NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
NelsonRushton
20d ago
From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.
How many is a bunch, and what counts as the same thing? I'm curious to see a list of these and I challenge you to a game: you name a documented act of Republican act of mob violence (where most of the protesters presumably self-identified as republicans and at least one person was injured), and I will name two Democrat acts of mob violence, etc., back and forth for as long as you can come up with them. "A dollar a ball until the loser says quit" [The Hustler].
NelsonRushton
1d ago
Let's start with number three, because that is the one that surprises me. (1) The city government of NYC is woke AF, (2) so is the administration of Columbia U, and (3) one element of the woke agenda is a strong leaning toward both Palestine and BLM to the point of permitting illegal protests for both. Do you affirm or deny (1), (2), and (3)?
The 1960's example is a bad example because many of those Democrats switched to being Republicans such as Strom Thurmond after the Democrats started pushing Civil Rights legislation.
"Many" is how many? I am skeptical of this claim of fact. I would like to see a list of pols in the US House and Senate who (a) voted against the civil rights acts of the 1960's, and who (b) ever (before or after) switched parties from Democrat to Republican. Is there more than one (Strom Thurmond)? Robert Byrd, champion of segregation who filibustered the 1964 civil rights act, was a lifelong Democrat who was praised by Hilary Clinton as a "Friend and mentor", and Barak Obama gave the eulogy at his funeral.
And what makes you say it was Democrats who pushed Civil Rights Legislation more than Republicans? For example, looking at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 39% of House Republicans voted nay, but only 20% of Republicans, while in the Senate 31% of Democrats voted nay but only 18% of Republicans. I think the story was the same for other similar bills. Am I mistaken?
Are you suggesting that everything bad should be illegal, and that the law should be a perfect mapping of all possible actions to their ethical value and from there to the punishment or reward that is appropriate
No, that would be stupid. On the other hand, if (1) action X is immoral and illegal because it tends to cause a certain harm, and (2) action Y tends to cause more of the same harm, then it seems to follow that action Y is at least as immoral, and ought to be punished at least as severely, as X. Does it not?
me: Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it?
you: Not solely because, but yes, among other things it contributes to the collapse of civil society, especially if it's never punished.
then why else?
Me: Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
You: Not very much, but it's better than not hiding the theft, and better than using the proceeds from the theft to do more evil. Do you disagree?
Yes I disagree. The word "it" I think is a potential point of equivocation here. "It" could refer (a) to the theft, or (b) to the transaction of the theft, concealment, and essay-writing. Let me clarify that "it" is the theft, and ask the question again: is the immorality of the theft mitigated by the other two actions? If so, should A receive a lighter penalty for the theft, if he is caught, than if he had not carefully concealed the theft and written the essays?
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an organization that advocates for the violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America?
My guess is that this is supposed to be part of some implicit, clever argument, but it is too clever for me and I can't be sure what it is, so I have to guess. I wish I did not have to guess. My guess is that it is an example showing that speech inciting certain actions can be justifiably illegal in certain circumstances. I agree with that but I do not think it answers the questions I asked. Are you saying that B and C should go to jail? To the extent that theft is illegal because it has a tendency to cause other thefts, perhaps they should.
As you are likely aware, Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke in the writing of the Declaration. Locke wrote that the doctrine of equal natural negative rights was plainly discernable by independent reason:
The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; [Locke, Two Treatises of Government, essay II, section II].
In the opening words of the Declaration, Jefferson follows Locke's wording in this passage fairly closely, writing "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", where Locke had written "life, health, liberty or possessions." In the same paragraph, Locke says, not that these precepts are part of English or Christian traditions, but that they can be ascertained by "all mankind who will but consult it [reason]". So the idea that these notions would be obvious is not a new idea in Jefferson's time, nor a straw man, but the stated opinion of the thinker who was probably most influential on Jefferson's writing. Logical inference from self-evident premises, in the style of Euclid, was in fashion during that period in writing on subjects from physics to politics -- however queer a fashion it now appears to us.
The fact that Jefferson was advised by Madison to keep his opinions to himself does not make them any less his opinions, and the fact that he was writing a public document does keep his opinion from working its way into the text. The text says what the text says.
