WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
7hr ago
I don't actually think it especially changes the trolley problem if the single person is a suicide attempt.
WandererintheWilderness
8hr ago
Oh, I agree. I'm just saying that "(partly) responsible for his death" is a much lower bar than "guilty of murder".
WandererintheWilderness
8hr ago
And likewise if Digwa stabbed Nowak through the lung he's far more responsible for Nowak's death than the police officers who failed to get Nowak first aid, but responsibility still exists even if it isn't exclusive.
WandererintheWilderness
9hr ago
And he explicitly voiced this specific concern in the speech itself:
Well, not exactly; this is concern that penalties for those guilty of out-and-out racial discrimination would get a lot harsher, which is not quite the same slippery slope as sanctions being extended to those only "guilty" of thoughtcrime. But as I said I do take the point.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
Well again I'm not actually convinced that he made that prediction. I still find it a more natural and coherent reading of the text that the strife he perceives in Britain's future is the political oppression of white racists by an electoral majority of brown anti-racists. I don't actually think there's any textual evidence that he was envisioning a plague of acts of personal brown-on-white violence like Digwa's. If that had been his point, I contend that his rhetoric would have been burying the lede to such outrageous degrees as to make the overall speech laughable, but I don't think it was his point.
(I think you actually have a much better case in the other sub-thread when linking his doomsaying, not to modern crime statistics, but to the rise of anti-free-speech legislation, which can legitimately be seen as a slippery slope from the concerns he voices. This doesn't wholly rehabilitate the speech in my eyes, because I still think that in fact a just society should not allow racial discrimination, and allowing it in the name of preventing a free-speech-destroying slippery slope is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; and also because he's still complaining about private responses to racist behavior i.e. the children chanting "racialist", not just institutional overreach, so his principled-libertarian cred is less than stellar; but it's a fair defense.)
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
As I said in my other reply, by saying Chauvin was responsible for his death, I am not necessarily saying that he acted wrongly. Prioritizing the safety of the innocent over that of the guilty can be the correct utilitarian choice in a fraught situation. But you're still responsible for pulling the trolley lever. Even if it wasn't you who tied the person you sacrifice to the trolley tracks, you still made that choice; you can justify your actions, but they are your actions.
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
But again, FttG originally praised him as "a conservative voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration". Even if I we grant that he had those kinds of statistics in mind, he just comes across as a mealy-mouthed coward for not having the guts to explicitly discuss his most important claim or the evidence for that claim. He would be leaving the most important "uncomfortable truth" unspoken.
This is why I think "came for… and I did not speak out" has to mean something like "they got sent to Auschwitz, which no one ever should be for any reason, and I let it happen", rather than "I myself did something, anything, to oppose them". With the benefit of hindsight, the writer does not think he should have allowed the Nazis to do whatever they wanted to the communists; but I don't think it follows that he regrets ever criticizing communists in any way, and I don't think it even follows that he thinks no amount of police action against communist terrorists was ever justified.
Therefore I do not think "first they made laws preventing bigoted old ladies from renting rooms to Negroes…" is a valid application of the poem, because I am not a hyper-libertarian and I do not think that 'the power to forbid people to rent rooms to minorities based on personal prejudice' is an inherently immoral weapon for the government to wield. I am not turning a blind eye to unconscionable evil being done to my enemies. I can conscion outlawing discriminatory business practices, I can conscion it just fine. It's what I would have been campaigning for already, no ominous "they" required.
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
I said "best practice for maximizing a fentanyl-overdose patient's chances of survival"; not "police best-practice for dealing with a drugged-out suspect who might be dying but might also still be a danger to others". It may very well be that keeping him restrained on the off-chance that if they'd relaxed the hold, he would have turned out to be faking enfeeblement and run off and harassed people, was a defensible gamble for public safety. But if, in a situation of Bayesian uncertainty, you choose to prioritize neutralizing the potential threat posed by an individual over that individual's own health, and it turns out he was in fact dying, then you're responsible for his death. That doesn't necessarily mean you made the wrong choice, but you did make a choice that led to his death and you need to own up to that.
