WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
This is a perfectly reasonable take, but a completely different thing than what I meant (and took @aiislove to mean) by "UBI skeptic", ie someone who believes that even if it could be implemented as advertised, a UBI would not be good for a majority of humanity. I think, insofar as it is ever worth discussing ideals rather than short-term ends, this is an interesting conversation in its own right, separate from the object-level AGI-by-2027-vs.-moribund-AI-bubble debate which determines how soon if ever we might get the magic robots.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI (…) I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do
Well, this is the rub. The UBI skeptic's worldview is a fundamentally aristocratic one which does not share your faith in the average individual. The UBI skeptic generally agrees that there is an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices - he simply believes that lower-IQ or otherwise mentally disadvantaged people cannot say the same, and the happiness of a fraction of clever dilettantes is not worth leaving the Average Joe to rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
I don't, myself, find this picture convincing, though it is a failure mode which it is worth bearing in mind. It seems to me that to the extent the horror stories about self-wireheaded proles living off the dole have some basis in fact, the individuals at issue don't actually have much in the way of the option of traveling the world instead, so they don't prove much. Moreover I think this kind of willpower-sapped listlessness should be understood as a form of clinical depression, and could likely be addressed with antidepressants if all else fails.
Still, you said you "didn't understand" the doomer viewpoint on UBI - well, here goes.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Also, Big Government doesn’t need to be strange or sinister (…)
Well, amen to that - but I got the impression from your OP that you were presenting government interference as a kind of aberration, that the State's interference in things like the mooted mutual-support-network-of-elderly-bachelors was inherently overreach and not the proper purpose of the State. In contrast, then, I was arguing that providing this kind of service is exactly the purpose of a state, and squashing internal competition comes hand in hand with that. In this framing, we might say that a given government - say, the 21st century US Gov - has grown so cancerous and counterproductive that it ought, at this point, to be circumvented and replaced from within; but statements like "The State shouldn’t even be perceived as 'leaving you to rot' in your old age" still come across as self-contradictory. If it were functional the State absolutely ought to deal with that sort of thing, in fact that is exactly what it means for it to be "the State"; it just might be the case that it's so bad at it currently that it ought to be prevented from fulfilling this natural purpose.
Also, side-track, but:
The non-aggression principle is incoherent.
Well, now, I wouldn't go that far. It's not optimal for national flourishing, but then, no one ever said morality had to conveniently be isomorphic to the optimal strategies for material success. It may be (whether because God wishes to test His children on virtues orthogonal to profit maximization, or because there is no God) that doing the ethical thing leads to material ruin - that doesn't ipso facto prove it isn't the ethical thing.
The State shouldn’t even be perceived as “leaving you to rot” in your old age. (…) do you contribute enough to a community that they think it’s worth helping you out? Are you a beloved Grandfatherly figure or are you the local crotchety hermit? (…) Maybe you and a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age.
But in principle, isn't "the State" what organically arises from the latter arrangements scaling up and coming to rely on common record-keeping infrastructure to reduce friction cost for all involved?
It starts with a tribe or a village. Old Greybeard is a font of good advice, so of course, everyone chips in to get him some fruit and cured meat in the winter. And maybe they do the same for Old Bald Bastard who curses out anyone who comes near his hut; no one likes him, but… the current best hunter's pretty cranky too, and he isn't stupid. If he sees that O.B.B.'s left to rot, he'll leave the tribe in the lurch and look for some place where he can expect better rewards for his years of good service once his teeth start to fall out. Wait a few generations. The village gets bigger - now there are a lot of old mouths that a majority of townsfolk wants to see fed for one reason or another, but it would just be inefficient to collect separate donations for each old geezer individually. So a guy takes it upon himself to collect bulk donations from each household, and divide them up equally to all the elders. So far so good.
Except, what if it turns out there's another guy doing the same thing for contributions to the town bridge-building budget, and yet a third guy who collects the money for the town watchmen to buy themselves weapons they use to defend the whole community? Not only is this more work for everyone, but some of the less well-off households keep having to explain that they can't give to the Elders Feeding Fund because they already gave all their spare grain to the Soldiers Feeding Fund. Pretty soon, everyone agrees it's more convenient for those guys to work together and create a single list, and for each household to make one donation a year, that gets divided up between the different useful community functions.
All perfectly sensible, but suddenly you have something that looks an awful lot like taxes and social welfare.
Presumably your libertarian alarm bells start going off at the step in all this where it stops being optional for a given household to give to the "charitable" fund. Now, I would personally say that it's fair enough of the majority to take the trade-off of "a given household can no longer opt out of the yearly donations without leaving the tribe altogether; but in exchange the collection process will be (relatively) hassle-free for everyone". Of course, I can respect the classic ethical objection - "coerced giving is theft, end of story, it doesn't matter if it's more 'efficient'". But it sounded more like you were concerned about the overall inefficiency of government intervention than taking a principled stand against taxation even at the cost of potentially suboptimal outcomes. And if that's your position, then... I don't think it's coherent. Every step I outlined is just a rational iteration upon the previous status quo, making things smoother and more efficient for everyone. The solutions you advocate aren't really an alternative to a social welfare state. They amount to little more than doing social welfare in patchy, inefficient ways while depriving yourself of the centralized record-keeping tool which thousands of years of cultural evolution created for exactly this purpose: the State.
