vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
15d ago
Could someone point me to good resources to better familiarize myself with the facts around the Israel Palestine conflict?
What are the best arguments on the side of those who are pro- and anti-Israel?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation.
Okay, but do you believe the opposite of this is true as well?
"Bricks and stones may make our homes, but words will never help me."
Usually, people justify free speech not just on the fact that speech doesn't do harm, but because free speech produces some tangible good in the world through the sharing of information.
But if you don't believe words can cause pain, do you also believe that words cannot produce the opposite of pain - pleasure?
Because if words can't affect bodily pain or pleasure for better or worse in your view, wouldn't it be the same whether the government banned speech or allowed it?
But if words can cause pleasure/produce benefits, then how can you maintain that they cannot ever produce harms?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Where do you fall on fraud?
And do you consider copyright violation or trademark infringement to be a form of "mere speech", or does it count as something else?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I could get behind 1, but I don't know if I agree that institutionalization's biggest problems aren't inherent to the system. Sure, we can make very nice madhouses with blackjack and hookers, but at the end of the day there's always going to be people who straddle the fuzzy line of "too crazy for society" and "able to safely exist in society", and if those people are forcibly robbed of their liberty, they'll often be able to mount a justifiable case against any system that exists, no matter how nice.
We can always ignore such voices of course, but enough sob stories will almost certainly end at them being shut down again, no matter how nice they are. People don't like being stuck in a cage, gilded or otherwise.
With regards for 2 - surely you'd only want to set a high cash bail for violent crimes with a chance of recidivism or something? A crime of passion that's unlikely to have a follow up probably doesn't need a $1 million dollar bail.
As for 3, I'd certainly be open to letting communities police themselves. I was interested in the proposal someone put forward here about a neighborhood all chipping in for private security to supplement what the state provides, and I find that an interesting idea as well.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
This is incorrect and a vile form of genocidal propaganda that i will not let go unchallenged*.
Look, on my dad's side I am 14th generation American with ancestors that were on the Mayflower. By your definition, I'd qualify as an ethnic "American."
I think it's okay to be proud you had ancestors who fought in the Revolution or whatever, but I don't think your categories make a lick of sense. At the very least, I think most people would say that a white person who grew up in America from birth is basically "as American" as an "(Anglo) American." I have friends who were 100% ethnically German, and who grew up speaking English and no German and they're about as American as you can be. They're definitely not German.
I guess in principle, I'm not against the idea of calling out specific subethnicities like "Anglo American", "German American, "French American", but people just don't do that for white people, and it seems likely that we'll see a new ethnogenesis of "White Americans" if it hasn't happened already. And to be fair, I think the Anglo Americans played a large role in the ethnogenesis of White Americans.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Do you believe there are ever any circumstances where it is okay to attack the US congress? Do you believe that there are any actions that the US congress could commit that would ever make violence against them acceptable?
I think the difficulty I have is that we in the United States aren't a nation. The United States isn't and has never been defined by being a single ethnic group sharing a common birth. We are a civic state, defined by our ideals and institutions. (This is the reason American conservatives are so different than "blood and soil" European conservatives. By and large, even the conservatives are classical liberals in the United States.) Because we got our start in a bloody revolution justifying itself based on a conception of natural rights, it must be the case that there are circumstances where it is alright to attack a government and its representatives. But despite this being a core part of the ideology under-girding the United States, I'm dissatisfied that the vast majority of people seem to think that it is never okay to rebel or engage in violence against the state and its actors.
If one of the justifications of the 2nd Amendment is that capacity of violence against the state needs to be preserved to lessen oppression and tyranny, why is it that in practice the set of "tyrannical acts that would justify violence against the state" seem to always be an empty set? Is it because America truly is the freest country ever conceived with no hints of tyranny and oppression anywhere in its 200+ year history? When is violence against the state ever justified?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
(Because that's when we can start talking about the ACTUAL cause of violence, aside from guns)
What's your theory of the case? What, say, three interventions do you believe would have the largest effect on societal violence and crime, and be implementable within a little-l liberal constitutional republic under the rule of law?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I suppose I didn't make myself clear. I am somewhat sympathetic to motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists of 1954, and I don't have a great argument for why they should have seen political violence as beyond the pale given their island's relationship to the United States. The ordinary means of political redress were denied to the Puerto Ricans, and violence seems reasonable enough under those circumstances, even if I prefer if Congress would not be attacked by people for the sake of stability.
While I don't think January 6 posed all that great a risk to the country given how badly executed it was, I tend to be less sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. A big part of this is because I don't think the thing they were angry about - stolen elections - were a "legitimate" complaint, if we don't engage in a motte and bailley about what we mean by a "stolen election."
