feel good.
But this is the fundamental disagreement. Wicked men feeling shame is good for them. It is, among other things, a necessary step towards contrition and redemption.
But, nihilist that you are, I suppose you think that it is equally well and good that a man be a monstrous tormentor of others as a benevolent saint, provided their internally coherent self-satisfaction is the same. Being a moral relativist, it isn't as if you believe the man could actually BE good, so BELIEVING he's good is the closest thing.
I'm still awaiting your method for discerning the shame you feel at having done bad things from the shame you feel because a part of your correct (obviously) moral sense has been deliberately taught out of you.
Careful meditation, introspection, reflection, thought, and mindfulness. It is a lifetime a hard work and it never stops. Nobody said being good comes easy. I fall short in many ways (as do we all), but I don't then declare that my moral failings are fine, because it's all just relative.
My method, if you were curious, is that there is no difference and that exaniming and understanding the source and mechanism of shame is important if you want to reach anything that could be described as "good".
That certainly seems easier, a shame it is wrong.
Drinniol
7d ago
Well there's not much to argue about. As far as utility goes, I think your nihilistic worldview is not only wrong, but cleaves you off from the most important and fulfilling parts of life. I think you don't even know what you're missing.
If I were to talk to someone who was, for whatever reason, seemingly congenitally incapable of love - and they argued about how, really, they preferred it this way... how could I possibly disabuse them of that notion when they don't even have a concept for what they're missing out on?
Sorry I submitted early and had a much longer reply if you want to reread.
But OK, it's just the standard subjectivism/solipsism/moral relativism.
OK, why do you believe it? Because you think it's true? Why should that matter, all morality being subjective. Why is believing true things better than false things? Because of its utility? But what if it has no utility. What if it has anti-utility.
Moral relativism is a self-defeating viewpoint if there ever was one. If you're a great believer in evopsych as it applies to culture, you surely recognize what a doomed meme subjectivism is, even if it is true? How can a society where no one believes their cultural norms have any actual force or truth possibly survive against societies that do?
"All cultures are equally valuable" says the dying, suicidal culture before it is extinguished forever, all light it might have contained or provided lost, to hordes of people who say, "Actually, my culture is more valuable."
"But if you look at it from a purely physicalist point of view you'll see that there's really no objective reason for you to assert your culture over ours, and although I also believe there is no objective reason for you not to, I'd really prefer that you didn't kill all of us, even though I don't have any objective objections because such things can't exist, subjectively-", last words of the last cultural relativist, as recorded in the Great Holy Annals of Our Final Victory Over the Silly People, by Muhammed Muhamed Mohamed.
Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with seeking more of them.
Why is that good, as opposed to merely feeling good?
Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.
Why is that bad, as opposed to merely feeling bad? I think you don't recognize that such a difference could even exist, which seems to me very... empty and sad.
The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.
No, it would not matter whether or not it was observed or imagined by me, or you, or anyone. That it is obviously good is because we have a moral sense.
You can't seem to disentangle your own belief that everything must merely boil down to meat preferences in the end. It has nothing to do with feeling good or feeling bad. It has everything to do with being good or being bad. Feeling guilty doesn't feel good. It actually feels quite shitty. It would be much, much easier and more pleasurable to simply decide that the thing you are feeling guilty and shame about is actually not bad at all and it's just your irrational guilt/shame that's the problem, not your bad actions correctly causing them. Believing this would feel a whole lot better, it would feel good, but it would be bad.
You can make a just-so story about why such and such moral beliefs must have been adaptive (except when they weren't), but what I am trying to say is that most people don't believe this. They believe that they have a moral sense (perhaps imperfect) and that through the exercise of this moral sense they can discern right and wrong. Almost everyone believes this unless it is deliberately taught out of them.
Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.
Well I don't want to get into a whole discourse - but there is a whole discourse on sorts of wickedness that are inflicted on others vs. internal wickedness (which is nowadays called victimless - nonsense, as if you yourself can not be a victim of your own actions - and therefore not wickedness). Both are wicked, but the correct response to both is very different. I also do not believe in an afterlife where finite wrongs are met with infinite punishment.
