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Notes -
You yourself commented a few months back about doing a 'double-take' when reading some of my recent writing, suggesting (in different language) that I was becoming 'radicalized' on a few topics. One area you've counter-radicalized me is the conversation around falling birthrates in the west, and frankly, I'm coming to align more with the TwoXChromosome worldview that it's just a trojan horse for social control.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more concerned about the birthrate than I was. I'll even grant that surrogacy makes me uncomfortable, though more because I dislike the idea of disempowered people (surrogates in the third world are even more gross) being exploited in yet another way.
However, in the last 24 hours, we've had two comments explicitly shaming people who want to have children, specifically because the way they're trying to have children is aesthetically displeasing to you.
The limits of our biology are changing by the year. Will you make your children accept the limits of their biology and watch them be crippled by polio, or something? As Doglatine put it when seeing the reflexive support amongst locals for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, your position is boiling down to a reactionary rejection of anything the left and/or mainstream like, rather than a prospective, constructive worldview. So with that in mind, I have to ask: If, tomorrow, I invented a way to boost the birthrate comfortably above replacement (or to whatever arbitrary value you want), it's eugenic, it's whatever you want it to be - but it doesn't involve traditional, cis-het men repeatedly sticking their penises inside conventionally attractive cis-het stay-at-home tradwives followed by 9 months of pregnancy discomfort and childbirth - are you going to be joyful that we solved our demographic problem and charted a course towards our brave new future of eugenic John Von Neumanns? Or are you going to be upset that we didn't do it the way you wanted and those nasty degenerates are still having buttsex and dying xir hair blue?
If your answer is the latter (and I suspect for many of the Katja Grace haters it is), then yeah, I have to say TwoX are probably right about you.
Still reactionary. Have you ever laid out a positive vision for what you want the future to be, since you don't like mine? I'm curious to hear what you actually want as opposed to talking about those awful people doing things that you don't like.
There are two ways to read this, which are endlessly and intentionally confused in popular politics (not that you are). One is like "conservatives are having a moral panic about birth rates because they're confused, and it'll result in more social control, which is bad". Two is "conservatives don't really care about birth rates, but they do want to impose social controls, so they're lying / posturing about birth rates to achieve that" (and maybe that posturing is structural or unconscious).
The former is arguable, but doesn't fit the "trojan horse" metaphor. The latter seems less likely, population declining is a facially reasonable worry, one can come to it via "human lives are good so decline means fewer happy lives", "CHINA will win if our population declines", "in 1000 years there won't be anyone left!!!", etc. It can still primarily, as a concern, function to impose social controls, maybe even ones that don't solve the original problem, but there isn't really any deceptiveness that 'trojan horse' would imply, imo.
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You two seem to have an underlying philosophical difference that is causing this confusion. I would hazard a guess that Arjin, whether explicitly or not, has a Natural Law understanding of humanity. Curing children of polio is good, because humans are supposed to be healthy. Giving children tentacles and an extra set of eyes that can see infrared is bad, because humans aren't supposed to have tentacles or infrared eyes. If you give them tentacles and infrared eyes, are they still human?
Those who don't understand things in terms of Natural Law don't see the problem. To them there is no way humans are "supposed to be" so we can do whatever we want and be just as human as ever. Curing polio is the same kind of thing as transforming someone's body shape radically, or whatever. To someone with a Natural Law understanding, it is not at all the same kind of thing. One is fixing something that is wrong with someone, the other is creating things that are wrong with someone, insofar as wrong is deviation from what it means to be a human. Polio is a deviation; transhumanism is a deviation.
Similarly, humans naturally form families where a child has a mother and a father, because both sexes are needed to procreate and humans are the kind of creatures that care about their kids. If you don't care about your kids, then somethings wrong with you. If a kid doesn't have a mother or a father, then something's wrong with that family. Similarly, mothers are supposed to get pregnant, carry their child, and then care for it and raise it and be part of its life. If for some reason she can't (if she died in childbirth, if she's an unfit mother, if she is unwilling to care for the child) then adoption can happen, but adoption is not ideal. It's a deviation from how it should be. So deliberately creating situations where mothers bear children that aren't their own, for the purpose of giving them to someone else, is pretty "un-Natural" in the Natural Law sense.
Your primary disagreement is philosophical, that's where the debate would be most fruitful.
Are they? Assuming Natural Law then Polio existing in its natural state and infecting humans is part of it right? Humans either surviving or not based upon their fitness is what is natural. Interfering with that is unnatural.
Your interpretation only makes sense in a version of Natural Law where humanity is special for some reason. That us not being infected by X is the natural thing and therefore us wiping out X is natural.
