FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
You can suspect whatever you want about what kind of autistic power level hiding fatlords everyone is, but you have to respond to posts that exist. You have to participate in the conversation people are actually having.
You can also not do that because you decide it is beneath you, and accept a ban as the consequence. Each person makes their own choices, and I would be very surprised if Hlynka did not fully expect the ban and at least weakly agree that it was justified based on his behavior.
The flood
People throughout the world grow extremely wicked, God destroys them as punishment while protecting a righteous man and his family. Not capricious.
sodom and gomorrah
People in two cities grow extremely wicked, God destroys them as punishment while protecting a righteous man and his family. Not capricious.
the binding of isaac
God demonstrates that his chosen patriarch is willing to sacrifice his son, and also that such sacrifices are not desired by God; that is to say, the absence of child sacrifice is not due to a lack of fervor or obedience on the part of God's people, but rather because God himself considers child-sacrifice abhorrent. Not capricious.
being a dick to job
The point of Job is that God is under no obligation to justify his actions to his creation. It is not claimed that God acts arbitrarily, only that we are not owed an explanation for specific things that happen. This is as close to capricious as your list gets, but throughout God insists that he has reasons for what he does. Not capricious, any more than any other need-to-know system is.
the killing of egyptian first-borns
The Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews, and attempted genocide against them by ordering the execution of all their male children. Their own first-borns are killed by God as punishment, after they are given repeated opportunities to relent from their actions. Not capricious.
Exodus 4 : 24
Moses, while acting as God's prophet, has violated the covenant by not circumcising his sons in direct violation of God's command. Not capricious.
Kings 4 : 23
The youths treat God's representative with scorn, dishonoring God, and an example is made of them. Not capricious.
Judges 11
The capricious actions are all Jepthah's, not God's. Jepthah is a cautionary story about swearing foolish oaths, and Jephthah himself is no more an example of a righteous man than Samson is.
None of these citations involve a single capricious action on God's part.
Again with Freud.
Stop claiming that expert-based consensus settles arguments, and I'll stop citing the gold-standard of evidence that expert-based consensus absolutely does not settle arguments.
Look, it’s not a binary. All else equal, an adult being convinced by arguments is more evidence of them being correct than a child believing something.
And if Christians were only made by convincing children, this would be relevant. But they are not, and those convinced as children grow up and have ample opportunity to change their minds. Likewise, adults being convinced of something is not good evidence that the thing they're convinced of is true. There is no such thing as proof by social consensus, so stop citing social consensus as evidence.
The Enlightenment celebrated reason, it was a move away from unconditionally accepting orthodoxies about things like science, religion, and the supposed rights of monarchs.
"Reason" doesn't mean embracing "The Truth", but rather embracing "whatever I can't personally think of a good counter-argument for, possibly while being actively deceived." The Enlightenment moved away from Christianity; it immediately and enthusiastically adopted novel orthodoxies about science, religion, and the supposed rights of social classes, frequently to disastrous results. The places where it delivered good results are also the places where its push away from Christianity was largely neutralized. The places where it did move away from Christianity, it produced slaughter and oppression.
The basic problem is that human reason is not, in fact, a very good way of figuring out the world around us. If you're familiar with economics, think about economic Central Planning, why it was attractive and why it didn't work. The Enlightenment failed for similar reasons: it assumed it had the answers to questions that it did not, in fact, have the answers to.
See here for a debate on the subject.
I don't think that describes the ordinary HBD type, though it does describe some of the louder ones. The ordinary HBD type believes in meaningful racial differences in intelligence and thinks it's a bad idea to implement racial discrimination to correct for this.
It's probably worth making a distinction between "political HBDers" and "factual HBDers", but as you say, the political ones are the loudest here, by far. I don't think this says anything about the factual HBDers, other than that they're relatively invisible in most conversations where HBD comes up, so they aren't the central example of an HBDer that comes immediately to mind.
I used to use the label "alt-right"; it was a snappy, effective label, and there was a time when one could reasonably argue that the 1488 types really were a small minority within it. But the media and the 1488 types worked together to grant the latter de-facto control of the label, so I stopped using it. I could make a strong argument that the 1488 types have no claim to the label, but at some point other fights take priority.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
Demonstrate that more moderate stances can solve or even significantly ameliorate the problem, and I'll happily concede.
