YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I mean the concept might be foreign to you but you just invoked it. The "Should" is saying you expect me to feel sympathetic. It is prescriptive. You believe I owe sympathy in this situation. You insist that if I don’t sympathize, that reveals a deficiency in me. That means you are treating sympathy as an obligation, just in moral rather than transactional terms. My emotional framework is different than yours, you and I feel sympathy for different things and different causes but you want me to work in your emotional framework, rather than accept my own. It's no different than what my lefty friends do, I reject it here as much as I reject it there.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
The downsides of policy are not evenly felt by the population, so it was, "Guy who had never suffered the bad effects of his policy tells us that the problems with his policy are tolerable."
Maybe I got too in the weeds, but this is a succinct summary of my stance with an added spice that lefties do it too and as such I have an dislike towards people who advocate for policies they will never have to suffer the effects of.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
he simply pointed out the crux that placed them at an impasse
Having been in discussions like this before, this is many times just that rhetorical trick. It often involves subtly strawmanning their argument and the connecting it to some disfavorable idea. You essentially create this gordian knot and that demand they untie it despite it not really being their argument in the first place.
Since he clips most of his stuff, if you find some I will watch it to be proven wrong.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
Nobody ever 'admits they were wrong' in a standard internet-style debate.
And I find that state of affairs deeply depressing and not at all worthy of praise. I don't think just because there is mud we should lionize the pig that goes and rolls in it.
And I think his main strength was simply demonstrating to College students, who otherwise feel like they're surrounded by peers who believe one thing and are pressured to play alone
I too was once a right of center college student among a fairly lefty student body, I don't think watching some agitator coming to my school ever made me feel a release of pressure. Because it was never just an intellectual debate, they always smuggled their own worldview in and tried to assert it was correct. Ie. Peterson: "We need to think about the boys, and how they need to follow traditional gender roles(smuggled assertion) It was like trading one oppressor for another.
That... is not what Sacha Baron Cohen is achieving with his work.
I mean his whole lifestyle was funded by him going out and essentially mocking the intellectually disabled. He dunks on his outgroups, clips it and sells it to his ingroup for laughs and fame. This is Sacha Baron Cohen's whole schtick too. Calling it some higher calling of opening the minds of young kids is just the in-group party line to hide the stink of mud.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I think martyrdom generally requires you to willingly be killed for your beliefs. Staring in the face of death for your beliefs and choosing to accept it, is an honorable and noble decision. That creates a powerful symbol. A political agitator being killed by someone who disagrees with them is frankly human politics as usual (in the grand sense). We are a nasty species with a penchant for killing other humans for being outside our tribe.
Calling that state of affairs a lie is just raw unfettered denial of the human experience.
I think the calling into question whether Kirk was a Cynical Propagandist/Political Agitator vs a Noble Truth-seeker is fair game. Doing so is not denying any human experience. And if the truth laid bare is still enough to rouse a tribe to hero-ify than that is fair game too and better for it.
But the one guy who did so enough to talk publicly to the other side
You see talk, I see preach and mock. I see a young priest going among the disbelievers not to understand and find common ground but to convert, mock, and vilify and derive popularity and monetary compensation for his efforts. I don't think such base motivations are worthy of calling it martyrdom and it makes a mockery of that very human experience.
The debate is over. We all lose.
Yes we do.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
What outgroup am I booing? I'm booing Faceh specifically for his lack of charity and the fact that he probably can put the shoes on the other foot but is choosing to just be a partisan.
This makes no sense as a steelman. Kirk does not represent a a detraction from the truth so great, any concept ofbit goes out the window. Anyone who claims so would have to be even more diaguated by academia, the mainstream media, not to mention the heaps upon heaps of influencers they follow themselves.
This entire thread is filled was counter points, Kirk was not some virtuous truth-seeker. He was to quote Dase: "a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy". Glazing him as a truthseeker such is sufficiently large enough departure to be called out. It would be like calling Beria, "just an investigative journalist trying to bring to light all the evildoers" Calling out that calling out as some sort of lefty bootlicking fanfiction is very uncharitable. The steelman absolutely is that that anyone calling into question Kirk's virtue are doing the mirror behavior of people on the right who called out the leftist propaganda.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I'm going to push back on the obey/believe or die spectrum. Communist Russian didn't require you to believe unless you were a party member, they just wanted you to obey. Same for Commie China. Nazi germany clearly wanted you to obey and be the right race or die.
notable exception of some regimes going after minority targets.
