oats_son
1d ago
I feel for you, but it really boggles the mind. Why would he prescribe capsules if they aren't a thing in the UK? How is it even possible for him to do that? Does he make the mistake frequently, I wonder?
oats_son
2d ago
On your advice, I poked around on the death penalty wikipedia page and found something I've been wondering about for a while: volunteers for the death penalty! I wondered if it was possible, never knew it had actually already been done by multiple people.
Something curious about that, too, though: the first execution after the reinstatement was Gary Gilmore, and it was a year after he was convicted. But the other examples on that volunteer page take close to a decade to get executed, if they ever get executed at all. That's for people that have waived their right to appeal and are just trying to get a speedy execution. My new thinking is that the legal system is like some old processor that used to be speedy but is now limping from decades of use. Of course, lawyers figuring out the best ways to game the system probably also contribute to death row appeals processes taking forever.
oats_son
2d ago
Actually, now that you mention it, I was thinking of getting a Honda because it might be cheaper than a Toyota, but I always hear that their transmissions are worse and are usually the first thing to go bad. Is that true? Also is it worth learning to drive stick shift? I am thinking it is not, since you lose out on cruise control.
oats_son
2d ago
I'm probably buying a new car this weekend. The 2007 Toyota Corolla has accrued more repairs than it's presently worth. Still drivable, but soon won't be, though it has earned itself 273k miles in its honorable time served.
So, got any car recommendations? Do you buy new, or lightly used? Hybrids worth looking at? If your car right now was summoned to the great car dealership in the sky right now, and you had to buy a new car, what kind of budget is sensible? Are you an old person who makes good car decisions, or a young enlisted man who makes horrible car decisions? I will refuse to listen to you, either way. But I still want to read your replies about car recommendations.
oats_son
3d ago
I have suspected for a while that the appeals process for death row prisoners has been greatly drawn out. I told a lawyer acquaintance about this one day when he ranted about the death penalty for a while, but he confessed that he has no knowledge of its being lengthened or not.
Well, I finally have a piece of evidence: John Brown commenced his deadly raid on October 16, 1859. He was convicted on November 2, 1859, after a week of deliberation. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Not even two full months of a prison stay.
So now my question is: when did this change? If it took a long time to make death row appeals take decades, what were the critical points in the fight?
oats_son
10d ago
I think I did mean something more current? Something you can use to criticize the current government. The undercurrents that caused Tiananmen Square are surely still there. The undercurrents that caused the Great Leap Forward seem to be mostly gone, since China embraced capitalism after some decades of struggling with the whole socialism thing.
oats_son
10d ago
Considering the track that the nation is going down, I was doing some more thinking. The approach that seemed to be the best to me is that the federal government must be weakened until it is no longer present, and let states spend their incomes how they choose and enact policies that they want, rather than viciously fighting over the same federal institutions every 4 or so years.
But upon my trying to dig up arguments against Marxism (probably the most dangerous philosophy I think has a chance of doing anything right now), I found that Karl Marx didn't really outline how socialist countries should make the transition into communism and, in fact, such a thing is probably not even possible. Institutions will try to perpetuate themselves in any way they can. Given this fact, I think DOGE is doomed to ultimately fail, especially if the next administration comes in and undoes the damage it is doing. So what is the prudent path forward?
Furthermore, this episode of history has revealed the weaknesses of liberalism: if you give people their own individual rights, including the ability to speak and convince each other of values detrimental to the state, eventually this kind of split will happen. If the federal government dissolves, and each state becomes its own nation, should they still embrace liberalism as the least bad of every option? Or should countries reserve full authority to do as they please, and there are no inherent rights?
oats_son
10d ago
Is there some list of sins the Chinese Communist Party has committed somewhere? I've heard of the widespread general repression and censorship, of Tiananmen Square, of the One Child Policy, and of the Uighur Genocide, and I am wondering if I am missing something. I want to be ensured of their actual level of awfulness before I get into hypothetical arguments with hypothetical tankies, who despite knowing China is capitalist, still seem bent on interpreting them in the most charitable light possible and dismissing the rest as western propaganda.
If you have book suggestions on the subject, that would be good too. I had to read "The Origins of the Modern World" for college non-western civ, and I quite liked it. On that note, if you have any general world history books, that would also be great. I especially have no idea about Korean history.
oats_son
11d ago
Yeah, workers' coops are an actually possible thing in America, but this is ignored.
