georgioz
10mo ago
Sorry, it was just bad writing. It should read something like "Hypothetical person identifies as nonrestrictive ...". It is common to use "I" in hypothetical examples in my language but maybe it seems weird in English.
georgioz
10mo ago
Ultimately, polyamorous is broadly understood as the opposite of monogamous, and monogamous refers to a relationship model, not an orientation or proclivity.
I slightly disagree. Opposite of monogamous is non-monogamous as there are more models. There are different types of non-monogamous relationships such as for instance polygamy or polyandry which I viewed differently from polyamory. Also for monogamy you can have various models ranging from lifelong commitment that can even carry beyond death of your spouse to serial monogamy including hookup culture.
What do you mean by "relationship model"? I just googled polyamory and this is how it was defined:
Polyamory is a form of ethical, or consensual, non-monogamy that involves having romantic or sexual relationships with multiple partners at the same time. Ethical, or consensual, non-monogamy describes relationships in which all parties are aware of and consent to practice non-monogamy.
Yeah, to me that is about right in terms of how I thought about polyamory. It describes "relationship model" as that of open relationship, it also explicitly says that it is non-monogamous and also that it is practiced. I do not get the "identarian" argument here - to me polyamory can also mean that both partners openly and consensually bang other people. Also to me what Aella pushes can also be viewed as an identity - I someone can identify as nonrestrictive person although his partner never expressed any desire to fuck other people other than him. But he still may hate even a thought of him putting some restrictions on his partner hence he identifies as polyamorous despite him and his partner both living in exclusive and committed monogamous marriage for over 80 years now.
Plus this "identity" vs "relationship model" distinction is not as smart as it seems. A different example I saw somewhere recently are attempts at redefinition of gay/lesbian identity as something akin "sexual model" mostly in order not to offend trans people since "same sex attraction" as identity can be a thin ice to skate on nowadays. Supposedly saying "I enjoy fucking vulvas" is viewed as more hip in some spaces. It is not as if it is your fault that vulvas are attached to females, that is just a coincidence and it definitely does not tell anything about your "identity" and especially its relation to archaic concepts such as biological sex (as opposed to non-biological sex I guess?).
By the way I actually think that it is more prudent to care about people close to me as opposed to people far away. And it is mostly due to the fact, that helping means involving oneself into other people lives, which also brings certain level of responsibility. As Scott Adams says: There is nothing more dangerous than resourceful idiot, in my language we also call them "idiot with initiative". You know the type: a good meaning person who decided to water your succulents so they rot, the moron who cleans your cast iron skillet with soap only on larger scale. You can also think about it as skin in the game principle where you are responsible for outcome of your actions however well meant. Only in the case of charity it also goes the other way - that people who disagree with your type of help can actually address you directly and hold you accountable. In Catholic teaching this is reflected in the principle of subsidiarity.
Sabine Hossenfelder looked at the topic and came up with numbers of Nuclear costing 2-3 times more compared to other sources of energy. Mostly due to longer building time, which increases financial costs (interest) which in turn feeds into a lot of negative feedback loops.
Nevertheless I am still very skeptical about any cost calcultions. Nuclear seems to be the worst, but it is also the most thorough source of energy where everybody is obsessed about everything due to decades long campaign against this type of energy. As far as I know it may be the only source of energy where we calculate all costs ranging from building costs, operation costs including nuclear fuel as well as decommissioning cost. I am yet to see some comparisons where let's say fossil fuel costs will also include all the damages caused by climate change, respiratory diseases and/or hypothetical costs of carbon capture and storing of all the CO2 released - that would be equivalent of nuclear waste storage and power plant decommissioning for nuclear power.
I am also vastly skeptical regarding the prices of wind/solar as this new and cheap perfect solution. Renewable energy is supposed to be the most efficient and greenest energy - and yet the one country that heavily invested in the plan of turning their energy system to this new source (Germany) sees rapid rise of energy prices. Try even googling things like "total cost of German Energiewende" and you will see widely different estimates ranging from tens of billions to trillions of EUR. The costs are hidden in various types of subsidies, surcharges but also regular infrastructure projects. I am more inclined to see the costs in hundreds of billions just by looking at one project of new north-south grid that is supposed to bring wind power from windy North to industrial South with the price tag according to Bloomberg from years ago exceeding EUR 100 billion and that was in 2020. This grid upgrade alone has the price equivalent to that of around 9 nuclear power plants similar to highly criticized one constructed in Finland. These 9 nuclear power plants could produce 130 TWh of reliable baseload output that could be thrown onto the old grid providing over 20% of energy production in Germany (all renewables now produce 40% of electricity). And we are talking only about grid cables - the costs are insane.
