Tree
12d ago
You’re a pretty knowledgeable guy, Dean. But the problem is, the more one knows, the more spurious relationships one’s brain can come up with. There’s really nothing linking german elites’ mistaken evaluation of islamic third-worlders’ productivity, to the debt ceiling, to german unification. They could easily have rejected any one of those, and keep the others. Those are all independent events.
Tree
13d ago
It's a simple question for me because bringing more life into the world is an unalloyed good, and I fail to see the negative in this situation (aside from vague religious and personal feelings). But overall it’s a complex issue. Not the place for blind moralism.
Tree
13d ago
I'm not saying those are core claims, just what garden-variety conservatives frequently say at the dinner table. I don't consider anecdotes like justawoman's to be refutations of serious conservative thought. But they are not "trolling".
It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.
I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.
Other ideologies have their own idealizations of an imagined past or an imagined future, of course. And simplistic stuff they say at the dinner table.
Tree
13d ago
It’s a legit point. The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.
Plus, a lot of straightforward claims conservatives make like ‘all mothers love their children’, ‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’, ‘all people have a god-shaped hole’, etc, can be refuted through a single anecdote.
Tree
13d ago
I do agree that the end can justify the means in certain cases. But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended. I'm not arguing for rape-and-kidnapping-based natalism.
Tree
13d ago
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You must have a low threshold for what you consider ‘deep, deep evil’. Most people probably don’t realise all the ways in which they’re ‘profaning’ your preferred norms on “Sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a mother and her child ”. Is almost everyone deeply deeply evil then?
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Wrong comparison. I don’t consider surrogacy as an alternative to normal child-bearing, but to normal non-child-bearing. A surrogate child is not pulled from the set of normal comfortable children and thrown into an orphanage, he's pulled from the aether. He's thankful he even has a mouth to eat old bread with.
Do you have scientific evidence for your position? And if the available evidence was against you, what about the ‘ancient and holy ways’? It would be a waste to debate this if it was never your true objection.
Tree
13d ago
is it moral to buy children, or is it not?
Of course it is. It's immoral and selfish to deny them life. Do you accept this consequence of your stance?
What is your actual justification? A vague appeal to sacredness("not a business practice.")? Personal feelings of disgust ("I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice.")? "Objectification"? Forced acceptance that life sucks ("That’s just the way it is.")?
Tree
14d ago
The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist? The bond between mother and child is a sacred thing yada yada, the problem is, modern mothers, left to their own devices, don’t have any. No bond, no child, and no mother. And that’s a sadder outcome than some blemish on your idealized view of motherhood.
Kids are resilient. You can just pump them out, hand them over to some strangers or an institution, and they’ll turn out fine. Well, they’ll complain in adolescence, but they’d do that anyway. Even life under suboptimal starting conditions is still well worth living.
Tree
22d ago
The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.
Tree
22d ago
I didn’t say that. Also don’t simultaneously doubt my word on what studies say and preemptively dismiss them. You have insulated your position from evidence. You are hostile even though our object-level positions aren't far apart. Your comments are terrible and you should feel bad.
Tree
22d ago
I just presented the statistics, I even said I am sympathetic to the 'henpecked husband' trope. I need more than your naked assertion of governmental lying to dismiss studies, even and especially those I would like to dismiss.
Tree
22d ago
It's negative. The happiest group is married with children, the unhappiest unmarried with children. Also known as "the people who have their shit together" and "the people who don't have their shit together".
Anyway, because of this, the correlation between marriage and happiness is way stronger than between children and happiness. So if I'm conflating two things, it's not to the advantage of your 'shrieking harpy' argument.
Tree
22d ago
What do you say to all the studies which find correlation between marriage/children and reported happiness?
Full disclosure: I sometimes argue against them, eg by pointing out that happy people are more likely to get married. But from an opposite perspective to yours: I think men in traditional marriage are, not oppressed, exactly, but too often treated like beasts of burden, expected to do unpleasant work and provide money to women and children, without a right to expect anything in return.
Tree
22d ago
What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.
Tree
23d ago
Not to mention it’s extremely stressful and labor-intensive on the parents. And given that the evidence on the kid’s future well-being is inconclusive, that is the main thing.
They’re doing liberalism wrong. Liberalism is rooted in a profound lazyness. ‘laissez faire’, let [things] do, let it be. It’s like old hippies ‘free range’ education, not this micromanaging shit.
Tree
23d ago
Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness?
Of course. Unlike other women, you are aware of the patriarchy and rape culture and the myriad ways in which they threaten and coerce and pressure and nudge an entire sex into sex. Is it surprising that a strong perceptive woman unafraid to stand up for herself would run afoul of the meek sexual object role the patriarchy assigned to her?
Tree
24d ago
The last big decriminalization push was in the 80’s, so I presume you’re old. You’ve monitored your male friendships for intimacy and noticed a statistically significant change, based on a cutoff point like this, bearing in mind that friendships in later life are often less intense?
Excuse my skepticism. It’s just that until a few years ago, no one had heard of this theory, and now it’s seemingly so obvious it has seeped into people’s bones.
