Spookykou
9mo ago
A request for disavowal is only appropriate if there is a history or suspicion of this kind of slipperiness, and I would apply it consistently to any other topic where this issue applies.
To clarify my question, is it your position that someone who has only ever been a part of camp 'unfair' who wants to discuss camp 'unfair' with you, must first disavow camp 'stolen'? If not, then that is resolved and I simply misunderstood you. If yes, then while I have no intention of going through your comment history I think it would be quite extraordinary if this was actually a consistently held principle. Demanding that people you are talking to disavow Bailey position they have not themselves mentioned or argued for, seems like it should violate community norms if not rules.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Could you explain what you think I was referring to when I used the phrase 'Isolated demand for rigor' in my comment, and how this is a reply to me, because I can't parse it.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Are you saying that the word 'stolen' has a hard technical meaning such that someone who believes, for example, that there was a distributed effort by various actors including those in service of the US government to pervert the course of a fair and free US election, can not in good faith describe that as a 'stolen' election? Is this a standard or established somewhere else? Did Russa 'steal' 2016?
Are you claiming that anyone who wishes to argue that the election was flawed or unfair must also state emphatically that it was not 'stolen' before it is possible to have a productive conversation, even if the person in question never said it was stolen, or did, but never referencing the more extreme and implausible versions of that claim?
Are you sure this is not an isolated demand for rigor, is it really your normal operating procedure to demand disavowals from interlocutors in this way, either over a specific definition or cluster of ideas, even if that person has not previously held or promoted them?
How would you feel about reciprocal rules, would you be okay with both parties not using the word 'stolen', such that they could not say it was stolen, and you could not say it was not stolen?
Spookykou
9mo ago
I must have missed these discussions, because I've never seen this as far as I recall. How does this argument work?
My understand was that this was based on a statistic that found married women are more conservative than single women. There are a few different reasons this might be/have been the case. I could see a social pressure, stronger in the past, expecting that a wife would adopt political views more in line with her husband/would vote in step with her husband. Married women will be older on average than single women so the basic older>conservative pipe line. The institution of marriage could change how someone evaluates a lot of different questions, putting priority on their children over welfare for strangers, etc. This is at least my vague understanding of the situation (but it could be a reference to something totally different?), and some possible arguments.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I am not a huge fan of education, and would argue that we as a species don't have a great idea of how to even do 'education' as it is often presented. I suspect that there is an education floor that is necessary and useful though and that our modern education system is more than sufficient to meet that floor, expenditures in excess of it are probably low value. However I believe that for the vast majority of it's existence the American public school system has been an effective redistributive program that produced more value than it cost us as a nation. I think it is increasingly difficult to do good welfare programs because a bunch of sociologists decided to make a bunch of shit up 40 years again and nobody has ever called them on it, but we could do better than we currently are pretty easily. I do not have a strong opinion if any given current program is positive sum, but I think some probably already are, and we could do better than we currently do.
Spookykou
10mo ago
Did I really need to include an exhaustive list of, 'things that make people happy but are bad for them so I would not want to subsidize those things'?
Alternatively, do you think it is literally impossible to have a 'positive-sum' redistributive program that does not boil down to buying people Heroin?
Spookykou
10mo ago
I have been to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, multiple times and lived and worked in Beijing China for over a year.
Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop). I would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.
Taiwan and Hong Kong seem mostly the same, honestly, maybe a bit more 'liberated' but the base Chinese cultural programing seems to go hard.
Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.
Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.
People aren't as principled as they would have you believe.
Seems, almost trivially true and correct to me.
The example of the money on the ground stood out to me, because I honestly think a significant number of Japanese people would actually take money they found to the police lost and found. While I don't think this behavior is driven by the strictness of their State, I am not confident in saying it is because the Japanese are more principled, in the abstract. I would rather say, that principles are easier to hold when everyone around you holds them. This would also be my explanation for the small town effect.