What's different this time, in the main, comes down to tech centralization, mutual reinforcement of Blue-Tribe centers of power, and the unusual fervor generated by peculiarities of the Progressive worldview. Progressivism has been a serious contender since the founding of the nation, but the fight didn't have to go this way, and I think it evident that it did go this way in large part through naïve trust in "enlightenment principles" that were never, ever going to hold.
And sure, there are a great many disagreements within all tribes or political camps. Have faith in human nature, give it a little more time. The escalation spiral works its magic, and such disagreements resolve themselves.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.
But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.
The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.
The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Then what are prayers for?
They are for building a relationship with God. The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us, to a limited but significant extent in this life, and to the maximal extent in the next.
Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion.
That's one way to frame it, sure. It's also an isolated demand for rigor.
It is routinely argued here that humans are deterministic machines. All forms of this argument that resulted in falsifiable predictions resulted in those predictions being consistently falsified over more than a century of dedicated testing across the globe, and the current popular form of the argument is very clearly unfalsifiable. Likewise for bedrock Materialist claims about the Material being all that exists: by their own standards, it is very clear that things definitely exist that we cannot observe or interact with even in principle; to the extent that we can in principle observe the chain of cause and effect, we arrive at an effect with no observable cause. And yet even those materialists who recognize this fact are not disturbed by it, because their Materialism is axiomatic, the origin of their reasoning rather than its destination. And that is perfectly appropriate, because this is the only way anyone can reason in any way at all.
Axioms that make bad predictions are selected against. Axioms that fit as much of the available evidence as possible are selected for. It should not be surprising that a set of axioms that have lasted thousands of years fit the available evidence pretty well, and both Christianity and Atheism have existed for thousands of years.
Our disagreement, it seems to me, is not over the facts, but over their interpretation, and specifically over the moral significance of pain and death. You seem to argue as though death were avoidable, but it evidently is not, and everyone does in fact die. You seem to argue as though suffering is much more real and more significant than I understand it to be. I observe that death and pain do not necessitate some uniform amount of suffering, that suffering expands and contracts by orders of magnitude based on a variety of factors, the state of one's own mind being predominant among them.
From a previous discussion:
If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.
...And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
We observe the same pain and death, and draw different conclusions, because our axioms are different, and because axioms drive interpretation of evidence much more than evidence drives adoption of axioms. Reason is fundamentally an act of the Will; neither of us is being "forced" by evidence anywhere we do not want to go. But it is not clear to me why I should consider your axioms better than mine; your moral anguish over evident pain and death does not actually serve to reduce the pain and death more than my moral accommodation of it, and arguably has resulted in worse pain and death in the long-term as attempts at Utopia collapse into harsh reality. My accommodation of pain and death prevents neither buckling seat-belts nor attempting cancer cures; I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
...And the reply to you, of course, is that "not hating" does not obviously preclude burning cities to ash together with their occupants. Christianity is not a pacifistic religion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I find this willingness to apply 'deranged' label to resentment over getting mutilated unsettling. Can't help but see it as a defense mechanism first.
We've experienced it, and do not consider it worthy of the term "mutilation". No perceptible loss of function has been observed; while I'm sure there is a quantifiable difference, that difference appears to be entirely swamped by other factors.
It is, in fact, possible for a person to fixate on something minor and blow it up out of all proportion. One of the best ways to tell whether this is happening is to look at whether their experience generalizes. The experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well. You can tell people that they've been mutilated, but many of us do not in fact perceive ourselves to be mutilated. You can claim that sexual pleasure would be greater; okay, so instead of it being the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience, it is instead the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience. Like, you get that sex is primarily a trigger, right? Do you think if you shave a few millimeters off a gun's trigger, it makes the gun less powerful?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
But the materialist narrative isn't at all dishonest...
...This is best demonstrated in words other than my own. From a link in the Cryonics discussion:
All of these ideas challenged the traditional view of Vitalism, and were steps towards “reducing” man, and indeed all living things, to the status of mechanisms: clockworks that could be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will. These novel ideas had the power, at least in theory, to confer on men the knowledge and ability formerly reserved only for god. If life was a natural phenomenon governed by the same physical laws that enabled the construction of timepieces, factories, bridges and manufacturing machines, what was to stop man from creating life itself and, in essence, usurping the role of god?