He was talking about value that stay-at-home mum provides (or saves if you wish) for the family. Between daycare, schooling, food preparation, house cleaning and other small tasks such as small repairs - the value of labor provided is really high. Labor itself may be less expensive than $70k a year for daycare center or even for restaurant, but the cost of the rest including rent, taxes and cost of additional regulation is just so high that it overrides any benefits of economies of scale in as much that the do-it-yourself approach makes a lot of sense.
I think that this whole schtick about "truth" of Christianity to me is a tactic used by New Atheists but also some other people as kind of mud fighting tactic. This is what we mean by truth, so then come down to mud with us where we can use common juijutsu techniques to overpower you.
To evade the topic of religion and existence of god, we can have a question of "Does Sherlock Holmes exist?". The New Atheist position on this matter would be something like - he is fictional character, he is invented and therefore it is false to say that Sherlock Holmes exists. There is no grave of Sherlock Holmes, he did not do any of the things described in books as he is not real. Okay, but another position can be that actually Sherlock Holmes may be the most famous of all the detectives, more people know about his character compared to any living detective and that he was important in shaping real lives of many people including kids who became detectives.
Moreover also this prioritization about truth in atheist and also sometimes in rationalist circles is not what it seems. One obvious example is that of correct model usage. One model can be useful in one situation and misleading in another situation, it may not be that easy to just say that the model is true or false. Which is actually pretty close to the above paragraph - Christianity is maybe "useful" as metaphilosophical system that binds and points certain ontology, teleology, epistemology, axiology and sociology toward some outcomes you may even agree are good from the outside-of-christianity view. In that sense it is useful and this at least in some sense "true" model of the world, in similar sense as Sherlock Holmes may be useful model of the world of detectives let's say.
Additionally and related to above, it is also hard to just say that "Truth" is supposed to be the ultimate good. For instance Sam Harris is also know for his utilitarian stance where he thinks that people "should maximize human flourishing", that is his teleology of people. He also thinks that even if you are epistemologically uncertain of how to define maximization and flourishing, you can at least say that you want to prevent suffering at the very least in certain negative thinking. But then this begs the question: what if the best way to minimize suffering and maximize human flourishing is for people to be Christians and believe something that is not "true" in the strict sense?
I think that atheists and also rationalists to large extent are too quick to point out hypocrisy in moral systems like Christianity let's say when it comes to their beliefs in truth of biblical events like the flood or creation. What us ommitrd is that everybody is hypocritical about something, we do value "usefulness" even above truth in a lot of our actions.
I will evade this whole discussion by provuding a little bit of the outside view of Slovak resident. And my opinion is that US election conduct seems to me amazingly unsafe and to the core untrustworthy. As a reference, I served in election committee in Slovakia and it is against the law for spouses to go into the voting booth together with possibility of one spouse coercing the other to vote as they want. We do require ID with photo for voters to vote in a specific place they are assigned based on their address and the paper ballot is handed to you against your signature. If you want to physically vote elsewhere in the country because of travel, you have to ask for specific one-time voting ID that enables you to be manually added to some other voting list. You may also ask to vote via mail but you have to register 52 days before voting and ask for the ballot to be mailed to you, this is specifically for people who vote from abroad. And to be fair I am against that as well although only around 2% of votes were delivered by mail.
All votes are paper based, they are counted by actual people in voting committee on the spot and ballots are safely transported from thousands of voting places by police. Recently my friend and I had a thought exercise of how to commit voter fraud and we could not find a theoretical way of doing it properly. The voting system is highly decentralized, vote counting is watched by regular people who can take a photo of paper document of voting count for each election place and then cross-check it with official website of central voting committee. In fact many parties have representatives in election committees who send them those voting counts so politicians have some idea about election results even before official ones are announced. Elections are highly trusted and with good reason, vote results are known within hours of closing polling places - in the past we had a party that did not get to parliament by just couple of hundreds of votes and nobody disputed that result. Say what one may about my country but elections are airtight.
