FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
If you are a committed Christian (or theist in general, I guess) your reality requires lots of maintenance.
What sort of reality maintenance do you have in mind, here?
Religion is the practice of having faith in things you can't deduce through empiricism, atheism is a rejection of faith, and anti-theism considers faith the be a type of negative utility delusion.
Do you believe in free will?
I can, empirically, observe and interact with my will on a minute-to-minute basis. I can gather it, direct it, strengthen or weaken it. My interactions with it are nearly as inescapable as my interactions with gravity.
It is routine for me to observe Atheists arguing that Free Will does not exist. They admit that this belief makes no testable predictions, that one should act in every way as though it existed, and yet assume that it does not. They explain that this is because, under Materialist assumptions, it can't exist. They do this despite a considerable history of their forebears making confident predictions for something like two centuries that the will's nonexistence could be demonstrated and used for basic engineering of people, only to have all those claims falsified; the current position is the "determinism of the gaps" that they have retreated to.
It seems logical that they wouldn't pick a fight on such poor terms if they had a choice. If Materialism demands that free will not exist, then evidence of free will is evidence that Materialism is wrong. We each have a lot of evidence that free will exists.
The above, to me, looks like a pretty good example of "reality maintenance". What do you have in mind?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Christians have not gotten rid of the Old Testament God, and Christianity built the stability, peace and plenty that made a grift like the Enlightenment possible.
nope, posted in the wrong place.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Well, how many Christians' concern with worldly life crosses the line (and by a lot). It seems the case of overwhelming majority of them.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly caring more about earthly affairs is an error I'm prone to, which I must constantly try to resist, and a lot of people calling themselves Christians don't seem to be on the right side of the line. On the other hand, I'm not confident that either of us can rigorously identify where the line between "making a good-faith effort" and "only pretending to try" is, and I'm certainly not confident that most non-Christians even understand what Christians are aiming for.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It is equally not obvious why a thinking Christian theist should care about any earthly affairs and do not concentrate only on saving souls from eternal fire.
Christians do not have the power to save souls from eternal hellfire. Each person chooses whether or not they want to accept salvation, and by far the best influence you can have on their decision is to be genuinely involved in their lives. If they are concerned with earthly affairs, being involved in their lives is going to require you to be at least a little concerned with earthly affairs as well. Being a Christian does involve putting a hard cap on how concerned one is with earthly affairs, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
According to that simple math, we should all be starving because we don’t work the land.
With no IC engines, no electricity, no pesticides, no modern crops and techniques and a general iron-age toolset at best, we would in fact most likely all be starving if we didn't work the land. That's my understanding, at least. Is yours different?
In simple terms, they more than made up for the loss of their farming work by producing tools, trading for better crops etc, which allowed the farmers to support them, and enriched society in the process.
What evidence is this statement based on? What tools then existing and proven would make up for, say, a 30% reduction in agricultural labor?
They didn’t do it to be dicks, but because it was in their interest, like a boss who refuses a raise.
Preventing famine is in everyone's interest, the poorest most of all. Again, I'm open to being corrected if it can be clearly demonstrated that a better path was available, and that the people passing the laws should reasonably have been expected to recognize it. I'd even accept evidence that their motivations for trying to keep people farming was something other than "if we don't have enough farmers everyone will starve".
More generally, how was keeping them on the farm supposed to be in the bosses' interest, specifically? If these people moved to the cities and generated wealth as you allege, wouldn't that make the bosses' positions better? Why wouldn't they want that to happen? Why wouldn't they think that would happen?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
would it be easy to profit off of, if you couldn't legally run a business making and distributing it?
I’d think Americans would have a problem being ruled by someone who does not require their consent. Where’s that alamo spirit?
They did not solve the problem of rule without consent, they just changed a relatively benign despot for an insanely paranoid and delusional pack of murderers, and then a competent but bloodthirsty tyrant that plunged the whole continent into war. They made everything worse, and got millions of people killed for zero benefit.
In any case, the idea that you make things better by killing the bad people is exactly the problem I'm pointing out here. Killing people should never be a terminal goal, which is yet another of the mistakes an entire branch of Enlightenment ideology repeatedly makes.