This is a pretty big exception in that the most common culturally accepted example of right wing oppression killed 6 million people based on their minority status. I don't know enough about Pol Pot/Cambodia to make the distinction of how much they wanted you to believe vs obey.
While it is true that some of this is probably true because of new social technologies generated by things like social media, it was safer in the religious days with the possible exception of a few minorities.
Again I disagree, somehow the oppressive elements run by the religious majority isn't classified by you as a "believe" categorization feels biased as hell. Pretty much every other oppressive religious government (Iranian Theocracy?) requires your belief. I'm not sure why the rosy tinted glasses about an oppressive Christian government. Also forgive me for not feeling it was safer that you could get fired/ostracized from your community for playing bloodly Dungeons and Dragons...
In contrast these days you have a much, much, MUCH larger group of society that is being oppressed...or at least feels that way.
I know you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed, and honestly I imagine the lefties still feel the cultural scars of the religious rights oppression. I don't feel that the religious right has shown any evidence of having learned from this experience and that if they return to power they will somehow say: "Let's put the super weapons back in the box, we learned that being an oppressive majority was not fun for the oppressed and have decided to be better this time around" So the lefties pretty much need to maintain power unless they want to be "killed for buttering the toast on the wrong side"
I personally prefer my tribe to do the oppressing from now on. We can call it the "Shut up, Grill and be an adult, or Die" oppression.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
No offense but following this:
That so many of them are wedging their shoe firmly in the back of their throat, thus making the point stronger is kind of a natural outcome of their mindsets.
with "/speculation" is pretty much the rhetorical equivalent of being an asshole to someone and then saying "JK!!" I think the subtext(is it even subtext??) is really clear that you don't think much of your political opponents and you can't come up with a compelling reason that they don't feel Kirk is worthy of the lionization he is receiving.
The left isn't very committed to being the party of 'truth' right now, and seems damn happy with constructing an alternate reality for themselves
Sounds like the right has the perfect moment to position themselves as the party of 'truth'. Yet here they are proving that it was only ever superficial and the rest of us are stuck with two dominant tribes that have no virtue.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I'm confused, do you think I'm pro political assassination? I detailed my stance farther up if in a spin-off of the parent chain if you are interested.
I feel like if we dig through history for some ideological firebrands, we definitely could find some that were killed for their speech. And a historical consensus that is mostly ambivalent about their deaths.
I mean, you have Sacha Baron Cohen, he goes into right-leaning spaces... but he's doing it explicitly to mock and parodize them, not to have dialogue.
Is this not what Kirk was doing? He got popular from doing dunk videos mocking and parodizing leftists. He wasn't going to campuses to engage in some sort of virtue-find-the-truth-discourse. He was a debate bro/arguments-are-soldiers type who would never have admitted he was wrong. There was always some gotcha or rhetorical trick to dunk on his opponents and end the debate. Has he ever, on screen, in these debates admitted he was wrong, or that he didn't have the answer? I'd love to see evidence to that effect.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
This so so boo outgroup I'm shocked it doesn't run afoul of the rules. Have some charity especially when you are going around demanding it from others.
The steelman answer is the right has spent the last half-decade claiming they are the party of "Truth" telling, that these lefties want to lie to you and silence you when you try to speak up. Now the right is committed to glazing Kirk and any concept of the "Truth" is out the window, and the right wants to silence you when you speak up. The "moderate" lefties are probably doing the same exact thing the "moderate" righties were doing.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
Such an action is toxic to the norms of discourse that is fundamental to a free, democratic society. They should be caught, tried by a jury of their peers, and put to death.
However at what point does one person's political assassination become another person's freedom fighter?
This doesn't at all mean him pulling the short straw and the risk coming due isn't tragic as he acknowledged in his comment.
Sure it is tragic, but it doesn't mean he is owed sympathy. And the lack of that sympathy doesn't make people sociopaths any more than a lack of sympathy for illegal immigrant mothers being pulled from their homes and deported, makes other people sociopaths.