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose? (…) What is a whip used for again?
Either that, or he has smuggled in the implication that browns are inherently liable to be physically violent to whites without actually justifying it in any way whatsoever, which again makes his entire rhetoric founded on silently assuming the most crucial conclusion. Pick your poison, but he doesn't come out looking good in either case, intellectually speaking.
sigh Again, it depends on what you mean by "came for". I do not think that my outgroup should be oppressed or have their civil rights ignored. But this does not mean "you can't anything at all against your outgroup, ever". The poem was not intended as anarchist apologia that says you can never outlaw, or even oppose, any evil behavior whatsoever because "coming for" anybody in any way, ever, is too much of a slippery slope.
To put it another way, if you think "first they came" applies to "first they came for the people who refuse to rent rooms to Negroes, but I did not speak out, because I was against refusing to rent rooms to Negroes" then I do not see how you cannot extend it all the way to "first they came for the people who lynched Negroes in the streets, but I did not speak out, because I was against lynching Negroes in the streets", or "first they came for murderous paedophiles, but I did not speak out, because I was not a murderous paedophile", at which point it loses all meaning. I think clearly the poem only works if by "came for" you mean "sent to a gas chamber en masse"; if you mean enabling the government to do unconscionably awful things to your outgroup, things it should never be allowed to do to anybody for any reason. But no one was suggesting sending the racist old lady to a gas chamber in a cattle wagon.
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
Ultimately, I don't know what best practice for maximizing a fentanyl-overdose patient's chances of survival looks like, but I would be very surprised if it looks like pinning him down in a chokehold, any more than best practice for a stab victim is to try to handcuff him. Whether Floyd died from physical choking or as a result of the drugs he'd ingested doesn't let Chauvin off the moral hook; in Floyd's as in Nowak's case, it would still leave us with officers who wasted time "restraining" an already-dying man instead of trying to save his life.
'First they came for the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist...'
Okay, but the thing is, I dislike the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists. I dislike them intensely. They disgust and appall me in much the same way that blacks disgust and appall them. I and people of similar political and moral principles to mine would be liable to "come for them", in the sense of wanting to outlaw racially discriminatory refusal-of-service on their part, even if the racial minority they discriminated against made up an irrelevant 0.01% of the population and had no electoral weight of their own. The "first they came for the XYZ, but I did not speak out" rhyme breaks down when the XYZ are not merely a group to which I don't belong, but a group that I already considered enemies regardless.
Of course, you can have a maximally libertarian setup, where the old lady is allowed to refuse to rent to Negroes because she thinks they're icky, and I'm allowed to call her names for being a bigot because I think bigots are icky. But Powell seems to think we should be shedding tears for the old lady because children follow her around calling her a "racialist" (which I stress again, she objectively proudly is), so permit to doubt his principled commitment to freedom.
The funeral pyre is burning for Nowak, 'you' and you's family are next.
Again, I do not think there is any sensible reading of the speech which suggests that Powell is concerned about browns enacting genocidal violence on whites. His "funeral pyre" is a purely demographic/cultural one, his doomsaying prophecy is that one day there'll be so many brown people about that white racists will be ostracized. He puts forth no evidence - no argument - that the new brown majority will treat the white minority unkindly, except specifically in the form of cracking down on white bigots.
Mark: I am not saying that no such argument can be made - Nowak's murder alone is an argument written in blood - I am saying Powell does not make any such argument. He is not talking about the same thing you are. The thing he's talking about is rather more stupid, and infinitely less serious.
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
Okay, but again – why are you bringing this up? What does that have to do with this case?
I share your frustration with magicalkittycat's rather confused line of argument as I'm reading through this comment thread, but if I may steelman the basic point just to satisfy my own OCD-esque tendencies: I think the valid argument that magicalkittycat has been failing to make in an intelligible way goes something like "mistaking a rational-seeming attacker for the victim and a panicked, incoherent victim for the deranged attacker is a standard police failure mode, as shown by this error's prevalence in domestic abuse case, which is so great that steps have sometimes been taken to circumvent it ie dual arrests. Therefore, the null hypothesis in the Digwa case should be that the races of the parties is flatly irrelevant, and it was just an example of this welll-known, non-race-based failure-mode at work."
