orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Religious people, I can at least understand are kneecapping their worldly pleasures on the promise of some mythical afterlife of eternal bliss. It's a silly reason, but it is a reason. But you? You're just making your life harder and yourself more miserable for essentially no reason at all.
Is one's personal gain the only admissible reason to ever do something?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
While, as an omnivore, I can't really disagree with you in practice, the word "meaningful" seems to do a lot of work. What is the difference between meaningful suffering and meaningless suffering?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I'd be opposed to this for a number of reasons, but most importantly: if you have any use for democracy at all, "one person, one vote" is an extremely important Schelling point. It's easy to come up with reasons your favorite demographic group should get more representation than others, and while as pointed out above there is already some wrangling on who gets to vote, giving de jure multiple votes to some people would start an immediate arms race for politicians to give ever more voting power to their supporters.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Commensurably more are killed in the extra vegetable production required for a vegan diet, so there could be some inflection point where killing animals directly provides enough calories that it means fewer dead animals in total compared to the sheer volume of rodents killed.
I don't know if this is necessarily true; meat and dairy animals also require plenty of plant food, so an omnivorous diet still requires a lot of agriculture in addition to direct human food production. Granted, many such animals are raised on pasture land that could not be farmed in the first place, and even the ones fed with crops are given cellulose-rich material that humans could not digest, but factory farming still has a pretty large agricultural footprint.
If someone is to the point of caring about the soil bacteria, wouldn't vat-grown food still be wrong? It's living... sort of... and the nutrients that compose it come from somewhere. Wouldn't all existence be basically impossible?
I was thinking more of insects and earthworms. No, if you add bacteria to the moral calculus then one's immunitary system is a worse atrocity than any ever devised by humans, and that's indeed not a very practical principle.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Worth keeping in mind, I think, that the grammatical gender of nouns in Romance languages is essentially arbitrary and has no relation with sex or socio-sexual gender. In Italian, knives (coltelli) and spoons (cucchiai) are masculine, while forks (forchette) are feminine; a table is masculine when you are working on it (tavolo) and feminine when you are eating on it (tavola); one egg (uovo) is masculine, but two eggs (uova) are feminine; bones may be masculine if they are scattered (ossi) but are always feminine if they are part of a set (ossa); female bumblebees are masculine (bombi), while male giraffes (giraffe) are feminine; and so on. As far as I know, that's the case for other Romance languages as well.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
What is the alternative? It's not like those animals are not killed in the production of the regular omnivorous diet. If you are interested in animal welfare, it makes sense to go with the diet that kills the fewest possible animals even if the number is not zero. (Growing all of one's own food? I'm not sure you can get all the range of nutrients with your own work, and you are still going to kill the soil microfauna and plant parasites.Vat-growing food seems the ideal, but it will take a while before that is enough to fully support a human body.)
The people who EDIT: you argue against would say the exact same, that they are looking at the true essence of people that everyone could obviously see if they weren't led astray by ideology.
At any rate, I'd say that you cannot appeal to an ineffable essence independent from physical features and claim support by biological facts; the two things are in direct contradiction.
Basque is not Indo-European, either; Breton is, but as a Celtic language it's more closely related to Irish and Gaelic than to French. Occitan/Provencal is much closer to French, but you could say the same about, say, Catalan; I believe even Occitan is generally recognized as its own language (of course, the difference between a dialect and a separate language is often arbitrary).
EDIT: the beginning of the Lord's Prayer as a sample, taken from Wikipedia:
French: Notre Père, qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel.
Occitan: Le nostre Paire que es els cèls, sanctificatz sia lo teus nom, avenga lo teus regnes, e sia faita la tua voluntatz sicò el cèl et e la tèrra.
Breton: Hon Tad, c'hwi hag a zo en Neñv, ra vo santelaet hoc'h anv. Ra zeuio ho Rouantelezh. Ra vo graet ho youl war an douar evel en neñv.
Basque: Gure Aita, Zeruetan zaudena, santu izan bedi zure izena. Etor bedi zure erreinua. Egin bedi zure nahia zeruan bezala lurrean ere.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I would rather be forced to pretend that transubstantiation makes sense than to believe TWAW
Transubstantiation believers killed quite a lot of people over transubstantiation beliefs, or other such points of doctrine. To be honest, I'm also not entirely sure in what sense TWAW may be wrong that does not make "the blessed host is the flesh of Jesus" equally wrong.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
It definitely deserves a longer treatment than one sentence, but I'm fond of "once you've told a lie all truth is your enemy". Or something about lightning, I guess. Intentionally professing beliefs in falsehoods because they are useful is the epistemic equivalent of the doctor killing their patients to donate their organs -- it may sound like it does more good then harm in the short term, but you wouldn't want to live in a place where that's the rule.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
HPL's poetry is much less remembered than his prose, but I like much of it. Astrophobos in particular strikes a chord in me I can't quite describe.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Rainbow flags identical to the gay flag except for "PEACE" written across them were still being used as a non-LGBT-specific peace symbol in Cambridge UK as late as 2002
Here in Italy I still see them used that way, if it matters.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Dying with dignity means going out with a bang.
Surely that would be dying with honor, while dying with dignity implies stoic acceptance of the inevitable, in the honor culture vs. dignity culture sense. That leaves out dying with face, I guess.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
How many people died in the XXth century?
How many did not? For most of recorded history, one third of all born children died in infancy, quite often taking their mother with them; of course these billions died quietly, often unnamed and unrecorded, and a death tax of a child every three in nearly every household is not so notable and exciting as a holocaust killing a hundredth of that number all in one event. The survivors didn't even find it all that noteworthy; after all it was all natural, and probably the will of God. Now the death tax is gone from most of the world, and on its way to be gone from the rest of it.