The other argument is that our brains are natural, our inventiveness is natural, our ability to transcend what "should" be by using our brains is natural. Outside of a supernatural descriptor (this is how humans should be because God says so) what things should be and what is natural is very hazy.
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Are humans supposed to want to defy their nature?
If not-
then clearly I'm already not human. So I'm free to follow my nature.
If so-
then excuse me while I go follow my nature.
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... are infrared goggles anti-nature? If they are, computers and agriculture are too, and much moreso.
This "natural law" approach dissolves into nothingness when it touches evolution - species are always adapting to their environments, evolving, and "nature" is that. So to say something that hasn't happened yet is unnatural, and therefore circularly, bad, rules out every existing adaptation. Single cells weren't supposed to come together into multicellular organisms and throw their genetic lot in with their clones, until they did. Multicellular organisms weren't "supposed" to have light-sensitive cells, until one randomly gained slightly-functional light sensitivity. Baby animals weren't supposed to develop inside their mothers' bodies and drink fluid secretions ... until they did. And monkeys weren't supposed to talk to each other, until, slowly, it developed ...
Even from your perspective, what are the natural laws? Is it natural law that all humans should live happily and peacefully? Or that they should fight and die in war for their nation/kin/religion? Attitudes on this have changed over the past few centuries - as they've simultaneously changed for those with other moral theories.
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I think you've hit the crux of the problem.
But this is a weird example of "against Natural Law" to use, isn't it? The polio virus isn't artificial. It's been infecting people for thousands of years. It doesn't even seem to have a zoonotic reservoir (one of the reasons why eradicating it is possible, ironically), so Mother Earth or Nature's God or whatever specifically pointed that bomb at millions of human targets. This is all about as far from "unnatural" as it gets.
In fact, for decades polio could have been used as a cautionary tale against trying to fight Natural Law! Historically most poliovirus infections were in infants and toddlers who had better odds of recovery, but we started being much more careful (dare I say unnaturally so?) with our sewage and cleaning up our drinking water, so we lost our early exposure and our population immunity, and then we started seeing epidemics in older age groups with much higher risks of paralysis. It would have been a clear case of hubris and nemesis, except we were able to follow up the sanitation improvements with vaccinations not too long afterward.
You don't really understand what Natural Law is, if you think that just because something happens in nature it is Natural, in the Natural Law sense.
It's an understandable mistake to make. English is a terrible language for these things. Natural used to mean according to something's nature, but now it also means "not artificial" or a vague "animals and plants and stuff".
I explained this once already over on ACX, so if you don't mind I'll just copy over my comments from there:
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What does Natural Law have to say about population-specific human traits, or individual mutations, which are adaptive in one environment but maladaptive in another. For example: dark-skinned descendants of American slaves, after moving to the northern half of the United States en masse during the Great Migration, found that they and their children and grandchildren were suffering high rates of Vitamin D deficiency and related debilitating conditions such as rickets; their highly-melanated skin, optimized by thousands of years of evolution to block out the oppressive and omnipresent African sunlight, could not effectively absorb the far more limited sunlight available in the cloudy and dark Northern winters. What had been an extremely advantageous trait in one context became an equally disadvantageous trait in a different context. And in the mirror-image counterpart to this scenario, Israel, until very recently, had the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, as a result of a largely Ashkenazi Jewish population - genetically mostly descended from pasty-skinned Central/Eastern Europeans - being transplanted to a very sunny climate. To this day, Australia does have the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, for very similar reasons.
Another example is something like the cluster of mutations that make someone like Yao Ming, or Giannis Antetokounmpo, two very abnormally-tall NBA players. Yao Ming’s extreme height, and Giannis’ massively long arms and enormous hands, make them ideally-suited to play modern NBA basketball. However, these same mutations would come with debilitating drawbacks in a different environment; firstly, the massive caloric load needed to feed them would make them extreme burdens in a harsh environment where food is scarce; their height would also be a massive disadvantage in, say, the Amazonian jungle, where they would constantly be smacking into trees, alerting predators and prey alike. In Yao Ming’s case, he also suffered from a number of injuries to his feet and ankles due to the extreme pressure out on his lower body by his height, significantly shortening his career. These men are very fortunate that they live in a period of human history wherein their atypical qualities could be harnessed into blessings, instead of being life-threatening curses. And on the flip side, the vast majority of Yao’s countrymen in China evolved to be significantly shorter than the global average, since they evolved in the frigid climates of Siberia, where a short and compact body allows for the optimal distribution of body heat. (The “yellow” complexion we associate with East Asians is also a result of the evolutionary pressure created by this same environmental history; it’s due to a thin layer of subcutaneous fat optimized similarly for preserving body heat.)
