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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I think this is misrepresenting the complaint (at least the one I implicitly voiced here). The problem is not along the lines of "God wants me to be good, but I'm evil and can't help it, why did God make me this way?", and I can only see this framing emerging as a Christian (mis)interpretation of a mindset that is alien to them. Rather, it takes the form that the Christian God, as described in Christianity, is evil from the Atheist's perspective, and moreover is claimed to command everyone to do evil (as understood by the non-Christian) to earn his approval. It doesn't seem to me like the Christians I interact with (actively or passively) ever have a useful response to this, only being able to say that God is definitionally good and so the degree to which His purported nature disagrees with my understanding of the Good just is prima facie evidence of the latter being mistaken.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
If the AI revolution actually happens, the answer to this may depend on the definition of "self". Perhaps America-the-geopolitical-entity reaches new heights of power, but America-the-300something-million-people are paperclipped or left to live out the rest of their natural lifespans miserably under the watchful eye of Skynet.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
You are totally free to go to Hell if that's what you want.
Which version of it, the "separation from God" one or the "fire and brimstone" one? If it's the latter, "hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything, I will just torture you for{ever, _aeons} if you don't obey" doesn't register as a particularly compelling vision of freedom. I know that especially Evangelical Christians would consider "God is evil" to be very nearly an oxymoronic statement, but if their God created me, why did He equip me with a moral compass that says it?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Would those actually result in America "righting itself", even ignoring the expected self-harm from the backlash due to the large number of Americans against those two things? Criminal illegal immigrants don't really seem like a problem that is big enough except psychologically, unless the illegal immigration itself is considered a sufficient crime, in which case kicking them out would probably kick the bottom out of agriculture and other menial labour heavy areas; purging the commies might entail destroying much of the tech industry and university research, because a lot of the most productive people there are about the most proudly self-identifying commies around.
"Sure, destroying the things I hate will cause a lot of disruption at first, but what will grow back afterwards will be so much better because it will not be encumbered by the things I hate" is a line of argumentation that has a bad enough track record (including, in particular, from assorted commies!) that one should not just accept it on faith.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
I always wondered if Lewis considered the ultimate application that quote automatically suggests, being a card-carrying believer in the most supremely omnipotent moral busybody of all. I feel like the benevolent deity who fails to understand the wants and needs of His subjects is a somewhat exhausted trope now, but was it already back then?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Right, but it seemed like @OliveTapenade was partially coming at this from a "who are these newcomers to lecture us, the original Right, about what is Right" angle. (This kind of mirrors the "tankie left" vs. "mental health left" (I still think "Ctrl-Left" is a great coinage) divide, though in the US the latter has comprehensively won while the Alt-Right is at most a strong minority within the Right)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I take it as an answer in line with what @aaa said below, which is something like "it's not in the Bible, but clearly something that was believed by early (more Western than the founders?) Christians within 200-300 years of founding". Except for the longer excerpt from Augustine, though, the arguments don't really seem to obviously be implying an outright "personhood"/complete equivalence of fetuses to central examples of "persons" angle, instead going for general pro-natalism (most obviously in the "poisonous drugs to secure barrenness" text: it's associating abortion with contraception which involves no "conceived seed" at all, and the "conceived seed" vocabulary + implication that it has not yet "received vitality" also sounds like it considers the fetus less than human).
At least without context, Jeremiah 1:5 sounds like it's more about God knowing the future. If you want to read meaning into the phrasing in "formed you in the womb", it only seems to suggest that "you" were formed at some point while being in the womb (so between the point where the fertilised egg leaves the tube and birth).
Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."
Sorry, but this seems like what Scott called "Eulering" to me. Defining life, for moral purposes, is not the magisterium of science to begin with.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
It was a fantasy insofar as he described it as a generic party with a generic GigaChad in attendance, not a party which was attended by people who were specifically personal fans of GigaChad. If the story is just "there exists a guy who has some girl fans he can objectify and they enjoy it", that's not saying much of interest about the "underlying true nature of complaints about objectification" at all.
There exist cannibals who someone wanting to be eaten throwing themselves at them, but this does not make a case for your neighbourhood involuntarily-merely-wannabe cannibal that all the people who want to lock him up if he voices his desires are being hypocrites who are just waiting for a chad like Meiwes to come along. He could make a case that it is some kind of cosmic injustice that Meiwes found his willing meal but he has nobody, just like Roy could make a case that it is unjust that Clavicular has an army of hoes and he doesn't, but this does nothing at all to lower the legitimacy of complaints of those who just don't want to be eaten, or don't want to be objectified, or don't want to work 80 hour weeks, at all.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with? The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people. (I can see an argument for not pulling the plug on the braindead from the perspective of "surviving relatives have sentimental attachment to the body" only.)
(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)
to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.
I think there's a great case to be made that Christianity and Leftism are closely related, which only rubs people the wrong way because in the US the majority of those who identify with the respective movements have evolved to be mutually disgusted tribal archenemies. It seems kind of like what happens when you point out to modern Greeks all the ways in which their culture, genetics and language have been influenced by the Turks.
Alt-righters, whose LARP of choice more often than not is some sort of BAP-style Classical elitism, seem to be one group that definitively has the right to call Christians "left-wing", because the thing they are LARPing in doing so (Classical Antiquity) was overturned by Christianity with a memetic package that through a modern lens very much parses as such.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
If the standard is just "one guy somewhere has said something that is generally considered bad to a woman and she was okay with it", then surely the instances of whipped husbands and wallet-cattle men should count too (and say the same thing about the "underlying true nature of complaints about" men being used as paypigs).
In fact, if that's the standard, a lot more things meet it. For example, the existence of 80 hour workweek hot-desking, hot-bedding startup drones in SF exposes the underlying true nature of complaints about workplace exploitation and work/life balance: you don't actually want reasonable working conditions, you are just waiting for a hot GigaChad industry like SV startups to give you the tingles!
This reminds me of that one time the Bavarian independence party had to run in all of Germany for EU parliament elections, and they decided to run a campaign based on "don't you want to be rid of those damn Bavarians at last" in the parts of Germany that are not Bavaria.
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