At one point, maybe in the late 1700s, it might be argued that the above was not a lie but only an untested theory. But then we tested it, at considerable length, and very thoroughly falsified it. Neither living things in general, nor man very much in particular, attain the status of "mechanisms: clockworks that can be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will", much less "usurping the role of God".
When such theories are falsified, and their proponents decline to update but rather ignore the evidence or begin stacking epicycles, that is dishonesty, or at least a level of foolishness indistinguishable from it. We all laugh at the Flat Earthers and the Sovereign Citizens who have rendered themselves impervious to evidence. But "I think, therefore I am": there is no evidence more immediate and more readily available than the existence of the Willful Self, which prominent Materialists consistently agree cannot exist as it evidently does.
You claim:
I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago.
...But in fact the evidence you describe does not exist. We have significantly more and better evidence for a historical Jesus now than we did a thousand years ago, contrary to the predictions of the majority of a previous generation of materialists. We have exactly the same amount of evidence that he was the Son of God, that God exists, that people have souls that we did a thousand years ago. Depending on how one counts it, we have slightly more evidence that the souls of do-gooders are happy than we did a thousand years ago, at least from a strictly materialist frame, given that "religion is a plague to be cured" has largely given way to "we need to figure out how to generate the benefits of religion without the drawbacks". The old-school materialists didn't recognize any benefits to religion. The new-school materialists don't admit to how much of their edifice is built on falsified claims.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one.
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it. Most people were subsistence farmers, and the military force was necessary to prevent the next guy over from rolling through and looting all the portable goods. Anything better than that required a level of structure and coordination that no one involved could maintain.
Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
You understand that food has to be made, a process that takes a lot of work with a lag-time of several months to a year? If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities, where does the next harvest come from? What happens to the people in those newly crowded cities?
Don't you see how that seems rather like saying "If you don't like the practice of double mastectomies, don't practice it with your kids"? Obviously double mastectomies are vastly more destructive than circumcision, but I don't see any principled difference.
The fact that it's vastly less destructive is a principled difference.
Literally anything can be labeled "abusive" or "harmful" if one engages in sufficiently enthusiastic linguistic masturbation. If one is to retain one's sanity, it is necessary to understand that the application of a label does not automatically shift reality. Yes, I understand that circumcision impacts the mechanics of sexual pleasure. The thing is, they do not seem to impact it all that strongly, given that orgasms still fuckin' rock even with one, and sexual pleasure is not remotely the sum of human existence. The simple fact is that I and a lot of other men have had one, and it does not appear to us to be that big a deal. This is in fact born out by the survey you linked: those with their foreskin intact very much want to keep it. Those who've lost it mostly don't care.
I implore you to let your psychological guard down for a moment and sincerely examine whether your attitude towards circumcision is simply a result of having been circumcised (which I'm assuming with 95 percent confidence that you have been) and the distress you'd experience if you were no longer able to avoid truly reckoning with what was inflicted on you.
This is quite absurd. What, exactly, was "inflicted" on me? I take it for granted that uncut men experience more intense sexual pleasure, but having experienced a goodly amount of sexual pleasure in my life, I do not find myself mourning the lack of additional intensity. What I have is good enough to be frankly dangerous; Having more would be nice, but why should its absence be some terrible crushing tragedy? Do you approach all pleasures this way, mourning that your car isn't a lambo and your house isn't a mansion, and that you didn't buy bitcoin for .001 cents a coin when you should have? How would it benefit me to obsessively mourn the things I theoretically might have had, rather than enjoying the good I do have in a spirit of contentment?
Why is it not good enough for me to freely decide that I won't continue the practice with my own children? Why is more than that needed?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
They are actually unequipped to properly analyze these works because their own religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself.
...Provided you are correct, and "properly analyzing these works" means agreeing with you. Alternatively, they have their own analysis, and while you can dismiss it at your pleasure, we are equally free to dismiss you at ours. There is little point in discussion where agreement with your bespoke interpretations is set as a precondition for engagement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.
It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
The later appears to me to be a mainstream position, not "the absolute vilest possible relevant thing you could say."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I used to be one of those "quality contributor charity cases". People make choices, and sometimes they choose to change.