So, is it “natural” for humans to be dark-skinned, or to be light-skinned? And is it “natural” for them to be tall, or to be short? These questions are unlike questions of the type “is it natural for humans to be healthy, or to be sick?” While some human traits/conditions are purely negative - it is strictly worse to have a flu than it is to not have a flu, and it is strictly worse to have no legs than it is to have two legs - many traits and conditions provide complex sets of tradeoffs, and sometimes whether or not a trait is good or not is entirely context-dependent. Autism, at least of the high-functioning “Asperger’s” variety, is another extreme example of a particular way that some humans are, which provides both massive benefits and significant penalties, both at the same time. I don’t really have a good idea about what Natural Law has to say about those sorts of things. Maybe the sorts of traits and mutations that would be extremely advantageous for human beings trying to survive the ravages of long-distant space travel would be horrendously disadvantageous - even monstrous - here on earth.
I also think it’s amusing that you brought up dogs in the context of Natural Law, given that *nearly every extant dog breed in existence is the profoundly unnatural result of a millennia-long project of directed/molded evolution orchestrated by humans, which has produced bizarre chimeras which could never have emerged in Nature, and which bear essentially no resemblance to their ancestors of even a century ago in some cases. There are no wild pugs or lhasa apsos. The bulldog and the chihuahua are nothing remotely like wolves, nor are they all that much like each other. Do advocates of natural law look at a dachsund and feel existential Lovecraftian horror at the blatant perversion of the natural order which such a creature represents? Think what had to happen to turn a wolf into that!
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You're hitting another of English's terrible ambiguities here - do you mean "abnormality" in the positive or normative sense? If the former then it's easy to think of counterexamples (again, including polio exposure!). I'd guess from
that you take a normative meaning, which lets us escape from nature red in tooth and claw, but then that other commenter's "Anyone can claim Natural Law is whatever they want" criticism suddenly sounds quite fair. Infrared vision doesn't sound better than Mark 1 eyeballs to you, but it does to me. I'd need technological help to get it myself, but I also needed that help to escape thousands of years of polio. Which of us is right?
Whether we think of "best" or
the question jumps out: in whose judgement? Perhaps this made immediate sense in a polytheistic world, where a God of Humans might intend them to be healthy while a God of Disease intends polio to spread, and "naturally" we humans want to side with the first guy? But a monotheistic God made that poliovirus too, and in that world "He must have intended it" would seem to be a far safer assumption than "He might not have been paying attention that day". In an atheistic world we could almost get back to the polytheistic case, but not quite - we might try to anthropomorphize evolution, but we still don't end up with an Evolution of Humans that we can side with vs Evolution of Disease; we only have an Evolution of Particular Currently-In-Some-Humans Genes, which isn't universal enough or, ironically, human enough, to form a basis for a Natural Law. Even if Darwin won the argument in one sense, that only suggests that we were asking the wrong question.
Even the "Currently-In-Some-Humans" category gets fuzzy when you look through prehistory. I'm may only be a few dozen trivial mutations from a selection of my parents' genes, and so on with each stage of their ancestors, but do that a million times and we're looking at tree-hopping monkeys. The nature of my ancestors at that point was that they were four-legged animals! At what point did their increasingly-bipedal descendants become "unnatural", and then "natural" again?
Yeah, you're still not grokking Natural Law.
Set aside whether God intended humans to get polio. Lets focus down to ground level here. What does it mean for a human to be sick? How do we know if someone is sick?
Well, we know someone is sick because we have an idea of how healthy humans are supposed to be, and sick humans differ from that. Healthy humans breath easily, humans sick with a chest cold hack and cough and wheeze. Healthy humans are about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit: if you're much hotter or colder than that, you're sick. If you found someone whose leg is black and putrid with necrosis you say to yourself "That doesn't look right. This person is sick."
Yet all of these judgements require us to have an idea of how a human is supposed to be. What a "natural" human is like. When we compare sick humans to the "natural" human, we can see something is wrong. What's more, we believe that it a bad thing to differ from the "natural" human. We don't consider having a leg that is black with necrosis to be just as good as having two legs that are operating normally. Without our conception of a "natural" human, distinguishing sick from healthy is impossible. They're just different kinds of humans that have different ways of being.
Yet it doesn't seem that our idea of healthy and sick is arbitrary. Our concept of the "natural" healthy human seems to correspond to something real. It does seem that humans are "supposed" to have two legs, and that our digestive system is "supposed" to provide us with nutrients, and that our heart is "supposed" to pump blood through our body. It doesn't seem that a heart that stops pumping is just as good a heart as one that keeps pumping. Regardless of whether the heart was created by a mind or by blind evolution, it isn't arbitrary to say that the heart's "purpose" is to pump blood. Or that human's have two legs. Or that eyes that see are better than eyes that are blind.
