atomic_gingerbread
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User ID: 258
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes.
To whom does it seem we have such an ability, and on what basis? We subjectively seem to have free will, sure, but nothing in this seeming directly illuminates its relationship with the material world, just as the subjective feeling of pain reveals nothing about the firing of group C nerve fibers. Direct experience is simply ambiguous on these matters.
The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Compatibilism was not invented by Dennett, having existed in some form since the Stoics. It's the dominant view among English-speaking philosophers (59% in one 2020 survey). If your best characterization of the doctrine is that we have free will "somehow", you are not engaging seriously with it.
The rest of your post veers in a strange direction. There are a fair number of respected anti-materialist philosophers. Their arguments rarely have anything to do with reports of ESP or other fantastical powers, but rather the irreducibility of things that are ordinary and familiar--free will, intentionality, subjective experience--to a completely mechanistic account of all of reality. Many of these arguments are subtle and persuasive and are taken seriously in the field. "Mental telegraphy", generally, is not.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
Commercial and pornographic speech are well-established under Supreme Court precedent to enjoy less protection than other forms. Indeed, the government already regulates unsolicited online porn and advertising. A website that enforces similar rules locally would be completely in keeping with the spirit of 1st Amendment jurisprudence, even if more strict in specific details than existing statute.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
No, wishful thinking would be something like
If you're not going to engage with my direct quote from a leaked Slack conversation imputing motivated reasoning on the part of the virologists pushing the zoonotic origin hypothesis, I'm not sure what to say. I've met my burden, take it or leave it.
And that motte and bailey is carried out entirely by the anti-conspiracy side.
The comment heading this thread is explicitly advocating for this broad notion of conspiracy, i.e. one where all facts are publicly known and consensus among "conspirators" is informally established through open communication channels.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
Sure, but it is still incredible that they pulled it off.
I'm not sure they pulled anything off, given that they completely failed to dissuade the public from suspecting a lab leak. It also doesn't take extraordinary coordination for the "we virologists didn't fuck up, please don't cut our funding" faction to emerge victorious from internal deliberations. The PR of any large institution will reliably follow such a self-interested trajectory, available facts permitting.
This fact alone means that lab-leak theory can never be considered a "conspiracy theory"
I consider it more of an "incompetence theory", which should always be at least somewhat plausible to anyone familiar with how often even experts screw up. The real conspiracy theories were in the vein of purposeful release scenarios, engineered bioweapons, etc.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
It was absolutely wishful thinking: on the part of virologists Ron Fouchier and Christian Drosten, proponents of gain-of-function research who were a major force pushing for the zoonotic origin theory. Kristian Andersen said as much in the leaked Slack conversation, calling them "much too conflicted to think about the issue straight - to them, the hypothesis of accidental lab escape is so unlikely and not something they want to consider".
The wishful thinkers carried the day, no doubt aided by the fact that accusing China of imperiling all of humanity through incompetence, without ironclad evidence, at a point in the pandemic where virologists and public health bodies desperately wanted their cooperation, was never going to fly. All communication with the public by large institutions is like this: multiple factions disagree internally but unite around a common message, a process in which politics and cognitive biases inevitably intervene. If one is naive about this reality, I suppose it might seem like a conspiracy. But a definition of "conspiracy" that encompasses something so pedestrian seems like a motte and bailey: on the one hand we have the unremarkable PR practice of selectively presenting only the most agreeable facts, and on the other we have the director of the NIH covering up Chinese bioweapon projects. Your priors for these two types of "conspiracy" should be radically different.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin.
Given that a zoonotic respiratory coronavirus epidemic had already emerged in China before, and that high-level scientists involved in public policy are going to be biased toward believing that they and their colleagues are competent and trustworthy and didn't accidentally unleash a pandemic that would go on to kill millions, it's more likely that they were giving an account of events that they believed themselves -- perhaps wishfully -- rather than trying to mislead the public.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
I know right wingers who believe the election was stolen and as such are essentially checked out of electoral politics. It's an internally consistent position. There's no point fighting if you literally can't win.