You’re introducing a lot of confusion with your definitions because the anti-enlightenment position you’re trying to occupy already exists as a distinct set of ideas (then as absolutism, nowadays as neoreactionary).
The confusion already exists. People claim that the Enlightenment is defined by a commitment to individual liberties, and then claim that the French Revolution was a central example of an Enlightenment project. These two claims are contradictory. My position is that you cannot claim A = !A. I feel like that's a pretty solid position.
And they do not recognize this artificial split between good(american) and bad(fr**ch) enlightenment. So me and my enemies, we all agree, we reject your innovative definitions as unhelpful.
Then you and your enemies are ignoring the evidence in front of you, because those two revolutions were very, very different in character from each other. You are being sloppy in your definitions, and I object to that. If we are going to claim that a category is important, that category should be rigorously defined. If that category is an ideological movement, we should be able to define what features determine whether an item is included or excluded from the set, and we should be weighing the historical results of that ideology more heavily than theorizing or public statements of intent. I am willing to accept whatever definition you prefer, provided that definition is then scrutinized properly and rigorously applied. If you want to define the Enlightenment as "only good things and never bad things", I'm fine with that, as long as you do so explicitly, so I can point out that such a definition is useless for analysis of the real world.
Seems like you’re trawling through a giant enlightenment box, arbitrarily picking stuff you dislike and putting that in your new smaller enlightenment box, while the rest is just relabeled as good common american god-fearing sense.
No. I'm asking you and everyone else to give your definition of what we all agree was a pivotal ideology, and then sort two very distinct historical examples according to that definition. This should not be hard to, and it is not unreasonable to insist that it should be done. This is what definitions are for.
In reality, what made it the enlightenment box is the giant anti-enlightenment box next to it, which you ignore.
Then make that your definition, and let's see where the evidence goes. If you want to claim that the Enlightenment is defined by opposition to traditional forms of religion, government and social structure, I'm fine with that. It still leaves America and Britain as distant outliers given that they kept their traditional religion and social structures and even much of their government, and it still leaves the basic problem that the more Enlightened a revolution was, the worse the results it delivered.
Or perhaps I'm not getting the definition right. Feel free to correct me in detail. Make your case!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Besides, there were SF sent into the region, who are undeniably so.
As the saying goes, "You can't thicken up a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
The argument is that the act itself, the moment of decision, is cheap. The expensive part is living with the consequences as they grind away, moment by moment, for years without respite.
Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God.
Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations. In what sense would it? In what sense is God more complex than a universe looping according to non-observable physics without beginning or end? Is there math that can be shown proving one less complex than the other? You mention Kolmogorov complexity, but I'm skeptical. Wikipedia provides:
the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of a shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output.
...I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense, so I don't think you can meaningfully calculate the Kolmogorov complexity of any one of these, nor compare their complexity to determine which is the "least complex". All three concepts are, by definition, outside the bounds of observable reality, which means that whatever statements you make about them are unfalsifiable. I see no reason to presume that you can meaningfully do math on unfalsifiables.
Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives.
It doesn't, actually, if the alternatives do not conflict with materialism when materialism gives answers that seem reasonable. Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations. The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further. It turns out that it does in fact need further things, and in addition appears to require discarding quite a large amount of solid evidence. Those realities pretty seriously undermine its claims to primacy through simplicity, occam's razor, etc, or that people are forced to it by a hard-nosed commitment to only draw forced conclusions.
There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.
Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"?
Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."
Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.
Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?
The math does a better job.
The math doesn't do a job at all. It isn't supporting your conclusion. Your commitment to Materialism is axiomatic, not ultimately dependent on the outcome of a formula.
Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?
There was a passage you posted once, that talked about how if you stepped through the last few hundred years in fifty-year increments, reasonable predictions would be completely blown out every time. I can imagine reasons why that sort of pattern might not continue, since there's good reasons to think the last few hundred years have been unusually prone to chaos... but why would one be sure the chaos has concluded?
You talk about Anglos devouring the light-cone, an eventuality that, accounting to translation, I think I agree would be less than preferable. Are they going to devour the light-cone because their biology determines it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Yes. Why would one believe such a thing? Is there a FAQ or a Sequence this meme derives from?
Why not?