So in that sense, regardless of whether God intended humans to get polio or not, we can say that a human sick with polio has something wrong with them: to be sick with polio is not "natural" to humans.
I hope that helped.
You've glossed over the question of "how do we define 'humans'" - even repeating "human's have two legs" after my questions about bipedalism. "Humans have two legs" sounds right from my point of view, just like "neohumans have infrared vision" would from theirs, but an Ardipithecus ancestor might think I was just an unnatural change, hopelessly bad at palm walking on my dwindling forelegs. From my ancestors' point of view, am I a natural human, or a deviation from Australopithecus? This question is isomorphic to "will any transhuman descendants of mine be natural transhumans, or deviant humans", save for special pleading.
If we're going to focus on the ground level, look at what we literally find in the ground. Fossils, of a connected web of species, none of which exist except as a series of changes to their ancestors. "Don't make biological improvements" is positively false, and normatively it isn't a "Law" that would preserve some definition of human, it is a rule under which humans would never have existed. Setting aside God(s) doesn't make this idea of Natural Law more defensible, because even just setting aside Young-Earth Creationism begins to make it incoherent. "What is natural for humans" is a dissolved question once you realize that the implicit presupposition of a well-defined "humans" category in space-time is a false premise. Anthropocentrism might have been a reasonable null hypothesis, before we knew any better, but at this point "why are nearly-human creatures so unnatural" makes about as much sense as "why are the stars so tiny". The stars aren't tiny, but realizing that for all but one of them requires perceiving things so far away in space that it requires careful thought for us to realize the exception is just another star rather than a special singleton category of "sun". Non-homo-sapiens hominids aren't unnatural, but realizing that for all but one of them requires perceiving things so far away in time that it requires more careful thought for us to realize the exception is a single link in a chain rather than a special singleton category of "human".
Even "how do we define 'healthy'" isn't a trivial question either.
Do we? Not a rhetorical question - has the Hygiene Hypothesis been definitively refuted? Last I heard, there was evidence that "never get an infectious illness", even aside from increasing the dangers of any later infection, might also increase the risk of asthma and other autoimmune disorders.
And that's just counting the microorganisms which generally cause illness - breeding completely "germ-free organisms", with no microbiome at all, is even more fraught. For some for the very same microorganisms which cause illnesses in rare excess, the absence of those microorganisms seems to cause autoimmune inflammatory disorders if they're removed. Animals have evolved with asymptomatic infections of dangerous bacteria for so long that we don't actually have the capability of remaining healthy while uninfected! Are pathobionts' presence mandated by Natural Law? Is the answer immutable, or contingent on whether we can discover a safer artificial substitute to expose our immune systems to, like we did with polio?
I strongly agree, and since human hearts have a distressing tendency to stop pumping before the rest of the human is ready, I hope neohuman hearts are more capable. By your definition, that would make them more "natural" than us, right? Similarly, it also doesn't seem that an eye whose sensitivity stops at 750nm is just as good as one that can see to 800nm or 850nm. We might thus conclude "neohuman eyes and hearts are more natural than human ones", or at our most justifiably parochial we might say "neohuman eyes are natural to neohumans, human eyes are natural to humans", but for us to say "neohuman eyes are unnatural" would make about as much sense as a non-primate mammal saying "primate eyes are unnatural" (does anyone really need a third visual opsin?) and less sense than a typical bird or fish saying so (wouldn't you agree that losing two independent dimensions of color vision wasn't just as good as keeping them, even if we eventually reevolved one dimension back?).
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Maybe a pithy way would be to say "it's natural law, in the sense that it's in the scorpion's nature to sting frogs".
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I sometimes see "Natural Law" brought up, the problem is that it's not a consistent framework. Anyone can claim Natural Law is whatever they want - and indeed the entire idea of what's in and out constantly changes!
I'm sure women being outside of the kitchen would've been against "Natural Law" a couple of centuries ago.
Can you provide a reason why I should consider Natural Law as anything other than a justification for arbitrary aesthetic preferences?
The people claiming "Natural Law" is a thing explicitly reject the idea that they are merely "claiming that Natural Law is whatever they want." You can claim they're wrong, but assuming that their construction is mere whim is assuming the conclusion.
Would you agree that if "Natural Law" is, in fact, just "whatever people want", that our historical record of the formal conception of Natural Law should look like a random walk as peoples' desires shift and change over time?
If the historical record does not look like that, is it a problem for your thesis?
Because if followed, it delivers superior outcomes, presumably.
Clearly I misunderstood what Natural Law is - my experience is mostly idiots on reddit invoking it like some sort of catch-all argument-winning technique.
