Very nice set of anecdotes.
Stop trying to justify "I think these pregnancies should be aborted for eugenic reasons"
The eugenic solution would be to not have any other child after the first downer. Downers rarely reproduce so there is little risk there but there could be a genetic component (although it seems that it is rare) and that would be a reason to avoid healthy carriers.
aaa
1mo ago
(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)
There isn't but there is a long history all the way back to the 2nd? 3rd? century of christians opposing abortion. Some people speculate that it was because they were accused of eating children or something like that.
aaa
1mo ago
I was hoping someone had already posted about this so I can ride on it. Let's say they did have the downer, what would happen?
- within a few years the downer starts consuming large amounts of attention and money as the downer's parents try to give him a simulacron of contemporary white-collar life
- the resource consumption never ends
- they probably never have another normal child because they don't have the resources
- their life continues to be ruined until they die
- afterwards the downer becomes a burden on the wider society
- eventually the downer dies
Let's now talk for a second about suicidal empathy. I think suicidal empathy is just christianity + technology. For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive. Better to help someone when they are down on their luck, it's probably temporary, it probably helps the whole village not to let them die for a temporary thing. The upside is probably worth the downside of helping irredemable people some of the time.
Your neighbor now is everyone who lives in a 10000ft radius of the earth surface. You can easily know how they are doing no matter where they are, you can go there within a day or two at a (relatively) irrisory price and you can also make them come to you at the same low price. The somalian sitting of the coast of lybia in a repurposed fishing boat? Your neighbor. The same somalian living in your country definitely your neighbor. His family? Your family's neighbor. Kicking them out as illegals? Definitely not helping them.
And that's how the Catholic Church pushed for regularizing half a million immigrants to spain this year.
This and the downer's story are actually the same category of error. Had the downer been born in the Christian Dark Ages the downer would have died of some retarded accident within 10 years and if not he would have been given the, relatively cheap, life of the beast of burden, not the simulacron of life of an intellectual that we try to give them now.
Euthanasia is also in the same category. Not killing the sick is a good idea because sometimes they get better and otherwise it's like, an extra two weeks. Not so much when we can keep them alive for 60 more years without much effort. Christianity + technology = suicidal empathy.
What's the solution to suicidal empathy? More cruelty, we need to start liking cruelty. The problem is that nobody is willing to do it, you have to trick people by saying "you're not helping them IT'S AN INVASION!!!!1!!!!!!1!!!11!!11!!!!". But it only goes so far. The downer would basically be happy we have to give as much as we can to the downer.
aaa
1mo ago
Couldn't one make the same argument about any kind of child labour?
I wouldn't be entirely opposed to it. Those laws were created at a different time.
aaa
1mo ago
I think Adum is a bit confused about the genre of this movie, they wanted to write a myth not a historical inquest. And it's hard to make the latter into a movie that's interesting, you have to be especially dry, so a lot of biographies end up falling into one of two categories: the mythology and the character assassination.
Leaving neverland was the other side of the equation, possibly even more dishonest since it's (IMO) more likely than not that the accusations are fabricated and it was done to someone that can no longer defend himself, on account of having been dead for over 10 years.
Imagine trying to portray the accusations of pedophilia in a way that doesn't make them come off as either indisputably true or slander, but rather something that's likely not true but maybe? How do you do it? Who is the point of view character? You have to put some third party character into the movie that sees the event as we, the general public, saw it. It's a different genre.
As for the child actors, is there even a problem? We all know of the cases where things go bad because they are reported on by journalists (Jake Lloyd podracing in real life amiright?) but when the child actor goes on to become an electrician who's going to inform you?
aaa
1mo ago
Talking about minimums is irrelevant. First because people don't want to have a child with a minimum viable life. Secondly because to make sense of it you have to compare it to conditions in high fertility societies. For example: having a child means you have to plan your vacations around the school year for 10+ years, this does not matter if you don't have vacations and you will never be able to afford them anyway.
Also, downthread you say:
Most of the points are reasonable and essentially boil down to "ensure your children grow up healthy and with a basic education".
this is how low fertility happens, it's almost all a consequence of good things that we like that ends up making children suck as a side effect. Take the vacations example above (I'm not saying that's the main thing by the way), why does it happen:
- we have more disposable income: GOOD
- we want children to receive schooling: GOOD
- we are going to provide free schooling to children: GOOD
- we don't want to have children go for long periods unsupervised: GOOD
Or take child seats laws, which make children suck as a side effect: do you want children to die in car accidents? Do you want to kill children? Are you a child killer? You must hate children if you want to abolish child seats laws.
aaa
1mo ago
People don't want children because children here suck ass (or, they are too expensive, same thing). "But climate change" is the left wing cope, the right wing cope is "make motherhood high status". There is no viable solution.
aaa
1mo ago
Doesn't fit. Birth rates did not collapse until after the baby boom (by definition)
No, the baby boom is called that specifically because birth rates were already falling before and it was a reversal of the trend, producing a significantly large generation.
aaa
2mo ago
the most we asked from any drafted Vietnam soldier was what, a 13 month tour?