Drinniol
7d ago
Yes, it's axiomatic. Being punished when you do wrong is good. The cosmic scales are balanced. It simply is good.
Why is pleasure good? Why is pain bad? Why is fulfilling preference good? As you well know, at a certain point we all must defer to some axiom of what is right and wrong, whether it come from god or preference or whatever.
I simply see punishment for wrongdoing as axiomatically good. Indeed, your hypothetical incorrigible psychopath deserves to be punished and suffer. If he does not learn, being incorrigible, he will do more wrong and deserve more punishment. It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.
That the psychopath does not recognize this no more changes this brute fact than does his opinion that killing people is fine, actually, makes that actually true. But, of course, it is superior if punishment also effects a moral change. And the most significant and greatest punishment is not that which is externally and bodily administered, but that of genuine guilt and shame for understanding one's own transgressions. But it is extraordinarily for the good when someone does, in fact, recognize their guilt and repents it, even if this causes them to suffer greatly.
It is far, far superior for a murderer to repent their ways out of genuine contrition than to be given a magic pill that, say, makes them forget their crimes while also causing extreme pain in addition to making them model citizens, even if that has the same deterring effect.
And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.
Also, I don't believe in true incorrigibility. Everyone has the potential for redemption. "Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven." - The Archdemon Screwtape
My apologies, the you is rhetorical and broad. "You (the left)." I'm not wishing personal, specific harm on Skibboleth.
One of the divergences of right and left, however, is their belief in retribution, punishment, and suffering as morally justified and necessary in and of themselves. It has been my general observation that the left has completely abandoned the idea that retribution and punishment can be just and morally necessary for their own sake, not merely as incentives or correctives.
If there was a magic pill that would ensure a criminal never again committed crime - indeed, became an upstanding moral citizen - but induced no particular suffering, I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers, and that any further retribution upon them would be barbaric and primitive. I do not believe this, nor do most on the right.
Suffering punishment when you do wrong is correct, morally. You SHOULD feel guilt when you do bad things. The push towards a shameless society is very, very bad. Shame is good, actually. Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop. A father disciplining his child does so out of love, and for their own good. So understand that even when if I say things like, "I think X should be punished" - this too is not necessarily a statement born out of hate. I can and do think that being punished can be good for someone. I think this is frequently the case, in fact.
And again, not merely for its utility to modify behavior. I think this a view that many postmodern leftists simply can't square - "I want you to be hurt because it will be good for you on a spiritual and moral level to be punished for your sins. I want you to suffer because I love you and suffering can, in fact, be good." The purely utilitarian view where all suffering is bad simply can't deal with this. Their instinct is to try and invert it somehow, "Oh, the suffering actually is good because it brings positive utility later-" NO. The suffering is good because it is suffering. If it is just it is just completely independent of the future. If the universe were to blip out of existence the next nanoinstant, it would still be just.
I want to also comment briefly on hate. Hate, in almost all modern popular media, is simply bad in and of itself. Epitomized by Star Wars philosophy schlock about the dark side. "Hate is the worst. Humans would be better off without hate. If only we could learn not to hate?" - These things sum up a LOT of the left's worldview. I think it's dead wrong. Hate is the most human and divine of emotions. God is merciful, yes, but he is also wrathful - when it is justified. A rat can feel fear, or even joy - can it feel hate?
And what of the utility of hate? The left seems to have completely forgotten why hate exists. Whether you think it a quirk of evopsych or a divine part of the grand design, hate has a strong, real, and practical purpose. It motivates you to completely destroy long-term threats permanently, even at considerable short term cost. A herd of gazelles might stomp out a lion that eats their young if they can catch it in the act. A tribe of humans tracks the lioness 30 miles to their den, kills her, kills her mate, kills all her cubs - and repeats the process every time they even see a lion in their territory from now until eternity until their distant descendants can't even imagine what it is like to fear being prey, to fear their child being snatched up in the red jaws. That is the value of hatred.
The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded.