(There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence. Even if you're really doomer-pilled about full-sized, modern governments, however, I think the above argument still illuminates the fact that it's not uniquely strange or sinister for Big Government to try and screw up attempts like the one you describe to create "mutual support networks". Fundamentally, that's just the perfectly healthy reaction of an established State trying to nip de facto secession in the bud; no State, good or bad, can tolerate the creation of a rogue mini-State within itself.)
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
an unknown woman
Is a college classmate unknown, though?
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
They've said that about the comics for the better part of a century. It's not exclusively about the movie.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
2] Being sucked into the west would wreck Ukraine. Their culture would get replaced by America ghetto culture, their cities would fill with migrants and they would get all the same cultural bagage that saddles the rest of Europe. I have visited Kiev and it was a beautiful city with minimal third world migration, few tattooed fat women with nose rings. The last thing they need is an EU/Soros cultural program.
3] It is bad enough that we northern Europeans have to be in the EU with Greeks and Romanians. Now we are going to add Ukraine into this mess? We are going to end up paying to be in a brutally corrupt and inefficient EU.
I can understand both these positions, but I don't understand how you can hold them simultaneously. Either Ukraine's local culture is good and deserves better than to be subsumed by the standard Westernized global culture, or Ukraine is a shithole and adding it to the EU will further dilute European greatness in the same way as adding Turkey would have done; but I don't see how both can be true at the same time.
Though speaking of questionable dichotomies,
The idea that Europe is about to be steamrolled by Russia stands in contrast to the other narrative that Russia is a collapsing gas station. Which one is it? Is Russia about to collapse or are they about to conquer Europe?
while I've had this thought before, I think a reasonable steelman is "Russia is collapsing but hasn't collapsed yet; we're still in the danger zone; that's why it's important to keep it quarantined long enough for it to completely fall apart". A wounded bear that hasn't stopped fighting yet is a dangerous thing.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
but if he didn't do it then what's all the excitement about?
If he didn't do it and there's a sinister government plot to frame him, this makes the initial murder out to seem like a much more successful and thus appealing form of rebellion. Not only is the real culprit still at large (so cheer up, kids, if you want to give it a try, you might get away with it!), but if The Man was this determined to close the case by hook or crook, to the point of fabricating evidence against an innocent, then it shows that they're running scared.
ack people just disproportionally appear in advertisements because... They just do! It's not as if there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing 'white prejudice' through mass propaganda. That would be insane.
What planet are you living on? Affirmative Action and the pro-#representation woke block are in no way trying to hide their agenda. Landmark casting of a black Star Wars lead or whatever are inevitably cause for grand celebrations, and the political ramifications and academic justifications are outspokenly praised by the media! The politically-correct "box-ticking" phenomenon is many things, but it is not some secretive conspiracy that the Elders of Zion are gambling the public literally won't notice. Except for the word "Jewish", the overwhelming majority of the online left would happily endorse your second sentence!
(As for the Jewish angle, I think you're committing the usual anti-Semite's magic trick of blurring the distinction between "ideologies invented by people who happened to be ethnically Jewish" and "ideologies deliberately crafted to benefit the Jews as a community". The idea that Freud was playing 5D chess to undermine other races at the behest of his own is farcical if you've ever read any of his writing. He was plainly just an ordinary crank who thought he'd figured out the truth about human psychology. HBD itself, whose suppression you claim is some wicked Jewish plot, would predict that there would be a high percentage of Jewish individuals in the intellectual classes in any era, so it's not surprising that a high percentage of ideologies we inherited from 20th century intellectuals would have Jews in their family tree; you do not need to posit a secret coordinated plot to explain this observation.)
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Huh. I stand corrected. I remain puzzled by his behavior, unless there was some sort of crowd serving as the audience in the moment.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
He wasn't filming anything.
…Wasn't he (knowingly) being filmed? I thought he must be from the moment I read the summary; I can't really make sense of his behavior and incentives otherwise. Perhaps I'm too Internet-brained. Where's the still that illustrates the article from, if it's not a screenshot from a video?