However, what makes one "acceptable" and one "unacceptable"? I would prefer if there were easy and widely accepted principles for when political violence was considered acceptable, but the mainstream answer seems to "never, except in retrospect."
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The point of criminal laws is not to ensure that a thing never happens. We outlaw murder, but there will always be murders. The point of laws is threefold: 1) to discourage other criminals from committing the crime in question, 2) to reform the criminal so they never commit the crime again, and 3) if 2 is impossible, to safely contain a criminal away from the rest of society so that everyone else is safe.
My guess is that the number of gun-related assassination attempts in Japan over the last 50 years is probably going to be less than the equivalent number per capita in the United States. Now, if all-cause assassinations per capita were the same between the two countries (all else being equal), that would be evidence that gun control is unlikely to play much of a role in preventing assassination attempts.
If you live in a civilized country, you should have little trouble trusting your neighbors with weapons.
I mean, in my civilized country, a rando tried to assassinate the candidate of one of the two major political parties, so my trust is being strained.
My basic problem is that I can't say whether a rando trying to assasinate a political candidate is the 2nd Amendment working as intended (since it puts the power to decide when to overthrow tyrants in the hands of individuals), or if there is some principled way to criticize some acts of political violence as outside of the intended scope of gun rights?
I mean, you can own a car and it can't be taken from you by the government without due process and such (literally the fifth amendment), whereas operating one on private property is explicitly a 'privilege.' So no, there is no explicit right, but there's still an inherent protection in there.
The relevant comparison is whether it would be constitutionally possible for a Federal or State ban on cars to be enacted. I very much doubt if such a thing would ever happen, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
Wow, maybe there's certain advantages to owning guns that THE SECOND AMENDMENT WAS MEANT TO PRESERVE?
I GUESS THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS GOOD FOR SOMETHING AFTER ALL.
/sarcasm
I agree that there are advantages to owning guns, but the 2nd Amendment is about more than an "advantage" it is about a supposedly inalienable right. I would imagine that we should hold rights to higher standards than merely being "advantageous", as there are plenty of advantageous things that aren't rights. Cars are advantageous, for example, but there is no recognized right to car ownership or operation.
I'm weakly pro-gun rights, because I think that gun ownership is one of the more likely ways for minorities to protect themselves against right violations by the majority (i.e. a black man during segregation, or the Black Panthers following cop cars in the 70's), but I honestly have trouble mapping the limits of acceptable political violence within that framework. What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots? What is the dividing line between trying to assassinate Hitler or Pol Pot and trying to assassinate Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? If cops are a representative of the force and will of the state, who gets to decide when cops have crossed the line into tyranny and it is thus morally justified to kill them?
Because I am pro-civilization and anti-violence, I have trouble with my tepid support of gun rights. It seems great to be able to defend against a tyrannical majority in the abstract, but how do we balance that against the fact that any state (tyrannical or not) is going to defend itself and attempt to delegitimize resistance by the oppressed? Why do we consider the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers good, but the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War bad and illegitimate?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
My point is that there is no "they" you're negotiating with, though. "Democrats" do not speak with a single voice. Even if you look at majorities, that Pew survey I linked indicates that a majority of Republicans agree with preventing people with mental illnesses from owning guns, raising the minimum age to buy a fire arm to 21, and oppose allowing people to carry a concealed fire arm without a permit. Put that way, there is no party that is universally against gun rights or for gun rights.
The Democrat blob is not a monolith, and neither is the Republican blob.
If you're trying to make a point that Democrats who won't pass their preferred gun control policy (but limited to registered Democrats only as a compromise) are being hypocritical, I'm not sure the argument straightforwardly gets off the ground. First, I don't think the vast majority of gun rights advocates would be in favor of such a compromise, so you're not putting forward a live proposal that is really worthy of consideration. And second, there's reasons for wanting to oppose such a proposal apart from believing in gun rights. It's stupid to unilaterally disarm yourself, in a society where 40% of your "enemy" is legally armed.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
You're painting with too broad a brush. 20% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents own guns compared to 45% Republican and Republican-leaning. Even if a majority of people in the Democratic-coalition believe that the Second Amendment should be appealed and gun rights seriously impaired (which I'm not sure is the case - there's a big difference between "I want background checks, mandatory gun safety classes, and for convicted perpetrators of domestic abuse and other violent crimes to have their guns confiscated" and "I don't think anyone anywhere should have any guns under any circumstances") - I don't think you could defend this policy as a serious proposal, since it isn't actually the case that the group of people doesn't recognize themselves as having the right.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I agree that women voting is not an essential part of democracy, though I support women's suffrage.