Trump is perhaps the most hated man in America. He spent four years operating at the pinnacle of global power, an environment strewn with what are purported to be impartial legal tripwires placed to hinder abuses of power. He's incompetent and sloppy, arrogant, astonishingly vain, and defined by his contempt for anything that blocks his personal ambitions.
The people now indicting him achieved office through a population dozens of millions strong that uniformly believes that he's Satan incarnate, a criminal, a dangerous megalomaniac, a giant retarded toddler armed with a machine gun. They believe that his election was manifest evidence that our political system is deeply, perhaps irreparably broken. They see his Presidency as a disaster that needs to be cleaned up and then prevented from ever recurring. And again, he spent four years being, at the absolute best, sloppy and incompetent in an environment that purportedly is supposed to demand precision on pain of serious legal consequences.
Why not indict him, and jail him too while they're at it? How could doing so possibly be a bad idea? We're a nation of laws, right? He at least plausibly broke them, right? This is what the system does, these are the rules we all agreed to, what possible room could there be for complaint? And sure, there are some people, maybe even a lot of people who are too mind-killed to accept reality, and they're going to complain anyway. But what are they going to do about it?
Nothing, right?
The people doing this have the all the cards. They won the election, the bureaucracy is on-side, half the nation's voters have been screaming for this for four years. This is what power is for, to get good things done even when they're hard, even when bad people stand in the way! How could they not do exactly this, exactly now? If the bad people can't get it through their heads that they've fucking lost, then it becomes necessary to hammer the point, repeatedly and with vigor, until it finally sinks in. If they aren't getting it, then that means you aren't hammering hard enough. At some point in the escalation curve, they'll have to cave, won't they? That's how it works, isn't it? What possible reason could be imagined for doing anything else?
And if such a reason can't be imagined, why would you expect anything other than exactly this?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Maybe if comfort is your concern, you should find some way to restrain Blue Tribe abuses and usurpations.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
If the great majority of people who had been raped did not find that the experience resulted in trauma, I do not think we would have a consensus that rape caused trauma.
It seems obvious to me that the "trauma" experienced by a small percentage of circumcised males is the result of a self-inflicted and highly irrational neurosis. I'm circumcised. I would prefer that I were not. I understand what I've lost, and will not be circumcising my children. Despite these facts, my circumcision is not a great trauma, or even a small one; it does not impact my life in any significant way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
The true blue progressives- not their moderate hangers on, not the liberals, but the hardcore DSA people- are like actually crazy.
This is hyperbole about your outgroup; DSA ideology might be mistaken or even disastrous, but I don't think you're arguing that it's a mental illness, so claiming it's "like actually crazy" just adds heat without light. I get the general thrust of your argument and think it's valuable, but so is keeping things civil. Turn it down a notch. ...Checking your record, I see a pretty even mix of AAQCs and warnings. My advice would be to put a bit more thought into how you come across to your opposites in the future.
"Groomer" implies that the person is doing it for base selfish motivation (of future sexual gratification), when the people you call that believe they are doing it for the sake of the children and society at large.
"Groomer" has never been limited to sexual motives, and has always been used to describe manipulation/social engineering of the vulnerable for one's personal benefit.
Warm fuzzy virtue feelings are a personal benefit.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Raping someone to death and using their body as a trophy and then proudly releasing the video... makes it kind of an easy choice.
I've seen no evidence that this happened. Have you?
It feels like you're focusing on one sort-of part of the enlightenment's legacy - technocratic administration (which is way older than the enlightenment) - and breezing by the part that's really relevant to people: individual rights.
If the French Revolution is indeed the more Enlightened of the two, then why should we presume that individual rights are, in fact, a core element of the Enlightenment's legacy?
From the post above:
What is the Enlightenment? What is its essential nature, such that a thing can be said to be more or less like it, more or less of it, more or less descended from it? Which of its philosophical axioms are foundational, and which are peripheral?
How do we actually go about answering a question like that? It seems to me that we can start with four types of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:
- The propositions of the theorists who founded the movement.
- The statements and writings of the revolutionaries who put those theories into practice.
- The actions of the Revolutionaries, which reveal preferences more surely than words ever could
- The assessments and actions of successive generations of ideologues and revolutionaries, which show which ideas and methods persisted within the ideology over time.
