Drinniol
8mo ago
It used to be that plan B was simply, "OK, then we civilize you by force." See e.g. British treatment of the Thuggees.
But nowadays, the plan B is to just let the Thuggees keep strangling travelers for Kali while shrugging and saying something like, "Having apocalyptic cultists murder travelers for human sacrifice to their death god is just part and parcel of living in a multicultural society. The real villains are the people using the human sacrifices to tar all Thuggees with the same brush. Most Thuggees never strangle anyone to death in the back of a stage coach (they just celebrate, support, and venerate those who do). And anyway, if we hang all the death cultists, we're strangling them, so are we really any better?"
Drinniol
8mo ago
Watching wikipedia editors hem and haw in the talk page of Mount McKinley (currently still Denali... for now) about why, exactly, it was good and correct when they immediately changed the page name when Barack Obama did the name change but now that Trump is naming it back it should stay Denali has led me to the same conclusion.
Changing names of stuff is still silly, but as with all things turnabout is fair play.
I don't think there's much of a conflict. The J6 stuff was way closer to a legal protest (that is, a protest where people don't break the law) than most Floyd stuff was. I don't, and never did, view J6 as an actual threat to our democracy or any kind of insurrection. I think that's a fairly typical view too.
I always and continue to feel calling the J6 event an insurrection is a hysterically overblown misuse of verbiage. A bunch of people milling around the capitol building taking selfies is not an insurrection. Blowing up half a federal building killing hundreds as happened in OKC is an insurrection. An insurrection is a violent rebellion. Think targeted destruction of key infrastructure, armed ambushes of government convoys, and the mass assassinations of officials. An insurrection is an attempt at revolution. It is a war, and necessarily causes widescale death and destruction. The J6ers were not revolutionaries and for the most part not even wannabe revolutionaries.
Drinniol
8mo ago
Trump's motivations are irrelevant when assessing the rightness of the act itself. The right thing for the wrong reason is still the right thing, even if Trump himself gets not moral credit. As to that, if the choice were all or nothing I would very much prefer the outcome we have just had. And I do think the choice was much more all or nothing than it wasn't. As soon as you start picking and choosing, it opens an avenue of attack. "Why this particular person and not this particular person? Why clemency for this but not that?" And this attack will be leveraged to the hilt as many times as it can be since, after all, the attackers are absolutely politically motivated. They were willing to put people in jail for decades for low-level hooliganism or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why wouldn't they make hay?
There is also his own base to consider. Political capital is not an unlimited resource. Even Elon had to walk back his H1B stance on his own website. A significant part of Trump's base would see anything that wasn't a blanket pardon as a betrayal.
A blanket pardon is far harder to nitpick.
I also think that the protests were legitimate and the worst excesses (which still hit nowhere near the level of a typical Floyd demonstration) were intentionally allowed or even encouraged, both in the police/NG response or lack thereof and in some cases with literal plants acting as agent provocateurs. In any event, it infuriated me to know I lived in a country where sitting in someone's chair and smoking a joint got the full force of the federal government on you finding every possible way to charge you for as much as possible, while literally burning down entire city blocks killing dozens and causing billions of damage and possibly decades of urban blight was met with a, "I mean what are we gonna do, send in the National Guard (lol how ridic can you imagine that would be like totally fascism. fascism is when you shoot people burning down your cities don't you know?)."
Now we are slightly less living in that country. Hopefully the trend continues.
Forgive me for the facebook link, but my view is basically this https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1120248821680811 I don't think anyone should be able to break the law just because they are protesting. But I also think that a law that is applied unevenly, and wielded as a political bludgeon, is not only no longer serving its rightful purpose but serving an incredibly destructive one instead. It would be better for it to go unenforced entirely than for it to be used in such a way.
Drinniol
8mo ago
There's literally centuries - millennia actually - of discourse over morality and what it is and should be. But first you do need to accept that morality exists.
There's only nothing left to talk about if both sides believe values are merely subjective and that, therefore, no values can be more correct than any other in any absolute sense. Even totally incoherent contradictory values aren't wrong - after all, thinking that someone's beliefs shouldn't contradict themselves is itself just another merely subjective value judgment.
Drinniol
8mo ago
"Think about how upset being shot at makes you. Isn't it hypocritical of you to want to shoot back?"
As an aside, I hate how hypocrisy is now the cardinal and only sin in certain discourse. Since, as the theory goes, all morality is subjective, it leaves one who swallows the subjective-pill unable to point out how someone else's culture, values, or religion are evil and wrong. However, it's always possible to point out hypocrisy since virtually everyone falls short of their professed values in some way or the other. It is the universal argument. "No I don't believe in your backwards, primitive, parochial morality but then again you don't perfectly live up to the virtues you profess so really neither do you nyah nyah nyah." But there are worse things than being a hypocrite, namely: not being a hypocrite because you have no virtues to fall short of. There are only two types of non-hypocritical people: saints and the amoral, and there are many more of the latter than the former.
Drinniol
8mo ago
Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man should be imprisoned falsely.
A severe injustice has been overturned. The world is a little bit brighter, freer, and more just.
It saddens me that you can't see this.
I am filled with joy for the political prisoners and their families who were railroaded by a weaponized legal system. Those who perpetrated and defended this monstrosity ought to be jailed for at least as long as those now freed.
Learn best certainly, but when it comes to scaling compute all it needs to do is be able to learn by itself at all. I'm sure an AI intelligence improvement cycle would go even faster if it had an even smarter AI to give feedback, but for recursive improvement all that is necessary is even a small increase, compounded over and over and over again.
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