To me this argument looks like a recent product of cross-pollination between anti-woke strands, in this case manosphere + trad. Until the 2010s, imo it would have been shameful and somewhat ‘gay’ to even care about male intimacy. By that I don’t mean to say that the argument is wrong, just that it was not and still is not obvious .
I don't want to lead them on any more than I would want to lead on a female friend.
The true analogy would be leading on, a gay friend. There is no ‘leading on’ a straight man.
Tree
24d ago
Also no. I'm sorry, what are you guys feeling in your bones? That pride parades have fundamentally changed how you relate to other heterosexual men?
Tree
25d ago
Not to be all atheist, but one of the things I find most discrediting to the Church’s claim of providing moral guidance was its shameful compromising with hitler. Even though it was clear to church leaders that nazism was both generally evil, and opposed to the power of the church as such. Unlike the german people, who were more bribed than threatened into compliance with the regime (so can be said to be morally corrupted, and complicit), the church’s behaviour reflects pure moral cowardice.
Tree
26d ago
At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape. Whereas for the khmer rouge, the entire present population was fair game. It was all about the future. And if the present clay wasn’t molding fast enough into the ‘new man’, throw it away and try again, as many times as it takes. They went beyond identity politics, there was no ingroup left.
My eye does twitch involuntarily when people say genghis khan's empire 'opened up trade lanes' and 'travelers had never been so safe'.
I don’t believe in the hierarchy of motives. If you had offered to take the ‘undesirables’ off hitler’s hands, he would have happily agreed, just like the communist only wants successful reeducation for capitalists. The deciding moment comes after the original optimistic plan fails. You can then either give up on the idea, or find that you “have to” apply more force for reeducation than you thought, and so tragically break a few eggs in the process/ murder everyone out of convenience. The relevant moral lines are broken here, not on the higher level of goals.
Tree
27d ago
Homosexuality is legal in dagestan.
Anyway, I don’t see why women would be any less icked by a photo like that in some repressive country, than by two western male friends touching that they don’t know about. The respective legal situation determines the ick?
Tree
27d ago
Is not saying something a lie? For example, if I notice that my friend has gained some weight, but I don't tell him so, am I lying to him?
Does he care about his weight, and mistakenly believes it has remained unchanged? If so, silence would be agreement, and so, a lie.
Is not giving your opinion a lie? For example, if someone proudly shows me his new car and I tell him without prompting that it's ugly, a purely subjective judgement, have I given him valuable information or have I insulted him unasked?
Such a conversation often includes the words ‘do you like my new car?’, that is a prompt , and you have to say it’s ugly. How does the conversation go with you? He shows you the car, says ‘it’s soooo beautiful!’ and you go ‘yes, I too find it wonderful’ (no you don’t, it’s fuckugly, that’s a lie).
Do you think there is any difference between stating something unflattering, and conveying that information to them in a way that allows them to save face?
Yes, but I don’t like it much, it’s a compromise required by human weakness. Ideally, honesty should always be forgiven.
The ‘saving face’ problem is that the conveying of information has been sullied by social status games. Some bits of information, criticism, are viewed as little arrows harming a person’s status. That is not conductive to a clear view of the world.
What are your lovingly constructed delusions? Tell me if I should lie to protect them, and I will.
For example, I believe that this is largely a lie lonely people tell themselves, as I did once upon a time.
I think your view is unfalsifiable. What if I produced a happy hermit? What if I told you I have experienced far more moments of happiness alone than in social settings?
What is modern atomization? To a large degree, people with alternatives, choosing to be alone. They could talk to their parents every day. They could go through their contacts or facebook friends and do something with a friend every day. But they choose not to. As to what little they do do, there were essentially no negative psychological consequences from covid, even though the threat and lockdowns stopped most social contact for a time.
I believe the same is true of our social lives.
So many things are the most important thing in life?
Tree
28d ago
Humans are social animals
To a degree. To what degree, largely up to us. Like our mating behaviours are somewhere between the lifelong monogamy of some birds and the 50-women harem season of elephant seals.
Lying is acceptable if the liee wants to be lied to, but I don’t think most people agree to be lied to. Do you ? I certainly don’t. They, like me, believe their model of the world is sound, tested, and that the truth flows into it without obstruction. They trust that their belief that they are smart and thin is actually true, instead of being artificially maintained and protected by social lies. Far from getting pleasure from ‘insulting’ them, I think I’m doing them a favour at personal cost, because some will shoot the messenger.
That's bullshit, Dean. You're always long-winded even when you have little to say. They would have taken east germany and showered it with money regardless of the the retirement benefits situation. East germany was full of pensioners anyway, so there was no relative gain to be had from the cheapness of the rest of the labor force. In your theory, east germany is both a cost and a profit, depending on what your theory needs it to be.
You weave these elaborate causal chains which bear no relation to reality. People never believe stuff, they 'have to' believe it, because random cause X is the true cause.
I disagree. They believed in neoliberalism, they believed in the productivity of syrian refugees, they believed that debt is a bad thing. Their opinions, like mine and yours and even the german people's, matter. When they're right, good things tend to happen, when they're wrong, the opposite.
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