I am completely unsympathetic to both appeals for sympathy and cries of sociopathy at ones outgroup.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I mean, the 80s is half a lifetime away. The right wing that existed then doesn't exist today, and the lineage is rather thin as well
I mean fair but also there's definitely enough Christian conservatives on this forum advocating for a return to Christian morality even if they only make up a minority of the Right. And that's even before we get into the dissident rightists. Different flavors, but I imagine the feeling of being oppressed for having a different morality than them will be the same. I think the cultural memetic scars are also much longer lasting.
The left probably doesn't feel like they are deliberately oppressing FC. It's that C.S. Lewis quote all over. They feel they are freeing the people FC's tribe were oppressing. And if a few "bigots" need to be stomped on then so be it. I agree that they aren't deriving power from it directly but they are flexing that power, and to quote some Fantasy/Sci-fi Author I can't remember (Our that my memory invented: "Power is alive and it seeks those who will wield it, those it can corrupt to increase the power, so that they may wield it better. Power always grows in the hands of tyrants" Power is an egregor, and all entities exist to perpetuate their own growth and existence. The power they are flexing, that we feel oppressed by, will just be taken up by who ever replaces them. You can see that with the Rights return to cancel culture. After being affected by it for 2 decades, is the answer "Lets put the superweapon back in the box" no its "lets turn it on our enemies in our brief moment of power"
we're just two groups killing each other over whether bread should be buttered on top or on the bottom.
I like this phrase I'm stealing it. I despair that it will ever be so.
Not sure I want to wade into the discussion about the merit of the lefts vs rights values, too nebulous for me.
Let's entertain a hypothetical, some law gets passed that says "Saying the Democratically elected President has no clothes is now illegal punishable by jail time" I say the President has no clothes. Cops show up outside my house. I refuse to let them enter. What do they do?
In your world the distinction is that when they bust down my door and take me to jail they are the only ones inflicting violence, the law is not violent even though it backed up its authority with the social-derived power to inflict violence as an enforcement mechanism. I obviously disagree. I can infer the causality of that law and directly hold the people who proposed, lobbied, agitated for, etc. responsible for attempting to use the state's power to enforce violence for their own ends.
I feel like your rebuttal fails to understand the social reality of laws and how they are enforced. Can someone break the law and ignore the consequences? Governments that allow their power to be ignored don't survive.
The whole libertarian argument is farcical because those libertarians want the creature comforts that society provides them without wanting to pay for them. By living in society you agree to the implicit social contract. You are welcome to reject the contract and go live in a lawless place. Obviously since societies are land based, they tend to lay claim to all the land and its in their best interest to remove game-theoretical defectors.
That is (at best) unintentionally misleading, and (more often) an attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand to try to get people to accept a point they never would if you made it straight out.
idk what slight of hand you think I am doing. My explicit point is that governments are formed on the basis of a monopoly on violence and social consensus (for democratic systems) and their authority is derived from those basses. Thus any action by the government to enforce a law carries an implicit threat of violence against lawbreakers. I am open to you explaining to me how that is not the case but I have yet to see anything to the contrary
Words can never, ever, constitute violence. Violence only means inflicting actual physical harm upon people.
I agree that words alone in a vacuum can never, ever, constitute violence. I disagree that advocating for policies that lead to violent action absolves the speaker of blame. How do you think laws and policies get made? Do people not speak words when doing so? When they proposed the "President has no clothes" law was there not someone using words? If the end result is violence is there not some causal chain we can draw to such Words + Actions that directly led to that violence?
EDIT: I feel sort of confused on how my argument relates to the non-central fallacy that Scott is addressing, I'd need to go reread the blogpost. My argument is derived from a Hobbesian sense of social contract theory with observation on how people/collectives/governments actually accrue and use power.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
What's the solution? FC feels oppressed, you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed. We all support the ending the oppression. But when FC's tribe gets into power they go around oppressing everyone who isn't them. So I now still feel oppressed. The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
It really seems like the majority of people can't live with the idea that other people want to do different things with their lives and you shouldn't go poke sticks in their eyes because they are different.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.