I think anarchists are about the only faction of communism that realizes that they could just start communism with each other, in the form of workers' cooperatives and in communal villages, voluntarily. I think they are a far less harmful version of the ideology, and if all of the Marxists were instead anarchists, all the better; now you just have a bunch of people who vote left to shift the Overton window left without actually planning on doing anything nefarious (or doing much of anything at all, considering the anarchists I have interacted with).
Since anarchism is voluntary, the idea is that the commune shows people how things could be, and everyone slowly realizes the way things could be and join up themselves, I think. If the commune reaches a certain size, reality will check it and check it hard, so this bastion of freedom doesn't live very long and doesn't convince anyone who wasn't already a deviant. I consider that more benign, because it only disadvantages accountable people who willingly joined in.
oats_son
11d ago
Yes, I suppose it could be due to that kind of motivated reasoned mental mapping of where "left" and "right" are. You see this with the right wing in the exact same way: some righties say that actually the Nazi Party was socialist, see, it's in the name, Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party! To me, it reads as a cope (our side is just, and those other guys that got it wrong weren't actually our guys), but even if it was true, it is just proving horseshoe theory correct.
Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it.
As far as I can tell, Karl Marx knew that a classless, stateless society would get rolled by a central state immediately if capitalism still existed. So, the plan was to seize the state and implement socialism, and wait for every other society in the world to dissolve their states at once. Anyone who is really thinking could tell you that that would never happen, especially looking at the pathetic state of any genuinely central government behemoths of socialist states at the time. And yet, all kinds of Marxists, probably except for the anarchist movement, want to stack the bodies to create this ideology that will never work and is unfalsifiable, and will end up stacking even more bodies, accidentally and intentionally.
There are any number of posts on /r/LateStageCapitalism where they express their utter disdain for liberals. Every post on /r/TheRightCantMeme has an automod message that says that the subreddit is a far left one, and that liberals can fuck off. But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.
More than anything, it's the biggest slap in the face that accusations of communism or marxism are laughed off, when the share of open Marxists has seemingly increased exponentially in the last couple of decades.
I am trying to find a post from either here or the subreddit about the Russian revolution, and specific horrific details of the Red Terror. Details included pouring molten metal down the throats of priests. I'm guessing it was on reddit, because I can't find it using the search here, and reddit's search doesn't give me as many options as this one does. I think either gattsuru or FCfromSSC wrote it. Edit: I am pretty sure this comic by Existential Comics made a feature in the post, and it was juxtaposed against the actual horrific details of the revolution.
oats_son
15d ago
I'm not sure that it's very equivalent. Homosexuality was considered a behavior, not an inherent part of the self, for a long time. Same goes for engaging in furry activities like going to conventions and buying fursuits and jerking off to erotic furry artwork. You can even be a private furry wanker and no one would know unless they cohabited with you or raided your phone. Catholicism is a set of behaviors stemming from a set of beliefs about the afterlife that are not so easily modified and come with greater demands from above. There is no greater purpose to furry art or gay sex than self-pleasure, but there definitely is for Catholicism and other religions.
If someone wanted to explicitly exclude Catholics from their new non-liberal society, it would be bad, but perhaps justifiable, depending on conditions. Most non-liberals would want to exclude Muslims, anyway, and maybe the non-liberal versions of different sects of Christianity go back to holy wars. That's bad, of course, and it comes with the territory of losing our liberalism.
oats_son
15d ago
I don't really care if you hate gay furries. Frankly, they have an easy out of not engaging in homosexual activity and not buying fursuits or going to furry conventions. What triggered my thought of "wow, this guy is extremely unempathetic" is when you dodged my questions about what happens to all the other liberals who post in this forum to 1) bash the gay furry in two comments, 2) say that this forum sucks, and 3) say that you literally only care about your immediate family, and no one else.
