exped
1yr ago
What's a sustainable set of relations among humans for preserving their wellbeing and their children's wellbeing in the longest term? Here are some things it isn't: broken families, broader social group not being a kin group, rampant paraphiliacs with no interest in their own wellbeing, inadequate management of natural resources. None of this is about politics, it's just to suggest whatever the descendent civilisation of the one that rules today, wherein a large minority of physically and mentally unstable people are pandered to by an intellectual elite who'll believe whatever makes them most popular, it will be in better standing if it values justice before pity.
exped
1yr ago
AGI will be here within the next two decades. I naively predict there'll be something equivalent to sex and procreation in our technological descendants. Things are are rough for humanity one way or another for the next short while so even though each of us bears huge responsibility it's hard to know what it amounts to.
exped
2yr ago
It becomes okay at the point it isn't an objection to the continued existence and expansion of human or trans-human happiness. In the world we are in all people are similar and their nature is catered to best when they are more straight and traditional, even as human biology starts to shift because of endocrine disrupting chemicals and bondage to alien machines.
exped
2yr ago
Just starting with the first premise I am a self-declared non-racist who thinks you can select your friends based on race. You can select them based on anything, it's a matter of what you're looking for in friendship. You can select them based on attractiveness, smelliness, whatever you want. The moral issue seems to me to be not caring about someone's wellbeing in the cosmopolitan civilian way that we should all care about each other. The demands made of us by that form of care rarely come together to obligate you to be someone's friend.
exped
2yr ago
How much of the cure to an inability to cope with pain in general really is just someone's attitude? If someone is enough of a Life extremist to say to the proposal of a fate worse than death "bring it on!" (as I saw Jordan Peterson do on Lex Fridman's podcast once) they can take satisfaction in meeting with whatever comes next. It's also not even something that requires expending any effort as the real cornering that would be most difficult for any of us to face is being stuck in the present moment exactly as it is. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. This is why religion and philosophy are important even when they're not skeptically empirical. Civilisation is an invention of the human mind to regulate its emotions and all experiences are just different framings of the same hard problem of being.
exped
2yr ago
Maybe I was too quick to lump those things together. What I meant was people endorse legalised sex work when they want people's needs to be met in a very impersonal way with some government involvement and less reflection about moral development.
exped
2yr ago
There's a funny link between the things that upset me and it's that they all claim the part of me that I put last is bang on. Euthanasia, the medicalisation of everything, prostitution; things that play to quitters. I get reminded of Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and wonderful" when I think about it because I believe even intelligent life just moves about ironically, and nature bears a literally fantastic diversity of losing battles.
I think it’s morally consistent to care about people’s sex lives as part of caring about people’s happiness. It’s something most people want to take care of itself so they don’t have to think about it except when it’s personal, but if sexual dissatisfaction were way up and procreation was in mortal danger it could be reasonable to hash out sexual ethics publicly.
exped
2yr ago
I think what 2rafa was saying was most popular rightists don’t have a vision for the future of the world. Whether or not people without vision are hypocritical or can change the world it is a shame no public figure seems to have a beautiful vision for everyone’s future.
if you have the time could you clarify what you mean about sjw language mirroring abuser language? Is that because it is supposed to make the people it’s directed at believe they are rotten on a subtler level than they perceive reality? Is it just because it can be easily adapted in some way to present anyone at all as antisocial? Is it because the details of its criticisms are of the qualities those being criticised most need for their self-approval? Is there something more feminine about that kind of abuse as well (because it’s so psychological)? Is that kind of assiduous hostility especially likely to send socially isolated people over one edge or another?
I mean if the word atheism means something it's because it means you are modeling reality in a particular way, and anything that overturns your existing perception of objective reality enough will cause you to take offense naturally as it is really only a kind of surprise. There is a sense of the word religion which just means what is held most dear.
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