FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
When one can't be sure if he's speaking with God or with the echoes of his own mind refracted through religious culture, where does freely made choice even come into it?
Why do you need to be sure? Most (all?) major and highly consequential decisions you make in your life, you have to make without being "sure". Why should this one be different? You can, if you choose, believe in God. You can, if you choose, proceed under the axiom that he has communicated, and even that he continues to communicate. Many people do this, and many of those who do report good results. You can do likewise or not as you prefer.
You can argue that things ought to work a certain way or not at all, but this isn't generally how the world works in the cases where we can test it, and if others don't agree with your logic, why be confident that the way you think it ought to be is basic reality, and not your own biases and models echoing back to you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive and not, I think, all that widespread.
If this were a conversation in the general population, I'd agree. Maybe the rationalist stock has diluted somewhat here as well, but I've argued some of the points straight from the Sequences in the past. I maintain that the intellectual history of Rationalism shows that Materialism can break down and people mostly don't notice, much less ask "People just pretend to believe this, right?".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
Are you familiar with the atheist arguments that God's relationship to us could not possibly be loving, because it's based on coercion through threats and bribes? In my view, there's a pretty solid argument that it has to be this way for our choice to be freely made.
Interrogation of truthfulness is a good thing; my main objection is that most people I see attempting it seem to me to be doing it poorly: strict Materialists incapable of recognizing breaks in Materialism, for example.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
It's interesting to read them, check the date, and then recall how the Social Justice movement played out. It's possibly the wrongest Scott ever was.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
If our assumptions based on the observable reality don't work for higher realities, then that should signal we can't derive how/if God works from what we see in our world.
Say rather, you can't derive the mechanics of higher realities from observation of lower ones, and this is a point that most people theorizing about stacked realities appear to miss.
But God is not a mechanism. If a willful intelligence in a higher reality wants to talk to you, it can. If it makes claims about your reality, you can compare those to what you observe of your reality. If it tells you things about the higher reality, you can choose to believe it or not, and the perceived accuracy of its statements about the reality you are in can lend some degree of evidence for trust to operate.
In any case, what is "truth value"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
You must see how that just sounds like "separating from family made me feel worse".
I was not separated from my family in any sense but the spiritual. I spent lots of time with them throughout my time as an atheist; I was the "cool uncle" to their kids, I lived close to my parents and spent much time with them, I relished our time together. But I did not want a family for roughly the same reasons I didn't want to believe in God: it would interfere with my various habits of pleasure-seeking and vanity. Over time, it became undeniable that I had much the worse end of that trade-off.
All sorts of people have all sorts of experiences; I can only speak to mine, and what I've observed second-hand in those I know. My observation is that sin makes people miserable, generally in fairly obvious ways, and that both I myself and others I observe construct elaborate justifications why their misery is the fault of anyone other than themselves and their own choices. Sometimes this is even true, to a limited extent: people really do harm each other very badly, and it is certainly possible to have been harmed, wronged, damaged by the actions of others. But it is also possible to harm one's self, and people do so all the time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
More, I think. Have you seen a "new atheism" analogue for Simulation theory, Singularitarianism or the Doomish? I observe that a lot of the objections to theoretical violations of Materialism do not appear to be principled. There's a pretty noticeable gap between "do I have to believe this" and "do I have to not believe this", and a lot of human thought observably lives in that gap.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences . . . it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.
From personal experience, embrace of sin observably eats the self away even while you are still living. I could see myself becoming noticeably less human over time, more wretched, more insectile, ingrown in a miserable spiral of decay. And the reverse was true as well: pursuing Christ made me more human, allowed me out of myself in ways I had not been able to achieve while chasing appetite and pride, bitterness and vanity. I left Christianity because I believed it was making me miserable; as an atheist, I grew considerably more miserable, and eventually the contrast between my own life and the lives of my Christian family members grew too stark to ignore. I returned to the church, and my life now is incomparably better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I suppose the way I'd put it is that, in my view, He's got a good pitch. That is, I find the deeper claims of Christianity map well onto the world I observe: things like sin and its consequences, What it has to say about how humans work, what is necessary, which things remain constant over time, etc. It promises things that I want, and in my experience it delivers on those promises in tangible ways in the material world. The arc of my life diverged markedly for the worse when I became an Atheist, and diverged markedly for the better when I became a Christian again. I don't expect my personal experiences to be persuasive to people who are not me, but they are very persuasive to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Model the Christian God as a superintelligence, and the physical universe as a simulation. Then drop the usual model that any reality below the observable one should be assumed to work the way the observable one works. Consider that, if there were a deeper substrate reality under this one, you know nothing about how that reality operates at all, and none of our assumptions about the function of the universe necessarily obtain.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I assumed it was this.
I used to be a pretty big 9/11 truther, and suppose I still am in a fairly limited form. I dove deep on the pentagon evidence back in the day, and concluded that there was nothing to it. The usual claim was that what actually hit the Pentagon was a tomahawk missile; supporting evidence presented was the absence of large airliner engines in the wreckage, the presence of a much smaller turbofan engine, and arguments about the shape of the hole in the pentagon itself.
From memory, I've seen strong arguments that the main engines are absent because when a large jet engine running at full-speed hits thick reinforced concrete, it tends to shatter/explode. The small engine found was likely the airliner's APU, a small jet engine located in the back top of the fuselage under the tail, used for generating power for in-flight systems. Its positioning would give it the maximum protection from the impact due to the structures ahead of it crumpling. Other evidence included a shipping container in the area that had been clipped by the plane's wing on the way in. I'm pretty sure it was a plane.
