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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Legitimacy is an abstraction but power is not. Power is very real. A man who holds a gun to another man's head has power over that man.

No he doesn't, or at the very least only in so far as the man being threatened chooses to allow it. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. You're imagining that "the system" (or whatever you want to call it) is self-acting when it manifestly is not.

The man with the gun does have power over the other man. In some very unusual sense -- the sense in which "your money or your life" is a free choice -- he does not have the power to force the other man to act as he wishes. But he does have the power to force the other man to choose between acting as he wishes and dying.

I know what I'm about to say is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.

We are all dying. we are all going to die.

Even the retarded Yudkowskite who achieves his dream functional immortality by of uploading his consciousness to a block of computronium is doing to die when the last embers of the universe burn out, assuming the molecular structure of his processor didn't get melted down and repurposed long before that.

Death is not the end of things.

I'm a materialist; that's one thing I do have in common with Marxists. Death is the end. I'm not so sure about the heat death of the universe being the end of everything, it's not a concept I can wrap my head around. But as for me, when I die I'm done.

I'm a materialist

And there in lies the core of the problem, a materialist can never be free because he will always be a slave to the material.

a materialist can never be free because he will always be a slave to the material

what you mean by that? Do you really think that just because someone is atheist/materialist then credible death threats will force them to do anything?

Well, I'd say you're in for a rude surprise when you decide what happens in the material world isn't that important and then it turns out there's nothing more. But of course no matter which of us is right, you aren't.

Or maybe I've already been surprised. Maybe I've already had the proverbial gun to my head and after being told "comply or die", I realized that I would rather eat the bullet then comply. In such a case who would you be to claim that I was wrong? As I see it, whatever happens happens.

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