The comparison with US electoral system - especially for presidential elections where each state does shit their own way is laughable. You have mass sending of ballots and mail-in voting percentage in 30%+ range. You have ballot harvesting, you have strange centralized ballot counting with computers. You have no voting IDs in many places, you have gerrymandering, you have situations where precise election results are not known for days or weeks. And of course elections are often very competitive where literally thousands of votes can decide the next president as far back as 2000 Florida vote recount kerfuffle - I cannot blame anybody who thinks that those elections were stolen one way or another. From where I stand, the US elections to me look closer to this scene from Gangs of New York compared to elections I know in my country. And amazingly instead of trying to make US elections more trustworthy it seems that the they are continuously getting less and less legitimate, while shouting how pointing that out is antidemocratic. And I understand that there are reasons for why things are the way they are with all the aforementioned nitpicks. But the end result is still shitty and untrustworthy election system that is at least prone to election fraud conspiratory thinking if not actual outright fraud.
Agreed, it is the same with some people performing Roman salute while shouting Sieg Heil!, it is just saying Hail victory! in German. Some people surely use it with genocidal intent, while other people use this ancient salute in its original intent - "to give their hearts" by figuratively grabbing it by in their right hand and offering it on display. They may just want to express their strong support for your victory in your struggle. And as for why should they speak in German? It may have nothing to do with any hypothetical alignment of their views with weltanschauung espoused by national socialists in 1930s Germany. They maybe just like to use words like schadenfreude, it makes them look more educated. Context matters!
georgioz
11mo ago
Typo, I wanted to say they want to minimize suffering of course. Thanks.
We can of course also already anticipate the classic: "Regret actually is a big deal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing". Hint: it can move forward our political cause.
You smuggled in the argument that "sex is sacred" and therefore not at all like tennis. But then tennis people should just say it: sex absolutely is like tennis and it should be okay for children to have sex with adults was it not for all those pesky people who wrongly think that sex is sacred. But don't worry, as soon as we work a little bit on that opposition we will gladly accept child sex as new normal and embrace groomer as proud moniker.
Maybe the argument is that they will obviously not do that for political and strategic reasons. Something the NYT article gloats about: haha, we lied about gays being born that way to fool conservatives into accepting new laws. Now when we have majority and conservatives are eating dust, we can finally say what we wanted all along. And by the way trust us, the sexual liberation will definitely stop before full acceptance of Minor Attracted Persons (wink, wink hahaha).
Continuing the gymnastics analogy, Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?
I agree with the OP that this is question of conceptual core beliefs and morality. I think that what we are going through a phase where we will see what are the real consequences of of shredding the old moral principles and replacing them with what we have now. What I find interesting is that between people like Rationalists, Sam Harris and even New Left the common theme seems to be pedestalization of maximizing utils, which means something like "minimizing suffering" as the new ultimate value. The methods may be different - rationalists prefer to think about themselves as professional surgeons who know how to not get emotions in their way. They know what is moral and they will do what is necessary to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. The new left on the woke side pedestalizes compassion above everything else. They also want to maximize minimize suffering by means of compassionate justice.
I think this morality and aesthetics will bring us ruin, I do not think it is workable as a society-wide system. I agree with the OP that the whole theology is absolutely wrong, the focus on utils and compassion as the highest aim is not only wrong, but I think it is unstable as it was the result of the previous moral system.
A large chunk of the decrease in my p(doom) from a peak of 70% in 2021 to 30% now is, as I've said before, because it seems like we're not in the "least convenient possible world" where it comes to AI alignment. LLMs, as moderated by RLHF and other techniques, almost want to be aligned, and are negligibly agentic unless you set them up to be that way.
You are probably one of the few people who decreasd p(doom) from 2021 and after ChatGPT revolution in 2022. I updated the probability upwards due to:
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The increase in capability just by adding compute and scaling the old 2017 transformer architecture was surprising to many. A moderate breakthrough in hardware can move capabilities so much? We are closer than we thought in our race to AGI. It no longer seemed to be feasible to think beyond 2100, we maybe have decades and possibly even years to do what is needed to be done. Definitely bad news for alignment timewise.