I imagine that after a critical mass of defection only a handful of people would continue to hold to principals while everyone around them constantly defected. There is a sense in which only those people ever really had principles at all. Still, I value fair-weather principles. I think Liberalism, is a sort of coordinated attempt to get everyone to agree to some core principles and follow them and this is valuable and good, and should be encouraged.
Spookykou
10mo ago
Isn't Japan famous for people consistently turning in wallets with all the money inside, and similar stories? The, people in small towns not locking their doors things also seems related. I imagine that high-trust societies exist, and modern western urban centers just happen to be lower-trust, currently. Especially in 'public' spaces. I would bet there are at least some high-trust enclaves within most major cities where the norms shift closer to Japan.
Spookykou
10mo ago
It is possible to care more about the people being taken from and still support redistributive programs if you believe the things being taken have marginal value such that the people receiving get a lot more utility than the people being taken from lose. I would not put much stock in happiness research either way, but I think the latest is that more money really does continue to make people more happy, though, so maybe the 'marginal value of the dollar' has been overstated.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I have always felt that Paul Graham captured the modern concept of identity quite well. I can understand calling it incoherent, meaning confusing, in how people argue about it, often holding incompatible or contradictory views. That people try to game social status around the concept of identity does not really speak to the usefulness of identity as a concept when reasoning about the world for any given individual.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I feel like the core of 'liberalism' is holding principled positions, specifically with regard to crushing people who disagree with you, the Liberal Wisdom is, there are in fact bad tactics.
The progressive liberal conflict, is that progressives think appealing to principles is just a tool of the oppressor, no bad tactics, only bad targets.
The leftist liberal conflict, is socialism/communism vs redistributive capitalism.
This is how I understand these terms in the context of American, and to a lesser extent, Western politics in general.
Spookykou
11mo ago
Super late reply but I remember really loving a depiction of Watson getting ready in the morning in some Sherlock story I was listening to in audiobook form while working years ago. It has oddly stuck in my mind which is why I mentioned it here.
Spookykou
11mo ago
You seem to present an argument that Ukrainians do not have a good reason to fight, because at the end of the day the culture/governance of Russia is not meaningfully different from their current existence. Ignoring for the moment the accuracy of that, you compare this to Canadians resisting Americans, this seems to imply you think such a Canadian resistance is similarly wanting for a reason, because at the end of the day the culture/governance of America would not be meaningfully different. Of course, if this is true, then in theory if the role was reversed, and Canada was to attack America, since the same conditions must necessarily be reciprocal with regards to culture/governance, it would seem America would also lack a good reason to fight.
That is, your argument, as best as I can tell, seems fully reversable for any two nations to which it was applicable. Russians would be similarly foolish for fighting against Ukrainian rule, etc.
Spookykou
11mo ago
*Which is not entirely her fault, I think. It's just that to the viewer's ape brain, her combativeness works less well because she is a woman than it would if she were a man.
I remember when some people ran with this idea, trained actors to perform a gender swapped Hillary Trump debate, and it did not turn out the way they had assumed it would.
Spookykou
11mo ago
point deer, make horse
Total tangent, but I looked this up and it is very confusing. The story seems straight forward and simple enough, and everyone here seems to be using it in the same way, which is directly referential to the origin story. Blatant lies as loyalty test, might be my definition for the idiom. However, the first couple results when I googled it, all explained the idiom as some variation of, "to lie to manipulate people because you are evil", what is going on here? For some reason I am very upset by this. Are the google translations correct, and the idiom is really that watered down/pointless, or is this just several different people all using the same shitty translation that lacks the nuanced understanding of a native speaker?
Spookykou
11mo ago
Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.
O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought. DS9 is photon torpedoes full spread at traditional religious beliefs(which is especially clumsy because the Bajoran gods are real), Jack O'Neill is a peacenik xenophile who sneers with open contempt at Christian Republican Senator.
I don't think they were as bad as modern shows are today, but it is still consistently surprising to me how often and sometimes heavy handed political messaging was in these shows that I was totally oblivious to when I mostly agreed with the politics/hadn't been primed to notice.