Is this essentially correct, or am I missing a key distinction here?
You nailed it. And specifically this part here:
This fundamentally changes things because it means you cannot neglect my will; I am in control of how things pass into/out of my mind, and until you can go around my normal IO channels you need my buy in unlike with ships and planes who don't get a say in things. As a result, the normal paradigm of engineering ain't gonna work.
...And further, that this view is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence from every facet of human behavior, and every claim to the contrary is either unfalsifiable or has been falsified, yet people continue to insist otherwise, in a way identical to Sagan's invisible dragon. This isn't because they're stupid, it's because Sagan's invisible dragon is describing something irreducible about how humans reason. Reasoning is not simply doing math on accumulated evidence. The evidence is weighed and assessed in reference to axioms, and those axioms are chosen. You can choose to uncritically accept one provided to you by others, or you can choose to look at an arbitrary amount of arbitrarily-selected evidence until you arbitrarily decide that no more evidence is needed and a conclusion can be drawn, or you can take certain positions as self-evident and then prioritize the evidence that is compatible with them.
That last option is how people end up believing in Determinism, despite zero direct evidence in favor of determinism and a lot of evidence against it: they've adopted Materialism as an axiom, and Materialism requires Determinism. Any evidence against determinism is likewise evidence against Materialism, but because Materialism is an axiom, evidence against it is simply deprioritized and discarded. This is not objectionable in any way, and it is the only method of reason available to us. The problem comes from people ignoring the actual operation, and substituting it for some fantasy about reason as deterministic fact-math, as though their choices were not choices, but predetermined outcomes, and anyone who doesn't choose the same axioms is simply not reasoning properly.
There's a lot of gray area out there, and some of it quite dark.
I'd be interested on the grey you see. Torture regimes observably fail. Totalitarianism observably fails. Power slips through the fingers, despite all efforts to the contrary. People have been trying to reduce humanity to an engineering discipline for three hundred years running, and they've failed every time. Again, that's not conclusive proof that they'll continue to fail indefinitely, but looking at the historical record, and accounting for my understanding of technology that actually exists, I like my odds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I disagree, for reasons explained in the rest of the comment.
Christianity demands a balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin. Non-Christians seem determined to insist that we only do one or the other, as their short-term-preferences dictate, but we will continue to do both regardless.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
The fact remains that a rich, well-fed society is capable of raising more and better-equipped fighters than one clinging to the edge of survival.
...How does this model account for the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, etc? The general pattern of relatively advanced, settled, built-up civilizations getting wrecked by successive waves of plains nomads? My understanding is that in the east at least, the nomads themselves settled down to rule what they conquered, and were wrecked in turn by the next tribe to come along.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Humanity has not solved any of its actual problems. Not a single one. We still get sick, we still die, we still covet and lust and hate exactly the way we did at the dawn of history. People predicted otherwise, and were proven wrong. The specific ways their claims have been falsified provides solid evidence that this will not change in the foreseeable future.
"Stagnation" implies a lack of necessary growth, but "growth" in this sense is pretty clearly not possible.
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago.
It's evidence against a specific theory of God. It is not evidence against a God in the general case, or even against most specific cases. It does nothing at all to address a Simulationist theory, for example. Further, Materialism can't do better even by its own terms: everything we've learned about the mechanisms of the universe say that the universe shouldn't exist the way it evidently does, which is why we have people positing unfalsifiables like infinite universes.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul.
Which aspects of the mind have been explained and controlled by physics and chemistry, in the sense you mean here? Do you recognize that previous generations of Materialists have claimed far, far more control than they actually had?
As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem.
They've been trying to do that for three hundred years, and to date no shifting of the goal-posts has been necessary. I see no evidence that greater control over individuals or the public is available now than was in the 1600s or 1400s or under Alexander the Great. Deterministic control over individuals or groups does not seem possible at all, even in principle, and the feasibility of such control is one of the basic predictions of the Materialistic thesis.
This is by no means an obscure question. Disney can't get people to watch their movies. If brain-manipulation through measurement and control of brain impulses worked, they are one of the groups I'd expect to be really good at using it. They aren't, which is fairly good evidence that it doesn't.
Which religion doesn't either of course.