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Well, for one, Natural Law is the philosophical setting out of which all modern Western societies came. It has a profound impact on our current institutions and cultural values, even if you reject it as being truthful. In that particular sense it is not arbitrary but conservative: not just anything can be considered Natural, there is a long tradition that is drawn on. You may think the tradition is arbitrary, but understanding what that tradition in is very useful to understanding where a great many people in the West are coming from, whether they know it or not.
Beyond that practical consideration, Natural Law seeks, at least, to be the opposite of arbitrary. The whole point is that things have a real nature, one that they can conform with or deviate from. That nature is rooted in what they are as a thing, and things are not arbitrary. For instance, Natural Law would say that humans have two legs. If someone is born with one leg, they have something wrong with them. Is the standard "humans have two legs" arbitrary? Did someone just decide it one day? Clearly not. Saying that humans have any number of legs would be far more arbitrary than that.
Most people, likely yourself included, have a lot of Natural Law built into your thinking already. If you say a bicycle is broken, it is because you have an understanding of what a bicycle is supposed to be, and comparing the broken bicycle to the Natural bicycle is how you know that the broken bicycle is broken. The same for a broken leg. If someone asked you whether we should vaccinate a child against polio, you likely wouldn't say "Why? Kids with polio are just as valid as kids without polio." Similarly, if your cat gave birth to a fish you would be surprised and dismayed: if someone told you "Why shouldn't a cat give birth to a fish if it wants?" you would think they were crazy.
Where disagreement occurs is outside the realm of the concrete. We can agree that kids aren't supposed to have polio, and that humans have two eyes, but when it comes to how a society should be we likely come into sharp disagreement. Natural Law comes from the perspective that since humans have a specific nature, human societies have a limited number of ways they can be structured for humans to flourish in them. Just as a human can't flourish if you stab it in the guts, because of the nature of the human body and digestive system, so to it can't flourish if society metaphorically stabs them in the guts. You are not free to structure society, or your life, any way you want to because the reality of what it means to be a human means that some choices are unavailable to you and some choices are really bad ideas (just as it's a bad idea to stab yourself in the guts: saying you shouldn't stab yourself in the guts may be trying to limit your freedom, but its good advice nonetheless).
Now people can disagree on how society should be structured, given the nature of what it is to be a human. That doesn't make those disagreements arbitrary. If someone is working from a Natural Law background then their arguments should be grounded in what it means to be a human. If you disagree with them you can use that grounding in human nature as support. You may be able to defend a great many positions on Natural Law grounds, but you cannot defend any position you like. You can't say that blindness is as good as seeing, or that humans by nature love to be tortured, or that if we pass this specific law people will suddenly start working together without incentive.
Without Natural Law at your back things get more arbitrary, not less. You might argue that transhumanism will prevent disease; without Natural Law I can retort "What's wrong with disease? Why should we value being healthy over sick? Sickness is just an arbitrary category that society puts on those who do not conform to it's expectations." If you argue that transhumanism will increase human ability I might respond "Why should humans have more power? If we have more power we will destroy the Earth, and every living thing on it. We should de-industrialize instead, and fade away until none of us are left." If you argue that transhumanism is a great step forward in human progress, I could respond "Progress is a meta-narrative designed to hide the crimes of industrialists and tyrants, and has no meaning beyond that."
Yet, as a follower of the Natural Law, if you argue to me that transhumanism will prevent disease I may be swayed, for humans are supposed to be healthy. If you argue that transhumanism will increase human ability I might support you, for it is the nature of humans to improve themselves and seek excellency. If you argue that transhumanism is human progress I may or may not disagree, but I would at least agree that there is something to progress towards. You might convince me that transhumanism will allow us to be more fully human than before.
TL,DR: You should take Natural Law seriously because deep down almost everyone in the West, including you, believes in Natural Law, and if you don't then there's nothing left but arbitrary narratives and you become the kind of ghoul who is mad the people are curing the blind because blindness is just as valid as seeing.
And we arrive at the bonkers ideology of fat acceptance.
I think a compounding (and also, maybe somehow, complementing?) factor here is that Natural Law is implications in the direction of morality and moral absolutism. In the same way that arbitrariness creates more chaos and leads to negative outcomes for society, moral relativism creates far more pain, chaos, and evil than it "defeats" through its message of radical acceptance. A dirty trick that a lot of intellectually dishonest folks play is to intentionally conflate something amoral with something definitely moral(istic). Take for example the fat acceptance movement...he/she isn't a bad person for being fat! Of course. No one is disagreeing here. But a doctor will tell you you are an unhealthy person for being obese. Unhealthy? How dare you.
But excessive moralism has always been a favorite safety blanket of folks of all stripes. People have always traded social status for anything and everything else for more than they ought to for all of time. Being "right" may, in fact, feel a million times better than being independent and self-sufficient.
But, to quote the noted bard, Tyga, "I don't want to be famous / I just want to be rich."