An axiom is a premise to an argument. You don't set out to prove axioms within the scope of an argument not because they are obviously true, but because they are outside the scope of the argument by definition.
The phrase "self-evident" has meant the same thing from the time of Aquinas, through the time of Jefferson, up until now:
self-ev·i·dent\ /ˌselfˈevəd(ə)nt/
adjective
not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.
[Oxford Dictionary of the English Language]
Can you explain more carefully, from a textual perspective, why you think it means something else in the Declaration? If this is your whole argument,
I said that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is not the same as "self-evidently".
I don't buy it.
You can't rephrase "we hold these truths to be self evident" as "obviously."
Isn't that exactly what "self-evident" means?
self-ev·i·dent
/ˌselfˈevəd(ə)nt/
adjective
not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.
[Oxford Dictionary of the English Language]
Also,
What Jefferson is doing here is declaring his axioms. He does make several arguments later in the Declaration, but they follow from those axioms; they aren't meant to prove them.
I don't dispute this; there is no need to prove something if it is self-evident, in the dictionary sense of being obvious.
Your conclusion, that handing down traditions takes effort, is sound, but Jefferson would likely agree.
I believe not only that it takes effort, but also that it a moral duty of each generation. I am curious why you think Jefferson would agree. For example, coincidentally, here is another use of the phrase "self-evident" by Jefferson:
The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; & that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, & reverts to the society...We seem not to have percieved that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.. [Letter to James Madison, (6 September 1789), emphasis added]
Jefferson seems to hold that a given generation has no obligation to carry on the traditions of its forebears, even from a single generation ago -- and, in the same letter to Madison of September 1789, he argues that, therefore, the national constitution should be rewritten every twenty years:
The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.
He says in the same paragraph that the constitution should not merely be amended, but rewritten from scratch in each generation (that is, every 20 years). So much for sacred tradition.
One issue I have here is that I am not sure if three generations down the road - when this background morality of "normality" disappears - we actually won't end up eating babies as the new normal.
I believe that is where we are headed, and where we have been headed since the Enlightenment.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that the doctrine of equal, negative human rights under natural law was self-evident. Taken literally, this would mean that any mentally competent person who considered the matter would find it to be true -- like the axiom that m+(n+1) = (m+n)+1 for any two natural numbers m and n. Clearly the doctrine of human rights is not self-evident in this sense -- unless Plato, Aristotle and Socrates were morons after all.
For many years I charitably assumed that Jefferson meant that the doctrine of equal human rights defined us as a people. But now, after further reading, I believe that I was too charitable in my assessment of Jefferson, because I idolized him as a founding father. He actually failed to realize that the doctrine of equal human rights was not self-evident at all, but was part of his heritage as an Englishman and a nominal Christian.
The carrying on and handing down of our traditions takes effort, quite a lot of effort really. To the extent that we accept the Enlightenment liberal view that our moral traditions will take care of themselves, because they are spontaneously evident to any mentally competent person, we will not expend that effort -- and the consequence will be generational moral rot, slowly at first and then quickly. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes.
NelsonRushton
2d ago
The big media outlets don't seem to be interested in this story. Maybe that is because they are controlled by a Jewish syndicate, or maybe it is because it isn't a big deal. I go with "isn't a big deal". If they were conspiring to break the law that would be a big deal; if they were conspiring to change the law it would be at least interesting -- but what is happening here is that they are "conspiring" to enforce the law -- which they would already be enforcing, with prejudice, if a group on the other side were doing the same thing. So, so what?
NelsonRushton
1d ago
I read your post and you mentioned "vile and ineffectual resistance" but I don't see where you mentioned genocide as a strategic objective. That is to say Hamas and a critical mass of the Palestinian citizens want all of the Jews dead as an ultimate objective, whether they have a state or not. You assent to that as a matter of fact and think it is a morally defensible position?
You name the hardhat riots, in which 100 people were hospitalized and none killed.
I name
- the 1992 LA riots, in which 2383 people were injured and 63 people killed, and
- the 1965 Watts riots, which resulted in 34 deaths.
Your move.
NelsonRushton
14hr ago
Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.
Hear, hear!