I'm partial to the empirical arguments from Garrett Jones' "10% Less Democracy", which argues that if you look at indexes of democracy and compare them to a variety of measures of well-being, it is not the case that the most democratic countries have the best outcomes. There's some floor of democratic-ness above which outcomes tend to rise, and some ceiling above which outcomes become bad again.
I think fiddling with secret ballots probably isn't worth it, as long as you're empirically above the floor of democratic-ness with all of the other policies you adopt.
I'm from Colorado, and I've had mail in voting for basically my entire adult life (the bill was passed in 2013), and I would be immensely disappointed if we ever got rid of it. For me, it is and was the status quo and I would not enjoy a change in the social contract because of some heady intellectual concerns.
I can understand some of the concerns people had in 2020, with sudden, massive changes to many states' voting systems, where there might not have been adequate provision in place to ensure that it wouldn't be a massive magnet for fraud and questionable tactics. However, I tend to think that in places where mail-in ballots are the norm, it's not so much of an issue. I fill out my ballot, drop it off in a box under 24 hour surveillance, then check online to see that it has been received. It's all a very straightforward process.
There are certainly good arguments in favor of the secret ballot, but America had public ballots up until the 1890's, and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period. Mail in ballots are more private than voting was in this period, but less private than walking alone into a voting booth, and I don't actually think there's a compelling reason to prefer one to the other. If gathering ballots is such a big concern, pass some laws regarding that, but leave mail in voting alone unless it becomes obvious that it is an issue in practice in a given state.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Modern atheists have an unfortunate tendency to equate all of Christianity with the beliefs of the most vocal, modern evangelical Protestants.
I mean, I wasn't thinking of modern Protestantism per se at all, Evangelical or otherwise. I've read through documents like the Westminster Larger Catechism (albeit years ago now), and my general impression was that the Christian attitude towards the Old Testament was not that none of it mattered to modern Christians. There was a fairly extensive role for the Old Testament in those old confessions and catechisms beyond it being the old covenant that doesn't apply anymore. There was lots of emphasis on the importance of Adam and the Patriarchs of Genesis, and discussion of parts of the Old Testament (like the 10 Commandments) being moral instruction that was still relevant to modern Christians.
A quick search reveals that you're Eastern Orthodox, and I don't discount that they probably have their own traditions surrounding the Bible and Apostolic Authority that differ from any Protestant or Western Christian branch, but even so I would find it unusual if an Eastern Orthodox scholar said that what God said to Noah doesn't apply because of Jesus' covenant. At the very least it seems to me that rainbows still happen, and God still hasn't flooded the Earth again, so it can't be the case that the Noahide covenant has been completely superseded.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
But what /u/Quantumfreakonomics is saying is that it is something that God says prior to the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. It's easy to write off a rule from Leviticus or Exodus, because, as you say, Jesus came to fulfill the law from a Christian perspective. But it is much harder to take a normative statement God said to Noah, the ancestor of all of modern mankind and prior to any Mosaic covenant, and say that it doesn't and shouldn't matter to modern Christians. Do you also think that Christians shouldn't be fruitful and multiply, or enjoy the beasts of the field and plants as food?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I don't necessarily agree that the intersex argument for trans acceptance is a motte and bailey, any more than the "dolphins have hairs" argument for dolphins not being fish is a motte and bailey (under a morphology-based taxonomy scheme of animals.) Trans activists who bring up intersex people are using them to point to a weakness in people's unreflective definitions of sex, and then adopting a "lumper" position that trans people should be included under their identified sex because of that ambiguity.
There's a few possible places that argument could go wrong:
- It could be the case that intersex people do not exist, or are easily and uncontroversially able to be categorized as one sex or the other. (Thus a merely two category system is tenable.)
- It could be the case that intersex people do exist, but that there are easy and uncontroversial membership tests for "man"/"male" and "woman"/"female" that can be easily used to categorize non-intersex people. (Enabling a straightforward three category system.)
- It could be that the boundaries of sex are indeed fuzzy, but that for splitter-related intuitions we don't want to include trans-women among women, and trans-men among men, even if we might allow intersex people membership in those categories. (Two categories with fuzzy, ambiguous borders.)
For my own part, I do think the existence of intersex people is a good argument for "sex" being messier than commonly believed (the same way that I think ring species and occasionally fertile hybrids point to the concept of "species" being messier than commonly believed), but I don't really use that as my argument for trans people. Instead, I have something closer to a socio-legal "adoptive sex" model, where a society can create fictive "sex" categories the same way that adoption can create fictive "parent-child" relationships. Each society or subculture gets to decide what the package of rights and privileges associated with "adoptive sex" are, and so might chose any variety of constructions surrounding bathroom inclusivity, prison inclusivity, and sports inclusivity. For my own part, I'm really only a partisan for there being some sort of protections for employment, housing and financial services, since I tend to think those are the most impactful domains, and I'm okay with less important private businesses denying services or discriminating in most other domains, since I tend to think the market will work itself out in the long run.
