guajalote
8mo ago
"By your logic" isn't a claim about what the other person thinks or believes, it's a claim about what the structure of their argument logically implies. If polygamy is bound to die out because its practitioners fail to reproduce, then the same reasoning should generalize to other analogous situations. If it doesn't generalize, that implies the claim being made is either wrong or insufficiently precise.
guajalote
9mo ago
Houston deals with them quite effectively, though not very ruthlessly. Housing is affordable so the homelessness rate is low to begin with. And every few months the police dismantle the homeless encampments and their residents are forced into free government housing.
guajalote
9mo ago
It seems to me that secular Judaism is more of an ethnic or cultural identity than a religion. But I don't really know enough about the topic to have an informed opinion. And I doubt that secular Judaism is actually capable of succeeding at the goal you mentioned in your OP: "to take ground among the growing percentage of persons who do not believe in god." It doesn't evangelize and doesn't seem capable of "taking ground."
I think most of them actually do believe that adultery and murder are wrong, etc.
They may agree with these statements, but they don't give any weight to the fact that they're part of the 10 commandments. And there are a number of commandments that atheists explicitly reject, such as the first four.
The atheists basically already believe the underlying moral framework of Christianity but don't identify their beliefs and behaviors as such.
They agree with certain aspects of the Christian moral framework, but reject many other aspects. And most of the aspects of the Christian moral framework they agree with are not specific to Christianity and are common in most cultures all over the worlds (e.g. murder and theft are bad).
guajalote
9mo ago
You can have religion without god, but I don't see how you can have religion without faith. By "faith" I mean roughly this definition that popped up when I googled it: "Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment."
But if they aren’t coming to Jesus anyway, surely I would prefer to funnel those people into a group where they can proudly and honestly proclaim that ‘of course Jesus isn’t real, but that’s not the point; the 10 commandments have served our people well for 2 thousand years because they work and you should follow them too.’
In this form of the religion you have faith in the Ten Commandments or in biblical laws more generally. If the adherents take this faith seriously, then they end up being every bit as "religious" as if god existed. As you put it, people would still have to be "convinced to believe or to feign belief" in the inerrant properties of the Ten Commandments. So at best you have effectively replaced god with the ten commandments, and I think you will find it just as hard to convince atheists to truly believe in them. Alternatively, if the adherents don't really take their faith seriously, then it's hard to see what holds the religion together, or how it answers the kinds of existential questions that people look to religion to answer. It's reduced to a social club at that point. If people were excited to join secular social clubs we'd see participation in clubs like Rotary Club, bowling leagues, etc., rising rather than declining.
guajalote
9mo ago
You are wrong about the medical spending
I think he is wrong about net tax revenue as well. Something like 60% of Americans receive more in transfers than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes, i.e. they are a net drain on government revenue. Plus, I would wager that lower income people are more likely to not wear seatbelts (and drive less safe cars in general) which would skew this even further.
guajalote
9mo ago
Any time someone makes an argument premised on (i.e. an argument that rises or falls based on) personal experiences or opinions being true, they should be warned or banned for doing so. People need to make arguments that other people can engage with. Claiming epistemic privilege based on identity, credentials, lived experiences, etc. is antithetical to this. It's the fallacy of appeal to authority.
guajalote
9mo ago
"Premised on" is an important qualifier in my post. People should feel free to cite personal knowledge and experience, but if their argument rises or falls based on that personal knowledge or experience being true, I think they are failing to make a real argument. If their argument boils down to "trust me bro, I know what I'm talking about" it's not contributing to the discussion.
I sometimes mention that I am a lawyer, and I am, but I don't expect anyone here to give me special trust or deference on legal topics because of it. I don't expect anyone to even believe me when I say I'm a lawyer. My arguments need to be independently supportable via evidence and reason, not purported credentials or lived experience.
guajalote
9mo ago
IMO, any argument premised on the speaker's personal identity should be bannable regardless.
guajalote
9mo ago
Declined, happy: saw the writing on the wall, jumped ship at the right time
I think "sour grapes" is more like "declined, regretted, doubled down." You're doubling down on the decision you regret by claiming you wouldn't have been happy if you'd done things differently, the grapes would have been sour anyway.
Similarly, for "invested, regretted, doubled down" you could use the term "throwing good money after bad" or "sunk cost fallacy."
guajalote
9mo ago
I don’t see why you should agree. If you’re not a utilitarian you can say “people getting more of what they value” can be a bad thing if their values are confused, perverse or evil.
Right, this is why I said "generally tends towards."
For instance, let's say you're a deontologist and your morality consists of the maxim "obey the ten commandments." If someone is dirt poor, they have to do what it takes to survive, they have little freedom. Maybe they are forced to steal or kill to survive, thereby breaking the ten commandments. As people get wealthier and have more options, so they have more freedom to choose to follow the ten commandments. This doesn't mean they necessarily will do so, but it means that they are more able to do so. They have more capacity to be morally good actors under any moral system because they have more freedom of choice.
guajalote
9mo ago
Rule 1 of fighting nationalists - don’t let them become proxies for their supporters. Lots of Americans are fat, lots of them have bad tans.