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It sounds like Aristotle’s telos and Plato’s Forms repackaged into a different system. I absolutely respect those ideas I just hadn’t seen that sort of framework before.
I’d argue it might better suit you to go back to the arguments of Aristotle and Plato for the sake of aesthetics and avoiding the No True Scotsman problem at the least. I appreciate the write up and agree with what you’ve spelled out as Natural Law, but I’ve seen so many others use it to arbitrarily justify what they like I honestly have trouble taking it seriously.
Are there any significant differences from Aristotle and Plato’s thought that are unique to Natural Law?
That's an excellent question, and one I'm not fit to answer. All I can tell you is a potted history of Natural Law. Aristotle and Plato are considered some of the first writers to expound on Natural Law, and the Romans (particularly Cicero) expanded on their ideas, particularly as they apply to society. Natural Law got refined further through the Middle Ages and beyond, particularly by Aquinas. A lot of Enlightenment thought was explicitly based in in Natural Law. I'd skim the Wikipedia article on it for more details. Beyond that, you'd have to ask a philosopher.
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I have never felt so misunderstood in my entire time in this community. Are you mixing me up with someone else? I did mention doing a double take on your opinions in a past conversation, but when have I ever expressed anything positive about eugenics?
Are you an anarchist? If not, can you explain to me how to lay out a positive vision for a society without resorting to any social control? If you are an anarchist, don't you see how it's a purely negative vision of rejecting any sort of structure?
I've seen this "you guys don't have a positive vision at all, you're just reacting to our glorious progressive revolution" going around, but I don't get how you can say it with a straight face. Remind me again who came up with the whole concept of "deconstruction" and was madly applying it to every positively created social institution we had over the past 50 years?
What's that bit about conventional attractiveness supposed to imply? Do I still win if we keep our current sexual dimorphism, 9 month pregnancy and childbirth discomfort, but everybody's really really ugly? How is this supposed to be any kind of dilemma to me anyway? When have I ever expressed a preferences for a race of Von Neumanns running around? Yes, I side with dysgenic trads fucking themselves back to the stone age, and it's not even a contest! But it's not really a test of my principles, whether or not I have positive vision, or whether I'm just reacting to you. If you wanted to set one up, you'd make me chose between blue-haired neo-agrarians reproducing exclusively via butt-sex, and a traditionalist Borg Collective. Setting aside that I don't even know what a "traditionalist" Borg Collective means, and uncomfortable questions about how the neo-agrarians got to reproducing via butt-sex, I will always side with the group that rates lower on the trans-humanist scale.
I know you noticed, and I know it surprised you, so why didn't you stop and reassess your view of us, and the implications of our beliefs, when you saw that the people actually expressing any kind of discomfort with the whole Katja Grace thread were Dase, Hlynka, FCfromSSC, SouthKraut, and me? You didn't even say a bloody thing yourself, until you saw Dase speak up!
Oh god, why am I the only one that has to answer reductio ad absurdums around here? Sure! Fuck it, I'll take one for the team!
Are you going to let a giant cyber-blob assimilate the planet because you don't want to stand in the way of progress, or something? Do you have a positive vision, or are you rejecting the blob just because you're such a reactionary?
Finally, back to the main topic - yes, let's pull that thread a little bit. Like I said, we now know for a fact that the slope is slippery, and as one of the people who made ruthless fun of conservatives for even bringing up the idea in the past, and someone who's horrified by the world around me, I would very much like to know what makes you think this whole thing is going to stop here? You don't like exploiting third world women? How about brain dead surrogates? They can't get any more disempowered than they already are. Please you give me the positive principle that is supposed to stop this insanity.
What am I, chopped cabbage?
Contemporary standards of consent cover this pretty handily.
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I was trying to head off anyone who might be upset about X so we could focus on what I think is salient for the discussion. I don't know what your views on eugenics are, but my base assumption is that most people here believe in HBD and most of those people support some form of eugenics.
Nope. I'm just here for the music.
I'd suggest you go on the internet, join a community (it could even be this one!) and just write. Try and convince your fellow (wo)man of your vision for the world without being a hater. You could also start a substack, write op-eds for legacy media, be one of those youtube influencers, talk to people in meatspace. Tell me about your tradwife utopia in good faith, how you want to get there, and engage in a respectful dialogue.
'No u' isn't a particularly convincing rebuttal. Moreover, it papers over the fact that your specific contribution is at least 90% complaining about 'bad thing my outgroup did this week.' Your idea of a palate cleanser, because the previous conversation was too toxic, is 'look at these gay fucks trying to be happy in a way I dislike. Major Cthulhu/body horror vibes here guys amirite?'
But alright. Come on, arjin. Whip out that meaty, utopian vision of yours and slap my dirty deconstructionist face with it. I'm ready for it.