You still haven't really outlined your ideal society even still; would you be okay with your family ascending to royalty and everyone else being a miserable serf? For me, it's easy to say that Marxists and neo-Nazis and other radicals who want to kill people and wield the state should be suppressed, but that standard would still include the progressives and the dissident right, and that's mostly the same position we're in now. Where is the wiggle room on how much you can deviate in your ideal society? Is reading about political philosophy for 8 hours a day okay?
oats_son
16d ago
Wait, I thought genital herpes was really common and basically mostly benign. What's the deal with genital herpes?? Any input would be appreciated.
oats_son
16d ago
His motivated reasoning justifying transgenderism arguments is mostly what I think of, but to be honest, I have a limited amount of exposure to Scott Alexander. I found Scott Alexander through this forum (which I in turn found through rdrama.net), not the other way around as I assume was true for many here. Until recently, it was the consensus that he stopped being the firebrand he was in the 2010s, and I found what I saw of his new stuff significantly less interesting than the original Slate Star Codex blogs that were linked here, so I wasn't particularly motivated to disprove the consensus. I prefer the monthly AAQCs to his new stuff.
oats_son
16d ago
I think you're basically right. His voting preferences are indistinguishable from something like an anarchist voter just trying to push the Overton window left. I think he is deceiving himself when he says he's a centrist and believes he has a better chance of tinkering with the Democratic Party to make it into what he wants than he does any other alternative. He's pretty clearly blue at heart.
Given his priorities lately on hammering the left about how it handles education and how it's handled the FAA hiring scandal, it aligns with his stated goals and makes him not the ideologue that I think he is perceived as here, but he has serious blind spots, like Scott Alexander, but perhaps less severe.
oats_son
16d ago
I do check his Twitter. In fact, he's just about the only main reason I visit the site, because I value what he has to say. If you can link it, I would appreciate it, though I don't think it's the whole story, since he clearly supports Jesse Singal and thought it was a mark against Bluesky that they were trying to kick him off.
oats_son
16d ago
This lack of empathy is not what I think the ideal person should have, nor is the victim complex. I suppose this is one example of someone whose values I do not share.
oats_son
16d ago
"Who cares" is not the response I was looking for. This problem extends a lot farther than Trace, obviously. Do you think China fosters the type of environment that makes this type of forum possible? For how niche it is, for how many types of people post here, for how many ideas can be represented here, this website itself and everyone in it is a product of liberalism. Do you care what happens to it? Do you care what happens to everyone who uses it? Do you care what happens to yourself?
oats_son
16d ago
I did read Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept last time you linked it in reply to me. That's actually what set off some of this disturbed line of thinking for me. I'll read the other blog post later. Yes, your past posts are quite illustrative to me, but I was hoping someone else would swing by and change my mind. I don't think it will happen.
How do you cope?
oats_son
16d ago
As a fundamentalist Christian that slowly deteriorated into an agnostic, son of a right wing libertarian that later turned into a radical fascist, who still tends to think with conservative values, I am a product of liberalism. I do not share values with many people, given that I am agnostic and yet still right wing, and yet still holding disdain for a lot of the rhetoric thrown around by the current administration. If liberalism goes away, what will happen to me? If liberalism goes away, what will happen to gay furry skeptic centrists like TracingWoodgrains?
oats_son
16d ago
But Germany is one of the parties that I mentioned in the post as being failures of liberalism. The parliamentary system collapsed. The other parties weren't willing to work with the AfD, finding them too detestable. Am I reading the situation correctly? The government will pick itself back up, but the problems of having fundamental disagreements within the country will continue, and get even worse.
This is kind of related to the thinking I've had on Marxism lately... I don't think the Founding Fathers properly understood that having people in the country that are opposed to the principles of the country are extremely corrosive to the country. Like the rationalists, they thought that the marketplace of ideas would win out, and that free argument would expose the wrong headed ways of thinking, just like exposure to sunlight kills germs. But they turned out to be totally wrong. People aren't rational.
Wow, The Hobbit really is good for kids, huh? I think the main problem with Lord of the Rings proper is that it's really boring a lot of the time, perhaps too boring and slow-moving and overall wordy and complex for a kid. The content itself is morally fine for them, not traumatizing or anything, but all those other things make it hard to start so early.
Turning this back to Culture War material, you'll probably never give them a new kids book, would you? There's something profound to me that we used to be so sure of ourselves that we were constantly churning out works that everyone could enjoy, and even now, everyone can still retroactively enjoy them, but at some point, the cultures diverged enough that nothing can be trusted anymore, writers cannot go with the old frameworks respected older works once used, and classic themes might appear corny and simple by now.
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