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
That may well be the case. But as I said upthread, I would have had no issue if Steele had been going after a Muslim preacher. What I find outrageous about this anecdote is that he picked, as his target, a woman doing volunteer work to fight Muslim domestic abuse - which is to say, a woman doing what she can in the direction of liberalization! Did she still identify as a Muslim? Possibly. If so, does this reflect genuine faith, or simply very reasonable fear of the social consequences of becoming an apostate? Unknowable. But either way, such a woman should be an ally, not an enemy, to someone earnestly trying to deal with Muslim-associated customs' negative impact on society.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Well, yes. Just because I am very progressive for this website on a number of issues does not mean I am an automaton repeating the maximally woke point of view on every issue, and the dangers of Islamism, and illiberal customs perpetuated by Muslim communities more broadly, are among the things I take very seriously that the current progressive bloc is very bad at seeing for the massive problems they really are.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Not in a private discussion. Where you disrupt a stranger's activities in public and put a gotcha to them to engineer a viral moment, yes, it is bullying.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior. He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head. I think that's plenty offensive enough to make the man a deeply unsympathetic victim of unjust laws, even if the laws are unjust. It's not about what he believes, it's about his actions.
And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse, i.e. the exact societal problem his stupid little stunt was intended to highlight. At the point when point-scoring for point-scoring's sake comes at the direct expense of actual furthering of the goals that points are nominally being scored for, I think you can start to talk about derangement.
I object to the characterization of what I advocated as "assault" - perhaps my reaching for the image of a slap was needlessly confusing. I refer to a slap of the old-fashioned kind that women could once give to men who behaved like cads - not as an act of violence intended to cause physical harm, but as the strongest available signal of public disapproval. Feel free to substitute your preferred kind of public finger-pointing to shame people who behave in horrid but non-illegal ways. Personally, so long as it is understood that the purpose of such a slap is not actually to knock anyone down, I rather wish we brought it back; I mean it very differently from the "punch Nazis" meme, for which I now realize it could easily have been confused. But that's a whole other conversation and not relevant here, so again, perhaps I shouldn't have gone there.
I also object, and more strongly, with continuing to characterize what Steele said as "asking someone a question", as if he had just asked for directions to the post office. He did not "ask the woman a question" in the sense of genuinely seeking information from her. What he did was either intended as a gotcha, or as intimidation - in other words it was bullying. Moreover, as I said, had she been incautious in her answer, it may have goaded her into a response that jeopardized her volunteer work, or even put her safety at risk - which Steele knew perfectly well. Now again. I do not believe that what Steele did should be a crime, any more than I think high school bullies should be clapped in irons unless they get too physical. But it was, to my way of thinking, incontestably bad behavior, and over-criminalization of bullying is not the same thing as criminalizing the earnest expression of political or religious opinions, let alone the criminalization of "asking polite questions".
A lot of these are genuinely shameful, and I'm not about to argue that the following one should actually be illegal, but this:
A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.
strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume @dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim. The linked article describing Steele's behavior as "polite questions" is ridiculous. In the first place, this was clearly a stunt, not some good-faith attempt to have an unprompted theological discussion with a stranger, as that blurb implies.
But more importantly, it was a mean-spirited and counter-productive stunt. If you're actually concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse in Muslim households, a woman currently engaged in an outreach effort whose whole purpose is to acknowledge and deal with the problem - and a volunteer, mind you, not a professional NGO grifter! - is the last person you should antagonize for the sake of drawing attention to yourself. If you've got balls, ask a Muslim preacher. At a push, ask a random woman in a niqab. But for fuck's sake, when someone actually tries to do something about the exact thing you're complaining about, don't put her on the spot in public in such a way that she must either obfuscate and come across as a hypocrite, or own up to an actively anti-Muslim stance. (Never mind that the latter might put her at genuine personal risk: it would instantly destroy her credibility with the very abused women from fundamentalist households that she's trying to coax into trusting her!)
So - Steele's stunt was stupid, cruel, and cowardly behavior. In a common-sense world the appropriate response would be a slap across the face that no one sensible would think of prosecuting as physical assault, but of course, in the age of TikTok ragebait, giving him "minority punches preacher who was just asking questions" as his claim to fame would just be giving him what he was after by other means. Is suing him in a court of law an appropriate substitute? No. But I sympathize enormously with the desire to punish this kind of heel behavior in some way and wipe that smug grin off the guy's face. As it stands, he wasn't charged with anything, just briefly detained, and I think that's probably a fitting level of inconvenience for the offense, societally speaking, though I wish it didn't have go through the justice system.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
In general the mainstream christian views on science don't believe that god has a personal involvement in reproduction. They believe that god created life with intelligent design, but biology, chromosomes, eggs and sperm ... heck even natural selection and evolution are all real phenomenon that stem from god's original design.
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.)
WandererintheWilderness
12d 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
12d 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
14d 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
15d 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".
Depends how lifelike the robots are. You could imagine a world where people live surrounded by a Dunbar's-number's worth of robots (or VR simulations) that they can feel superior to, and scratch the itch that way. Or indeed, where we all become the omnipotent gods of our own little subjectively-infinite pocket universes. Not to say this is necessarily the outcome I root for or anything, but, could happen, conditional on sufficiently magic magic robots.
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