To which you're essentially preemptively objected that if that were so, then we should expect to see instances of this race-neutral bias affecting cases with a rational-seeming white attacker and a frantic POC victim. Which is sensible, though I don't think it necessarily suffices to defeat the argument. (It may be, for example, that pro-minority bias is involved in cases where police officers are confronted with a visibly distressed person of color in a way that 'cancels out' the usual 'believe the more put-together person's claim' bias - but that in the Digwa/Nowak-shaped case, race never becomes a relevant factor because the pro-minority racial bias would simply have been reinforcing the already predetermined outcome, and can thus be discounted.)
I have just reread Powell's speech to make sure I don't put words in his mouth, and I'm sorry but I still think it's petty, get-off-my-lawn prejudice disguised as argument, and only looks prescient by accident.
Above all else, I remain baffled that of all the sob stories he could have quoted to make his point - and I do not doubt that legitimately sympathetic stories existed - he chooses one about an old lady who courts destitution by stubbornly refusing to rent rooms to non-white customers, and then has the nerve to complain that she is denounced as a "racialist" because of it. That he expected his audience to parse her as a sympathetic rather than pathetically self-destructive figure speaks volumes.
And in much the same way what sticks in my craw about the main, demographics-based thrust of the speech is that he isn't "voicing uncomfortable truths". In fact, he's leaving key parts of the argument unspoken, either because even he couldn't bring himself to say them out loud, or because he somehow considered them literally self-evident. To wit, he leaves the statistics about immigrant demographics to speak for themselves; he writes as if the mere prospect of there being more brown than white people in England is self-evidently repulsive. He is not making an argument that if this process is allowed to happen then nice Polish young men are going to be stabbed in the street by crazy Sikhs and the police will turn a blind eye. Either he is assuming that everyone already understands browns to be violent savages by definition but doesn't want to say it out loud, or else, as near as I can tell, the whole of his argument must come down to "there are soon going to be more brown than white people in England, and then the browns will be in a position to outlaw racial discrimination on the part of white business owners, which would be illiberal; it is the God-given right of racist old ladies to refuse service to Negroes if they want".
From a 21st century vantage point, this is just… such a deeply parochial argument. It's so quaint. It somehow manages to simultaneously be almost unthinkably bigoted in its basic assumptions, and comically optimistic about the kind of problems that runaway immigration would actually cause. Religious extremism is not a twinkle in this man's eye. Rape gangs do not follow from anything in this speech. Spurious, witch-hunty accusations of racism are not even what he's talking about, and God help us, he's not even discernibly talking about HBD. He literally just thinks that if there's too many brown people the brown people will "oppress" your basest, most vulgar, I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist by outlawing that kind of racism, and that this would be a great blow against freedom in England.
It's honestly kind of embarrassing (though it's a testament to his sheer skill as a writer that the flow of his prose almost disguises the underlying vapid stupidity of the argument).
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
Of course, I’m not a Brit or Irishman or Scotsman,
Oh, I see; you're Welsh.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
But again, I think this argument proves too much. Having sex with someone where no money changes hands is uncontroversial, therefore there should be no controversy about having sex with someone when money does change hands?
I mean, de-stigmatizing sex work is a pretty mainstream online-left opinion.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Yes; I just think that the operationalization of that depends a great deal on your threshold for what would be inappropriate from a man (and I genuinely think this might be a matter of varying norms in different milieus, rather than something with an objective right or wrong answer).
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
can include something super-polite along the lines of "Hey, how would like me to get a couple rounds of beer for you this weekend? I just need another guy to help move this couch."
I wonder if there's a social-bubbles/Blue-vs-Red effect - this example, because it introduces a transactional dimension to the interaction, isn't what I'd call "super-polite". There might be a social expectation that paying back the favor further down the line would be the proper thing to do, sure, but I would consider it somewhat rude to make that an explicit offer as part of the request. It implies that the person you're asking is self-interested and would only help a pal out if he's certain there's something in it for him.
