WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Eh, I don't know. It depends on the religion and how they think of God, but if I believe that God exists and serving Him is important then it doesn't seem especially surprising for there to be more-or-less-meaningless rules which I am encouraged to follow as a demonstration of loyalty. Compare patriotism - it doesn't inherently matter what I do with a square bit of stripy cloth, but if I want to be a Good Citizen then I still shouldn't disrespect the Flag.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
In the one, true, Catholic faith, God's laws are not arbitrary. They may be impossible to fully comprehend in our limited mortal brains and may, very frequently, be exceedingly frustrating. They are not, however, arbitrary.
Maybe this is the case in Catholicism; clearly it wasn't the case in Lewis's understanding of Anglicanism. The idea is also, of course, pretty mainstream in Judaism. I never meant to claim that God's laws are always viewed as arbitrary in all religions, which would be silly, only that there are cases where we can reasonably expect some religious people to distinguish between things they do out of conscience, and things they do out of faith alone; and that euthanasia might be one of them; and that this may be what the interviewer had in mind in that particular instance.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Funny how soon it morphed into "bake the cake, bigot!"
This is not in fact a cosmically-preordained consequence of legalizing gay marriage.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
I think this debate would go rather better if you told me.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
and such was grounds for an annulment
If requested - but it did not, to my knowledge, equal an annulment in the sense of an infertile marriage being deemed to have no legal value. I've never heard of a third party suing to break up a couple's marriage against their will by seeking to prove that one or both of them were infertile. (I'd be genuinely curious to know if that did ever happen anywhere, but even if it did, I would remain skeptical that this was a broadly-understood principle as opposed to a weird legal loophole.)
That said, if you want to redefine modern marriage to exclude people who are provably infertile in advance, I'm all for it.
This is at least coherent, and I would find it more respectable than the status quo ante. That being said, I doubt you'd get much of a constituency for it even among normie conservatives. It smacks of Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering, and at the human level it'd be fundamentally counterintuitive to say that infertile people can't get married even though people who become infertile can trivially stay married.
(And the same standard would, of course, raise further questions. With rapid advancement in medical science, how definitively can we assert that a currently infertile couple won't be able to use IVF in 10 years using some funky CRISPR stem-cell wizardry? But then by the same token, can we really rule out IVF for homosexual couples as a real possibility within the lifetimes of gay couples currently seeking marriage? For lesbians at least, to set aside the surrogacy problem for M/M couples.)
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere on the thread, that argument is seemingly defeated by any system which allows provably infertile people to marry one another. If you allow that, then you've allowed the expansion of the right to marry to inevitably-childless couples, and withholding it from homosexual couples is just haggling over price.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Not Thomas, but I felt your post was callous and flippant, and this is because I regard suicidal impulses as a mental illness, not an action which it is worth criticizing at the level of rational debate. It's a "stop hitting yourself!"-level error - suicidality is an altered state of consciousness, and suicide survivors coming out of it very often testify that they're immediately aghast at what they experienced. ("What was I thinking?") You may as well tell a schizophrenic that hearing voices is irrational, or a junkie that whatever he ingested he should just stop tripping, as a pure exercise of will, because rationally, he knows fnords don't exist.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Is "guilt and self-hatred" the expected mechanic here? I thought the story, considered as an account of the real events, was so obviously slanderous that if the guy had killed himself over it, the claim must be that he had killed himself in despair over being wrongfully accused by everyone in his life despite knowing himself to be innocent. The idea that he might take the caricature to heart seems much more bizarre.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Interestingly, many states had laws on the books that some people couldn't marry unless they showed that they were infertile. Namely, close relatives.
This has been trod over time and time again, but people still draw on this silly argument.
I don't follow how the first sentence leads to the second.
Do not impose your atheistic beliefs on people who do not share them.
No one's asking religious people who are against gay marriage to get gay-married against their will.
as if the interviewer thinks that people of faith ought to somehow divorce their entire worldview from their decision-making process
Charitably, the interviewer may have been thinking of the notion that some divine commandments as more law than morality - i.e. "arbitrary" rules that Christians must obey to show obedience to the Lord, but which a moral philosopher could not conclude ought to be forbidden from first principles if God had not specifically forbidden them. C.S. Lewis once wrote to a girl that she should not feel guilty for euthanizing her ailing pet cat but rather "rejoice that God's law allows [her] to extend to [the cat] that last mercy which we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans". If this is how one thinks of the Christian ban on euthanasia, then it makes sense to say "sure, as a Christian, your faith forbids you from performing euthanasia; but surely your conscience still allows you to see that had God not forbidden it euthanasia would be a good thing?".