I honestly don't know what Trump really thinks about 2020, but I do know he would be better off if he just admitted he lost because people were angry about COVID, but "we'll get them next time". He essentially blackpilled portions of his base by claiming Democrats are capable of large-scale election conspiracies.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
By "fraud" I mean something that causes invalid votes to be counted, or valid votes to not be counted, or coerces, bribes or disenfranchises voters. I'm not sure if any jurisdiction considers ballot harvesting in the absence of these other activities to be fraud. Texas, for example, explicitly defines "vote harvesting" as separate from "electoral fraud", although engaging in fraud as part of a vote harvesting organization can result in enhanced penalties.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)
Yes, he was complaining that they were more susceptible to fraudulent voting ("millions of counterfeit ballots").
Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest?
This thread is about Trump's state of mind: why would he bother running again if his claims of election fraud were made in good faith? In that context, it's relevant that he did not invoke the reasonable scenario you presented, but rather a wide-ranging conspiracy where millions of votes can be fabricated.
atomic_gingerbread
8mo ago
The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots.
No, that's not the argument Trump advanced. He claimed that the election was stolen via fraud, and asked Bill Barr to have the Justice Department investigate. Specific claims advanced at the time include over 3000 people in Nevada voting after moving to another state, or that Pennsylvania postal employees conspired to backdate late ballots.
These claims were all, of course, false.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
I agree that, speaking fully generally, it's very difficult to detain a suspect who is high on drugs in a way that is completely benign when considering all the unknowns in securing a scene and maintaining officer and public safety. This is not a fully general scenario, though, but one with a very specific fact pattern:
- Chauvin had the backup of three other officers, two of whom were helping him physically restrain Floyd, and the other controlling the crowd.
- The officers knew Floyd was on drugs based on their own judgment and experience of suspect behavior. Tou Thao made reference to it on video.
- Floyd was already cuffed.
- Floyd was uncooperative, but not a violent threat.
- Thomas Lane twice expressed concern and suggested moving Floyd into a recovery position, but Chauvin replied no.
Under this specific fact pattern, where officers were well in control and could spare time to contemplate the well-being of the suspect, the refusal to try changing restraint position seems incompetent or negligent. This wasn't some split-second decision made under gun fire, it was simply a bad call by the senior officer, and it led to an unnecessary death.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
Yeah, I meant it more figuratively. Literally embedding nurses with police isn't going to work out for the reasons you mention, and hiring random meatheads without police training to manhandle uncooperative patients could also go very wrong. Police need adequate, medically-informed training in identifying overdosing suspects and adjusting their restraint techniques to minimize accidental death. Instead of a nurse literally standing over their shoulder, they need to internalize the basic knowledge to make the best calls.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
I can believe that police restraint is safer for generally healthy but uncooperative people, given that hospitals aren't primarily in the business of provisioning well-built men to wrestle criminals into submission. By the same token, police aren't primarily concerned with the finer details of managing overdose patients, and training in this area seems to be spotty. Every source I've found indicates that the knee-on-neck restraint Chauvin used was a bad choice for someone who was obviously high on drugs. Having a nurse on hand to give pointers could have averted a major fiasco, just as nurses could stand to have a few burly guys on hand in a pinch.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
Floyd had already been patted down and cuffed. He was uncooperative, but not a threat to the officers or others at the time. He was obviously on drugs, so his compromised physical condition was apparent regardless of his statements one way or another. It's possible for suspects in other, different encounters to lie in order to escape or threaten officers, but that wasn't part of the calculus in this case. The restraint technique Chauvin executed was simply too dangerous for someone with depressed cardiopulmonary function. Whether this was a systemic training failure or just criminal depravity on Chauvin's part is the interesting question. The jury seems to have concluded the latter.
It's probably inevitable that some percentage of people who overdose on hard drugs and then encounter police will end up dying in custody under ambiguous medical circumstances. That said, police should not be employing techniques that are more dangerous than necessary to protect themselves and the public.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
There are a lot of good retro shooters (sometimes called Boomer shooters, even though they really target Gen-X/Millennial nostalgia). Amid Evil, DUSK, and Cultic are good examples made in modern engines. Ion Fury and its DLC is excellent, and is made in a descendant of the original BUILD engine used to make Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood (and, uh, Redneck Rampage, I guess). Shadow Warrior, by the way, got a more modern reboot in 2013 which itself got a sequel. It's pretty fun.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
I think this is a fair take. Aggressive restraint techniques for people experiencing "excited delirium" (i.e. they're high on drugs and about to give themselves a heart attack from overexertion) were common among various police departments. This was probably not wise. Manual restraint by people untrained in medicine is inherently risky for people with compromised cardiopulmonary health (i.e. they're heavily dosed on opiates). Physicians can strap patients who are a danger to themselves to their beds with purpose-designed devices and monitor their vitals; some beat cop with inadequate training is really rolling the dice when they sit on a suspect's neck or back.