This was well put. You put in words exactly my thoughts but far more eloquently than I could. (Minus the "despised him part")
The point I am trying to make is: Experiencing schadenfreude for political, social, whatever opponents is a very human thing. People on this very forum express satisfaction watching lefties experience the comeuppance for their policy positions. I imagine those same lefties view that behavior as sociopathic, if they witnessed it. You expressing the same horror of that "sociopathic behavior" when the shoe is on the other foot rings very hollow to me.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I don't think assassination is a good response either, but I suppose I lack sympathy for Kirk and I find the wailing and gnashing of people on the right to be just as annoying as the wailing and gnashing of people on the left.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I clearly answered it when responding to you, so the accusation of dodging rings a bit hollow. Go dogpile someone else
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Did you see the section where I said that it requires action? A normiecon mouthing off at the bar isn't taking direct action to create said law. Kirk wasn't just a random dude running around to debate people. He was actively involved in political lobbying, funding, and trying to get laws passed.
Or is it just the gay stuff?
What about religious stuff, gun stuff, free speech stuff, tax stuff. You seem to think this is some sort of gotcha, when you have clearly failed to ascertain my political tribe
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.
So Kirk needed to callously advocate for other people to pay the cost for his beliefs and it was bad that that happened but it must happen?
I'm really not sure what your point is here.
Man this is such a foreign concept to me.
Political accountability and taking responsibility for your beliefs is foreign to you? It concerns ME that you think asking for your tribe to not pay the cost of your beliefs but the other tribe should is something that doesn't compute for you. Can you not put yourself into the shoes of the people across the isle from you? See how they view the worlds and how they feel. idk have some empathy for your fellow man.
Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.
I'm not really a Hylanka-stan so maybe one of his torchbearers can swing by and tell me if I'm using this term wrong. But to me there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole" with your understanding on politics and the dynamics of power in a society. The role of the state is to enforce violence through the monopoly it extracts from its citizens. By creating laws it is threatening violence on citizens that fail to comply. Creating laws that force people to behave certain ways is by definition using violence. You just get to call it nice words like "Vote", "Campaign", and "Lobby". So a professional political pundit who runs around trying to create laws, and drive political actions is using the state to enact his/her own tribe beliefs and force them on all other tribes that exist in that state-polity. Otherwise why would people commit violence for political means. They are just discarding the useful social tech that we've used to abstract violence away from individual control.
For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.
Gay people upon hearing my speech AND my effort to get that speech codified into law should rightly see that as violence. Just like Christians do if I were to say "believing in religion is an abomination" AND advocated for laws banning teaching people religious beliefs. Speech does require action but that action doesn't need to be directly violent. I am abstracting that violence to the state to enforce.
The average person isn't really in a lobbying position but Kirk very much was.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364548?context=8#context
Any more straw people you want to light on fire?
I guess I see that. I am libertarian-adjacent... I've spent time arguing that argument and I think the devil is in the details. They tend to smuggle a bunch of assumptions into the "is theft argument" even if the core of the argument is the same as mine. Assumptions about the role of government and the necessity of funding it. The President has no clothes argument is meant to convey that the law can be without real governmental purpose unlike most taxes.
I see what you are saying about the noncentral fallacy argument. You are right it does apply. I also understand how it can be abused. However I feel that leaves me at an impasse. To me this argument is not prescriptive, but descriptive. I would love for someone to prove to me this is not how the government functions, it's not now how societies function. Calling this the noncentral fallacy (even if the shoe fits) is essentially trying to ignore the actual meat of the argument to argue over the colloquial definition of violence. "The logic is sound but you can't call it violence because people don't want to think about it like that", feels like an appeal to lemmings and ostriches. Idk how to craft the verbiage to get around that counterpoint. And so it feels like the attribution to a fallacy is akin to attempting to silence the argument. The noncentral fallacy is in of itself a rhetorical trick.
With the qualification that it's not absolving the perpetrator of blame or evil spirit. I suppose I can accept that the words themselves are not directly violence from a definitional standpoint. But from a functional standpoint I think someone acting with "evil" intentions towards you, and using words as a medium for those actions merits a response that might heuristically map towards words->violence.
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