In contrast I move in social circles where the expectation is that if someone (maybe not a complete stranger, but an acquaintance, friend-of-a-friend, coworker sort of person) asks you for help, provided the request isn't phrased patronizingly or clearly unreasonable in scope, it'd be kind of dickish to turn them down. Helplfulness and community spirit are important qualities to cultivate. This is why it intuitively seems to me that shooting a girl down if she asks you for help with something is a break from established social scripts, something you'd have to actively decide to do in an effort to portray yourself as an alpha male. If all else being equal "Uh, no" would be your default answer to someone asking you for help without an offered payout, then sure, saying yes if it's a hot girl would read very differently, and it might make sense to refrain from making that exception.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
An asteroid hitting the Earth has the benefit of being instantaneous; I had in mind a slow, painful death from gradual organ failure or similar (which seems similar to the possibility of a slow death from malnutrition and dehydration in the event of social collapse from runaway climate change). I agree it's more defensible to have the child if your only consideration is an early cutoff, the suffering was an active ingredient in my reasoning. Though with a child whose projected death is at a somewhat older age than 18 months you'd run into the dilemma of whether to tell your six-year-old kid that they're for sure going to die before they grow up, which seems like a very cruel choice for any parent to have to make either way.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
I'm not sure I would use the phrase "mind games" to include "getting in the habit of acting in such a way as to receive respect from others"
I am starting from the premise that a decent person would, all else being equal, help a same-sex acquaintance with inconveniences like helping to carry a sofa if asked. If you refuse to help a female acquaintance with the same task because you're trying to maximize your chances of getting in her pants, then you're treating her worse than a generic person specifically to push her supposed evopsych buttons with ulterior motives. How could this be anything else than a mind game? And again, how do you get from that to the mutual trust and intimacy that is at once the condition and the chiefest pleasure of romantic love?
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Sure, the Reaper comes for us all, but I wouldn't have a child if I knew, eg through embryo screening, that it would almost certainly die of a horribly painful disease before turning fourteen. I don't think most people would. If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years", the prospects of a child conceived today would look an awful lot like our screened embryo with the horrible genetic malformation. Needless to say I don't grant the assumption, but it seems, on its own terms, to add up.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
I mean, sure, Homo sapiens might not go extinct, but I think it's reasonable to have qualms about having a child if you believe they've got a 90% chance of dying in the apocalypse, even if you grant that 10% of humanity might survive and eventually rebuild something civilization-shaped.
this logically implies that just about every European parent in the fourteenth century was unimaginably sadistic, like some kind of unholy offspring of Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele and Simon Cowell.
I think the general thinking is more that they were morally incompetent - multiplying because the Catholic Church told them it was virtuous to do so, and they couldn't even conceive of a consequentialist utilitarian argument about whether or not to have a child.
And if you insist on pretending that you’re not having children because of climate change, at least respect our intelligence enough to commit to the bit. Sell your car, travel everywhere by bike, stop using air travel, give up eating meat. Otherwise, you’re fooling no one, not even yourself.
This only addresses the "having a child would be unethical because they'd contribute to climate change" line of argument, not the "having a child would be unethical because the world is going to burn and they'd die of thirst in their teens" line of argument. If you genuinely believe the world is going to end in fifteen years, I think it's intellectually consistent to be spending your remaining years in comfort and even hedonistic decadence, even as you say that the world is going to get so bad in a short enough time-frame that any child would curse you for bringing them into the world by the time they were old enough to do so. It's… convenient, but it's consistent.
On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.
You are, again, skipping crucial steps. It's not inevitable that a demographic change will lead to physical violence against the old majority. If, say, Belgians or Koreans moved to my town en masse I would not expect them to start stabbing the locals, whatever the scale of the migration. To believe otherwise would be sheer, paranoid xenophobia. It may very well be the case that if you replace my Belgians and Koreans with Pakistanis or Sikhs, the murder rate will in fact go up, but this is a specific claim about the cultural (or, if you must, genetic) dispositions of Pakistanis and Sikhs, which requires evidence to back it up; it's not the null hypothesis about any generic group of foreigners.
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