The Minneapolis police swore up and down that Chauvin's actions were contrary to department policy. This is probably technically true, but if you told me it was nevertheless common practice and they were covering up a systemic training issue by scapegoating a single cop, I'd find it plausible.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
Nancy Pelosi's infamous insider trading
Insider trading laws are extremely lax with regard to transactions made by congresspeople. This is very convenient for them, and they should be pressured to ban congressional stock trading. The same can be said for Feinstein's conflicts of interest due her husband's business ties. Improper? Unethical? Sure. Illegal? They have expensive law degrees and lawyers (also with expensive law degrees), and they wrote the laws. Chances are they know exactly where the line is and didn't cross it. Prosecutors can't be held responsible for selective prosecution if the law hasn't actually been broken; they have no recourse even if they think lawmakers are scumbags that belong in prison.
Joe Biden profiting off Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.
There is an impeachment investigation over this run by congressional Republicans. It's not going well, by the way. I share your cynicism that he might have colluded with his son in influence peddling, but coming up with compelling evidence that stands up under scrutiny hasn't gone well even with motivated people at the helm. Trump, by contrast, managed to get caught on tape admitting that he possessed classified documents that he didn't declassify before leaving office. He's not merely unethical (like most of Washington), but also criminal (by the letter of the law) and incompetent. This astonishing combination of characteristics suffices to explain his legal troubles, or at least casts doubt on the theory that unprecedented Democrat norm-breaking is primarily to blame.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
I'm sure plenty of Democrats would like to go after everyone with an (R) after their name, but the ability to successfully prosecute or sue political opponents is still heavily contingent on them having provably committed crimes or torts. This is not an endorsement of selective prosecution, merely an observation that Trump is a uniquely vulnerable target because he can't seem to stop breaking the law. It's hard to discern if his legal troubles represent an unprecedented weaponization of the justice system versus him being an unprecedented outlier in terms of surface area for liability. Maybe indiscriminate Democrat lawfare against Republicans will become the norm, but it's hard to conclude that based on evidence available today since it's so deeply confounded by the singular choice of opponent.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
New York brought a civil case, not a criminal case, because no laws were broken
The case was a civil action brought under New York Executive Law § 63(12), which explicitly enables the Attorney General to bring suit against someone engaged in repeated fraud. Not all fraud is criminal; most is a civil matter.
So what creative accounting? That the appraised and assessed values of Trump properties are not the same thing?
One of Trump's properties jumped in reported value from $80 million to $150 million between 2005 and 2006 without explanation. He admitted under oath in 2007 that he overstates property values and thinks most other people do as well. Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress that Trump regularly inflated or deflated the values of his properties for ego or tax purposes. Trump's own CFO testified at trial that Trump had overstated property values by hundreds of millions of dollars (around double their value). In facilitation of this, he also falsely reported other data about his properties, such as reporting a 10,000 sq. ft. apartment as 30,000 sq. ft. These are not small technical discrepancies, but a repeated pattern of massively fudging numbers for financial and tax benefits.
Do you think other Republicans will not be subject to these same attacks in future?
The ones that engage in decades of systematic fraud, yeah.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
I agree that politics was a motivation in pursuing the case, but it seems beyond doubt that Trump's organization did, in fact, engage in "creative" (i.e. fraudulent) accounting. I mean, he's a New York ex-Democrat real estate magnate. What were the chances that everything was above-board?
Selective prosecution is a problem, but it's a lot less of one when you aren't guilty. It's like the left-wing pundits who are angry about air time being given to Biden's cognitive decline. DOJ prosecutors can certainly communicate prosecution decisions to the public in a politically-motivated way, and the media can decide how much to cover them, but ultimately the effectiveness of these attacks hinges on Biden actually having declined cognitively. At some level, Democrats are responsible for painting themselves into a corner with this liability. So it is for Republicans who are staking their political future on someone as unreliable as Trump.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
Do you remember the 2016 election? Were you politically active for it?
Yes, I was.