If I claimed that deep Christian faith was a core element of Enlightenment ideology, you would laugh. If I pointed to Kant's profound faith in Christianity, you would continue to laugh, and you would be right to do so. Kant's Christian faith may have been the core of his personal philosophy, but it did manifestly failed to propagate into the ideology as a whole. What did propagate are the ideas we see in the French Revolution: absolute, unshakable confidence in the primacy and sufficiency of human reason and rationality, militant hostility to traditional religion, enthusiastic secularism and atheism, and honestly not a whole lot else. Individual liberties get a lot of lip-service, but their actual record is a whole lot worse than the ancein regime's, from what I've seen.
I wrote this post to highlight what I see as the fundamental dishonesty of the consensus discourse regarding the Enlightenment. When people talk about the Enlightenment's results, they talk about outcomes in America or Britain, the two distant outliers of the entire Enlightenment project. When they talk about Enlightenment values, they go straight to Revolutionary France. They ignore the fact that the best results came from the societies that maintained strong Christian social integration and placed absolutely minimal trust in the products of human reason, and the worst came from the countries that embraced Enlightenment principles whole and without restraint.
By the way, the Americans founders were mostly Deists, a highly enlightenment-derived version of Christianity...
Several of the most prominent among them were indeed probably not too far in beliefs from Robespierre. And yet, the sum of their peers and society was such that they kept their opinions mostly to themselves, and often spoke even to each other of Divine Providence in contradiction to their own avowed beliefs. Meanwhile, in France...
The point of this comparison is not to argue that Christianity is awesome. It's to point out that Christianity is very clearly not part of the Enlightenment, and so the revolution that embraces the Christian faith of its populace is not a very Enlightened revolution.
There is little uniquely innovative or "enlightenment" about the fact that the Jacobins were despotic centralizers or that they persecuted religion
Your point eludes me. The revolutionaries themselves, and their subsequent progeny, seemed to find both despotism and religious persecution both innovative and eminently desirable. Here's Mark Twain offering apologia for mass slaughter a century or so later:
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
The mendacity of that passage galls. Leave aside the absurdity of the cited numbers; grant them for the sake of argument. He minimizes the crimes of his favored ideology by comparing them to all harms and misfortunes, natural or manmade, for a thousand years previously. In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
- We know how to solve all our problems *If a problem can't be solved, that failure is the fault of specific people with names and addresses. These are the principles Twain enthralled himself to. He frames the slaughter of the revolution as an alternative to the pain and suffering of pre-revolutionary life, rather than an intensification of it. He learned nothing of value from the French Revolution, and neither did his fellow Enlightenment ideologues. The slaughter was at worst a necessary evil, at best a positive step toward utopia. That's the lesson they took from their revolutionary histories, not concerns about the limits of human reason or the necessity of safeguards against emergent tyranny.
You can't claim that the pathological hubris and maniacal bloodlust were tangential to the spirit of the movement, when the movements' own champions consistently affirm that that they were necessary and justified.
It's more than fair to say, as @IGI-111 does downthread, that it's debatable whether scientific government can be given credit for the industrial revolution. There is still, however, a strong argument that individual rights and liberalism can be given that credit.
And what sort of societies gave birth to such principles? Was it France, with its radical egalitarianism and staunch secularism and obsession with "scientific" progress? Or Britain and America, deeply Christian, cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change?
I don't know if I fully buy the argument myself, but anyone arguing against the enlightenment needs to be able to fully extricate all of its credit for the industrial and commercial revolutions to challenge the strongest arguments in its favor.
One would.
The other approach, of course, is to bite the bullet and say the post-enlightenment world has brought prosperity, but it wasn't worth what we lost.
I don't think the Enlightenment has any claim to creating our prosperity at all. It did not end the religious wars; the religions and secular authorities did that jointly before its birth, and once it got rolling it caused some of the worst wars we've ever seen. It did not establish universal literacy; the Protestants did that, with the able assistance of Guttenburg. It arrived after science was already organizing itself, and so cannot claim credit for establishing it. It cannot claim credit for the subsequent industrial and scientific revolutions, because its focus was always social science and the theories it promoted were uniformly garbage, and because the nations that drove those revolutions the hardest were not very Enlightened. It cannot claim credit for individual rights and liberties, because it systematically trampled those rights and liberties wherever its ideology was allowed free action. What it did do, quite reliably, was produce vast, pitch-black concentrations of human misery, the historical record of which our current consensus steadfastly refuses to seriously grapple with.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.
