WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
If I found out that Jimmy Savile had died under suspicious circumstances, I wouldn't go around saying 'how wonderful! the child-rapist is down in hell where he belongs!' but an internal 'good riddance, the world is better without him' would seem completely appropriate.
I agree, but I think the word "internal" is doing ~all of the work. What I was trying to gesture at with the "whatever he died of" paraphrase wasn't merely the "statement of the obvious" that you interpreted it as, but the line of argument that kicks the can on whether it was murder or not and says, "who cares if he was choked or died of a self-inflicted overdose, he was such a scumbag that Chauvin would have been doing everyone a favor even if it was murder and we should all look the other way". I see a fair bit of this among online rightists, including on the Motte, and I don't think it's unfair to parse it as tantamount to celebrating the alleged murder, even if its proponents carefully avoid endorsing the claim that it was murder, keeping their approval safely tethered to hypotheticals.
My view, therefore, is that expressing that sentiment publicly is unethical for the same consequentialist reason that loudly cheering on a political assassination is unethical. In either case, the problem is that it creates a climate in which potential future murderers are given reason to believe that they'll be hailed as heroes if they commit extrajudicial killings, just so long as the targets are sufficiently bad guys in the eyes of the public. I think this would very much apply to a hypothetical Jimmy Savile murderer. We might shed no tears for Savile as a person, knowing that he really was a child-raping monster; but we do not want to give trigger-happy would-be-heroes the impression that gunning down celebrities that they're totally sure are secretly pedophiles is something society approves of. For, uh, obvious reasons.
Celebrating Kirk's death could still have this effect even if he had been a privately horrible man whose widow was glad to be rid of him; celebrating Floyd's ostensible murder could have this effect whether or not Floyd was a victim of circumstances vs. an unrepentant bastard, and indeed, whether or not Chauvin actually, as a matter of fact, killed him. The only valid moral question to ask about people dancing on their respective graves is whether that celebration might motivate some other guy to take a shot at another politician; might motivate some other cop to finish off some other lowlife whom he feels is definitely irredeemable scum.
(But, as stated, although it's an important question to bear in mind in terms of how individuals choose to act, I don't think it's one whose impact could ever so great or direct as to make the grave-dancers 'as bad as the killers'/culpable for the deaths themselves in any meaningful sense.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I think that's the point. They wanted him to die, and they celebrated when he did.
…I think this is normal? Not great, but normal. Human nature has an irreducible element of spite and Schadenfreude; the fact that most people have people in the world whose guts they hate, news of whose sudden death would bring only elation - this is not some new pathology. It is not exclusive to the Left, it isn't exclusive to the United States, it's not even exclusive to the West. The mark of a civilized society is that we painstakingly sever the instinctive connection, in all those unruly ape minds, between "boy, will I be happy when Gurg finally bites it" and "I should make Gurg snuff it by throwing a big rock at him"; not the excision of the former attitude from the human heart, which no society has ever achieved.
Indeed, you mention "their own parents" as if it were some extreme of depravity, but I think children being relieved when unloved parents who disagreed with them about everything finally shuffle off their mortal coil is a much more universal phenomenon still than people being happy to hear that some minor outgroup celebrity has died. It isn't pretty, and I hasten to add that it's the furthest thing from how I think about my own family, whom I love very much. But it's only human, and the mere presence of this mindstate does not make a murderer.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done.
If you grant this principle, surely this clears the bar of "remotely comparable": both situations are comparable in that they involve people celebrating a perceived enemy's death even though this could be regarded as incentivizing wrongful deaths in the future. They may be very different in other respects, but that comparison still stands. And the fact remains that in neither case does it seem fair to jump from "this celebration is unwise" to "anyone insufficiently condemning the celebration retroactively shares blame for the wrongful death", which was my actual point.
There's more I could say with regards to the Floyd/Kirk comparison and the degree to which left and right talk past each other on these issues - and I can get into that if you'd want me to - but fundamentally they seem to be besides the point I was trying to make, which was simply "the-right-broadly is not responsible for Floyd and the-left-broadly is not responsible for Kirk, assigning blame that way would be crazy in either case", so I'm going to leave this reply at that unless prompted, in order to avoid burying said core point.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
none of them
I mean, for starters, some of us are against the death penalty even as applied to sane murderers.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder? I sympathize with the idea that celebrating an assassination should be taboo in a way that celebrating other kinds of death isn't - the possible second-order effects are obvious - but I think speaking in terms of collective guilt is a bridge and a half too far.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
white violence is extra bad because white men are evil
I think the point is more "feeling bad about violence against white men is superfluous, because white men are privileged".
