WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
'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
2hr 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
4hr ago
Of course, I’m not a Brit or Irishman or Scotsman,
Oh, I see; you're Welsh.
WandererintheWilderness
1d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
7d 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.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
your chances with her.
Your chances of what? Your chances of quick casual sex, maybe. I don't think it harms your chances of falling into deep, mutual love, though, which is best done on a solid foundation of honesty and friendship. You cannot build a soul-deep connection with another human being if, from day one, you're playing mind games where you treat them worse than you would a stranger in an effort to push their evopsych buttons. Those tactics may get you somewhere, but that "somewhere" will not be love.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
They are not so underdeveloped that they should be lacking this much in the sense and good judgment department.
I think the argument isn't really "this 20-year-old is so young he couldn't understand the severity of what he was doing". It's more about how we shouldn't punish his future 30-year-old self over what he did at 20, in the way that we would feel comfortable hampering a 40-year-old's freedom over crimes he committed at 30, because a 30-year-old is much less likely to repeat his 20-year-old self's mistakes than a 40-year-old is likely to repeat a 30-year-old's.
(I'm not impressed by the argument as it pertains to 20-year-olds, but I think that's the basis on which we don't try, say, 9-year-olds like adults. 9-year-olds are not inherently "lacking in the sense and good judgment department" in the sense of not being responsible for their own actions; they know that killing is wrong and they shouldn't do it. But you aren't in any realistic sense keeping people safe by keeping a 9-year-old murderer off the streets for forty years, the likelihood of someone committing murder aged 9 is basically apples and oranges to their likelihood of committing murder aged 40 unless genuine mental illness is involved.)
I don't really have a dog in the race of whether Aella counts - I was defending the usefulness of "sex worker" as a term, which I think of as a broader category than "prostitute", rather than a euphemism/politically-correct synonym for it. I think camgirls are a more salient example of "clearly a kind of sex worker but importantly different from a common-usage prostitute", while, as you say, the line between prostitutes and escorts/courtesans is always going to be blurry at best (especially as bog-standard prostitutes having business, legal, and self-esteem incentives to make themselves out to be closer to the escort end of the spectrum regardless of the factual truth).
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
A prostitute is etymologically someone who is 'put out there', offered up to the public. "Sex worker" is broader, encompassing camgirls and pornstars who don't, in fact, make themselves available to the man on the street. I suppose escorts may or may not go into the narrower "prostitute" box depending on how exclusive they are, and how much personal taste factors into their choice of client (I think this was the key difference historically between a prostitute and a courtesan, at least; a woman who presents herself as a prostitute is advertising that she will fuck anybody if the money's good, while a courtesan must to a degree be wooed if you want to get in with her, she'll just also expect you to pay for the privilege if she says yes).
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I considered typing "now-considered-to-be-offensive" or some other convolution, but ultimately deemed it unnecessary - I think it sort of goes without saying that "offensive term for [ethnicity]" means "term considered offensive by the sorts of people who care a great deal about what terms are offensive", particularly in the context of pointing out that their UK colleagues seemingly came to a different conclusion about the very same word.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies,
Hang on, I thought these were different - certainly in America, "Gypsy" is a now-offensive term for the Romani. I knew that it was apparently still kosher in the UK, but I assumed that it was used to refer to the same population. Does the British "Gypsy" refer to Irish Travellers rather than Romani? Is it an umbrella title encompassing both?
This is the means by which armies secure their borders given the current state of technology. But if an army had technology that was more effective than lethal force at protecting the nation's borders (eg, for the sake of argument, foolproof mind-control rays), it would use that instead of killing people. The tails eventually come apart. The better definition of the army's purpose is the one which correctly predicts their actions in all hypothetical situations, rather than the one which only works in the current context but breaks down outside of it, even if both definitions correctly predict armies' actions in the real world.
For example, you might think that an airline's purpose is to make money by conveying passengers from A to B as fast as possible, or you might think that an airline's purpose is to make money by burning jet fuel. In the real world, given the current state of aviation technology, conveying passengers from A to B is going to be done by burning jet fuel. But "conveying passengers from A to B" is a better statement of the airline's purpose than "burning jet fuel", not a euphemism for it, because if a technological breakthrough suddenly gave us a better, cheaper way of powering airplanes than traditional jet fuel, we would expect the companies to switch over in pursuit of more effectively conveying passengers, rather than giving up on conveying now-reluctant passengers and finding other reasons to set fire to jet fuel.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
I don't think so. In the event that an army has a choice between securing the nation's borders non-lethally with 100% effectiveness, or killing people, we should expect the army to pick the former strategy over the latter. Therefore "the army exists to secure the nation's borders" has information value as more than a euphemism.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
Materialists are making the logically consistent assumption that if humans are computers, then AI is guaranteed to surpass our capabilities in every respect. So they predict a future which may not be real if materialism isn't real, and are hallucinating that such a future has arrived out of a cycle of fear and a desire to get ahead of it.
I don't think this makes sense. You don't have to be a materialist to believe that AI is capable of surpassing human capabilities in all strategically relevant respects. It may very well be that only creatures with non-material souls can have qualia, but AI doesn't need qualia to destroy the world, and it certainly doesn't need qualia to wreck the economy in a mundane sense where it doesn't even go rogue.
You'd have to be not only a non-materialist, but someone who believes that the soul is doing a lot of the 'thinking' in a practical sense, for this to be otherwise - and I don't think that's a mainstream opinion even among dualists. But even then - even if you believe that a material machine can never replicate what happens in a human's mind when the human thinks about a problem, this is no guarantee that the AI can't arrive at a functional answer by different, possibly more efficient means.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
Old people can be comfortable if they earn it,
What do you mean by "earn it"? If you mean "earn it morally by contributing to society while they were able", sure. If you mean "literally personally earn the money they'll live off of in their elder years", we have a problem. There are plenty of working-class people who can work hard every day of their adult life, but for whom making enough savings to make a decent living on in their golden years is simply not a realistic outcome. Have these people "earned" a few decades of retirement? I say yes. I say society needs to offer them some guarantee of it if it wants young men to go into those lines of work, and they are necessary work. But that's going to look like a pension system.
(No, "get married and have kids" doesn't square this circle. Odds are their children will be living paycheck-to-paycheck too, the last thing Junior needs is another mouth to feed on his minimum wage.)
That's totally fair. I misinterpreted "trying to get people to do anything more than show up" as suggesting you were mad at people not actually doing the signposted activity, rather than people refusing to do their fair share of the admin/etc.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
anything more than show up
But surely that's exactly the point of third spaces. They aren't supposed to be activities you have to put effort into - the whole point of third spaces is to enable what, for lack of a better term, I'll call socially-acceptable indoor loitering. When the bar and the bowling alley are third spaces, you don't go to the bar to drink, and you don't go to the bowling alley to hone your skill at the game. If you want your board game meetup to fulfill that role, you need to stop worrying about whether the people who show up actually play board games. Otherwise you're just running a hobbyist group. Hobbies are socially valuable too, but they're a different thing.
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.
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