WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
I think most people draw a difference between organized killing in war, and murder. Mark that I repeatedly said "murder", except when directly quoting the Sixth Commandment - not "killing".
This is not simple disagreement here. I'd expect something like the redditor response to John McCain's death in that case, where they acknowledged that they disagreed with him entirely, but still really respected him and are sad that he is dead.
The "still really respected him" part seems off. I'm not talking about "simple disagreement"! Sometimes you really do just think a guy sucks. That's fine! That's nothing new! Most folks have people they hate to some degree - and I'd say even more have people they have zero respect for even if they don't actively hate them. That doesn't mean they all support wanton murder. Having nothing nice to say about someone (beyond "he was a human being and as such had a certain inalienable dignity" which is so general as to be meaningless) is perfectly normal, and we shouldn't normalize asking people to lie about this in the event of something unfortunate befalling that someone, on pain of being assumed to be pro-murder. That's just a demand for large-scale hypocrisy.
(Which is precisely how I've always felt about mealy-mouthed statements eulogizing people you were calling anti-American mass-murdering fascist commie crooks ten years ago, to rapturous applause from your base, as having somehow been great respectable statesmen all along Even If You Had Your Disagreements™. If Trump says something nice and respectable about Biden when Biden croaks, I will not believe he means a word of it, but that doesn't mean I think Trump wants Biden killed.)
Though again, I can get behind the idea that if you have nothing nice to say, you should simply say nothing.
then yes, you do actually need to say why murdering is bad, because you just encouraged your friends to murder someone.
But again, what if they genuinely do just believe murder is bad in and of itself, for no more elaborate reasons than feeling "Thou shalt not kill" is carved upon their conscience in letters of gold that no circumstances can alter? What do you expect someone like that to say?
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
The average redditor will say everything nasty that's possible about him, they'll say that he was hateful and said disgusting things on a regular basis, that he made the country worse, that his words were violence against people, that he increased the amount of people ready to commit violence against minorities, that he needed to shut up and get off the campus, that the world is now better because he is dead. But to make it better, they'll say that murder is wrong, so they disagreed with his murder. Well, redditor, you did not convince me at all. You gave me several absolutely fantastic reasons to kill people like Charlie Kirk, but just one really weak reason to not do it (because murder is bad) for reasons that you didn't list out. Do you really believe that murder is bad? Why?
I wouldn't call a fundamental axiom of morality, indeed, one that has been regarded by the Abrahamic faiths as an explicit divine commandment for over three thousand years, a weak reason. And the tacked-on "Why?" at the end seems particularly odd to me - most people's reply to "why is murder wrong?" will be a confused "it just is"; they don't hold murder to be bad for instrumental reasons, but to be inherently unethical. For a majority of Westerners, that is the most important reason not to kill someone, and it is self-sufficient. "Why is murder wrong?" cashes out as "Why is badness bad?".
More broadly, what do you expect someone who disagreed totally about Kirk's politics to say, here? Do you really expect each comment to go on a lengthy digression about the underpinnings of moral philosophy? I can entertain the idea that in such a case (ie "a man you consider horribly evil has been murdered, but you genuinely don't want to come across as supporting murder"), the most decorous, moral thing to do is simply to keep silent and not opine on the event at all. But by definition, left-wing redditors who take that high road are not going to show up in the comment threads you describe. This leaves only the ones who feel compelled to speak at all, and I don't think you can fairly or realistically expect them to say anything else than what they do.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Certainly I can see why someone would think that. Personally I believe that kindness is the overriding moral imperative governing human behavior; therefore insofar as laws serve to constrain and standardize human behavior, they should strive to be kind before anything else. The only thing that you should trade kindness against when designing laws, IMO, is the long-term survival of the legal system itself - which might apply to things like violent crime and even immigration, but surely not disability accommodations.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I actually used "kinder" as well as "better" specifically to be transparent about the fact that I consider kindness an inherently valuable quality for a law to possess, for moral reasons, separately from other ways in which a policy can be "good" for society (i.e. instrumentally). Because I wanted to avoid people saying I was begging the question by simply saying "better" and taking it for granted that kinder laws are better. I'm at a loss as to how else I could have communicated my point at this point.
Not really. My preferred policy would be for disabled people to get guaranteed allocations, which they get to keep even if they then choose to be proactive and get extra money from gainful employment (at which they would not get these kinds of accommodations). This is noticeably different from the accommodations which I believe should be provided to democratically-elected members of the government so as to allow disabled people an equal shot at shaping government policy. I have no doubt you disagree with this, but I don't think it's circular - both halves simply flow from the same underlying premise of "kindness is good".
Most of the judicial opinions that form the law of the land are written primarily not by judges in black robes but by anonymous clerks whose names are nowhere in the text. (…) To even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional.