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
They aren't real concerns at the nation-wide, environmental level. They can be very real concerns for the locals whose utilities get diverted.
I'll note that I'm not the OP, and also that I didn't mean that slavery being legal entailed that raping slaves must have been legal, I was merely making explicit Opt-out's apparent factual claim that this was so with American slavery pre-1865.
Quickly looking into it, the situation does seem to have been more complex, and unsurprisingly varied from state to state. When it comes to white masters raping their black slaves, no state seems to have been so crass as to explicitly allow it in law, even if it was a widespread practice. That being said, I did find this 1850s Mississippi Supreme Court case which explicitly ruled that "the crime of rape does not exist in this state between African slaves" as "their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners". This seems to decriminalize master-on-slave rape only by implication, but it does at the very least explicitly legalize slave-on-slave rape, so it was sometimes legal to rape slaves.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
1865 was the Thirteenth Amendment. So long as slavery was legal, it was legal to rape slaves.
He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that.
This seems like a strange claim. Three-year-olds lie to themselves when they've been naughty. I agree with @urquan that it's an extremely basic, natural human reaction to a feeling of guilt, not some sophisticated cognitive contortion that only superior minds can master. If anything, I'd say that idiots lie to themselves more thoroughly and more successfully than midwits and geniuses - less cognitive bandwidth means less lingering self-doubt about one's own bullshit, once swallowed.
These aren't the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!
Why not? It all depends on where he's built the mental wall. One form of denial is "I never raped a woman at knifepoint, of course not, it's not true, you're lying", but another form, which is just as psychologically soothing, just not legally helpful, is "it's an animal instinct, I couldn't control myself, it's not that I'm a mean person who wants the girl to suffer, I just literally couldn't think about that until I got my nut out". Many serial killers, never mind rapists, rationalized their behavior to themselves in this way - not by lying to themselves about what they were doing, but lying to themselves about how much agency they had in choosing to do it.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I agree; but the idea that British bureaucrats would carefully overthink the conjugation of the modal verbs in a piece of official paperwork, on the other hand, isn't so implausible.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Guardianship exists, in theory, in the interest of the child/disabled person. Enslavement definitionally exists to benefit the slaveholder. This isn't to say that some system of slavery can't be worked out that also gives guardianship-like benefits to the slave - or that guardians don't often take advantage of their charges in some way - but let's just say that as much as guadianship isn't perfect, the historical record viz. slaveholders prioritizing their slaves' welfare and flourishing over their profit margins really isn't great.
That's also true. You can probably play infinite recursion with this, and plausibly you're right that it would be better to leave it at "You will" than start playing the triple-bluff game. I just sort of got the impression that you were accusing the authors of the booklet of wanting to soften the threat - that you interpreted them as saying "well, if you're naughty, we might have to expel you, although don't worry, we might choose to be lenient" - and I wanted to make the point that this was not necessarily the intention behind the "could"s.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
And no one in Europe aside from Ukrainians and Russians is real asylum seeker.
That's rather my point (I mean, I'd say there are a few others e.g. Uyghurs, but same difference). As someone who does believe in the moral duty to aid genuine asylum seekers, I dislike the fact that the "asylum seeker" category has been turned into "immigrant 2.0" and massively overstrained. I would like it to get its old meaning back. Therefore, I approve of official documents which acknowledge that coexisting with asylum seekers is not necessarily comfortable; that when and if we choose to grant that status, we do it out of ethical duty, not because we are mistaking the asylum seekers for swell, prosocial immigrants whom we'd love to see put down roots once the crisis is over. Asking if asylum-seekers are a good fit for Western values is a category error, and pretending that they must be before we can let them in is precisely the overreach that lets asylum-seekers trade on public goodwill to turn into permanent residents.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide?
My point is that they should be - that this is what the legal category "asylum seeker" is supposed to be for - and the booklet makes sense in that context. To the extent that the category has been artificially expanded in a way that makes the booklet look weird, it's the expansion that is to blame, not the booklet.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
My only complaint is that the "could"s in the list should be replaced with "will"s.