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The nature of LLMs is terrible as candidate for AGI. The technology is inscrutable, explainability of these models is terrible. Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody could predict what compute is needed for qualitative jumps such as that between Chat GPT and GPT-4. This makes the models notoriously tough to align even for basic things, like hardening them against exfiltration of training data. If AI can provide answer of when was president of France born, maybe it knows what was in the email CEO of some company sent on January 1st 2019 - if such data was used to train the model. The fact that the most likely candidate for AGI is as Yudkowsky said some just some "giant matrices of trillions inscrutable floating-point numbers" is terrifying - there may be googleplex combinations of viable matrices like that and we do not know what subset of those can be considered aligned and we do not know how to get there. We are just adding compute and are amazed that the thing that is growing in our petri dish is getting more and more capable, we do not manage the growth in any meaningful sense. In the past we had different approaches to Machine Learning specific to domains, people reasonably thought that maybe we will have to work on specific algorithm designed to integrate these separate subdomains. But no, we found out that just throwing compute on very simple game of "predict next word in text" is enough to gain multimodality and make the output more general expanding to domains like computer generated graphics, speech recognition and other areas that were previously separate fields. Also not to just talk broadly, we now know that LLM can discern self-reported race of people from images of their bones beyond current limited capabilities of medical doctors, who can do that from few things like skull etc. Nobody knows why or how the model does it, it just can and we move on.
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One last thing to the above point is the old news of top-notch AI model playing GO getting beaten by one simple trick. For years people thought that the model "knew" how to play go in normal sense, the whole community thought that they "aligned" it with the task of at least beating humans in this game with very simple ruleset. Except it was proven that the model achieved results by learning some different concepts, it probably learned a completely different "game" and winning at go for years was just a sidefect. It did not learn very primitive concept that even amateurs at the game can grasp. The "alignment" of the model with basic rules of Go was a lie. I cannot imagine how can we align many orders of magnitude more complicated LLM model who has to grasp all the rules of reality, and imagine that we get exactly what we want, that there will not be any security hole and that some random teenager does not start apocalypse by some primitive prompt or strategy even after the whole scientific community will celebrate the safety of this particular "giant matrix of trillions inscrutable floating-point numbers".
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We now have the new Q-Star breakthrough in Open AI. And at least according to some speculation it seems that what it achieved is that one can use compute not to train the model, but to automate evaluation of answers to questions. Imagine it as on the fly training of the model that selects most promising answers generated by larger static model in LLM powered chain-of-thought automation. It seems that this approach can temporarily boost capabilities of the model by orders of magnitude at the expense of more compute focused on specific question/prompt. If true, this means that there is another lever where you can literally throw money on some potentially productive questions like "how to make LLM more effective" and let LLM provide answers. We may be closer to intelligence explosion than we thought last year.
All in all, I do not see p(doom) decreasing in any meaningful way, quite to the contrary.
georgioz
11mo ago
Of course it is well documented, it even has a name of toxic masculinity. You have it right there in the article:
Men who adhere to traditionally masculine cultural norms, such as risk-taking, violence, dominance, the primacy of work, need for emotional control, desire to win, and pursuit of social status, tend to be more likely to experience psychological problems such as depression, stress, body image problems, substance use, and poor social functioning.
georgioz
11mo ago
Sexism isn't a general thing that people can do to others by discriminating on the basis of sex, it a specifically BAD thing that only MEN can do to only WOMEN (and other non-MEN).
Sure, I understand that concept. Bellow I even used similar example of Christian with strong beliefs. You can observe him praying, visiting church services and praising god and all that. But by understanding his beliefs you also can infer that he also believes in Satan as a force of evil. It would probably not be very far fetched to say that maybe such a person can accept that somebody got ahead in his life - getting rich etc. - by having nefarious help from demonic forces. Heck, with very strong belief you can see demonic forces in most innocent aspects of your own life.
That is the gist of what I wanted to say - that having strong beliefs has consequences. And I do not think that feminists are against using sexism to advance cause of women in the same way Christians would be against using demon worship to get ahead - like achieving pregnancy or destroying their enemies. The bar would be much lower for feminists in this case as the belief system is identity based as opposed to outcome based. "Sexism" against men is not real sexism, a boardroom full of women is the most feminist thing ever and opposed to being sexist.
georgioz
11mo ago
If somebody sincerely believes in Christian God, I think it is safe to assume that he also believes in Satan even if that is not the word you hear often. We can play the game all day long but it is not psychologizing to assume that.
Sure, I can agree also with that characterization. The main point being that relationship and marriage are of secondary importance. It is all about her, and the job of the man is to support the woman in her life path.