NelsonRushton
19d ago
My claim of fact is that the Democratic party has, since its inception with Andrew Jackson, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the civil rights era, and up to this very day, tended to be the party of (1) racial caste systems, (2) illegal mob violence, (3) censorship, and (4) you-work-I-eat, from slavery to welfare.
NelsonRushton
20d ago
In some ways, the tweet is not wrong.
I think the tweet is dead wrong. It makes a claim of fact, that is a universal generalization, that is not true, and that is not usefully close to being true.
NelsonRushton
28d ago
I think there's arguably a "descriptive" version of utilitarianism, and a "prescriptive" one... For an analogy, look at medicine... In the same way, economics as a field of the social sciences is "merely" the descriptive study of how economies work, but the reason we study economies is because we want stable, functioning economies that do a good job of allocating resources and have positive effects on well-being.
This all makes sense, but I do not believe it is right picture. As you suggest, there is a line between, say, the academic discipline of economics on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the role played in moral decisions by the findings of economics. But, also inherent in your description is the fact that the academic discipline of economics falls entirely on one side of that line. So economics as such does not, after all, have a normative component. Moreover, utilitarianism, as a theory of the moral good, lies on the other side of that line -- that is, it says, as a function of the findings of fact and causal law, what is moral and immoral, while remaining silent on those findings of fact and causal law (except as hypothetical illustrative examples). If it were otherwise, we would see whole chapters of the work of Mill, Bentham, and Harris (in The Moral Landscape) devoted to deep investigations of fact and causal law (but of course we do not).
The practice of medicine probably does span both sides of the line, but I think this is a special case, because doctors deal face to face with their patients, who in fact have widely varying degrees of compliance with medical advice. One common tool for increasing compliance is moral suasion (for example, when your doctor wags his finger at you and says you are a bad boy or girl for not taking your medicine, or getting your regular checkup, or whatever). Thus, genuinely moral suasion is part of the practice of medicine, and I conceded that utilitarian reasoning plays a major role, insofar as what physicians morally pressure people to do is a function of scientific findings of cause and effect. I will chalk that up in support of utilitarianism as one tool in our moral toolbox.
On the other hand, I do not believe this argument transfers from medicine to politics, or foreign policy, or individual ethics. The hard part of medicine is knowing what works and getting people to do it in spite of their stubbornness and lack of discipline. The hard part of economics, diplomacy, and life on the street is trading between the interests of various overlapping groups and coalitions engaged in zero-sum conflicts of interest. That is where the study of ethics really ought to help us, and where I claim utilitarianism does not.
NelsonRushton
5d ago
Good point. Thanks. Edit made.
NelsonRushton
16d ago
We can say this with confidence, because this law is a consequence of what mass is, mathematically
This is simply not correct to say about the Law of Gravity. It is almost correct to say about the second law of motion:
F = MA
with one caveat. Newton implicitly assumes that each particle has a property, called its mass, which is constant over time. It turns out this not true: the mass of a particle can vary over time as a function of the object's velocity, according to the special theory of relativity. If you alter Newton's theory to make mass, force, and acceleration functions of time, then I think you are correct and the second law of motion is just the definition of mass. But then, by itself, it does not predict anything (since you could measure the mass of a particle, then perform an experiment, and anything could happen since the mass might have changed between weighing the particle and doing the experiment).
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].
By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!
I also feel that if a return to a sufficient level of realpolitik and putting Western interests first is ever going to be pulled into the Overton window at this point
What we have seen up to this point in the spread of wokeness (including anti-West, victim-class politics) is unfathomable craziness and stupidity, but not material threats to the safety and comfort of the upper middle class and the wealthy. I would guess that those threats are coming soon (within a generation, or two at the most), and I think that could change the Overton window dramatically. If you've read the Old Testament, it is a familiar pattern (substituting "wokeness" in current events for "idolatry" in the Hebrew Bible).
I am not particularly optimistic (as, say, Vivek Ramaswamy is) about what will come next after that; it might be right wing tyranny. (If you had visited Germany in the early 1920's you might have thought, "What a zoo! Look at all these Marxists rioting in the streets, and all this open sexual deviance!). But I do agree with Ramaswamy that wokeness is likely to eat itself as its material consequences begin to be felt by the new oligarchs.