Because you turn around and write the exact same thing as yesterday about a different group and are somehow blind to the fact that you're doing it! It's frankly hilarious that you think you're somehow morally superior to the trolls who were shitting on Katja for trying to be happy yesterday, even as you're turning around to shit on gay people trying to be happy today!
It doesn't surprise me at all that there's discord between the Rights who are sympathetic to rationalists and the Rights who aren't, and of course there are plenty of people here who I believe do have good moral character. In fact, I believe most people here probably are perfectly fine (almost certainly far above the median) in real life. The beliefs expressed here are just a small facet of everyone's personality.
But man, they do suck sometimes.
Why don't you, @aqouta and gattsuru get together and tell me when and what I'm allowed to write and get back to me. You complain if I say something, complain if I don't and I'm pretty sure the actual operative principle here is that you just don't like what I say.
Because you carelessly toss bombs like:
without making an argument beyond gay people trying to have children is icky, transhumanists are icky, transhumanists must be destroyed! Which leads 'accept the limits of your biology and move on' to be the closest thing to a principle I can distill from your post. Okay...can you elaborate on how I should apply that principle to the rest of my life? Or if that's not your actual principle, what is?
Brain-dead surrogates don't bother me any more than organ donation does. Put another box to tick next to the organ donation one for womb donation and problem solved. But moving on:
I don't have any objection to a woman choosing to use her body as a surrogate. I get uncomfortable when a woman is forced to choose between abject poverty, slightly less abject poverty flipping burgers or being a piece of womb-meat for ivy-league educated Chad and Jake who live across town. Even more uncomfortable when the woman is in the third world and faces even worse choices. We don't allow pharma companies to entice homeless people into super risky clinical trials with million dollar payouts, and I think the same principle applies here. On the flip side, we also need to incentivize people to work, so the economic carrots need to have at least some bite.
So...maybe utopia is some form of UBI that allows basic needs to be met while still allowing incentives for people to work if they can? Followed by a world where we could grow babies on command without physically incapacitating women for 9 months? Followed by a range of worlds enabled by speculative technology I can't imagine at the moment. I suppose if you boiled it down to principles, bodily autonomy, consent, general freedom in how you decide to pursue happiness balanced with the Greater Good? And, dare I say it, intersectional analysis when it comes to the dynamics between surrogates and couples trying to impregnate them?
Alright, now how about you tell me your vision?
You want to stop the insanity? Stop being a hater on the internet. Politely tell other people to stop being haters on the internet. Go grill some burgers.
Oh, they're here, but they tend to be on your side of this particular spat.
Cool, that's exactly what I'm doing. So I guess arguing against surrogacy isn't social control.
It wasn't meant to be convincing as much as it was setting boundaries. I'm not going to smile and nod as I'm being accused of something your entire movement is based on.
Oh, it's fair enough as a personal criticism, just not an ideological one. Also I think 10% is a pretty good result!
Fun fact: that's not what I said. I was criticizing surrogacy, and as curious_straight_CA helpfully informs us most of those are done by straight couples. The reason I brought up how we went from gay marriage to surrogacy for gay couples was to criticize the progressive ideology, and how it gets you to sign on to unobjectionable things in the name of tolerance, only to pull you down to agree to practices that are, frankly, horrifying. The best part - which you are currently engaging in - is when it tries to frame your objection to the horrifying practice as attack on an entire group of people, most of who have nothing to do with the practice.
I'm not blind to anything, and I'm fully aware of what I'm doing, and yes it is morally superior to criticize a practice not attached to any particular person or group, then it is to generate drama around particular person that - at worst - made some poor decisions in the past.
But that's my point - this isn't what's happening. I didn't not attack Katja because I'm sympathetic to rationalists, this whole thread is a swipe at their ideas.
I suppose it could be as simple as "good moral character", but I also have to feeling you're fundamentally misunderstanding us.
Now "transhumanists are icky" is something I said, and that is where the major Cthulhu vibes are coming from, and I'll defend every word of it. I take it you're not a fan of the bombastic style, and you'd prefer something more contemplative and precise, but cut me some slack, I was having some fun, and I didn't think you of all people would get so upset about some humor at rationalists' expense.
As to how the principle would impact your life, that's a fair question. Sorry for being flippant before, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether someone is setting you up for a dunk, or asking an honest question. Broadly speaking I think there's a relatively defined line around repair and enhancement, where repair would be completely fine, and enhancement would not. There might be some tricky areas at the boundaries, but there always are some with any principle. There are folks going around saying how that's what Catholics and Natural Law philsophers were advocating for. I heard these arguments when I was young, but I only half-remember them now so I don't know if I can sign under them 100%. Still, that might be something to look up if you want these arguments elaborated on.