Drinniol
7d ago
By all means, try to go to art school and get elite support and patronage - some nice New York galas - as a traditional painter who wants to make Christian iconographic art. Really emphasize in your applications and piece descriptions how Christian it is. Maybe throw in some quotes like, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Make sure to REALLY tie that into current trans trends, and pornography! Man, really emphasize how bank loans are usury and a mortal sin, and how all the people working for Chase (who funded the museum wing) are going to (justly) burn for eternity. I'm sure that will go over really well over champagne and salmon bites.
I'm sure you'll have your own special exhibit in MoMA in no time at all.
There is a vast amount of conservative art, but you do not see it in your bubble. It is not on TV, it is not in the papers, it is not advertised - cities don't commission it, (taxpayer funded) nonprofits don't fund it, museums don't host it, universities don't teach it.
No, my goal is to end the cycle with permanent victory (Hell, I'd settle with just most of my remaining lifetime). I am sure you will say, "But don't you see how the left was trying to do the same thing?"
Obviously. They failed, so the cycle continues. And your proposed solution is simply to cede victory forever. Yes, of course, we could end the culture war today if we just unconditionally surrender. Why didn't we think of that?
Endless cycles of repression is infinitely preferable to total defeat. Let's flip it around - all the left has to do is just totally renege on all their culture war beliefs; just 180 on trans, 180 on abortion, 180 on affirmative action, 180 on forced vaccinations, 180 on marxism/socialism, and damn the cycle's over. Peace in our time! Why do you guys not do it, do you just hate peace? Do you just want an endless cycle of repression? Sounds pretty barbaric not gonna lie. Just give up, like you're proposing we do. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?
"Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?"
Drinniol
7d ago
No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.
And why don't you believe them?
You do realize what they AREN'T saying, right? Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview, when they complain about not being able to speak? Do you have an ounce of self-awareness about what a damning statement it is on your character that people complain to you about not being allowed to speak their minds instead of actually speaking their minds? Complaining to you about not being able to say things is their only safe way of expressing that they don't feel comfortable actually expressing themselves around you.
For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.
People crave good careers and not being harassed by twitter randos. In many areas access to such things is gated by saying goodthink and not saying wrongthink. Don't confuse kowtowing to the mad emperor with heartfelt respect for his insane majesty.
I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.
Drinniol
7d ago
I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever. I have been living under a censorious regime in a country that supposedly enshrines freedom of speech as one of its highest virtues for My. Entire. Life. The only place where I can even come close to honestly speaking about how I view the world is in anonymous and pseudoanonymous forums like this one, and even then I take pains not to get too real with y'all because it's really not that difficult to dox someone with a long post history and it just takes one obsessive.
Why are there no rightists in the academy? Could it be because they were systematically deplatformed and depersoned and dethroned on a generational, decades long project to completely seize control of elite production forever? No, it's because righties are dumdums, we're all dumdums.
And now you have the audacity to complain when the institutions you hollowed out are being kicked over, all the support columns contributed from the right having been forcibly removed? Boo hoo.
If you may allow me a moment of cathartic ranting emerging from decades of repression; razing these institutions is a moral imperative. I want them to do it more. I voted for it. I hope it gets worse for you. I hope your degrees not only become worthless, but millstones to drown you. I hope you have to hide your former affiliations on your social media and resumes, like I have had to do with my views for my entire life. I hope you know every ounce of the fear and anxiety your regime has smothered on me like an inescapable burial shroud, for, again, my entire fucking life. I hope they are so thorough with their dismantling of your institutions that in 50 years your cathedrals that are on the tips of every tongue now are only vaguely recalled in retrospect. A quaint historical artifact, like Standard Oil. Only then can something somewhat resembling what was lost be built from the ashes.
You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.
Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get. If you read between the lines, you should have seen this seething rage boiling over years ago. I am quite certain that many, many people feel the same - they just don't say it, yet; the habit of censoring one's own emotions, thoughts, and opinions for safety being deeply ingrained. The tighter you seal it, the more dangerous the pressure cooker becomes.
Drinniol
28d ago
Are you serious or are you taking the piss?
By which I mean, after decades of censorship from the left, where even slight heterodoxy could get even genius tech founders like Palmer Luckey ejected from facebook almost as soon as he was brought on for billions - now, only now, is it creeping authoritarianism?
