Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
8hr ago
I don't think so, because I don't know what an "objective" purpose would even be, hence my original question. An omniscient being would be aware of an infinite number of perceived purposes for a person, but that doesn't make any of the purposes non-subjective.
Supah_Schmendrick
8hr ago
I don't care to litigate the proper definition of the word "purpose". So long as you agree that the concept exists, I think we can agree that it's a different thing from the perception of it, which is my point.
I'm not sure I do agree that the concept exists independently of an observer/interpreter, either external (as in the case of someone reading code), or internal (as in a person asking "what is my purpose").
Supah_Schmendrick
20hr ago
It's the same as the difference between a perception of anything and the thing itself. The map is not the territory.
There's a difference between applying that statement to a physical object, vs. to an intangible trait or quality.
When I write code, the code has no sense of purpose at all, yet still has a purpose.
Wasn't the community just arguing over this with Scott's piece on "the purpose of a system is what it does"? This doesn't clear things up any. There is your intention as the author; there is the result of the code as it functions; there are various interpretations of the code by outside observers/users...none of which necessarily overlap or align. Which is the objective "purpose" and what is the reliable method for determining it?
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
It sounds like you can't even in theory imagine a world where it's actually true; such a world would not just give you a sense of purpose but an actual purpose!
What is the distinction between a "sense" of purpose and an "actual" purpose? How would a human person know how to distinguish between the two in the wild?
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
"Merit" is not defined as "the person with the largest pile of money at death."
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant.
Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Yes, but a bilateral conflict is how you reach a new stable equilibrium; one-way ratchets don't have any brakes.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality;
How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
This is because we don't want to optimize for consumption, production, or accumulation within single human lifespans. Not for nothing do we have the proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
Not true, actually. Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" include a plan for gradual emancipation through colonization, and he was a proponent of the portions of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery from newly-acquired US territories. Virginia was contemplating a plebiscite on emancipation in the early 1830s. If anything, support for slavery got stronger as the 19th century wore on, via what should really be a quite familiar process of reciprocal polarization between south and north. The William Lloyd Garrison radical abolitionists and Calhounian "positive good" types fed on each other to the exclusion of what had been the predominant view that slavery would eventually shrivel and die on the vine after the banning of the slave trade in 1807 (which was done at the first instant the Constitution allowed it, btw).
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
What the fuck is going on?
Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody,
This seems like a contradiction; trad-LARPing in the digital age is insanely post-modern and Baudrillardian.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
TDA, with no conclusion language or question begging (i.e. don't use "invading army", "criminal gang" etc to describe them)
But Tren de Aragua are a criminal gang. That's their purpose for existing. The BBC, no fan of Trump or his deportation agenda, say it started as a corrupt local railway union which extorted carriers and contractors on their section of line, then turned into a prison gang, and now is a "transnational criminal organization" which controls diverse economic activities including gold mining and sex trafficking, and engages in political assassination as well as more commonplace "murder and torture."
The question is whether their activities in the US are in coordination with the Venezuelan dictatorship, as asserted by the administration.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people.
Hardly.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
US legislative branch seems to be very slow and inefficient.
That's because by and large they have given up on legislating as bodies, and instead are some combination of grifters, insider traders, and wanna-be pundits. Also, they're not very representative because turnout is low and very few people are engaged with their local legislative representatives and instead care almost exclusively about presidential/national politics.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
The best execution of the policy would likely have been to let the call happen for some period longer than 5 minutes, and document thoroughly discussions and decisions about the custody of the 2-year-old, but with the same result (assuming that the mother did in fact want to keep the daughter with her, and the father did not have some legal right to contest that.
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
There are plenty of us in California who are capable of understanding, and even believing, modern right-wing arguments. We just don't mix in San Francisco techie society.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Ive said this before but i think it bears repeating. Any definition of the "online right" that excludes the various Limbaugh and Brietbart succesors who comprise the core of the Tea-Party/MAGA movement, the Rogan-listening Bar-stool bros, and the crunchy-con/trad-cath homesteaders is excluding the vast majority of the online right by volume and is thus unfit for purpose.
It's like writing a history of the "new left" of the 60's and 70's and focusing on the Panthers and Weathermen...i.e., understandable, but myopic.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
The police catch most criminals.
Citation very much needed.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Ah side-sword, my beloved Achille Marozzo drills :) :). I trained casually with a school before law school while I was living in a different city, but since then I've not managed to get back into it. I had a blast when I was doing it, and still occasionally leaf through manuals for fun during my free time; I'm trying to slog through a destreza manual right now.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
No, "democracy" is the idea that power vests in the expressed will the people, and frankly the only politics that most people know anything about is presidential politics. With apologies to Madison, the house is not the body closest to the needs and desires of the people, because most people can't name their representative and few people vote in those elections when there isn't a presidential race to goose interest and drag lower offices along on its coattails.
The Demos, whether for cultural, material, techological, or irrational reasons has decided to place its trust in an elected hetmanate occupying the office of the President, imbuing the occupant with totemistic responsibility for just about everything, regardless of his formal ability to cause or prevent the events in question. This has been done with the connivance and acquiescence of the legislative branches, who voluntarily have surrendered most of their actual power to the executive, and have contented themselves with insider trading and playing wannabe-cable-news pundit on CSPAN.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed.
Another way of saying this is that it's reverting to the historical mean in terms of sophistication and rhetoric.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Or, maybe, the other similar experiences that those two countries have gone through over the last hundred years, plus the common christian heritage for roughly a millennium before that, outweigh the last generation or two's habits when it comes to organized religion.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
That just moves the pressure up a meta level for determinations to be made about what is "valid." The same arguments will be made about sick children, sick spouses, sick family members, &c. And of course things will be fabricated at a higher level than they are caught, and enforcement will be weak.
Okay, I don't particularly care about technical definitions; I was asking because I didn't understand what you were trying to get at with "not just a sense of purpose but an actual purpose," which seem to me to round to the same thing.
More options
Context Copy link