ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust.
I don't think we're talking past each other, I just disagree with yours / Davies' core thesis. No, that's not how it works at all. There are scams and frauds in Russia, and there are essentially no high-trust communities there. All that happens is that scammers have to come up with new tricks that other people haven't heard of yet, and so don't know to be on the lookout for.
A community that doesn't lock it's doors is high-trust. If they get burgled, and start locking up it makes them low(er) trust. A burglar learning how to pick locks does not magically make the community high(er)-trust.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
58m ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white.
None of that proves "the call is coming from inside the house", unless you're one of the more advanced racists.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
This is completely false. It doesn't surprise me, as westerners don't really grok low-trust societies, even the ones that acknowledge their existence (because hilariously there's quite a few who think doing so is racist).
What you're saying is the equivalent of believing that a predator can only successfully hunt if you transfer him it to Quokka Island. Quokka Island will appear to one as an all-you-can-eat buffet, but It's obvious predators survive and thrive quite well in environments where the prey is adapted to it's existence, it's just that they're subject to "you win some, you lose some" dynamics. In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy. To someone from a low-trust society, a high-trust one does not appear as "the only place where fraud is possible", it appears as one where the population hasn't bothered to put up the most basic defenses.
None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
The part that's counter-intuitive, and perhaps deceptive, is where you/he claims that tolerating fraud is the price for a high-trust society. No amount of tolerance will turn a low-trust society into a high-trust one. What needs to happen is the purging scammers, once that's done, people lower their guard naturally. They don't "tolerate" fraud, it just happens so rarely, it hardly ever enters their thoughts.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
The book is not counter-intuitive. It's wrong. At best it's doing the old gimmick of phrasing something true in a deliberately counter-intuitive way, to make it's reader feel smart, but the way you're describing it, it sounds just plain wrong.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
I think this is backwards. No one pays with fraud or murder to create a higj-trust / free society. A high-trust / free society comes about when the amount of fraud and deaths is so low, they're not worth bothering with to preempt.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
In light of this, I find myself wondering if a lot of new shows are as bad as they seem, or if I'm simply unable to overlook their flaws (or inadvertently comparing them to the best-in-genera alternatives)
Nah. A well-written show leaves you something else to mull over as your grow older. Maybe there's more depth to a character than you could even begin to understand when you were young (imagine thinking Boromir is just an asshole... couldn't be me!), or it touches on some abstract ideas you couldn't grasp earlier. Sure, I could flip the table over TNG's retarded security protocols that get broken regularly, and I probably would, if there was nothing else to redeem the show.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
And you don't think the chain of assumption that results in a liberaltarian state being naturally diverse, and a libertarian state being locked into racism, is a tad convenient for you? If a libertarian says "I don't think bigger states are naturally more prone to diversity than small ones", how is his explanation worse than yours?
Huh? France and the Benelux states had already been democracies for a long time before WW2, and France was already a republic to boot.
Sorry, I phrased it poorly. "the way the term is being used nowadays" is carrying some weight in that statement, as that way involves ideas like "you're doing democracy wrong if you vote in the way we disapprove of".
Spain and Portugal joined NATO only after those dictatorships fell, which I think bears mentioning here.
The US had military bases in Spain with Franco still in power. Admittedly, I know less about Portugal.
The Baltics used to be ruled by German/Germanized nobles for a long time and thus have a shared legacy of Western orientation; that much is certainly relevant in this case.
Southkraut allready summed up what I think about the German democracy, but aside from that, If it worked like that, and if Poland's tradition was relevant (more on that later), Belarus should have been one of the better democratized nations.
The Poles have a bygone but long and cherished legacy of being a republic with a parliament which, for example
Similarly to what German democracy looked like in practice, Poland was an "elite state" through and through. The nobles may have organized themselves as a democracy, but they'd scoff idea of having the society ran as anything other than a class based hierarchy. There's a throwaway line in Game of Thrones where Sandor Clegane says it makes as much sense to give the vote to his horse as much as does to give it to a peasant, and given their affinity for horses, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the line was first spoken in Poland.
Sure they have a democratic legacy that is both cherished and long, with the caveat that the part that's long isn't particularly cherished - they literally see it as the proximate cause of the collapse of their empire - and that part that is cherished - a last ditch attempt at reforming their system - lasted all 4 years.
It could have probably worked but nobody even tried.
Like I said, I don't necessarily disagree, but it's hard for me to tell what the world would look like if things panned out differently. Is a Germany where Eastern ideas were taken seriously one where Easterners don't vote AfD because their ideas don't resonate, or because AfD-ish / BSW-ish ideas are already incorporated into the mainstream?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I suppose humans are more fundamentally hierarchical than they are tribalist/racist.
As long as the person or people on the top stand to benefit from greater numbers of workers, and they don't personally suffer negative effects from things like immigration and ethnic diversity it is in their interest to encourage it. They command the people below them, who are also made better off in a number of ways from the increased number of workers, and on down through the system.
Okay, but the question you originally asked was:
I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted.
