WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
2d 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
4d 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
8d 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.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Sure. But I never said you couldn't oppose pro-trans policies on moral grounds. I said that there had to be (in principle!) a level of evil from the other side such that you would deem the side with pro-trans policies to be the lesser evil, even if that evil did not affect you personally. Say, you're a brown-haired man with a brown-haired wife and children; Candidate A wants to trans children to the same extent that current Dems do; and Candidate B wants to torture all redheaded children to death but will leave your brown-haired children alone. I think you don't have to be a shrimp-loving utilitarian to admit that in such a hypothetical, Candidate B is more evil than Candidate A and you should therefore vote for Candidate A, even though B's evil wouldn't affect your family personally while A's lesser evil might.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
I mean, I think the issue here is the scatological content more than the AI-generated-ness.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
Why do you seemingly struggle to accept that is a moral principle, just one you disagree with? Not everyone is a universalist. Not everyone is a utilitarian. I would find it evil to put any number of people above your own children.
I suppose I struggle to reconcile this with having a concept of nation-wide politics at all. Politics isn't about how you feel you should act - it's about how you feel some guys in Washington ought to act (and the rest of the machinery of state with them). I can understand a deontological commitment to always put my own children first, but it seems absurd to judge the US government based on whether it specifically puts my literal children first.
So when I said "if you have moral principles at all" perhaps I should have specified "if you have moral principles by which you can judge the actions of strangers, and not just your own". That is, moral principles such that you can say what the right or wrong thing for Alice and Bob to do might be, in a hypothetical world where you yourself don't exist at all. In a democracy whose population is counted in the hundreds of millions and where your vote doesn't even rise to the level of a rounding error, if you take an interest in politics then I expect that this is because you have criteria in mind on how you feel the government "should" act, with or without you in the picture. I expect that you would still have an opinion on who 'should' win in 2028 even if you knew for a fact you'd be dead by then, along with everyone you know.
And I don't think this is exclusive to universalist utilitarians. I believe many (most?) deontological systems recognize that it is meaningful for an individual to ask what the right thing to do is for someone other than himself, and it is conceivable that what the individual feels to be his own duty will run afoul of others' equally-righteous duties. For example, maybe I conclude that it is my duty as a parent to put my child first no matter what, but also that it is the cops' duty to punish murderers no matter what, and if this ends in me being gunned down trying to protect my murderous son then so be it. Yes? And in that framework, one's opinion on large-scale politics feel like they concern how you believe cops (etc.) should act, not how you believe you should act. It needn't be incoherent to say "I believe it is the state' moral duty to put down murderers, although I also believe that if the day should ever come that my son commits murder and seeks shelter in my house, it will then be my duty to set myself against the state".
All of which said, I do recognize that someone might just not have any particular moral intuitions of this kind - might be genuinely completely neutral on what actions are taken where they do not impinge on one's personal sphere. Sure! But I don't know what someone like that is doing talking about politics. Their set of moral preferences are simply not apt to make useful conclusions about how to run a government.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
If people want to corral their opponents into internment camps that's not a Nazi problem, it's a political oppression problem
Yes, but if those people want to do that and kill all the Jews and align all of society behind a charismatic militaristic leader… and on top of all that they explicitly call themselves Nazis… then surely it would be weird not to call them Nazis? (Again, this is all an "if". I'm not saying that I think the Republican Party are especially heading in that direction. I certainly don't believe the YR chat logs show anything of the sort.)
Not even close. Please reread the comment thread. Here is how it went: first, Myron Gaines, in particular, was argued by the OP to be a Nazi due to his personal demonstrated antisemitism. Then, someone claimed that, due to his support for Palestine, Gaines's antisemitism should really be ascribed to a trend among Democrats, not to a trend among conservatives. It was in counter to this that we got onto the topic of proving Gaines is indeed a conservative. The point is not "Gaines is a conservative, therefore he's basically a Nazi". Everyone in the comment thread agreed that Gaines is a Nazi-sympathizing antisemite: the debate was between "Gaines is Nazi-ish and this reflects badly on conservatives because he is one" vs , or "Gaines is Nazi-ish but this says nothing whatsoever about conservatives because Gaines, as pro-Palestine Muslim whose antisemitism is downstream of that background, could as easily be argued to be D- as R-aligned".