For me, a lot of "9/11 truth" became less plausible not due to the accrual of physical evidence, "evidence" in cases like this being something of a loaded term for a variety of reasons, but because the expected consequences that most of those theories predicted did not come to pass. Bush did not suspend elections nor make himself president-for-life. Institutions rolled on much as they had previously. If 9/11 involved a layer beneath the "official story", (and it pretty clearly did, see the stock trades for an example of where it seems inarguable that we aren't getting the full story), I think it's pretty clear that the hidden part of the story did not represent a significant discontinuity with the way our system in general worked before or after.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
My understanding, admittedly second-hand, is that more than one of the female jurors have admitted on camera to arguing their position based on their own "expert opinion", ie based on evidence that was not actually admitted in the trial proper, and that this is in fact serious misconduct. Can anyone else shed more light on this aspect?
Pretty sure it's one of either Muggeridge or Menken, the anecdote being mentioned in Scott's review of their autobiography.
[edit] - It's Muggeridge.
Yeah, that's basically my thesis. Greater social cohesion means the effect of cultural trends is significantly magnified, and the Progressive cultural trend was extremely strong even in our world, where social division was strong and deep. I guess our point of disagreement is that I see Communism as an obvious continuation of the Progressive project right back to the Enlightenment itself, so if you strengthen the Progressive push, you strengthen the Communist push as well, and I think beating back Communism was a near-run thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
My understanding is that the US provided a very large amount of the anti-communist energy throughout the Cold War. Canada I think is too close to the US to disambiguate. Australia I don't know much about. My understanding is that England was profoundly compromised by Communists top-to-bottom, and that's in the real world where the US is working as hard as possible to drag them back.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Without the history of slavery, probably there's a lot less conflict in American history. Most likely the Civil War doesn't happen, and the country is much more cohesive rolling into the 1900s. You have no bitter division to pre-seed conflict with modernism as it rolls out; in our actual timeline, a large proportion of elites went hard for socialism/communism around the turn of the century, through the 20s and into the 30s, and the south generated much of the serious resistance to Communism in the 40s, 50s and 60s. How much of that resistance is catalyzed by the acrimony of the civil war, reconstruction and the Jim Crow years?
No articles or references, just a lot of reading about modernism and its leading lights.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
No, it's a Russell conjugation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
My read of the historical evidence is that, in this scenario, we probably would have gone Communist in the 20s-30s, and things might well have been considerably worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
...Not convoluting the definition, but leaving it to obviously include most of the examples given while simply asserting that it does not fit them is also a strategy, I suppose.
"Trump is a Russian Asset" alleges that Trump and many members of his staff are working for the Russian government, their cooperation being secured through some combination of kompromat, bribes and ideological alignment. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". This is your reminder that this particular conspiracy theory was a paid op by Hillary Clinton, that Obama appears to have been at minimum aware of it and declined to intervene, that Obama's senior officials were directly involved in its implementation, and that it was pushed to the hilt by every major media organization in the country for multiple years, with devastating political consequences and zero accountability.
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men" claims that police routinely cooperate to murder innocent black men and then to cover up these murders as legitimate police actions, aided and abetted by other elements of the criminal justice system such as judges, prosecutors, etc. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Engagement with this conspiracy theory is universal within Blue Tribe, and conformity is policed viciously.
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination" claims that business owners secretly coordinate to violate black-letter federal anti-discrimination law, artificially depressing wages for women by 30% economy-wide and with sufficient cunning that they never, ever get caught doing it, because they hate women and want to exploit them. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Less prevalent that the racialized conspiracy theories at the moment, Feminism peaked early and largely exhausted itself, but we could tack on "Rape Culture/Believe All Women/Justice Kavanaugh is a rapist" as further examples as well.
"Billionaires control the government" claims that Billionaires have secretly subverted democracy through various legal, quasi-legal and illegal actions to put themselves beyond the reach of law and bend the government to their will. It universally involves claims that multiple actors are secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public. How could you possibly argue otherwise?
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want." This one does not fit your definition of conspiracy.
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists." "Conspiracy by greedy capitalists" is literally in the belief-statement, and is by no means a straw-man. Millions of people observably believe this, and are willing to endorse murder as a plausible solution.
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]" likewise observably involves claims of malign coordination by rich villains in a large and highly central proportion of real-world instances.
"Trump is a Russian asset."
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men."
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination."
"Billionaires control the government."
"Billionaires got their money by stealing it from ordinary people."
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want."
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists."
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]."
Or is it time to convolute the borders of "conspiracy theory"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
What's your understanding of the "pentagon situation"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Though I'll save any attempted lectures (which take too much finesse for me to ever deliver convincingly) for those who seem to be honestly pained by their beliefs I think are mistaken, rather than wheeling one out for OP who is always just looking for a new 'republican bad' angle.
For the record, I'll hear you out. MMT seems crazy to me, but I'm policy-starved, and politics runs on hope. If we're going to be acting as though MMT is true, I'd like to at least hear the optimistic case.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
If FC's particular brand of doomerism is not controlling (and it might be), then perhaps the most suitable tool in our Constitutional Republic for the task would be a Constitutional amendment.
Perhaps you could write it such that "balanced budgets shall not be infringed." That ought to keep things in-line.
It turns out that while innocent life is worth protecting, those subjected to the death penalty aren't generally considered innocent, and neither are soldiers in a war under, to my understanding, a somewhat different model.
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