I think there's an interesting tension here. If we're looking at the position of judicial clerk as just a menial job within a capitalist economy - there's stuff that needs doing, the market selects for the most efficient person willing to do them for what they're worth - then I get you. But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerks genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.
(Of course, some might argue the problem starts at "judicial legal clerks hired off the street have an outsized influence on the law of the land". Perhaps it would make more sense for anyone with that much power to be elected, or otherwise more clearly accountable to the public; we could then restrict these kinds of disability accommodations to the accountable elected public servants, without needing to provide them for the genuinely politically-irrelevant coffee-fetcher.)
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. (…)
I don't disagree with your analysis in terms of the current state of affairs, I'm just saying, this isn't a law of physics. Give them another hundred years, then what? Two hundred? Five hundred? It's not as though they have to independently invent nuclear weapons or anything, just stockpile. It just seems inescapably foolish to me to say "it's not ever going to be a problem to have a population of a billion who fervently believe it is their duty to wipe out the West from the planet for the glory of God even if they destroy themselves in the process". Maybe we'd better ignore them for the time being, but something's got to give eventually.
Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me,
I do not think this set of preferences is compatible with tolerating a religious movement which aspires to world domination and glorifies achieving that end through holy war. You may not be interested in what fundamentalists do in their own countries, but the fundamentalists in far-off countries are interested in you. Or, at any rate, will grow interested in you once they've secured their power-base at home.
Now, of course, in practical terms I'm no kind of Middle-East hawk. In the aggregate, interventionism in the Middle-East has proven counterproductive when it comes to curbing the threat of muslim extremism - infamously so. But in the truly long term, "let them sort themselves out" can only be a temporary solution - it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West. Barring that assumption, if we're letting them be for now, it can only be for one of two broad reasons:
- we hope that they'll organically become more liberal over time and the existential threat will peter out, à la USSR collapse;
- in the long term, we intend to get our ducks in a row and figure out an effective interventionist approach at some point before the jihadis get their ducks in a row and overwhelm the free world.
with #2 further subdividing into a comparatively peaceful "we'll figure out how to do secularization in a way that sticks" option and a maximally pessimistic "we'll crush them and salt the earth if it comes down to it" option. Plus an AGI-truther "we'll hit the Singularity before we need to worry about any of this" addendum, I guess.
But it cannot be because we should just reconcile ourselves to the existence of fundamentalist islamic theocracies for the truly long term, as an acceptable state of affairs for the planet Earth. That's just shaking hands with that nice Mr Hitler in 1938.
(Setting all this aside, I do have a basic moral objection to the existence of muslim theocracies qua muslim theocracies. But I think that's really neither here nor there. "Just close the borders to immigrants from muslim theocracies" remains a bad plan even if you value the welfare of Middle-Eastern women, homosexuals, Jews, Christians, etc. at exactly 0.)
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I'm not sure if it's an assumption about what Iraqis wanted in 2003, so much as a claim that after a generation of two of being ruled by a secular US-propped government they'd learn to like it and the islamic death-cult would die out. Which other experiments eg Afghanistan have of course shown to be… optimistic at best. But it's something, and it's probably the best we've got if you don't want to despair of human nature.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Its like a trolley problem where the only options are "hit this button to kill them more or less instantly, therefore minimizing suffering, or don't hit the button and they die anyway, but hours or days later, maybe in agonizing pain."
I'm inclined to argue for the second on ethical grounds, honestly! If they ask for a mercy-kill it's a different matter, but I'm skeptical of the humaneness of "putting people out of their misery" when they haven't asked for it. Maybe they'd rather spend their remaining hours praying, thinking back over their life, or whatever else suits their conscience. Certainly I'd want to be given the option if I was in their place.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?
I think there's two separate questions here. There's things rich people do because they're genuinely pleasant, but which overcrowding would ruin; and there's things rich people do purely as a status symbol because few people can afford them. I think the world genuinely gets better if no one is buying gratuitously expensive brands anymore, and people instead focus on buying clothes, accessories, etc. that they actually like for their own sake. Whereas it would genuinely be a shame if vacation spots became so popular that there was no way to enjoy mostly-empty nature anymore.
The problem with Biden's mental decline is that while him not remembering signing the order could mean that a staffer signed it for him, it could also mean that he forgot he'd signed it/didn't know what he was doing when he signed it. Which aren't good either, but are legally trickier to overturn if he hadn't been declared incompetent at the time.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
Digital is a different discipline
If the results are indistinguishable, would it truly matter? But I don't think even this claim holds water. Plenty of Internet art-kids use ink, paper, paint and canvas. Those who go to art school certainly do. "Traditional art" (Internet-speak for "non-digital", not a statement of style or ethos) is a well-populated tag on any platform where artists congregate. Searching for the most recent post on X to use the tags #TraditionalArt and #Painting, I immediately landed on this.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
we are rapidly losing other skills like painting and drawing
That strikes me as absurd. Isn't the common worry that we're overproducing artists beyond all economic need? The Internet is full of portfolios, webcomics, and so on. You still have thousands upon thousands if you discount manga-style artists (and I don't think you should if you're worried about technical skills being lost; what they lack is originality, but the archetypal manga style still demands a solid handle on perspective, proportions, etc.). The professional art world is a mess, but that's a small fringe of elitists chasing esoteric radicalism off a cliff like they've been doing for sixty years, and has had no impact on the number of people capable of drawing and painting conventionally beautiful artwork. We have more of those than ever.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Within Rov's analogy, "your company" is the US gov as a whole (with Trump being the "immediate supervisor").