Spookykou
11mo ago
Raised Catholic in America, it feels kind of like an apples to oranges comparison. I remember way more church stuff going on around Easter for sure, but I feel like there was more 'energy' around Christmas. Obviously a child's perspective might be skewed what with the gifts but Christmas was the bigger deal for me.
Spookykou
11mo ago
This is such a commonly expressed idea that is so alien to me I would love to get more details on it.
I don't even particularly love Christmas, I have spent more than a couple of them alone, but the only part of Christmas Creep that I find even slightly objectionable is the music. I enjoy Christmas decorations, I think they are cozy and festive, and often well done. It takes a lot of time and effort to put up good Christmas decorations, and it seems crazy to me to go through all that trouble and only put them up a hand full of days in advance and take them down immediately. Enjoy the atmosphere. Light a fire in the fire place. Drink more hot coco and mulled wine.
Thinking about my own preference here, it reminds me of Diamond Age, and the phyles/claves which I absolutely loved. I guess to try and name this nebulous concept I am feeling, it might be something like Aesthetic Intentionality. Anything that pushes against the dead aesthetics of 'universal culture' is at least interesting if not strictly preferable to me.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I assume they intended this to mean a reciprocal situation to the US, so, in the hypothetical the Christians are demanding that nobody talk about Passover in anything that could be considered general/public communications specifically and just refer to the time around Passover as "Holiday Time" because Saint Mark's Day falls around the same time.
Also the paid leave system in Israel is fundamentally different and more religiously based than the US model. From reading your link, it is just that all people get 9 paid holidays for holy days, and which days you are expected to take is broken down by religion (four religions listed, not sure what they do with atheists). In the US, Christmas day, just the one day, is the mandatory federal holiday. The vast majority of holiday time is private policy specific to an organization. I think this reflects a fundamental difference between how these counties view religious holidays that is almost totally orthogonal to the social engineering point the OP is trying to grapple with.
Spookykou
11mo ago
Live by the sword die by the sword. The left has aggressively pushed that everything and anything is a dog-whistle for racism, islamophobia, homophobia, etc. The too cute by half, about face to it being idiotic to suggest that antizionism is antisemitism rings hollow.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'. I tend to agree with netstack here that this is not a very useful model. The 'progressive stack' is at best a useful heuristic that might improve your ability to predict the fall out from such events slightly, but is very far from a consistent of systematized reality.
I am sorry but this still does not seem very relevant to what I was trying to get across, I will try again.
I am specifically asking if the demand for people to disavow a position they have not advanced is an isolated demand for rigor only being brought out in this instance, or a standard practice for productive conversations.
@ymeskhout has themselves acknowledged that it is, if not an 'isolated demand for rigor' a 'specific demand for rigor' because they think it is only appropriate when the person is 'slippery' or the topic is particularly fraught. Personally, I think this allows @ymeskhout far too many degrees of freedom, that this is functionally an isolated demand, and the correct approach would be to treat people as bad actors only after they have behaved badly, state clearly what you expect from them before continuing to engage, or simply not engage with commenters who you think are bad faith.
I am not replying to the broader conversation with @ymeskhout and have not participated in it. If specific users are behaving badly and @ymeskhout knows this and wants to act on that information, I don't see any problem with that. If the initial comment was, I can't have a productive conversation with @ motte-user-i-just-made-up without them first acknowledging that all of their previous election fraud claims turned out to be wrong, I would not have commented.
Do you think, as a general rule, it is reasonable to demand that people disavow popular Bailey positions that they have not personally advanced, simply because the topic is one in which Motte and Bailey arguments are common? I have a strong instinctive dislike for this kind of compelled position taking, it feels like a 'debate tactic', which is why I also asked about tabooing the word stolen. If @ymeskhout had simply said, it is necessary to state ones positions clearly and unambiguously, which they claim is all the disavowal is supposed to accomplish anyway, I would not have commented.
More options
Context Copy link