If you aren't joking you need to seriously take a step back and try to think how things look to someone outside your adamantium bubble for one moment in your life. I'm in disbelief that someone who posts here could be so oblivious by accident.
Drinniol
2mo ago
Learn best certainly, but when it comes to scaling compute all it needs to do is be able to learn by itself at all. I'm sure an AI intelligence improvement cycle would go even faster if it had an even smarter AI to give feedback, but for recursive improvement all that is necessary is even a small increase, compounded over and over and over again.
Drinniol
2mo ago
It used to be that plan B was simply, "OK, then we civilize you by force." See e.g. British treatment of the Thuggees.
But nowadays, the plan B is to just let the Thuggees keep strangling travelers for Kali while shrugging and saying something like, "Having apocalyptic cultists murder travelers for human sacrifice to their death god is just part and parcel of living in a multicultural society. The real villains are the people using the human sacrifices to tar all Thuggees with the same brush. Most Thuggees never strangle anyone to death in the back of a stage coach (they just celebrate, support, and venerate those who do). And anyway, if we hang all the death cultists, we're strangling them, so are we really any better?"
Drinniol
2mo ago
Watching wikipedia editors hem and haw in the talk page of Mount McKinley (currently still Denali... for now) about why, exactly, it was good and correct when they immediately changed the page name when Barack Obama did the name change but now that Trump is naming it back it should stay Denali has led me to the same conclusion.
Changing names of stuff is still silly, but as with all things turnabout is fair play.
I don't think there's much of a conflict. The J6 stuff was way closer to a legal protest (that is, a protest where people don't break the law) than most Floyd stuff was. I don't, and never did, view J6 as an actual threat to our democracy or any kind of insurrection. I think that's a fairly typical view too.
I always and continue to feel calling the J6 event an insurrection is a hysterically overblown misuse of verbiage. A bunch of people milling around the capitol building taking selfies is not an insurrection. Blowing up half a federal building killing hundreds as happened in OKC is an insurrection. An insurrection is a violent rebellion. Think targeted destruction of key infrastructure, armed ambushes of government convoys, and the mass assassinations of officials. An insurrection is an attempt at revolution. It is a war, and necessarily causes widescale death and destruction. The J6ers were not revolutionaries and for the most part not even wannabe revolutionaries.
Drinniol
2mo ago
Trump's motivations are irrelevant when assessing the rightness of the act itself. The right thing for the wrong reason is still the right thing, even if Trump himself gets not moral credit. As to that, if the choice were all or nothing I would very much prefer the outcome we have just had. And I do think the choice was much more all or nothing than it wasn't. As soon as you start picking and choosing, it opens an avenue of attack. "Why this particular person and not this particular person? Why clemency for this but not that?" And this attack will be leveraged to the hilt as many times as it can be since, after all, the attackers are absolutely politically motivated. They were willing to put people in jail for decades for low-level hooliganism or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why wouldn't they make hay?
There is also his own base to consider. Political capital is not an unlimited resource. Even Elon had to walk back his H1B stance on his own website. A significant part of Trump's base would see anything that wasn't a blanket pardon as a betrayal.
A blanket pardon is far harder to nitpick.
I also think that the protests were legitimate and the worst excesses (which still hit nowhere near the level of a typical Floyd demonstration) were intentionally allowed or even encouraged, both in the police/NG response or lack thereof and in some cases with literal plants acting as agent provocateurs. In any event, it infuriated me to know I lived in a country where sitting in someone's chair and smoking a joint got the full force of the federal government on you finding every possible way to charge you for as much as possible, while literally burning down entire city blocks killing dozens and causing billions of damage and possibly decades of urban blight was met with a, "I mean what are we gonna do, send in the National Guard (lol how ridic can you imagine that would be like totally fascism. fascism is when you shoot people burning down your cities don't you know?)."
Now we are slightly less living in that country. Hopefully the trend continues.