It is no armchair psychology to understand people on their own terms. A lot of feminists believe that men use sexism to gain power over women. It is literally what they believe, so why it should be "psychologizing" to say that maybe they also believe that women can also use sexism against men to gain power? Why is it psychologizing to just state what some people literally believe? If somebody believes that cabal of twelve Jews and Free Masons rules the world, is it far fetched to say that maybe they also can believe that another group of 12 "good" patriotic people can possibly also rule the world utilizing the same level of control and make it a better place? It has to be in realms of possibility that such a mind can contemplate, desirable even at least as some sort of second worst alternative to Free Mason Jews being on top, right?
My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs.
I think the point was something else. Imagine another test where people threw a dice and then they estimated what their dice throw was. Of course people who threw 6 could only underestimate or be correct and people who threw 1 could only be correct or overestimate.
So even if both the result and estimation was random, then you would reproduce Duning-Kruger effect due to autocorrelation. Result of “over/underestimation” is dependent and correlated to the measure you over/underestimate against which is also a variable. The correct answer is just that this is stupid statistical artefact.
I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.
Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.
In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.
So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.
Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.
I think that the New Atheist are "anti-west" in a sense that they have parasitic relationship toward western values that they nominally hate. It is very similar to some other anti-west or anti-Christian ideologies: they heavily rely on subversion of existing values to move forward with their goals. What I mean by that is to take some value that is part of the culture - e.g. "we were all created equal by god" and then just use it to ram through their own redefined version, e.g. that equity is just an upgraded version of whatever you believed before. But these values lack anchoring, as soon as the host you have parasitic relationship with dies, there is no longer any basis whatsoever to move these values forward.
If I don't believe in god or soul or equality as some god-ordained transcendental Truth, then why should I care about this or that disadvantaged group? Indians did develop literal caste system that prevailed for thousands of years, it is not as if equality is the only way we can conduct in this world. Maybe people are created unequal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing to keep it that way [hint - they are outgroup].
It is the same whenever somebody tries to poke a little bit into value system Sam Harris has. He uses some big words familiar to people in rationalist spheres such as "promote human flourishing" or "decreasing suffering" in a sense that he wants to move from the "worst possible misery for everyone", a thing very evocative of the image of hell. In the end similarly to rationalists he lacks grounding of his morality. If one takes this supposed "new" morality at face value, one quickly finds himself in realm of maximizing some hypothetical utils of unborn people by bombing datacenters or something, maybe alternatively one sees utils expressed as tons of biomass thus maximizing number of ants in existence or some utter nonsense - at least nonsense as intuitively viewed from somebody still at least partially partaking in western/Christian ethos.
It goes haywire real fast, so I agree that it is insanity to expect anything resembling western values by deconstructing and sawing off not only the branch you are sitting on but basically creating nuke and bombing the whole forest just to see what beautiful things will emerge out of the rubble. It is inherently self-defeating game, Sam Harris will not produce mini Sam Harrises as they will have no desire to study Christianity or religion as Harris did, they will bot be raised by people adhering to same values that formed Harris. And it is not as if it is impossible, but I find it interesting how many people use adding up to normality as some kind of stopgap for obviously intuitively wrong conclusions - like eating babies. Except apparently eating babies was literally seen as normal in some societies, I am not that sure if we are not building one such at this point.
You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
I actually don't think I understand your point overall but it feels like your point is we can't rationally prove that pain and suffering are bad, so checkmate rationalists, we're no better than anyone else. Which... okay.
No, this was not the point. Go and analyze pain and suffering of animals abused for bestiality compared to animals slaughtered for meat all you like in fine rationalist tradition. What I object is going to meta level of what are your personal feelings about this or that response to such thought experiments, in that sense a rationalist is not obliged to privilege your anecdotal emotional outburst. I may as well imagine somebody who is hurt by what you are saying - and believe me there would be no shortage of agitated people if I said that we are going to normalize bestiality.
And now voilà, you have some basis of understanding of what is going on, just by analyzing your own emotions. And we do not have to model other people as if they do not understand that pain and suffering is bad and they need you to explain it to them. They do understand it very, very well - only from their standpoint it is people promoting bestiality who are source of that pain and suffering for them. And it is you who opened this door for them by harping on your own personal feelings about the whole discussion, you made this meta discussion about how this original discussion makes people feel part of the game.
It was a secession from the The British Empire combined with revolution that overthrew the monarchy and installed Republic as a form of government. And it is not without historical parallels - for instance 1848 is known as a year of revolutions but these were equally inspired by nationalism such as in Italy or Germany or Hungary or Poland where calling it as secessionist/independence struggle against empires of the day can be equally valid.
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