Granted, Mao is still to blame for the worst famine in history. But famines with a death tolls in the millions were quite common before the 20th century; before mechanized agriculture and the Green Revolution, it did not take a mad ideologue to starve millions in India or China; it happened quite naturally whenever the weather was too dry or too wet or too warm or too cold for a few years in a row.
Smallpox killed half a billion people just in its last century of existence (its thirtieth, give or take). It killed a significant fraction of all humans who ever lived, and left most of the survivors crippled, blinded, or disfigured. Now it's gone; and nazism and communism and religious fundamentalism and all other deranged ideologies ever dreamed up have a long, long way to go before they even get close to the death toll of one of these perfectly natural facets of the human condition.
"Accept nature", if taken as seriously as those other slogans, could be stained with quite a lot more blood than "proletarians of the world, unite" or "work will set you free".
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The cool form of transhumanism would have that baby being born in a medical pod... Pod babies, semi-immortal brains in vats, machine enhanced human bodies (more than just a couple of medically necessary interventions like pace-makers), nervous systems transfers, rampant human cloning, etc. None of it exists, none of it is even that close to existing.
If they did, would there not be countless cries of outrage about what a disgusting affront to God and Nature each of those things are, too?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
just that there must have been a fair amount of children sired by someone else than the actual Pharaoh.
Epistemic status: half-remembered stuff I read long ago
I recall reading that the paternity of royal children in Egypt was relatively unimportant compared to similar civilizations, because the "true" father of the Pharaoh was always the god Ra, with his physical sire at best acting as a vessel, and therefore the mother being a lot more relevant to establish lineage. Indeed, I believe that the main reason for a pharaoh to marry his sisters as a habit was to acquire legitimacy from them, if not for himself at least for his heirs.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Barbara Mertz' Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs (2009 edition), a fantastically written history of Ancient Egypt. Last year I had also read Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt, a more scholarly text focusing on its self-image and its conceptions of the world, history, and power. My combined impressions were as follows:
- For being a Bronze Age kingdom ruled by literal god-kings, Ancient Egypt looks surprisingly nice. Sure, they had their share of dispotism, chauvinism, and imperial warfare, but I haven’t found anything like Assyrian brutality on prisoners, Roman blood sports, Greek slave economy and rampant misogyny, or Aztec mass human sacrifices. For the standards of antiquity (which are very low to us), it seems an actually pretty decent place to have lived as a commoner.
- The development of culture and worldview looks so strangely like a coherent arc. First there’s Ancient Kingdom pharaohs, who look so aloof and self-sufficient in their divinity. Then the kingdom collapses in rebellion and civil war, teaching the rulers of Egypt that they have responsibilities towards their people; Middle Kingdom pharaohs care a lot more about justifying their position with philosophy and theology. That era collapses too, with an invasion and occupation that teaches them that the rest of the world exists, too; and the New Kingdom is defined by imperial engagement with the great powers of Asia. Eventually the state model of the Bronze Age becomes unsustainable and Egypt fades into a province of distant empires, ruled by fatalism and detachment. This honestly sounds like the kind of satisfying storytelling that one should be most skeptical about in history; I wonder how much this understanding is due to scarcity of records, pareidolia, and my own ignorance, and in what proportion.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
So... why can't atheists do the same? Why do they need to study the alternatives before embracing their own beliefs and opinions?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Doubtlessly most atheists have a shallow and simplistic understanding of religions, but is that not also true of most religious people? I would bet that the vast majority of practicing Catholics are not experts on Thomistic metaphysics, and could not explain the exact nature of the Trinity without accidentally falling into heresy. If dismissing a belief you don't understand is worthy of scorn, is not professing one even more so? Do Christians need a solid grasp of Buddhist epistemology or Islamic jurisprudence, or for that matter atheistic philosophies, before they can properly and respectably disbelieve them?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art.
Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.
If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...
I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.
... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.
Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience.
Atheism does not entail being unaware that religion exists or of what it is, though.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The impression I got is that somewhere around 2012 there was a massive schism within the New Atheism community, from which the daughter community Atheism Plus was born. Atheism Plus, spearheaded by people such as PZ Myers and Richard Carrier, added several social-justice causes to New Atheism, and indeed largely shared interests, priorities, and rhetorics with the modern social justice movement. Eventually most of its members lost interest for the atheist aspect and sort of faded into general-purpose SJ. After the schism, people who still considered themselves New Atheists, such as Harris and Dawkins, were pretty much anti-SJ by default -- if they hadn't, they would have moved into the A+.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.
This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The knees and lower spine of humans are famously frail for the load they have to support -- a consequence of remolding our body for erect bipedalism in a relatively short time.
On what grounds? As far as I know, the physiology of pain responses is not significantly different between humans and non-human vertebrates, and a subjective experience of pain explains their behavior in response to harm at least as well as the alternative. We can't of course know for a fact what goes on in the head of other species, but that goes for humans as well.
It doesn't seem all that contradictory to me. You can very well say that eating animal meat is justified if (Utility of eating animals - utility of not eating animals) > (harm of eating animals - harm of not eating animals) * probability of that harm occurring (to cover the possibility that you're right about animal suffering). Widespread availability of lab-grown meat will increase the utility of not eating animals by providing a hopefully satisfactory alternative, thus decreasing the relative value of eating them, while the harm would be unchanged.
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