Forgive me for the facebook link, but my view is basically this https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1120248821680811 I don't think anyone should be able to break the law just because they are protesting. But I also think that a law that is applied unevenly, and wielded as a political bludgeon, is not only no longer serving its rightful purpose but serving an incredibly destructive one instead. It would be better for it to go unenforced entirely than for it to be used in such a way.
Drinniol
2mo ago
There's literally centuries - millennia actually - of discourse over morality and what it is and should be. But first you do need to accept that morality exists.
There's only nothing left to talk about if both sides believe values are merely subjective and that, therefore, no values can be more correct than any other in any absolute sense. Even totally incoherent contradictory values aren't wrong - after all, thinking that someone's beliefs shouldn't contradict themselves is itself just another merely subjective value judgment.
Drinniol
2mo ago
"Think about how upset being shot at makes you. Isn't it hypocritical of you to want to shoot back?"
As an aside, I hate how hypocrisy is now the cardinal and only sin in certain discourse. Since, as the theory goes, all morality is subjective, it leaves one who swallows the subjective-pill unable to point out how someone else's culture, values, or religion are evil and wrong. However, it's always possible to point out hypocrisy since virtually everyone falls short of their professed values in some way or the other. It is the universal argument. "No I don't believe in your backwards, primitive, parochial morality but then again you don't perfectly live up to the virtues you profess so really neither do you nyah nyah nyah." But there are worse things than being a hypocrite, namely: not being a hypocrite because you have no virtues to fall short of. There are only two types of non-hypocritical people: saints and the amoral, and there are many more of the latter than the former.
Drinniol
2mo ago
Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man should be imprisoned falsely.
A severe injustice has been overturned. The world is a little bit brighter, freer, and more just.
It saddens me that you can't see this.
I am filled with joy for the political prisoners and their families who were railroaded by a weaponized legal system. Those who perpetrated and defended this monstrosity ought to be jailed for at least as long as those now freed.
The cynical take was that "learn to code" was a deliberate push to oversaturate the technology worker market in order to break the power and unity of a dissident and growing political-economic block. Tech workers were getting too big for their britches, too expensive, and too socially/politically powerful. But now that there's 100 people applying instantly on linked in for every single tech job, and laid-off mid-level devs are taking 5 (even 6!) digit pay cuts just to get back to work (which also completely shuts out fresh grads even more since they are now competing with people who actually have experience)? Not so much.
The rise of a competitor to the PMC successfully quashed. But we see as well the power of all those gatekeeping institutions in other professions. Why was tech so easy to flood with workers as opposed to something like medicine? Because there's no big regulatory credential bottleneck.
Even if AI rapidly reaches the point where it could begin replacing doctors - it won't, because of the massive regulatory, legal, and credentialing edifice. That is, even if it becomes true that any guy of moderate intellect with just a bit of training and a fine-tuned LLM could statistically match the average primary care physician, that still can't happen. He can't be your PCP, because he doesn't have an MD. And as we all know, you need an MD to be a doctor and do doctor things. That's just the way things work. Which is great for doctors, not so good for everyone else.
Rideshare apps completely slaughtered traditional cabs and cabbies, especially the racket of medallions. Sucks to be some poor cabbie who saved up for years to get his own medallion only to have his entire investment torpedoed. But, it was ultimately a good thing and made car service infinitely more accessible and cheaper for everyone else.
What I'm saying is we need to break the hold of the MD over medicine. This will absolutely suck for doctors who already have their MD, who will see their wages drop tremendously as they are forced to compete with people who didn't take on six-figure debt and invest the better part of a decade getting an MD. It will, however, dramatically reduce healthcare costs and increase healthcare accessibility. I'm not saying you get rid of credentialing entirely - but there's no reason that every single doctor needs to do a whole ass MD where they take tons of classes and rotations on specialties they will never use. There's certainly a use for such well-rounded physicians, but it's frankly absurdly wasteful to have someone with 10+ years of higher education spending all of their time doing rote carpal tunnel releases that someone could learn to do in a few weeks. We're already seeing this emerge inefficiently and chaotically with the rise of the nurse practitioner solely because of the dire need, but what really needs to happen is a massive, widespread and deliberate reduction in the legal privileges of the MD in terms of "only an MD can legally do this."
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