My gut says no, since you mention the mid terms like they tell us anything
Midterm voting behavior is different over all, but the percentage of mail voting has been roughly similar to major election years (e.g. ~25% in 2018).
How do you think the fact that democrats need more voters and republicans need less voters plays into the situation?
If more people participating in democracy is bad for Republicans, so much the worse for Republicans. They can and will adjust.
Sure, but it was typically limited to legal residents living out-of-state/overseas and was something that had to be requested with a reason provided
A slight majority of states allowed absentee ballots without any reason (thus "no-excuse"), it just had to be requested. Source here. More states are no-excuse or all-mail after the pandemic, but it wasn't exactly unusual before.
Since the pandemic, eight states now have all-mail voting (sending out mail ballots to everyone by default), but none are generally considered swing states at the moment. Obviously this could still impact state and by-district federal elections, but it probably won't shift electoral college votes much. The 2022 midterms had around 30% mail ballots compared to around 25% in 2018, so the durable shift in voting behavior is much less than the outlier that was 2020 at around half. Republican-led states such as Georgia passed legislation making voting more regimented and less accessible, and Georgia is actually becoming a swing state. The charge of opportunism can be leveled at nearly everyone.
No-excuse mail-in voting has been available in many states for a long time, it just wasn't as broadly adopted before the pandemic. About a quarter of all ballots cast in the 2016 election were mail-in, compared to about half in 2020. This dropped down to about 30% in 2022. Eight states have made mail-in the default going forward, but generally not swing states. Overall, the voting landscape has changed somewhat, but 2020 remains an outlier in terms of poorly-prepared swing states dealing with a flood of mail ballots under duress.
Obviously all elections have irregularities, we just won't be experiencing the ones that made the 2020 election messier than usual. It's true that increasing political polarization and paranoia means that future elections might get picked apart even if they're run to ordinary standards, but this is an indictment of our political culture and not our ability to accurately count ballots.
atomic_gingerbread
9mo ago
As such I would suggest that in the event that the above safeguards are broken/removed or other irregularities appear (and I don't think you can deny that there were irregularities) it is only fair, dare I say it rational, to ask "what gives?".
What gave, of course, was COVID-19. It was responsible for the unusually high proportion of mail-in voting, which is certainly less secure due to chain-of-custody issues. Elections being a contested environment, this gave rise to a slew of legal challenges both before and after election day about exactly under which circumstances mail-in ballots are counted, implicating election statutes and the vagaries of interpreting them that had previously been uninteresting. Many jurisdictions also had inefficient processes for counting mail-in ballots; this was not a problem in prior years, but in 2020 it sometimes incurred multi-day delays in the tabulation process.
This all made the election less crisp and well-executed than before, which does decrease confidence in its legitimacy. However, none of these events themselves are suggestive of votes being systematically over- or under-counted in favor of a particular candidate. If irregularities only contributed noise and not signal, and they're unlikely to happen again now that the pandemic has passed, then it's only fair and rational to ask "who cares?" We could have run a tighter, more confidence-inspiring election, but what we got was serviceable given the unique circumstances of 2020,
Only in pattern matching the irregularities to a specific conspiratorial frame do they gain enough significance to be talking about them in 2024. The electorate is due basic assurances that elections are fair and accurate, but conspiracies theorists are not due overwhelming evidence before their claims can be dismissed on ordinary epistemic grounds.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on physicalism (which is related to and sometimes interchangeable with materialism) is a good place to start.
If you want to look at particular anti-materialist arguments, there is John Searle's Chinese Room argument. This is in principle a critique of the "strong AI" hypothesis that a computer could fully replicate a human mind, but given Searle's philosophical commitments, it can be read as a critique of any mechanistic account of consciousness rather than Searle ascribing special properties to biological processes in particular. Any of Searle's works on philosophy of mind would probably be up your alley.
The notion of philosophical zombies (very different from the Dawn Of The Dead sort) is another thing to consider. Many philosophers have touched on this issue, but Saul Kripke is a particularly well-known one who has pressed this argument against materialism.
David Chalmers is known for formulating the "hard problem" of consciousness, which is the seeming irreducibility of subjective experience (e.g. the "redness" of seeing red) to physical events (e.g. light of 650nm wavelength stimulating the retina and producing a neural response).
A lot of philosophy is published in academic journals rather than books, so Googling particular articles might be fruitful.
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