FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
The sin I was referring to is the sin of regarding a human being as having merely instrumental, rather than terminal, value.
I am not clear on what it would mean for humans to have terminal value. I am very comfortable saying that other humans are not merely a means to my preferred ends, which is what I would assume you mean by "merely instrumental", but they are also pretty clearly not an end in and of themselves, which is what I would assume you mean by "terminal".
I would say that our common humanity imposes upon us both significant rights and significant obligations. I am not sure you and I are anywhere near agreement of what those rights and obligations actually are. Certainly they do not override all other concerns.
That doesn't change the fact that they are still human beings.
The treatment other human beings deserve from me ranges from tender affection to swift, merciless death. That is a pretty wide range, and you don't seem to recognize a fair portion of it.
The former does not follow from the latter; what is natural is not necessarily just, and it is entirely possible for a decision to have consequences which are not deserved.
And sometimes they are somewhat deserved. And sometimes they are entirely deserved.
For many centuries, suffering from cholera was the direct consequence of the decision to live in a city; then we built sewer systems.
I'm a big fan, but I notice that you picked something where the harm was entirely separated from the choice made; there was no germ theory of disease, people knew that cities were plague-ridden but they had no idea what the cause was or how to stop it, nor which actions helped or made it worse beyond "don't go to cities".
Now swap cholera for methamphetamines, and explain to me what the equivalent of the Sewer is supposed to be. My understanding is that there isn't actually a sewer equivalent; a lot of people who get addicted to narcotics cannot be "cured" of their narcotics addiction in any sort of reliable way; if you have data to the contrary I'd love to see it. And so it goes with many, many other similar choices. You are speaking as though you have a solution to these problems, as though effort expended on these problems translates into improved outcomes. At this late date, my assessment is that such claims involve willful deception, of the self and often of others.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of our attempts to help people; however, I was addressing the arguments against even trying.
"Trying" is not an exciting new strategy you thought up in a stroke of genius five minutes ago. We have been "trying" on some issues for half a century, others for multiple centuries, others for millennia. Any claim that we should continue trying needs to engage with the extant results of previous efforts, or it should be discarded out of hand as fundamental irresponsibility.
As a society grows materially wealthier, the standard of living it is obligated to provide to the least of its members also increases.
No, I don't believe it does. Human wants expand without limit. Human needs are unchanged over millennia. You can disagree if you like, but neither I nor others are obligated to subscribe to your bespoke morality.
And what do you think the result of such an action would be?
"would", not "should".
They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.
Yes, exactly.
People make choices. Sometimes people make choices that are straightforwardly destructive to themselves and others. Sometimes these choices can't be un-made. When such choices are made, the people who made them sometimes need to be written off in any one of a number of ways. Sometimes this involves shaming or shunning. Sometimes it means imprisonment, exile or execution. We can wrangle over which choices require which responses, but the simple fact is that not all people are good, and not all people can be saved from themselves or their demons.
Not everyone who is suffering deserves better. Some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their own bad decisions.
There is a difference between telling all 100 "We need 10% of your wealth"
This presumes that the poor are actually going to be fed, and that it actually costs 10% of their wealth to do it. What I observe is that vastly more than 10% is taken, and that a large percentage of it is either pocketed by the takers or wasted on absurdities. I also observe that the poor around me are not starving, not by a very wide margin, and that many of the ends this system is supposed to support are never achieved.
I disagree.
A functional, formalized, rule-based society requires writing some people off. Every society that has ever existed or will ever exist does this. The only question is who those people will be.
Keeping your society functional requires minimizing the number of people being written off, and writing them off for good reasons. This requires less-than-absolute property rights, but less-than-absolute property rights doesn't actually obviate the need for the write-offs. Losing sight of this tends to devolve down to "property-rights-in-theory", at best, and then everyone is worse off.
I have been robbed of three vowels, and all the possibility they contained. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Fwiw, I am anti-stomping, and I do believe Trace is too.
I believe you are anti-stomping. What's your assessment of the following hypothetical argument?
"Sure, that black man had a right to vote. But now he's been attacked, he's in jail for defending himself, and there's a lynch mob gathering outside burning him in effigy. Wouldn't he have been better off staying home? Or if he had to go, leave his gun behind and just accept the beating?"
Taking this argument in complete isolation, I ask you: if I committed myself to this argument, would you say that I'm anti-stomping? What if I argued further that the proper solution for such a black man in the 1930s South would be to rely on his local police for protection? Would that be a good-faith anti-stomping position to take?
A major part of Trace's argument was that beatings are a lot less lethal than gunfire, so it's better for a mob to stomp on a person than for that person to defend themselves with gunfire. It is hard for me to agree that such a position can be fairly described as "anti-stomping". The reason I don't want to share a country with him is because he convinced me, through rigorous disputation, that should a mob come for my family he'll side with the mob.
It is certianly not war yet, and the probability of war is currently trending downward in my estimation. Discussion is still quite valuable.
I temper my sense of decency to ask, but... RAHOWA?
I think I have a pretty good understanding of both the spread of likely outcomes and the prudent path forward, and have made my peace with them. Also, sincere Christianity.
Homogeneity is relative, and does not preclude warfare; see the Civil War for a pertinent example.