So isn't the direct analogy here the people on the top being more racist, and therefore commanding the people below them to be more racist? If the dynamics of diversity and rational self-interest naturally result in people on the top imposing non-racism on the bottom, how does the nightwatchman state end up with government enforcers being racist/sectarian/whatever?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Because, I don't think most traditional libertarians support the "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" part of the equation, and I think that is a central part of how the idealized form of modern American politics actually works in practice.
But in your system, if society is racist top to bottom, how are you getting "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" rather than "men with guns forcing people to act racist"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
So why is the inability to solve bigotry running from top to bottom of the entire society a point against libertarianism, but not against the system you support?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Okay... whatever our current system is, how would it solve the issue of everyone, from top to bottom, bring racist?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
This is symmetrical to what Darwin is claiming with JK Rowling.
Still not quite. What's missing is the reasoning for this claims being justified by some passage from Biden's autobiography, the other poster arguing that said passages say no such thing, it turning out that the original poster hasn't even read the autobiography and is blindly repeating completely made up claims, and when that's pointed out he then says "it doesn't matter".
It's not false at all that at least some factions of the Republican party want to eliminate trans people, although this need not necessarily mean "death camps". For some it probably does mean death camps though.
There are some factions that want to ban the whole Gender Affirming Care thing, and abolish all the special accommodations given to trans people. Sure, this is often interpreted by the pro-trans side as eliminationist, though such usage of the word is unconventional, and any honest person participating in a conversation would qualify it properly.
If you actually truly believe that the second sentence is a reasonable thing to say about any non-negligable amount of Republicans, and if you really truly believe there's nothing at all egregious about this conversation, then please step me through some of the other examples of bad posts you've given. Why is it ok to say "JK Rowling
I don't mind Darwin's opinions, just his debating tactics, but you seem to be objecting to the content of people's beliefs, which is a weird approach for me in itself, but combined with saying the content of Darwin's post is fine, actually, it's incomprehensible to me.
Is it that he didn't explicitly admit he was wrong about the point on JK Rowling? Nobody every does this in debates
Absolutely false. Plenty of people do. I'm sure you do so quite often yourself. Just off the top of my head, you didn't react to the link where GuessWho admits he's Darwin by saying "pff, that doesn't matter".
What is more rare, and should not be expected of others, is changing your mind about your broader worldview during the course of the debate, but conceding basic factual statements is a prerequisite for having a reasonable conversation. If you don't have that, you're not even in a conversation, you're in Monty Pythons Argument Clinic
Is it that his original post had an offhanded bailey in it that he abandoned to focus on defending the motte instead? See my prior post: yeah, it's a bit annoying, but it's very common.
Is it that he didn't bother to defend the bailey even though that's a prime area where Amadan wanted to press him on? You mentioned him saying "it doesn't matter" was a problem, but obviously people shouldn't be forced to defend dumb positions if they'd rather give up and just implicitly accept an L on a given topic.
An implicit L would be just dropping the topic of JK Rowling altogether, not trying to claim he didn't actually mean her specifically when he said "people like JK Rowling", then claiming he has good reasons to believe she actually has more extreme views than she lets on, based on her portrayal of trans people in her books, and then claiming none of it matters when it turns out he was wrong about her books. An explicit L should definitely be expected from a reasonable person, when they make a mistake of this magnitude.
Also, the moment you call it a motte and bailey, you concede the entire issue, in my opinion. Motte and Bailey is a dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative debating tactic, that's just an objective fact. As to whether he should be forced to defend the bailey, no - there should be no bailey! The whole spirit of this place is that any position that comes out of your mouth is one that you should be willing to defend. It's in the website's sidebar:
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
It's in the freakin' domain name!.
If you're still thinking "what's the big deal?", it's that his wasting people's time. I don't mind drive-by trolls like AlexanderTurok or BurdensomeCount, because they're signaling clearly that 90% of their content is just bants. I roll my eyes and move on, or I join in on the banter, either way I know what I'm getting into. OTOH, If I'm joining what appears to be a reasonable conversation I want to take it seriously. I don't particularly care for how outlandish an idea is, how absurd and obviously wrong it seems, if it is held sincerely, I want to see what makes the person tick, or to see if I'm missed some critical facts about the world if my worldview is so distant from their's. When it turns out I'm not in a conversation, but a 5D word-judo fight where it can easily turn out that "people like JK Rowling" doesn't mean "a group of people that JK Rowling is a central example of", but "a tiny subgroup that is in the same cluster as JK Rowling, because said cluster is defined to span half of the entire society, if not more", then I'm going to feel like an idiot for jumping into it to begin with.
You claim this sort of behavior is very common, but this is clearly disproven by the fact that people we able to recognize Darwin under his new alt, specifically by his particular brand of dishonesty, bad faith, and manipulation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
If you and I were talking about US presidents, and I called Trump and Biden pieces of shit, that wouldn't be great but it'd be much less bad than if I called you specifically a piece of shit
That's exactly how I understood your argument, but my point is it doesn't work if you accept the logic of Darwin's argument, because in that case it wouldn't be calling you specifically, a piece of shit. You don't even enter the conversation. It's just about people like you, which is not at all connected to you specifically.