NelsonRushton
5d ago
There are two definitions of woke on the table; there is the dictionary definition and there is what people refer to in practice as "woke". These are not the same and I am referring explicitly to the Oxford dictionary definition, which does not reference leftism in any way. Hitler definitely espoused a message of wokeness in the dictionary sense, casting the Jews, Slavs, industrialists as historical class exploiters and using this as a pretext for seizing various assets on behalf of the Volk (folks; people). A case can be made that the Ayatollahs were/are woke as well. I don't consider Hirohito a "mass murdering tyrant" because he was beloved by his people and didn't directly kill them.
After researching your sources, I found enough evidence to withdraw the example from the post -- though implicitly I was referring to the Roman occupation in the Second Temple Period rather than the Kitos War.
It would be nice if you cited your sources more precisely, by author name, date, and document name, preferably with a link. I notice you did not name the document by Cassius Dio, or quote it, which is peculiar because it is pretty juicy in support of your point:
Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators [Cassius Dio (c .30BC): Dio's Roman History, Chapter 70 passage 32]
I think the current consensus (right or wrong) is that that quote makes Dio less credible, and in any case that is also my opinion. I don't find the other sources credible in their details either -- but I agree they are enough to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the Jewish rebellion in the Kitos War was tactically targeting Greek and Roman civilians.
NelsonRushton
18d ago
If you want society to follow a rule, hold to that rule and propagate that rule.
The issue is that there is no general law of cause and effect that would cause society to follow the rule because I do. On the contrary, it might sometimes be the case that society will follow the rule more if I (1) break the rule, (2) keep it secret that I broke the rule, and (3) use my ill-gotten gains from breaking the rule to promulgate the rule. If you claim that could never happen, then the burden of proof is on you and best of luck. Or do you claim that secretly breaking a rule for the purpose of strengthening the rule is moral if the rule is a good one?
Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it? I don't see how it would at all. Let us suppose the following:
- Person A steals a horse and executes a very good plan to keep it secret, so that the horse will be presumed to have run off, and that he took possession of a formerly wild horse. The thief benefits more from owning the horse than its former owner would have. Moreover, person A rides the horse to work daily, where he writes widely read and highly influential essays about the importance of the rule of law, and the wrongness of theft.
- Person B, an influential intellectual, writes an essay about why it is morally OK to steal, because there is no such thing as private property in the first place. He writes cogently and in good faith. The essay gets ten million views and can be blamed with high confidence to at least three actual thefts (suggesting that there are presumably hundreds or thousands of others inspired by it).
- Person C serves on a jury in a case of grand theft, and stubbornly hangs the jury because he has read the essay written by B. In the jury room, Person C argues cogently and in good faith. The accused person is not retried and goes free.
Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
I believe that B and C have done more damage to the moral prohibition against stealing than A has. If so, should the actions of B and C be illegal, and punishable by prison terms longer than what A would serve if he had gotten caught stealing the horse?
I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better
Coleman Hughes puts the case for the Israel beautifully in this 2 minute video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHekt7WLo
I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict can be understood without considering the facts that (1) Hamas, and the Palestinian people in aggregate, are strategically committed to genocide against the Jewish people, and (2) Hamas, with the enthusiastic support of the Palestinian people, deliberately embeds themselves into the civilian population in such a way that their operatives cannot be brought to justice for acts of terror without high civilian casualties. If you don't believe those two things, then the occupation looks unjust, and the Palestinian civilian casualties like a moral outrage that can be blamed on Israel. If you do believe those things, then Israel is taking just and necessary steps to defend themselves, and the Palestinian civilian casualties look like a moral outrage that can be blamed on Hamas. By analogy, suppose someone broke into my house and started killing members of my family, and he was holding his 1-year-old daughter in front of his chest as a human shield; I take a shot and accidentally hit the girl. The death of that child is his fault, not mine. In a similar case where his daughter is 10 years old and is deliberately acting as a human shield for him as he continues to stab members of my family, her death on him and her, but not me.