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.
I'm given to understand that reason demonstrates that a number of things are unknowable in principle. Materialism absolutely pretends to knowledge it does not possess, and has a long, very public history of doing so.
I grew up in a church with the understanding that Evolution was probably real. I can't be doing a "God of the Gaps", because I was born on this side of the purported gap. You seem to want to hold me to the predictions of previous generations of Christians, who made their arguments before I was born, and honestly, I don't think this is an unreasonable position to take. What is unreasonable is for you to object to being likewise held accountable for the arguments made by previous generations of Materialists, and it seems to me that my side has shifted the goalposts a whole lot less than yours.
and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god.
No, they aren't. The existence of innumerable false religions was already priced-in; the invention of additional novel false religions provides no significant additional evidence, because such novel false religions are (or should be) expected. On the other hand, Materialists have been both predicting and actively working to bring about the end of Christianity for hundreds of years now, and yet Christianity persists despite Materialist predictions to the contrary. To the extent that those predictions have been falsified, it seems that this persistence should be at least weak evidence. And indeed, as I noted above, Materialist attitudes toward Christianity have shifted considerably over my lifetime. The hardcore attitude that Christianity is pure net-negative has weakened considerably, due, I think, to the evidence piling up against such assertions.
Materialism is an ideology like all previous ideologies, not a breakthrough or a new paradigm. All that is required to observe it deforming over time is a moderately-good memory.
Bro, you can't invent your own definition of the enlightenment, then say that everybody else's definition is wrong because it doesn't fit your own.
I'm not saying that your definition of the Enlightenment is wrong because it contradicts mine. I'm asking you what your definition is based on, how it is derived. I'm pointing to a pair of purported Enlightenment revolutions, and observing that the features people generally ascribe to the Enlightenment don't actually cluster the way the standard narrative claims. One revolution is much more secularized and rationalist than the other, two values usually taken to be core elements of the Enlightenment.
If your definition holds that individual liberties are a core, definitional element of the Enlightenment, my argument isn't that you're wrong, it's that you should then conclude that the French Revolution isn't a central example of the Enlightenment, and neither are the succeeding generations who took the French Revolution as a positive example of how to make a better world. The problem then becomes that absolutely everyone else appears to be certain that the French Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and we can both notice we are confused together.
You say that your assessment comes from reading the words of theorists and revolutionaries, by which I have to assume you mean literally the French revolutionaries themselves. This is a good way to learn about the French Revolution, but not about the ocean spanning movement of the Enlightenment, on which exists a massive corpus of work by theorists arguing for the importance of individual rights.
My claim is that different types of evidence should carry different weight, and the order roughly goes: writings of theorists < theory as understood by revolutionaries < actions taken by revolutionaries/political actors < action as interpreted by the next generation of theorists/revolutionaries/political actors. Ideologies have a core, an identifiable set of central beliefs that define them. I'm arguing that the best way to identify that core is to look at which ideas make it into practice and then get propagated down through the generations and into subsequent revolutions and government reforms, versus those that do not. How could it be otherwise?
I do not think I am engaging in circular thinking. If the French Revolution is a central example of an Enlightenment project, than the values it trampled can't be definitional elements of the Enlightenment. If the values it trampled are definitional to the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution can't be a central example of an Enlightenment project. ...Otherwise, it seems to me that the definition of the Enlightenment is simply incoherent.
If you want to argue that the enlightenment brought tyranny, centralization, and religious persecution, you need to grapple with the fact that all those things were happening before the enlightenment and that the broad European history of the enlightenment is less absolutism and greater religious tolerance.
The French Revolution brought some of the worst tyranny, centralization of unaccountable power and religious persecution Europe had ever seen, and led to a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into one of the worst sequences of warfare it had suffered to date. Direct ideological descendants, Marx in particular, did significantly worse. They were worse than the status quo, and not by a small margin. I get that the American/British-style eventually spread and a lot of the European nations eventually settled down into peace and normalcy, and now they DO care a lot about individual liberties and other Enlightenment principles, and don't guillotine each other randomly. What I'm trying to do is to track the specifics of how that actually happened, compared to the recieved story of how it happened.