On the other hand I think it's a fair question to ask about the other side of the boundary. If enhancement is ok, when does it stop? Is everything ok as long as it's voluntary? A lot of enhancements would probably quickly spread through the human population, because they make things more convenient, but are things that give us convenience always good for us? When I bring up my Luddism people sometimes ask me things like "what, so you would get rid of the Internet? You really don't see any benefit from it?" Sure I do! My career, and a lot of my hobbies are directly connected to it. I met interesting people that I would have never met otherwise... but it's hard to miss the downsides. My attention span got shot. I have way too little patience for normies, when people on the same wavelength are so easy to reach. I'm way less connected to local communities than I used to be before the Internet took off. Even Internet communities themselves went from a relatively flat distribution of many small groups, to an extreme Pareto distribution where a handful of influencers on a handful of platforms command the overwhelming majority of the attention. All of this happened voluntarily, and is now opening the door to tools of surveillance that could only be conceived by crazy mofos like Jeremy Bentham. And protections against state surveillance don't cut it either, if all this power is located at Google or Amazon, it's just as scary, even when it's completely voluntary, even when it's more convenient, even when it resulted from people pursuing happiness.
I could go on, I could bring up the rates of depression and mental illness and ask what if cutting everyone loose to pursue their own happiness just makes them miserable, I could ask what if we end up chasing petty amusements and as a result forget the basic skills required to keep the lights on, but let's bring it back to surrogacy and crazier transhumanist ideas like Neuralink, CRISPR, and whatnot - you really cannot see how any of this could go horribly wrong? Do we have no right to stop it, just because people agree to it? Even if it results in the replacement of the human species with some horror beyond my comprehension?
On a whim, I recently rewatched all the 90's Star Trek shows, the go-to reference for optimistic SciFi. A thought that struck me, was that virtually all of the optimism actually comes from what you'd describe as a reactionary rejection of progress, rather than "we abolished hunger", equality, rationality, post-scarcity and other reasons people commonly reach for. After all the Borg have all of those things as well.
With all the tech they have, it's a miracle that they're still recognizably human. The crew had encounters with aliens that were rewriting their DNA on the fly, and they only used their technology for a cure, even though the fact they could concoct a cure means they could turn themselves into whatever they wanted. Cybernetic implants and prosthetics exist, but are absurdly benign for their level of technology. Some of the most iconic episodes are about the crew being tempted by some technology or some advanced alien, and them rejecting that temptation. Their society is devoted to a variety of edifying pursuits: science, exploration, art, craftsmanship, and cultivating traditions. A charming thing about it is the rejection of hyper-specialization, it seems like all the crew members make a point to dabble in various arts even when they suck at them.
Then on top of that, a few words on relationships. TNG aside, my utopian society would encourage stable long-term (ideally for-life) monogamous relationships, strong family and community relations, a love as a higher value that goes beyond the warm fuzzy feelings.
Sounds pretty good to me.
So... how does that stop things like going from gay marriage to being demanded to clap for 14 year old girls getting mastectomies?
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Neither a dedicated HBD'er nor eugenicist, though I would suggest one can be the former without being the latter. Just for your files. There was a raise-your-hand thread in HBD support a while back but apparently this site's search function is failing me.
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I'm confused why I was invoked here, I did not think I would have left such an impression on you. I have never and would never tell someone not to write something especially if they believe in it. That does not mean I won't criticize what I see as poor arguments like that idea that conservatives need some positive vision to oppose what they see as corrosive ideas. I'm not even really properly a rightist.
Read the post linked before your name, and the comment of yours I replied to.
Ah, well yeah, I quite dislike the shaming tactic of "is this what we've come to?", I disliked it when Dase did it in this thread too despite recognizing the same low quality discourse that inspired it. It is, at the very least, consensus building - which is against our rules here for good reason. If you want to make a criticism I'd rather it be more narrowly tailored to the actual offenders, I think this is a value you'd find useful in other contexts. I've pushed back against Arjin in this very thread, something you don't seem inclined to give me credit for by whatever aggregation method you use to lump all us witches together. It's not even a matter of rudeness so much as a clear sign you are falling prey to Out-group homogeneity bias. I'm sure you are off-put by this same bias in the other direction quite frequently and quite justifiably in this place.
All the interesting discussions that have been had here and you decide that the proper measure that we should be paying attention to are the lowest quality threads you can find. The kind of gossipy nonsense I barely even resisted the urge to collapse and only returned to from a ping. I'm not even saying if you don't like it don't read it or don't criticize it. Definitely do that. But don't attack this place for giving you the opportunity to.
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Keep fighting the good fight Chris. Don't have much to add, but I enjoy your comments and your consistency.
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