4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3d ago
This mindset seems like it could be labelled "cargo cult winning". You see someone beating your team at a ball game (elections/popularity/institutional control) and being obnoxious about it, hollering and making deliberately bad low-effort shots (that still hit) and singing little childish songs about how you are a loser (dragging institutions and values that you appreciate through the mud). You conclude that if you just do all the same obnoxious and self-handicapping moves that the opponent does and that seem to make them feel inordinately pleased, you too can win.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3d ago
With the anti-libertarian hat on, the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on). Playing with metaphors aside, even, it always struck me as very self-serving how libertarians question every piece of conventional wisdom about society and morality except the one that there is an objective, non-socially-constructed notion of "property" or "someone's" money. No, you see, the right to levy tariffs and taxes is just an instance of theft that humans have gaslit you into accepting; the right to not have me use a thing that you consider yours, though, is part of the moral fabric of the universe.
It is at least interesting to me that many of the same folks that have very strong opinions on what the very wealthy (most consistently defined as "wealthier than the speaker") owe to the rest of us also seem to think that everyone other than the very wealthy owe basically nothing to each other. You know, like not initiating physical violence.
Leaving aside the circumstance that even the pro-police claims here only seem to assert that the person who was shot would counterfactually have initiated violence if she hadn't been shot, I really think that police are a special case here. What do we get from them in return for all the money, status and authority we pay them, if not some degree of surrendering the right to avoid danger and violence that we accord to normal people? If the present police force aren't willing to take a deal that looks like "you get a salary, uniform and the right to order your fellow men around, but in return you have to accept the risk of taking the occasional pot of boiling water if the person throwing it hasn't been accused of a crime yet", maybe they should be laid off and replaced with people who are. I have few doubts that after an initial stage of kvetching we would find plenty of takers, considering how even the US military (<2x the active duty personnel relative to active LEOs, ~5x the annual deaths?) has little trouble finding recruits.
With that being said, if buildings start burning, I will, as she put it, rebuke her in the name of Jesus. I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."? Or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, she's obviously mentally ill, but she still shouldn't have thrown the pot for the sake of all of us. Of course the cops should have also just turned off the burner and handled the pot themselves if they were going to immediately be so afraid of it after she grabbed it.
Surely this (tortured, in my opinion) line of argument can be applied to both sides. Do cops ever think "if I act paranoid and kill the weird person here, (...)", or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, they obviously think they have a +2SD spidey sense and are very valuable individuals, but they still shouldn't have shot for the sake of all of us.
If anything, the cop version strikes me as rather more justifiable, because cops signed up voluntarily for a job whose description involves something about keeping the peace and protecting society, and random weirdos did not.
The details of this case notwithstanding, in the light of the comments it's probably worth contemplating that there may be a fundamental value difference between auths and libs in terms of their views of police - in coarse terms, I think the former may think that it is better that ten hapless civilians get shot by police than that one police officer dies on the job, while for the latter the ratio is opposite. So assuming this case was misunderstandings all around, the liberal (in the compass sense) sees a greater evil committed to forestall the possibility of a lesser evil (and would like to change the system so that in this case nobody is shot, even if this means hypothetical police officers actually getting scalded), whereas to the authoritarian a lesser evil was committed to forestall the possibility of a greater one, and so the only relevant discussion (which is in fact the angle being taken up by posters who reflexively side with the police) is whether the probability of the greater evil is high enough such that p*(greater evil) is still greater than the lesser evil of the shot civilian.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5d ago
"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.
But then you would get people trying to lawyer "predominantly", walk around with food in hands or just pockets to avoid wearing masks (lots of people, myself included, already did this seated), ...; also there is an argument that when walking around you cover more ground (germs don't fully disperse in dining settings, cf. those norovirus outbreak analyses where correlation with seat distance is seen).
OP was being a concern troll
Doesn't mesh with my understanding of that term, and OP seems to be my political near mirror image. Boomercons hating Trump for breaking rules and decorum seems consistent.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5d ago
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5d ago
The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5d ago
What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.
where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant")
As an aside, this sort of argument by ridicule can be used against any Schelling point rule meant to identify an easy cutoff point between two undesirable extremes (see also the old "she was only 17 years and 364 days old, you monster" jab). Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?
As for people like OP, who fail a sort of "guardian-guarded distinction" and transfer some of the sanctity of the things a rule or law is intended to defend against onto the rule or law itself (or conversely treat violators of the law as instances of the bad thing the law was meant to prevent), I understand your annoyance but it's also easy to see how they are part of the grease that makes our society run. Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.
A lot of wildbow's works (Worm, Pact, Twig...) hit similar themes; though the decline is usually violent, he has a recurring pattern of stories starting from a place of relative stability and affluence and gradually cranking up the bleakness/hopelessness/lack of resources available both to individual characters and to society at large.