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Well okay, but that's… not remotely what this thread has been about. This started out as an attempt on my part to find a circumstance in which you would deem a right-wing platform too morally heinous to support even if it would be advantageous to you personally. The Hitler-Khan administration would be the ones doing the killing, here. This is not about any kind of moral dilemma constructed by the Left, this is not meant to be an analogy for any particular current political question - it is about me probing the theoretical limits of your worldview, and wanting to confront whether you accept in principle that there could be a right-wing platform you would reject on moral grounds.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
I mean, quite plainly they mean "modern-day Hitler LARPers whose Hitler LARP will not stop short of actually killing people". If we suddenly had to deal with an exact Zodiac Killer copycat killing people, then it would be fair enough to describe this problem as "there's a new Zodiac Killer" even if the claim isn't that the actual geriatric 60s guy has come out of retirement. You may disagree with the factual question of whether the alt-right trolls who like to LARP as Nazis to trigger the wokes would in fact keep it up all the way to concentration camps given the chance. But supposing they did, describing that as a "Nazi problem" would be perfectly sensible whether or not they had a genuine, material line of descent from members of the original Nazi party.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
No, it makes one a conservative, which is what @magicalkittycat was addressing - ie Gaines's fault (should he be judged to be a Nazi on his individual merits) should be blamed on the Republicans and not the Dems.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
But a number of Nazi supporters in 1930 Germany would have voiced their support in term of "better them than the Bolsheviks", no? I don't think you can no-true-Scotsman a form of Nazi support away if it would rule out a plurality of actual 1930s Nazis.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
No.
…Are you sure? Would you literally send every human being on Earth to Hell if it meant saving your child, and your child alone? If the answer is yes, do you believe this is a moral position? (I could sympathize with feeling that if push came to shove you couldn't press the button. But I would regard this as a case of my personal affections overwhelming my conscience. I would, in the cold light of day, recognize that I was acting immorally, even if I could not help myself.)
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Well, for example, I have said a number of times that I'm against cancel culture. Sorry if that's a bit on the broad side, but I'm against it, it's wrong and it needs to stop. Much of my unfalsifiable-on-an-pseudonymous-forum putting-my-money-where-my-mouth-is has been in the realm of sticking up for free speech and trying to nip mob psychology in the bud, at my workplace and the like.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
No you can't. I get that you are really enamored with this high minded centrist/independent shtick. But electorally it fails 100% of the time, and most people have woken up that. (…) And I'll stand by that vote in the concentration camps because they got my 23&me results and saw I had 0.7% Jewish ancestry.
I feel like I'm not getting through here. I am not talking about what wins elections. I am talking about what is ethical. What is right. We do not live in a perfectly convenient world where doing the right thing will always leave you better off. A Christian will tell you that this is because you must wait until after death for your Reward, an atheist will tell you that this is because the world wasn't actually designed by a benevolent intelligence, but the point remains the same. I never asked you to imagine that President Hitler an VP Khan send you to a concentration camp: that is, again, smuggling your own personal welfare back into it. What 'm saying is: if you have moral principles at all, then surely, surely you recognize that there is some amount or degree of harm inflicted to random strangers that would outweigh the welfare of your child? That, no matter how much you want your child not to be transed, it would be evil of you to put material pursuit of that goal over the lives of ten million people you've never met and never will?
But I'm not even talking about elections, here. I'm talking about criticizing and denouncing evil in your Tribe. Under sufficiently gerrymandered assumptions you might still end up voting for the very people at issue as the lesser evil - but I would like to see some acknowledgement that there is evil here, and that this is a relevant consideration, separate from your personal welfare or even that of your kids.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
This is a non sequitur. No one's saying you can't oppose gender ideology. I am saying that you can oppose multiple evil things in multiple direction; that opposing gender ideology needn't entail that you never criticize other, unrelated evils, some of which might be to your right rather than to your left.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
I suppose it's wryly amusing that a conversation with a guy called Skeletor ended up at "well, okay, you got me, I'm evil. What are you going to do about it?".