You and Mandalay seem to be arguing that the French Revolution's murderous nature was par for the course. It was not. France wasn't a slaughterhouse under the ancien regime. America pulled off a revolution with absolutely minimal bloodletting. People have argued that tyranny and massacres were the norm for French politics, but the whole point of a revolution is that you stop doing things the way they've been done, and start doing them exactly the way you think they should be done. And again, there'd be no point in arguing about it if everyone recognized that the FR was a monstrous mistake. They don't! It's been lauded as a victory for freedom and social progress for two hundred years!
You can't just pick one country you don't like, ignore all the others, and act like their own history started in 1789.
I'm picking the first two (three, counting Britain) countries in the chain, and trying to make sense of the divide between them. The next step is to follow the branches of that split forward through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I'm not sure what to do with the argument that I can't act like the history starts in 1789, because 1789 is when this set of people secure absolute power and begin to use it. We can look at what came before them, or what opposed them, but neither seems to me to be of much help to the central problem; they won, they got to reshape their political world as they saw fit, and what they produced is what we have to judge them by. What am I missing?
Beyond this, your insistence that the success of the incredibly enlightenment oriented, rationalist-ruled, post revolutionary nations of Britain and America add proof that the enlightenment is bad is just baffling.
Britian and America diverged very sharply from France. If they're the central examples of the Enlightenment, fine, the French Revolution and its descendent ideologies are non-central, and then we need to ask why no one else seems to understand this. If France is the central example, then the extreme political divergence means America and Britian are the non-central examples, and their excellent results can't be attributed to Enlightenment ideology. If all three are central examples, then we need to admit that "The Enlightenment" can mean pretty much anything, and is thus an incoherent term.
Further, the French did what they did for specific reasons, and those reasons clearly derive from elements of Enlightenment philosophy, specifically the axiomatic confidence in human reason. I believe it is easy to demonstrate how those ideas contributed directly to the disastrous consequences in France, and how they continued to propagate through the subsequent generations of thinkers and actors.
The past 200 years are far away the most prosperous in all of human history. It is insufficient to say "science existed before"...
Science existed before the Enlightenment. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions are absolutely, obviously the reason for the graph you posted. The question is whether the Enlightenment is responsible for those revolutions, a question we can't answer without nailing down an understanding of what the ideology itself actually is and is not. I note that both revolutions were heavily driven by Britain and America, so the split mentioned above seems like it's pretty relevant.
The point isn't that science is fake, it's that the Enlightenment wasn't ever science, and especially not when it explicitly claimed to be. The educational revolution underpinning the birth of Science started with Gutenburg and Protestantism. The Enlightenment took shape because science already existed and was demonstrating its value. The Enlightenment itself was not a scientific movement, but a philosophical and political one. It frequently deployed fake science for political ends, using social hacks to bypass skepticism and verification because the lie was "too good to check"; Marxism and Freudianism being two of the more consequential examples, but the social sciences generally are rife with examples. Its ideological nature frequently undermined actual science, occasionally to disastrous effect.
Science and Industry, meanwhile, were obviously useful and experienced little to no ideological opposition from any quarter. No one who mattered was arguing that science sucked and should be stopped. What people were arguing against, and occasionally fighting, were Enlightenment social innovations. A fundamental part of the Ideology's strategy has always been to frame opposition to its schemes as opposition to Science. That's part of what makes it so pernicious.
Or at least, that's the reality as I understand it. If you think the Enlightenment was actually critical to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, though, it'd be good to lay out exactly why, what, and when it did the things to get the ball rolling. I'm skeptical, but open to being proven wrong.
You appear to be asserting that if I steal my neighbor's chainsaw, that's bad, but if I then give it to you, that's perfectly fine.
I don't think that's what you mean to say, but it is what you're actually saying. I think you should consider stepping away from the keyboard, taking a couple deep breaths, and thinking a bit about how this thread is going, because at the moment you don't appear to be doing a good job of either understanding or conveying meaning with the words you use. I genuinely do not mean this to be insulting, and invite you to show this thread to someone you trust for a disinterested outside perspective. I do not wish you ill, but I do find this thread bewildering; I recognize your name from the old place, and do not remember you acting in this manner in the past. If you like, I'll step out here and leave you to it.
Honor cannot be dispensed with, and treating the dishonorable as honorable is not itself honorable.
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