My opinion is that Israel has the right to defend itself by waging war against Hamas -- and also that, since Israel has overwhelming military superiority, they have an obligation to do this with the lightest touch they safely afford to. But Oct. 7 showed that Israel has heretofore been applying a lighter touch than they can safely afford to -- and so a heavier touch, so to speak, is called for. This "heavier touch" means that thousands of Palestinians will be killed, some of whom are completely innocent -- and the blame for that catastrophe lies entirely with Hamas and their civilian collaborators.
The objective of genocide against the Jews is stated in Hamas's 1988 charter. In the early 2000's, the ruling party of Palestine was Fatah, a terrorist organization. Before the 2006 elections, Fatah renounced terrorism as a tactic, but Hamas did not. Subsequently, Hamas became more popular and they won 74 seats in Palestinian parliament, a majority, compared with Fatah's 45. Since then, Hamas has controlled the schools and media in Gaza and the Palestinian population has become even more fanatical in their genocidal hatred of Israel. The analogous situation in the US would be if the KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood were the two major political parties, the KKK renounced terrorism, and as a result the AB pulled ahead in the polls and won majorities in both houses. But it is still not analogous because the AB doesn't strategically target black noncombatants. Hamas is morally worse than the KKK and the AB; they are more comparable to the Nazis, but they have much broader public support in their home country. They even use the same pretext as the Nazis: those people perpetrated a grievous historical wrong against us, and so we want them all dead, whether they individually had a hand in the alleged wrong or not.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself,
In the abstract, this is the case for Palestine. If you look at it in the abstract and in a vacuum, it makes sense, but I don't think we should look at it in the abstract and a vacuum. Instead, we should compare the response of the Palestinians to the way they have been treated to the responses of other groups who have been treated badly. We didn't see this kind of terrorism from the counties occupied by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Are the Palestinians being treated worse than the Ukrainians were in the Holodomor? (Hell no) Ukraine's ancestral homeland was occupied, and, unlike the Palestinians, they were really targeted for genocide. We didn't see this behavior from 1st Century Christians in the Roman Empire (who, in the latter case, were really targeted for genocide). We don't see it by Armenians against Azerbaijan, we didn't see it when France and Poland were occupied by Germany; We don't see it from the Comanches or the Sioux today; etc., etc., etc.
When somebody says, "how would you feel if...", the very fact that they have to make up this hypothetical means that they cannot think of a historical example of a morally justified campaign of terror against a civilian population by an allegedly oppressed civilization. And the reason there are no examples is that in the real world, civilized people do not respond to oppression with campaigns of murder of civilians on the other side. In a hypothetical, you might imagine that they do, or that you would -- but they don't and you wouldn't.
If you want to argue in the direction that my historical examples above aren't comparable to the Palestinian case, then that itself demonstrates that you cannot make a moral case for Hamas. If you wanted to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral, you would have to either (1) assert that the Palestinians have gotten shafted worse than any other group in history ever has, or (2) point to historical examples of morally justified campaigns of homicide against civilians, morally comparable to that of Hamas in terms of their justification and methods (e.g., in their use of human shields, the degree to which they preferentially target civilians, and their stated objective of genocide). You might argue, for example, that (A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified, and that (B) the tactics of the IRA are morally comparable to those of Hamas. Or you might argue that the French Underground in WWII was comparable to Hamas in their justification and in their tactics. Would you make one of those arguments, or any other such argument based on a historical example rather than a hypothetical or an abstraction? You have all of recorded history to choose from.
NelsonRushton
4d ago
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage.
This, partly, was my point. The definition of wokeness I was applying, taken from the Oxford dictionary (explicitly, using the phrase "in the dictionary sense"), does not reflect the common use of the word. If you read carefully, I never said Hitler, Stalin, etc. were woke. I said (1) their propaganda was rife with woke sounding platitudes, and that (2) their stated agendas fit the dictionary definition (but not the actual meaning in common sense) of wokeness.
But the reader shouldn't have to read that carefully to get the message, so I edited the first paragraph as follows to clarify that the dictionary definition of "woke" that I am using here does not reflect the common use of the word:
As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The dictionary entry doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws. Indeed, the Oxford definition does not mention, or even suggest, anything actually associated with wokeness, as opposed to non-wokeness, in the sense that the word is actually used. I submit this is because the dictionary's authors are woke (or else pretending to be, in order to avoid censorship and collective punishment).
Respectively,
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