-"Biden wants to take all our guns!" -"No he doesn't" -"OK but he's the Democratic president, and there are Democratic factions that want to do that"
Kinda missing the part about backing away to a claim about Biden specifically that they think is more defensible, it turning out to also be also be false, and then saying "it doesn't matter" even though they started the conversation.
Stuff like this happens all the time. People rarely get all that fussed over it.
I don't think it does, and I don't think anyone would say "you only hate him because he's right wing" if you got fed up talking to a guy like that after many conversations over the course of several years.
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't
Great, because if his argument is valid, then it wouldn't be talking about anyone who's part of the conversation, just people like them. So none of what you said applies.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
The issue isn't him putting words in JK Rowling's mouth, people do that all the time as part of completely normal acceptable conversations. If it went like:
- JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people
- No she doesn't
- Oh... Looks like I was wrong, sorry.
it would have been completely fine. He'd still be putting words in her mouth, but he'd be open to admitting he was wrong, and correcting. Instead we had him making a false claim, denying that he had made it, redirecting to another claim that he thought was more defensible, but was just as false as the first one, and then claiming that any false claims he made don't actually matter because he wanted to talk about something else, even though he's the one that brought each of these claims into the conversation.
It's textbook trolling - luring people into what appears a reasonable conversation, making insane claims to get people riled up, and ducking out after the damage is done.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong.
Again, him believing Rowling is a transphobe is irrelevant to the conversation, I'm completely fine with people holding that belief.
If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
If you don't think Darwin's behavior objectively crosses the line into dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative, I think it's pretty clear you are just biased in favor of people who go against the grain of this forum. It's fine, I get it, you catch a tonne of shit for disagreeing with the average poster here, so it feels nice to have company, but it's still bias.
But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not
If I start saying things about "people like Ben Garrison", you call it a personal attack, and I'll clarify I didn't mean you, I just meant people like you, will you accept the logic of that statement?
It wasn't a clairifiaction, it was an obvious attempt to avoid accountability for what he said. This is obvious because even as he backed away from the "eradicate trans people" thing, he doubled down on the claims of generic transphobia, which were directly shown to be just as dishonest. Even that wouldn't be so bad, at the end of it all he managed to get something like "shit, I fucked up, you were right" out his throat, but it's something he never does.
If you think otherwise, I urge you to consider that you're irrationally biased in favor of anyone going against the grain of this forum.
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
Are you assuming Darwin is an otherwise good faith poster, and deserves to be treated as such despite his long history of posting here. I think it's your turn to give some links proving your point.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
This is the second time I'm telling you, I already gave you the link to his totally good faith, absolutely not obnoxious, JK Rowling debate. FCFromSSC has links of his own can at least stop acting like people aren't giving you links?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Downvoting can get people stuck in a filter making his posts invisible until the mods manually approve them. OTOH it's also possible to permanently get out of it with enough upvotes (and there was a "charity drive" to do so, where I did my part by upvoting like 5 pages of his posts).
I already gave you one, and again, if you don't know the Smollet thing, you don't know anything about the guy.
And if you didn't interact with him much, then how are you making the claim about "the only reason people hated him"?!
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that?
Yes, he did. On what grounds are you telling people "the only reason they hate him" if you're not familiar with his posting history here at all?
Then we have Gattsuru who did this.
I'll grant you that Gattsuru's antipathy for you is somewhat strange, and for the good of both of you, he should just ignore or block you if he can't. If you think the lack of immediate moderatory action is evidence of some bias, you're wrong. It's standard procedure to be a bit more lenient for quality contributors, this is exactly how Darwin was allowed to post here for years with almost no mod actions against him.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue,
I get why it feels like that from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the majority of the forum. People start blurring into a single indescript swarm, and it's all the same to you if it's one guy being and asshole one day, and another guy on another day. But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that, if it was your ideology, or you personally in the line of fire
Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
If you're trying to tell me gatsuru is somehow as bad as AlexanderTurok, you're going to have your work cut out for you. For starters, don't you think keeping up with all these court cases required several orders of magnitude more effort than anything Turok has ever done here?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Sure, here's the JK Rowling debate (starts second post from the top). Surely you're familiar with the Smollet thing? If not then I don't know if you followed the conversation this guy spawned much at all.
Yes. If you think people only hated Darwin because he was unabashedly left-wing, you should consider if you're not doing the inverse. Maybe you only liked him because he was going against the grain (and maybe that's the only reason you like Turok).
If you told me "come one, he's not that bad, you just have an axe to grind against him" about almost anyone else, I could hear you out, but the fact that you think this is a plausible claim about Darwin in particular makes it extremely likely that you're the one that's irrationally biased.
Not much to expand on, the race of the people making the decisions is irrelevant to what you're discussing. What were you even trying to point out by mentioning it?
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