Exactly. You can't call him "fatty" because that's endearing and relatable to many Americans. You have to call him "gold toilet" or "Epstein island" or something. Something that makes him seem out of touch and elitist.
guajalote
9mo ago
Maybe if there is another financial crisis or 911 there may be an amendment to ensure that there are minimal delays for stimulus or other action for exigent circumstances.
This is one of the most horrifying amendments I can imagine. If there's ever a constitutional clause that grants broad emergency powers to the executive, the president will find an excuse to declare a "state of emergency" from which we will never again emerge. We would still be in a "state of emergency" from Covid if such a clause existed.
guajalote
9mo ago
I think it's true that technological progress generally leads to moral progress. Here I'm defining "technological progress" as "that which lets people get more of what they value at lower cost." If you are a utilitarian it's almost a tautology that "people getting more of what they value" leads to moral progress, because increasing utility is the definition of moral progress. Even if you are not a utilitarian, I think you should agree that "people getting more of what they value" generally tends toward moral progress, because it gives people the option to choose between more alternatives and therefore more freedom to choose the morally best alternative.
This is why I often disagree with people here who see preserving one's culture as a good in and of itself. Culture is a form of technology - different cultures differ in terms of how well they enable their adherents to get what they value for a given cost in a given context. Therefore cultural progress is possible as a form of technological process. Cultural change should only be resisted to the extent it's not technological progress.
guajalote
9mo ago
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
I think it's very unlikely he will do this, simply because neither Trump nor most of his supporters care about this. I think you are making the same mistake as the media by assuming "Nimra" is a racist dogwhistle. It's not, it's serving a different set of purposes:
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It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't use her real name, which makes her seem fake and insecure.
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Like all Trump nicknames, it's a power play. If you can give someone a nickname and make it stick, it reveals a kind of power you have over them. And I think it's clear that Haley could not do the same to Trump in reverse -- all prior attempts at nicknames (Drumpf, Cheeto, etc.) have failed to stick.
guajalote
11mo ago
Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:
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There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.
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The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.
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Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.
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It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.
guajalote
11mo ago
Yes, basically cats lack a robust theory of mind, whereas dogs have a theory of mind that allows them to infer intentions. This makes "no" and other punishment-type responses especially ineffective for cats because it requires an inferential leap: I knocked over the lamp, the human made a loud scary noise. To connect those things causally you need to form a hypothesis about the human's mental state (they are upset I knocked over the lamp) which cats struggle to do.
guajalote
11mo ago
Completely true. Most animals, even monkeys, have a hard time understanding pointing because it requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind. Dogs are one of the few species that can consistently understand pointing.
guajalote
11mo ago
Cats are definitely trainable, but dogs are so optimized for trainability they make cats seem untrainable by comparison. I think the biggest difference is that dogs are good at processing human social cues - voice, facial expression, and gestures. But cats are looking for cat social cues. This is why the cat always climbs into the lap of the party guest who hates cats. For a cat, avoiding eye contact and turning your back to them is a sign of friendliness; you're saying "I'm not threatened by you and I'm not a threat to you." To relate to a cat you have to think and act like a cat, but to relate to a dog you can think and act like human.
guajalote
11mo ago
So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.
I think this is partly true, but to the extent it's true you can say the same about the current culture war.
If you asked a devout Catholic in the 1600s whether people should be burned at the stake for questioning the transubstantiation of the consecrated host, most of them are going to say "yes," and their reasoning isn't going to invoke political strife or other secular reasons. They are going to give a religious account of why it's important to burn heretics - e.g. if we suffer a heretic to live, they might lead my children into heresy, causing them to suffer in hell for eternity. It's certainly true that this underlying belief and reasoning was stoked and amplified by political actors who stood to benefit from the conflict, but the reasoning itself stands apart from the political strife going on in the background.
I think you can say the same about culture war issues today. Much of the culture war is being driven by inter-elite conflicts or by conflicts between elites and the common man. But the underlying reasoning stands apart from this conflict - e.g. if you ask someone their opinions on trans issues they are going to appeal to object-level arguments to support their views and they won't perceive their views as being the product of cynical elites stoking the conflict.
guajalote
11mo ago
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable.
The narrative will be: "why did anyone ever care about this shit?"
Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was. People were getting burned for saying the consecrated host is just a cracker. Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.
When talking about current culture war issues, it's hard for us to imagine how they could become irrelevant to the point that future generations would be baffled that anyone ever cared. But that's how people would have felt in the 1600s; it was a literal battle for immortal souls, how could this battle ever become irrelevant? Yet it did. I think our current battles will eventually suffer the same fate.
guajalote
11mo ago
Ah yes, the famously unprincipled and animalistic act of not killing one's own children.
guajalote
11mo ago
Amazing how the human race has managed to survive so long despite our inexorable intrinsic urge to kill everyone but ourselves.
guajalote
11mo ago
Identical twins (genetic clones) are perfectly capable of disagreeing or even hating or killing one another.
"Structure" as in logical structure. If you argue "Polygamy's practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore polygamy is bound to die out," then you've made an argument with the following logical structure: "[Thing]'s practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore [thing] is bound to die out." If someone can find a value of [thing] that falsifies the claim, it implies that there is something wrong (incorrect or incomplete) about the logical structure of the argument presented.
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