"Freedom of Religion" seems like a good idea between Christians, with some Jews and vanishingly few Muslims and American Indians thrown in. It does not seem like a good idea if half the population are Aztec Blood Cultists. And indeed, we see the principle decay along these very lines, because the values that endorsed the principle are not in fact universally applicable. People are not in fact willing to tolerate anything other humans are willing to call a "religion". Those who coined the phrase did so in reference to their own, highly homogenous context, on the assumption that their present conditions would obtain in the future. They were wrong, and so the internal contradictions come to the fore until the principle has entirely self-destructed.
Well, you're certainly in the right place, since this is a subject we've discussed here at some length over the years.
Have you read Zunger's Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept, or Ozy's Conservatives as Moral Mutants? If you're looking to understand the breakdown of liberalism, those two would be my pick for the best place to start.
People act according to their values. When people share coherent values, they are able to live together and cooperate. Liberalism axiomatically assumes that at least a supermajority of humans share coherent values by nature. This is not actually the case; Liberalism evolved in a highly homogenous environment, and mistook the homogeneity of its specific host population for a universal constant of human nature. The truth is that human values drift over time, and can easily reach mutually-incoherent states. By claiming tolerance as a terminal value, Liberalism greatly accelerates this drift, and when values become broadly incoherent, it simply breaks down.
The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.
Indeed.
I am comfortable predicting that this will not happen.
Ok, well if, to you, democratic control means the military and spy agencies can’t have classified sources, methods and documents, then you’ve lost the plot.
We are not discussing the military and spy agencies. We are discussing the department of funding Trans Opera in Ecuador. I defy you to argue why USAID needs to keep secrets from the American public.
Then your feelings need calibration, because it is actually an argument against government secrecy regarding the distribution of foreign aid. I am actually not that fond of the other sorts of Government secrets either, but I can recognize that with regards to war and espionage, unilateral disarmament would be unwise. But this is not war or espionage. This is the expenditure of taxpayer's money, purportedly for straightforward humanitarian purposes.
There is no actual need for the people in charge of distributing food to the Ivory Coast to be provided with super-secret-squirrel information about "the actual situation on the ground", given that they are supposed to be directed by the State Department under the leadership of the President. If secret information indicates that they should do things in a specific way, they can be directed to do things in that specific way with no explanation as to why.
We're just over a week into the administration. Legislation doesn't move this fast. Further, it seems to me that these actions can serve as a proof of concept, which congress can then cement at their more measured pace.
Further still, while the GOP has largely been conquered by MAGA, there are still significant pockets of resistance to be mopped up. Try to do all this through the legislative branch, and you drastically increase your attack surface.
fixed.
You know, I accept just about all the rest of the post. But this is silly. A US agency needing to distribute food in the Ivory Coast needs to understand the actual (unvarnished truth of) the situation on the ground there, at the very least so they don't hire a boat to go dock in a harbor right before the rebels grab it or try to truck it through some area where the government has (in fact, but not avowedly) lost control.
I see no reason why this requires keeping secrets from the American public. If the unvarnished truth is inaccessible to the public, how can they meaningfully exercise democratic control over these expenditures?
Your preferences are being checked and balanced at this very moment. 51% of the people having unlimited power is certainly preferable to 10% or much less of the people having unlimited power, which appears to have been the situation prior to the last election.
My understanding is that the rifle was destroyed by a shot from one of the local police officers on the ground.
- sniper is aimed at the gunman.
- Gunman opens fire
- police officer on the ground reacts, aims, returns fire, hits the buffer tube jamming the rifle
- notable pause
- sniper shoots gunman
IIRC, we have in fact requested that people refrain from using this forum to post erotic fanfiction about political or culture war figures. It came up during the Sam Bankman Fried fracas.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't terrorism strictly about using violence to cause political change?
List of politicians killed during the 2024 Mexican elections. And that's just the politicians killed. You can murder normal people to cause political change too, and they do with some regularity.
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The argument I got in with him, that he has since pointed to as one of the bigger impetuses for creating the Schism, was specifically over whether it was appropriate for a law-abiding individual to use a gun to defend themselves from mob violence. I really do not want to misrepresent him, but his position very clearly seemed to be that it is better for the mob to be able to attack an unarmed person, than for an armed person to defend themselves from the mob with lethal force. He claimed (correctly) that since mob violence tends to be less lethal than gunfire, letting the mob brutalize helpless victims would result in fewer overall deaths. He claimed that the obvious best solution was for the authorities to crack down on the mobs in the first place, but when pressed with the then-current situation of the authorities ceding the streets to the mob, he stuck, as it were, to his guns.
I've seen a lot of morally-repugnant arguments here in my time. I'm quite sure I've seen many worse arguments than his. That one, though, is probably the widest spread between repugnance of argument and regard I had previously held for the arguer, ever. I've always respected Trace a great deal: I've spent enough time conversing with him over the years to know that he's a thoughtful, considerate, intelligent person. The lesson I drew from that conversation was that those qualities are insufficient for functional cooperation; it is, in the end, values which ultimately matter.
Here's the thread in question, read it for yourself. I'd be interested in your assessment of the arguments presented.
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