On the Japanese media side, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (English title might be something like Girls' Last Tour) is a worthy spiritual successor to YKK, perhaps slightly more on the bleak and eventful side. It's a sort of cute slice of life series about two girls traversing a ruined world in the wake of WW4 in search of a something/anything, as the last remnants of human activity around them flicker out. The author's narration and Twitter feed pattern-match against the worst cases of inadequately medicated clinical depression I have encountered. Both the manga and the anime adaptation are pretty great.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
9d ago
Couldn't that just be because "creating value" is not a general blue-tribe value? They could believe that all value is produced by their tribe without particularly feeling compelled to brag about it or try to claim personal credit for part of the process.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
9d ago
The rape element is as shocking in a modern polite society context as the Satan element is in a Christian one.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10d ago
Working in academia, the predominant perspective is closer to saying that everything of value is produced by the blue tribe anyway, so they should have the right to choose how the surplus is redistributed as well.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12d ago
Who are the "takers"? Both tribes would contend that their own are valuable hard workers and the other side are parasites taking more value than they contribute.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13d ago
Brazil is not really embedded in the Western media sphere/memetic pond, though. I'd be more inclined to compare with Fico, where the media barely even mustered disapproval, and instead the reaction was all "he kind of had it coming" and "what if this makes more people support his pro-Putin agenda". The subsequent EU election did not really go in his favour, either
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13d ago
There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13d ago
The same "it's different when people without actual power do it, and they are just joking/venting anyway" argument is commonly fielded in defense of variants of "kill all (white) men".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13d ago
Sure, sorry if it was opaque. The first sentence has nothing much going on - it's just the observation that in China every subpopulations seems to only become less rebellious as modernity and affluence spreads to them, and largely the wealthier people now seem to be happy to work and consume while the remaining sparks of rebellion all came from still-impoverished marginal populations as well as groups that dropped on the totem pole of wealth (HK).
The second one is a reference to "the devil makes work for idle hands", a phrase often quoted in Western contexts as part of an argument against allowing the masses significant leisure - the intended image being that only 16-hour workdays stop the plebeian masses from organising at some beer hall to stage an uprising against their betters or else falling into antisocial debauchery. I found the idea that more wealth would create more motivation to use that wealth in a way that threatens government control quite similar, but in reality, any leisure time modern Chinese people get seems to be sunk into modern entertainment - TV dramas and perhaps most conspicuously games that get players hooked using supremely gamified literal make-work activities, the "daily quests" or "dailies". This typically looks like performing some randomised chores (talk to NPC X, defeat five slimes, craft three potions) to get a daily reward of in-game currency that can be used for obtaining randomised lootboxes/gacha. At best, people go to organise in some online beer hall to stage an uprising against a rival subfandom of one of those games.
Paraphrasing a common zinger, what if it turns out communists can stay innovative longer than you can stay ahead?
More substantially, though, I don't see much of a persuasive argument here. You are generalising from very little data (a roughly 200 year old system that identifies as "capitalist" vs. the second major ~60 year old system that identifies as "communist") and theoretising about the "communist" system from first principles that there is very limited evidence it actually adheres to, and on top of that reaching a conclusion which is flattering to your obviously preferred system, which should give you pause. Is this different from a Russian arguing in 1904 that a heathen state will never prevail over a Christian one, with an argument based on the recent historical primacy of the former and imagining that the expected naval tactics of Russia and Japan can be derived from the tenets of Orthodox Christianity and State Shinto?
So far the PRC story seems to me to make a compelling case that you can suddenly and massively crank up the wealth of great numbers of people while making them less inclined to pursue freedoms outside of your prescribed window. The main line of work the devil is making for idle hands there appears to consist of mobile game daily quests.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
16d ago
I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
16d ago
The shoplifting in the metaphor is not posting hoaxes, but doing what LoTT does normally - "nutpicking" and sneering at the outgroup based on the most outrageous examples of its members. This is entrapment in the sense that those porch thief bait packages people like posting about on YouTube are - the reason the porch thieves are bad is not that they took the bait, but that they took non-bait packages before. The bait package is just a tool to catch them.
This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not? It doesn't matter that the arrested person was a shoplifter and police's core function includes arresting shoplifters, but only that they were black; it doesn't matter that the hoaxed person was a purveyor of bad epistemics and a rationalist blogger's core function includes obstructing purveyors of bad epistemics, but only that she was conservative.
There is a view that it is proper to enact violence upon and confine criminals and doing so doesn't make you qualitatively the same as those who would do so against any political opponent. It's not too much of a stretch to draw the same distinction regarding sneer celebrities and similar antisocial elements of the epistemic domain, and say that they ought to be humiliated, alienated and discredited regardless of political colour.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
16d ago
Wasn't this person already renowned for having some gorillion followers and profiled on major news media by the time Trace's hoax happened? If you don't have the capability to assess the accuracy of what you put before hundreds of thousands of people, then maybe you should recuse yourself from putting things before hundreds of thousands of people. Do you seriously think, hand on heart, that you would have accepted an "I am just a poor normie, you can't expect me to fact check" defense for a sneer celebrity with this much of a platform from the other camp?
You have to specify which Europeans, but having been all over Northern Europe for the past twosomething years after a long stint in the US, this really does not align with my impressions. Sure, the Germans (and to a lesser degree everyone else) have a contingent that has mentally spiralled into climate doomsdayism, but those are still way outnumbered by tribalism doomers in the US (just look at this forum!) and on average I just see more random people having more friends, hanging out with them more, and more of the sort of existential slack that makes people take 2-month vacations, backpack or go back to university for some wacky self-actualisation degree at age 50, while typical Americans are desperately hustling to keep/advance their social standing, make rent and fill their array of anxiolytic prescriptions.
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