Charitably, this could be an attempt to acknowledge the reality of imperfect enforcement from the word go so as not to come across as all bark and no bite later. i.e. a way to head off reasoning of the form "Hur hur, the fancy booklet said that if anyone has sex with a sleeping woman he will go to jail, but my cousin Ahmed did that last month and totally got away with it, can't fool me with empty threats" by saying upfront that it's a risk you incur, not an infallible process.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I for one was astounded that no one had dared to pull one of the many threads dangling from Arday's vast spider-on-amphetamine-ish web of lies
I mean, I have to think a great many people realized his autobiographical tall tales were bullshit, but treated them as just that - the tall tales of an eccentric egotist, which academia isn't short on. Without evidence of his track record of actual plagiarism, I don't know that lying about being a world-class marathon runner should be a fireable offense for a humanities professor - and I don't find it implausible that most people honestly never made the jump from "this eccentric scholar is obviously bullshitting about his athletic abilities (etc.)" to "wait, could it be he's lying about his actual scholarly work as well?". Not a great reflection on the rationality of the average human being, either, but not implausible. There's a group mentality at work, if everybody treats this guy as a respected authority in his field, then what's more plausible: he's a slightly crazy genius whose quirk is telling absurd tall tales, or he's a laughably obvious fraud and you're the only one who's noticed? Past a certain threshold the problem becomes self-sustaining. Of course, I don't doubt that people being afraid to seem racist by calling him out was a factor, especially at the start to get past the threshold in question. But I don't think it was necessarily the only force at play, nor the most potent by the late stage at which the bubble was finally popped.
"Not working" how? The alternative viewpoint is that shooting at the Strait is literally the thing we care about, the one thing we want them to stop doing, and so long as they get to keep doing it then we're losing.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.
Yes, but most old-school Forums - and, of course, subreddits - are modded by volunteer users, not by the domain holder. This would be the equivalent of specific Facebook groups policing themselves, as distinct from Facebook itself stepping in. (I suppose all it would take for even the Motte itself to comply with such a paradigm would be for Zorba to agree not to take any conventional mod actions, and I don't think he makes a habit of it anyway.)
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this
I don't think FtttG was saying it ought to be repealed, merely that it ought not to apply to any platforms that censor content on particular topics.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
Ah. I understand what you meant, now - you're analogizing the "good" in "good genes" with the "good" in "good investment". I don't think people who use of "good genes" colloquially would define "good" in this context as "contingently socioeconomically valuable genes", which is a jarringly cynical way of seeing the world. I don't think that a woman faux-modestly boasting "Guess I just have good genes" when complimented on her beauty is saying "My genes make me a valuable market object in the society I live in". I think what she has in mind is some vague underlying belief in objective beauty standards. I think she would say that her genes would still be "good genes", and her looks "good looks", on a desert island. That's the assumption I've been arguing under. Perhaps you think the average American in 2026 is both more clued-in to the fundamental subjectivity of all aesthetic judgements and more ruthlessly mercantile in how they relate to the world around them, but if so, that's the crux of our disagreement/misunderstanding. I think that when people who joke about "good genes" they are flirting with an unexamined belief in an objective value system, and that belief in such a value system is potentially morally hazardous. If you think that they aren't doing that in the first place, fine.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
Their arguments were legible and worked for thousands of years. (…) I'm not sure we've established that secular liberal individualism is so right that failing to meet its standards means you don't have an actual point.
I mean, we can get into the whole "God does not, as a matter of fact, exist" argument, but I don't know that this is a good use of anybody's time. Inevitably an argument that relies on the existence of the Christian God is going to be null and void when levied against people who are pretty sure that there's no such varmint, never mind the circularity of "X is wrong because God says so".
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce traits which are considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population – traits that a huge proportion of the population would either like to have for themselves, or would like their romantic partner to have. A reasonable compression of the previous sentence is "Sydney Sweeney has good genes".
I don't think this works with other forms of subjective taste. Most people like M&Ms better than they like aged Shropshire Blue - would pick the M&Ms over the cheese if given a choice of a free snack - but I don't think "M&Ms are better than Shropshire Blue" is a reasonable compression of that statistical fact, let alone "M&Ms are good snacks (and Shropshire Blue isn't)". This is what I mean when I say that I value diversity.
I feel very keenly that the world would be a worse, duller place if everybody conformed to bog-standard majority tastes - if nobody liked blue cheese. There's nothing wrong with sophisticated gastronomy being a niche taste, there's nothing wrong with most people finding Sydney Sweeney to be the pinnacle of attractiveness, but the moment you try to turn a subjective trend into a normative statement, you necessarily imply that in some sense, people who aren't attracted to Sydney Sweenney are in some objective sense "wrong", that it would make more sense if everybody was into Sydney Sweeney and M&Ms. That way does not necessarily lie Auschwitz, but accepting such a precept does lead in a very direct sense to envisioning a utopia as a conformist, monotonous Brave New World-type society that massively curtails the wonderful variety of possible human experience.
The point, though, is that Dolly Parton's public persona was also a camp, over-the-top hyperfeminine caricature of a normal woman.
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