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
In the post you replied to, self_made_human modded remzem for consensus-building and boo-outgroup, not for advocating violence. Did you mean to reply to Amadan's post?
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
As I understand it, a totally AI-generated post is disallowed, but a post portions of which are AI-generated is allowed, and there is not yet an official position on how much of a post has to be AI-generated before it trips the alarm bells (but it's definitely >0% and plausibly >40%).
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Gillitrut has not tried to claim that the video was hypothetical, but rather, pointed out that a judge has in fact ruled some of Trump's orders illegal. Therefore the Democrats in the video are not casting baseless aspersions, explicitly or otherwise, but reacting to already-established legal fact.
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
The question, I think, is whether social media merely removed bureaucratic gatekeepers so that a preexisting silent majority of extremists (as it were) was suddenly allowed to speak out; or whether the presence of politicians on social media contributed to a self-sustaining feedback cycle that made everyone's positions genuinely more extreme than they were before.
Under the latter theory, the outcome would indeed be "politics becomes more centrist and less populist/fringe", but that would not be because nefarious advisors are preventing the politicians from giving the base what it wants; it would be because, in the absence of the toxic social media clout-chasing incentives, the politicians and to an extent the people will genuinely come to hold more measured views because they aren't getting into stupid dick-measuring contests everyday.
Putting it into practical terms: in a world where he is forbidden to communicate in any way on Twitter or Truth Social or any similar platform, Trump is going to rant a lot less about CROOKED Democrats who are TRAITORS who should be SHOT to DEATH for TREASON. Is this because his advisors would stop him from saying what he wants to say? I don't think so. I think it simply wouldn't occur to him to tell the world half the shit he types, if he wasn't invested in chasing the algorithm like a common vlogger. Would he be betraying the wishes of the voters who put him in the White House? Again, I don't think so - at least, not in a counterfactual world where he was never the Poster President at all. I think his base would not want him to say this stuff if he hadn't gotten them hooked on their daily Two Minutes of Hate in the first place. It's a hyperstimulus like any other, and you've got to cut off the vicious cycle.
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
The only question IMO is whether you want the propaganda to at least be written (sometimes) and signed off on by the politicians themselves, or whether you want your representatives to be unable to speak except when the bureaucrats arrange and opportunity for them to do so
Presumably they could do that by going on television, releasing statements to the press, writing books, and all the other things that serious people did before social media. If you're concerned about the asymmetry with what bureaucrats get to release on the politicians-deserted social media, we can simply ban bureaucrats from using social media either - make social media a completely government-official-free zone - forbid the dissemination of official information of any kind through such platforms. An end to Bluechecks once and for all.
I think hydro meant "English" or "something that wouldn't have been recognized pre-1900" as two distinct options.
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
while the chances that GWB would pull a Gracchi and run for a third term were basically nil, with Trump all things are possible.
Eh. It's not that I'd put it past him if he were even just ten years younger - but that's just it, he isn't. Guy's old. By no means senile or at death's door, but you just don't pull this sort of shit at 82.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.
Well, yes. But in the heroin case, "someone who's tried it once is likely to want to do more" doesn't prove that you are wickedly preventing people from self-actualizing by forbidding them from trying it the first time. In fact, quite the opposite - we recognize that getting hooked on a hard drug 'hijacks' people's preferences and gets in the way of their real wants and goals, so that allowing them to get exposed to the addictive substance is doing a disservice to their self-actualization! So, conceivably, pregnancy could be the same: a woman who tries it once might get 'hooked' and that's exactly why it's against a woman's better interests to have even a single child, lest she get addicted to the experience and let it ruin her life as she irrationally sinks all her time and resources into parenthood.
(I don't actually believe this, hence why it's an unserious gotcha.)
That's true where the fleshy aspect of sexuality is concerned, but when we start talking about desires and personality, I do suspect a plurality of mainstream Christians are mind-body dualists of one sort of another, and would balk at the idea that love and desires are purely a matter of physical chemicals sloshing around in a physical brain, albeit a brain intelligent-designed by God. They'd say that this stuff happens in the Soul, which is Mysterious.
(I don't say this to score cheap shots or boo-outgroup. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Hard, dualism is a perfectly respectable position with or without theism, even if it's not mine.)
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