Everything you just said also applies to you. If morality is not tit-for-tat, then you still have an obligation to police your own side
Which I do! I didn't emphasize the point because like, you have to take my word for it. I'm not going to self-doxx and I'm not important enough to make an observable difference on the general state of leftist discourse. But I happily acknowledge that I have a duty to push back against evil in my own Tribe. I have never claimed otherwise, and I do not claim the behavior of the Red Tribe affects this duty in any way. Red Tribers in this thread are the people who claimed that defection on the Blue Tribe's part freed them from any responsibility to oppose evil among their tribesmen, and that is the claim I sought to refute. That my own position on evil in my own Tribe reflected the values I espoused, I thought was obvious from context and didn't need to be spelled out.
I also want to emphasize that I am not saying "Red Tribers have a responsibility to repress fellow Red Tribers whom I, a Blue Triber, deem evil". I am saying "Red Tribers have a responsibility to repress fellow Red Tribers whom they consider evil by their own standards" - eg if you're Right-wing but consider slavery to be evil then you should be putting genuine effort into opposing slavery apologists on your own side. If you don't claim to consider slavery apologia evil, or if you don't think people currently accused of being slavery apologists are actually pro-slavery, then fine! Where I push back is when they say "sure, I agree slavery is evil and that there are pro-slavery crazies in the Red Tribe, but the Blue Tribe doesn't punish its equally-evil pro-assassination crazies so why should I lift a finger to stop my crazies?", which I think is a morally untenable, hypocritical stance.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
This seems like an argument that it would in fact have been ethical to assassinate the Wicked Witch. This is fair enough regarding the plot of the movie, but I don't think it really challenges my underlying point that there are circumstances where it is commonly understood that you can rejoice in someone's death without implying that you would have supported murdering them.
To get away from rulers, political actors, and indeed, any hatred being involved, I think a good illustration of this principle can be found in people with a religious objection to euthanasia. If some old person in terrible pain happens to pass away in the night, it would be perfectly natural for a staunchly anti-euthanasia Catholic relative of theirs to thank God for this merciful turn of events. Yet here, the whole point is that they wouldn't have found it acceptable to take action to speed it along. That's why it's such a relief to them when it happens anyway, through no 'fault' of their own. In the same way, I think it is coherent for someone who hated Charlie Kirk and felt his existence was net-negative for the world to say "although I obviously don't support actually murdering people who I wish were dead, the fact is that I wished he'd drop dead, so as a passive observer I'm glad it happened".
(Naturally other concerns apply in the case of cheering on an assassination - ie it might encourage more assassins, whereas expressing relief that a terminally ill senior citizen passed away in their sleep is not going to alter the rate at which it happens. But my point was narrower than "it's okay to cheer on Kirk's death", which in any case I don't actually believe myself; my point was "celebrating Kirk's death post facto should not be equated with support for actively assassinating people like him".)
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Yes, but the more apt analogy to the problem I had in mind is the temptation to commit war crimes that would increase your odds of victory. "Well the enemy have started torturing toddlers for information, so we might as well do the same thing" = "Well the Left aren't doing anything to rein in their evil loonies, so why should I lift a finger about evil loonies in my own tribe?". In both cases, ethics dictate that if you actually hold a moral belief that [torturing children in wrong]/[a given Tribe has a responsibility to rein in its crazies], you should hold fast to that principle even if your enemy violates it first and indeed, even if it places you at a material disadvantage in a given set of circumstances. Fair-weather principles are not principles at all. They're just norms.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
You seem to be begging the question that there is an objectively correct morality and deviating from the progressive racism violates that
None of what I've been saying has been about racism, or indeed any object-level Right vs Left issue. My objection is to the principle of basing one's politics exclusively on what will lead to one's personal comfort. That seems to be a textbook example of amoral behavior no matter what moral principles you subscribe to, assuming you have any at all. Sure, "support my own team" could be a moral position! But what @Skeletor posted was:
Since we now live in some kind of post-liberal racial spoils hellscape, I'll be voting for my own team, thanks.
And what bothers me about that is the "Since" clause, not the "I'll be voting for my own team" in a vacuum. It makes it sound rather as if he is voting in whichever direction will maximize his personal comfort at a given time, not in a principled way based on moral positions for which he would be prepared to make sacrifices to his own personal welfare. "I'll always vote for my team no matter what" would be a moral position. "It seems the outgroup has defected and it's a free-for-all, so I'm looking out for Number One" is not.
??? 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.)
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