If you die it's forever. You can use this to do a qualia calculation by pulling coefficients out of your ass as it's customary for this type of exercise.
aaa
2mo ago
A lot of people are not merely invested in humanity continuing to exist but in society as it exists now, or something close to it or better, to also continue forth. If you make it so only welfare-dependent religious nuts and low impulse control criminals get to reproduce you will get a society of low impulse control criminals after they have done away with all the meek welfare-dependent religious nuts.
You do have to be invested in a better future, though, or at least a not-so-bad future. If you don't have children yourself and you don't care that it will all go to shit after you're not around anymore then, yes, who cares.
aaa
2mo ago
Yes, the Dark Ages were real. They were not "and this lasted up to the 14th/16th century until 18th century Enlightenment/19th century Rationalism/20th century mass Atheism came along to liberate us!"
Eh, on some metrics it did last until the 14/15 hundreds. Some of the graphs do look shockingly similar to the "hole" meme, tbh. The "enlightenment came to liberate us" part however is much more complicated.
It does matter who invents the name and the concept, or do you indeed agree with this stunning example of fact-based representation?
That meme has a lot of problems but who invented it is not one of them.
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
Yes, original invented by Christians Easter. It is based around the Jewish festival of Passover
Well, there you go. Original much like sonichu.
aaa
2mo ago
Oh, you wanna get into "When were the Dark Ages, what were the Dark Ages, and why did the Independent Free-Thinking Ain't Nobody Gonna Tell Me What To Believe set wholeheartedly and uncritically accept Protestant polemic propaganda?" Because let's fight about history while we're at it!
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-dark-ages https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2024584895847121066 https://x.com/GuthmannR/status/1741216526760374312 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
The dark ages are real, the name is merited and who came up with it first doesn't matter.
Throw in Easter
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
aaa
2mo ago
Those things exist as rhetorical devices. See these people were shown miracles and still doubted, how foolish of them, what retards. The people around you who don't believe? Retarded like them. Don't pay attention to the trick and it works.
aaa
2mo ago
The fine-tuning argument is one of the best counter-apologetical arguments against God’s existence because a God has no need of anything of the things you’ve described.
You are presupposing an omnipotent god because you are thinking about this as if it was an argument for the christian god. But if you think more in general, it works a lot better as an argument for a more limited kind of god that is specifically interested in creating matter.
But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.
This is a better argument against it. The fine tuning argument talks about probabilities but really is more about aesthetics.
aaa
2mo ago
A very interesting website is the amusingly acerbic History for Atheists website, https://historyforatheists.com/ .
I think that Tim O'Neill is actually a smug idiot and there's a lot of ideas that he's promulgating on that website that are worse than the new atheist positions he's trying to debunk, like the dark ages ages weren't dark, the date of christmas, the christianity of various traditions of christmas and easter, mythicism itself and even flat earth.
most of the public New Atheist figures were not just deeply ignorant (and indifferent) about history, they also tended to be deeply ignorant about philosophy and subfields of philosophy like ethics and epistomology
I think you are mistaking rejection for ignorance. I have a lot of sympathy for the position that philosophy is just as useless, if not more so, than religion.
There is a irony here, too, which is that part of what made New Atheism so incredibly vulnerable to Wokism (with Atheism+, etc) was exactly this deep ignorance about history, philosophy, ethics, and so on, and misunderstanding that the older, much bigger history of Enlightenment Atheism (and Deism) and its role in things like the French Revolution, the rise of Communism, 20th Century Communist revolutions, and so on
If you actually read some of the history of atheism you will find that in the west there are actually two atheisms. You can conceptualize both as different forms of christian heresy, if you like. The first one is theological it says "we examined your theology and found it discordant with the evidence". The other one is moral, it says "we examined your theology and found we can be more pious without you" hence woke.
Those two types of atheism keep getting rediscovered throughout history and they are often allied but reached a breaking point now that religion has become almost completely irrelevant in the west and the ideological differences can come to the surface. For example:
- On immigration. Theological atheism: "can we make it work?", moral: "love your neighbour"
- On rape. Theological: "is this rape accusation real?", moral: "believe the victim"
- On transrights. Theological: "you don't have a woman's soul because you don't have a soul", moral: "you are literally killing them by questioning it"
etc etc
aaa
2mo ago
My 2 cents: as much as it can be fun to talk about the existence of god in the abstract, it is actually useless. The word god has very little meaning divorced from a particular religion. Philosophers and theologians try to give it meaning, usually in the direction of some kind of neo-platonic thing a zero on some kind of axis (of change, of contingency, of morality, etc).
I don't find those arguments convincing but even if I conceded, it would change nothing in my life. And it wouldn't even make a difference in the life of the apologist, because it's just the first step in some grand apologetics project where every subsequent step is harder. And in a way it already happened, everyone (including me) is now convinced that the big bang happened. If you squint you'll find that there's basically no difference between the big bang and one of those neoplatonic gods.
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling
Not for me, I find all discussion of consciusness increasingly repulsive. I'd have to go with the anthropic principle, altough the ontological alrgument can be made to be formally correct so it gets a special mention.
aaa
2mo ago
The unmoved mover argument goes like "everything that moves is moved by something, this can not be an infinite chain, therefore there must be an unmoved mover, which is god". If god moved it would fall within the category of things that move and the argument would be contradictory, i.e. there can be things that move without being moved by anything.
I'm not talking about intent I'm talking about what was practically possible. The intent, who knows for sure, but probably you are right.
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