Whatever else you may say about capitalism, it does tend to erode discrimination under certain conditions. Black people needed a Green Book from the 1930's to the 1960's, but today every gas station wants the public's money enough that the the only color they care about is your green cash. I doubt McDonald's will ever start denying service to trans people, gay people, etc.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
A strange aspect of this phenomenon I've noticed is people somehow misremembering facts into existence that are the exact opposite of reality. I encountered this Tumblr post, where OP and several people in the notes seem to believe that Serena Williams "famously" beat a bunch of men at tennis, when the only professional match she ever played against a man she lost, and he was ranked 203rd.
It's hard to have a discussion when half of the people are wishcasting their opinions into existence. (I say this as one of the people on this forum more generally sympathetic to trans inclusion across a variety of social domains.)
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Regarding your last paragraph, I'm a fan of expanding Scott's principle of Give Up 70% of the Way Through the Hyperstitious Slur Cascade to all questions of controversial linguistic change.
For relatively uncontroversial issues, like a new technology you can "give up" and accept the new terminology at 1% adoption rate, but when it comes to considering something a slur or a faux pas, I think people waiting until 70% of people feel that way is a good rule of thumb.
If a large group of people act on this principle, it has the desired function of keeping language relatively stable.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
You didn't even link the report by Axios.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Okay, but if your position is that people in power "have ears", then I would ask what power we have to avoid them?
If it's not the Cthulhu of the masses we're trying to wrangle, then it is the power of the Cathedral or whatever right wing power brokers have going on, and we have basically no levers to pull on. There's a certain line of argument around warfare that bombing civilians doesn't make sense, because it doesn't directly hurt the military or the people in power who are isolated from the consequences. I think that cancellation works largely the same way. The vast, vast majority of people who are successfully cancelled are random people no one has ever heard of. A rich and powerful enough celebrity is relatively shielded from dire consequences, as evidenced by people like J.K. Rowling.
So if we live in a multipolar society propped up by capitalism making a small number of people almost untouchably powerful, and the powerful people are the only part of cancel culture that can be reasoned with, we're fucked. What levers do we have to affect the CEO of Cloudflare, against the heads of organizations, against private social media corporations?
I again come back to the idea that laws of some kind would be necessary to end cancel culture, and that's a massive coordination problem in its own right. Not to mention that it is unlikely to actually happen if neither side ends up taking a principled stance and supporting an end to cancel culture. A lot of the reactions here on the Motte seem to show that people would be happier with cancel culture as long as their side can get in on it too. What politician do you vote for if you want an end to cancel culture in that environment? What tangible steps can the sane people on both sides who oppose cancel culture no matter who's doing it take?
Okay, but again there's no one to appeal to? If news media turns a blind eye whenever one tribe is doing something, what power do I have to stop it, even if I dislike it? I don't have a megaphone, I don't have any power.
Again, it seems like people here on the Motte are saying, "It's about time we had the power to cancel people - it's been 10 years of one-sided cancellations, and our repeated requests for stopping have been denied!", and I'm just in the position where I feel like people are trying to control Cthulhu or something, and justifying it because of the impossible-to-control eldritch horror on the other side. Don't summon up what you can't put down and all that.
Ending cancellation is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are notoriously hard to solve. The Right now having a better ability to cancel is good for the purposes of "revenge", but I don't actually think it gets us any closer to an equilibrium where the incentive structures are set up to properly mitigate the worst aspects of human tribalism. Parts of the internet sometimes make me wonder if we don't need a Hobbesian Leviathan of some kind to force people to get along online. The more powerful the state, the stronger free speech protections can be, because the less it matters what the people actually think.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
The problem with decentralized cancellation is that no one person controls it. I've found cancellation distasteful for years, even as a relatively left-of-center person, and there's no Pope of Cancel Culture I can appeal to to make things stop. I'm not even on most social media platforms, and even when I'm on them I've cultivated a very separate little bubble, so I have literally no say in what anyone on "my side" does.
I think short of laws with teeth protecting the jobs of randos, or the big platforms adopting policies that would reduce cancellation, I can't see this changing. And unfortunately, the incentives of the attention economy mean that most big platforms like the angry froth of cancellation, and many states have at-will employment, and probably don't have much will to approach cancellation from this angle.
You say the arguments "fell on deaf ears", but who were the ears that could hear and could possibly do anything about this?
Did he? I've only read him in translation, but he's never seemed particularly rambly to me.
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