And prima facie it is not absurd to go even further and tell a Christian "it makes no sense for you to ban us atheists and heathens from performing euthanasia, unless you are also trying to forcibly convert us; you are barred from performing it for much the same reason that Jews are banned from eating pork, and however seriously you take that interdict, there is no reason why it should translate into trying to force the same interdiction on people who don't inwardly share your faith".
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
If you have to ask the question you're not great.
That may be - though is it? the annals of art history are riddled with self-hating geniuses who had to be physically restrained from burning their own manuscripts - but the more relevant problem seems to be false positives. Many mediocre, as-yet-unpublished artists believe themselves to be great and never question it.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
I was thinking more of magicalkittycat and wanderinginthewilderness and a few others, newish accounts who get so deeply concerned about civility and norms violations from the right
I do not acknowledge this as an accurate summary of my positions. Even if I did, I don't see what Jay Jones's texts have to do with "civility" and "norms violation" - they are, in fact, leaked texts, not public statements. As for "struggling to name a single example" of bad behavior on the Left, I don't know how many times I have to reply that I am against cancel culture. Like, generally. Point me to any example of a harassment campaign against a random private citizen based on their politics, I am going to be against that. But again, I wouldn't term the substance of my objections "concern about civility and norms violations". I care about the fact that such methods are wrong and harmful, not that they are indecorous in some kind of abstract way.
Incidentally, I really don't care, but it's Wanderer, not Wandering.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms
I think the key sticking point is that they will not tolerate such enclaves being trusted with children's education. A enclave of committed adults is free association; but an enclave which raises children on its doctrines is an anti-liberal cult which must be destroyed for the preservation of democracy. I think "should parents be free to educate their children as they see fit" might be one of the biggest under-discussed scissor statements in modern politics, where one side views the idea as self-evidently illiberal and abusive, and the other views opposition to the principle as self-evidently tyrannical and unnatural.
I think this is thoughtlessness on the part of the author rather than malice. She borrowed lifelike details from a real person and ascribed them to a villain, not to slander the template, but simply to make her story more realistic - never stopping to weigh the potential impact on the model at all. This is nothing new - Ian Fleming used to give James Bond villains the names of random people he'd gone to school with. (I remember reading that the real-life Blofeld family, which includes a popular children's books writer, remain quite miffed to this day that their name has become synonymous in popular culture with "evil Easter European mastermind stroking a white cat on a swivel chair".)
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
and surely, in the age of robotics, tasers and $50 HD CCTV we could easily shut down all physical forms of prisoner-on-prisoner violence in no time if a critical mass of people didn't think it's all part of the punishment.
I'm personally always banging this drum, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that everyone who opposes such measures actively supports the existence of prisoner-on-prisoner violence as part of the punishment. Some do, but I think a great number of them simply feel that criminals aren't worth the expense of the measures that would be necessary to protect them, ie they find the existence of prison rape distasteful in principle and would rather it didn't happen, but don't think honest men's tax dollars should go into preventing it when there are worthier causes out there.
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
Why?
If nothing else, the heartstrings-tugging about Palestinians has heavily focused on the plight of Palestinian children, who cannot be held responsible for the beliefs of their parents.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
There's deterrence to consider. Plausibly, fewer terrorist plots will get started in the first place if there's common knowledge that the FBI is constantly busting even very minor groups, than in a counterfactual world where that fact doesn't get publicized.
hideous mug
??? She's fairly attractive as political bit-players go. Not Hollywood-actress attractive, but come on now. (Certainly she has the kind of pleasant, genuine-seeming smile that Kamala Harris could only dream of.)
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
Of course, attacking someone who is openly carrying is also a Darwin Awards move
Not if you believe that the armed party was at high risk of killing an innocent person in the near future unless you intervened, and are choosing to risk your own life on a heroic attempt to stop them before they get that far. I would guess that this is what was going in in Gannon's head: he assumed that the only reason someone would bring a gun to such a situation would be that they planned to kill someone, and he fancied himself a hero. This is dumb, bordering on genuine paranoia, but if you take the assumption for granted then tackling the gunman is no "dumber" than any other desperate heroic act by an ordinary man.
My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. (…) I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.
I don't think that's a very good definition, especially if we're trying to apply it to non-sapient creatures. In the first place, I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.
And in the second place, it would mean that the exact same mistreatment could be torture or not-torture depending on the victim's will to live. Without tipping all the way over into suicidal, this is clearly something that varies from individual to individual. Some might have a very strong will to live; others might put one foot in front of the other mostly as the path of least resistance and wouldn't fight very hard if their life was in jeopardy. If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me.
This isn't to say I necessarily want to die on the hill that Piker's treatment of his dog qualifies as torture. But "would the dog rather be dead than experience this treatment" seems far too high a bar assuming it's even applicable to a canine mind. (I will clarify that to the extent I think it might be in the realm of torture, I am very much talking about the compounding effect of "being forced to sit still for hours on end under threat of painful shocks", where the constant stress and enrichment-starvation are part of it as much as the shocks themselves. I certainly wouldn't argue that shocking a dog to house-train it would qualify as torture.)