He wrote an effort-post about a specific thing. Asking for replies to confine themselves to that specific thing is not a rhetorical trick, and certainly not objectionable. If you think he's intentionally picking specific things to exclude other specific things where the evidence is against him, you are free to write your own effort-post about those specific things instead. I do not think it is unreasonable to defer from addressing "all claims of election interference that have ever been made", and confine yourself to prominent, specific instances.
Suppose I write an effortpost about the specifics of the Michael Brown shooting, focusing on the claims made by the public and press versus the evidence accumulated through the subsequent investigations. would it be unfair for me to say that I'm looking for replies to these specific incidents, not to address all other claims of illegitimate police shootings? Would it be reasonable for people to complain that I'm not addressing a shooting that has just become culture-war fodder yesterday, when my entire point is the disconnect between the initial reports and the actual evidence painstakingly accumulated well after the fact? Especially if other posters had made it a point to specifically cite Michael Brown as an example of an illegitimate police shooting?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Ah.
Unless they feel such unbearable mental pain from seeing other posters' contrary opinions
This is perhaps ironic on a thread where the OP is still frustrated years later by hearing a single user disagree with the dominant narrative here.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity. Describing him as a "single user" "disagreeing" is disingenuous in the extreme. He burned more charity alone than any ten other posters you could name.
Further, the entire point of that quote is that he wasn't the only one, which is in fact the truth. Unironic support for BLM was not rare, even when the rioting was in full swing. Even less rare was "BLM is bad, but less bad than every observed response to the rioting".
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
Materialists generally claim that their viewpoint is simply the default, that there's zero evidence for anything non-Materialistic, and so they simply follow where the evidence leads.
Determinism is adopted because non-deterministic free will would pretty clearly break Materialism.
The problem is that there is precisely zero actual evidence for determinism itself, and there is an absolutely staggering amount of evidence for non-deterministic free will.
Every human has an entire lifetime's experience of making choices freely. No one has ever demonstrated actual deterministic control over the human will, in any way, to any degree, ever, despite repeated claims that such control was trivial and extremely-well-resourced and -motivated efforts to implement or demonstrate such control.
Despite this, Materialists routinely reject all evidence of free will on the basis of a determinism-of-the-gaps, having retreated from "we can directly, repeatably and arbitrarily engineer human will to our preferences" to "whatever you do was what you were always going to do, even if we can't predict it or control it or test this claim in any way". Determinism has been tested, and has failed all tests. After decades of steady retreat, the current version makes no testable predictions at all, but is precisely a statement of blind faith.
Observable free will is significant evidence that Materialism is wrong. But no human belief arises deterministically, and every human belief is chosen through an act of the will. Materialists choose to adopt Materialism as an axiom; evidence of free will conflicts with that axiom, and so it is discarded, not because it is disproven, but because weighting and filtering evidence is the purpose of axioms. Materialists know that free will can't exist, because if it existed it would disprove Materialism, and their adherence to Materialism is pre-evidential.
...And all the above is not an error to be corrected on the part of the Materialists, but rather a demonstration of how human reason actually operates. All beliefs are chosen. No one has ever or will ever be "forced" to adopt a belief, by evidence or by coercion or by any other mechanism. Some beliefs require more maintenance and effort than others, and some beliefs pay off more than others, but it all comes down to choice.
That we do not have access to a complete understanding of reality, and that the unknown unknowns are significant and must be accounted for.
Empiricism and the entire scientific method are not universal solvents. They have limits, and those limits should be understood and respected, not papered over, ignored or lied about. The later solutions have caused great harm and misery, and that harm and misery has never been adequately answered for.
Why? Within its limits, science and causality work quite well. Engineering is delightful. But my appreciation of air conditioning and microcircuitry and repeating firearms does not obligate me to ignore significant evidence that free will exists. I am comfortable saying that inert matter seems to run on strict causality, while the human mind does not appear to do so. This costs me nothing, requires me to paper over nothing, offered significant predictive value back when Determinism was still making falsifiable predictions, and seems to me to offer decent predictive value on the currently-untestable predictions that Determinism still allows itself.
More options
Context Copy link