In this case, I don't even think we should be worried* He wasn't shocking the dog for fun, he was trying to make his property stay in the right place for his livestream
Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of. I don't think there's much of a leap from that to suspecting that he also thinks of the humans in his life as tools to be used for personal advancement, rather than people with inherent value and dignity.
(It is of course possible to straight-up believe that animals lack qualia and/or moral standing without being a psychopath in one's relationship to other humans - hence the teddy bear - but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking.)
WandererintheWilderness
23d ago
I'm not talking about Indians working remotely from India, but Indians moving to the US for work
Ah. In that case I don't entirely disagree (though you could still gesture at citizens having to pay taxes etc. that non-naturalized immigrants don't have to deal with), but I hope you understand the confusion given that you were making this argument seemingly in reply to a sentence which began with "offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world".
I truthfully do not understand why this complaint is illegitimate for an unemployed cashier with delusions of grandeur, but why I'm supposed to take it seriously when an unemployed software dev makes it
Purchasing power is the missing link here. Stuff in India is cheaper. It's not that the American software dev demands a higher living standard than the Indian ones settle for, it's that rent, taxes, etc. are more expensive for the American one than the Indian one, so if he settled for the same gross wages he'd wind up much worse off. The only way for him to compete would be to move to India as well.
It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison
I think moral intuitions on this point differ pretty widely. A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder. The idea that even if you intend to kill an animal, you should at least put it out of its misery quickly rather than let it suffer, is old and widespread; we typically recognize that a kid pulling the wings off flies is doing something wrong and perhaps concerning, whereas we would think nothing of that kid swatting the fly altogether. And this applies to humans, too. At an instinctive level I would be much more creeped out to learn that a guy I was about to shake hands with had once been a torturer, than to learn he'd shot someone dead. A good man might kill for a variety of contextual reasons, but outside of specific thought experiments about hidden bombs, torture's just wrong, and someone who practices it probably has something wrong with them.
So I don't think it's incoherent or even surprising for someone to object to the mistreatment of dogs while still eating meat. (Now, if they're morally consistent, such a person should also care about battery farming and other 'inhumane' practices. But I think a lot of people do insofar as they can bear to think about those things; if they don't act on this belief, it's out of moral cowardice, not a lack of theoretical opposition.) And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here. Even if we think of animals as flesh automatons who don't suffer in a morally relevant sense - even then, it would lower my opinion of someone to learn they'd torture a dog, for much the same reason that it would lower my opinion of someone to learn that they have a hobby of ripping teddy bears apart with their teeth. It makes me instinctively suspect that something about their capacity to experience empathy is broken, in a way that makes them untrustworthy in terms of how they'll treat actual sentient humans.
WandererintheWilderness
28d ago
This is a reasonable take, but it seems to me that if this is the rationale then it would be fairer to just criminalize destruction of evidence in itself, as a separate charge, and put a harsh punishment on that, without claiming that it impacts the verdict in the murder case itself.
I'll note that I'm not treating it as a debate to be won but as a debate whose shared purpose is to arrive at the truth.
But alright - humoring you: I don't, in fact, believe that marriage laws historically existed as social-engineering policies intended to encourage the creation of heterosexual families. As a broad simplification, I think that a critical mass of a given human population will be inclined to pair up into heterosexual households anyway, and the law eventually started keeping track of who's shacked up with who for a variety of administrative purposes (like settling inheritance disputes between a bereaved partner and the blood family of the deceased).
Only at a secondary stage did social engineers and moralizing busybodies realize that, once legal marriage became the norm, they could gatekeep it as a way to police who fucked whom and on what terms, whether based on their subjective ick-factors, or on their clever notions about the greater good of the nation. "By default any man/woman pair who ask for it can be legally married, but we will deny it to couples that could produce inbred children with defects in the hope that that'll make them give up on fucking one another at all" is a policy you get if you start from "everyone who's liable to shack up together in practice should get a rubber-stamped piece of paper regularizing that status", and only secondarily try to prevent unions that will be actively deleterious to society. I don't think it's a policy you get if you start from "we need to encourage fertile heterosexuals to shack up and make babies and raise them to adulthood" and come up with marriage licenses as an incentive, because if "number of fertile families" is your success metric rather than "number of people who'd have fucked anyway whose status is now regularized", it would be much cleaner to simply ban all potentially-inbreeding cousins from marrying than to carve out exceptions for infertile cousins.
(To be clear, I am making a kind of Rousseau or Thomas Hobbes "deriving the current state of affairs from a frictionless spherical state of nature" argument, not historical claims about a real sequence of events. This is only a model. But I think it's a model with greater explanatory power than "marriage was invented to boost demographics".)
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