FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
It also led to the 2000s, and the 2010s, and the 2020s. Lots of things look really great if you refuse to look at the long-term consequences. Meth, for instance.
With regard to the willful destruction of a viable human infant, no, I don't. Why should I? Do you have sympathy for mothers spurred by tragedy to murder their birthed children in other contexts? Do you endorse "accompaniment" killings like Sati?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
28d ago
It seems fairly clear to me that the psych construct underlying the median abortion is closure. The psychic goal of abortion appears to be to avoid not only being a mother, but also having been a mother.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
28d ago
Putting the kid up for adoption would also prevent single-motherhood, and my understanding is that the child would have an excellent chance of being adopted more or less immediately.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Yes, progressives say "it's not my job to educate you" as well.
"neither of us are capable of rigorously evaluating deep consequences" is a true and relevant statement, though it may not be dispositive. "I don't have time for your stupid questions, go look up the answer in the textbook" is two lies for the price of one: first, the person does in fact generally have time to answer questions, they just don't want to, and second, the textbook doesn't have the answers either. The equivalence you are drawing is non-existent.
Traditionalists are just the progressives of 50 years ago, after all.
No, they aren't. Fifty years ago Progressives and Traditionalists were in direct conflict with each other, on roughly similar terms as we see now. The main difference was that fifty years ago they were arguing what the results would be, and now we're arguing over what the results have been.
If the only difference between you and them is that they have the social power to enforce it and you don't
It isn't. We build, they destroy. We have a track record of producing positive-sum, complex societies that function long-term. They have a track record of producing negative-sum parasitic structures that extract value and burn it for no positive outcome, often based on establishing a social consensus based on lies.
What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision
That is fundamentally not what is happening here. The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case.
And to a fair degree of precision, the answer is, "No".
We have numerous examples of what an actual Supreme Court victory looks like. Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. Obergefell, which overnight fundamentally reshaped the law nationwide with strict enforcement and zero mercy for resistance or dissent is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.
It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories. Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate. We have stress-tested the formal mechanisms of the Constitution and its adjudication to their limits and perhaps beyond, and they simply were not able to handle the load. That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. The important thing is to realize that the formal account of the system is in fact a lie, and that the necessary power will not be found here and so must be found elsewhere.
The Constitution is a scam. Perhaps it can be a useful scam, to the extent that knowledge of its insubstantiality is not yet fully general; it is likely possible to still get people to trade actual value for its paper promises. I will not be one of those people ever again, though, and you shouldn't be either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Congress has not decided that illegal immigrants since the last amnesty are legal. They could do so. Alternatively, they could decide that whatever laws my side has, is, or will violate weren't actually laws after all.
I certainly believe that Congress should decide that violations of the law I support are no longer violations of the law. I think they should not do that for violations of the law I don't support.
To say the law is useless is an overstatement. People like you might still follow it, even though people like myself will not. That's useful!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
By all means, lay out this excluded middle ground. What's the answer to the problem? What's the difference between an endpoint and a frontier?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.
Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?
Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.
You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
Looks to me like Trump imagined that because the US is large, it has magical powers to compel others to do what it says.
Trump appears to be compelling others to do what he says. Israel's airports have just resumed full operations. Iran is telling the Saudis that they're ready to resolve their differences with the US.
I’m getting a strong feeling that this is the same exact thing as happened with Russia and Ukraine. Wasn’t he supposed to end that war? What happened there?
Trump does not actually have magical powers. He has considerable power, but exercise of that power comes at unknown but significant costs. So far, ending the Ukraine war is beyond him. We'll see how it goes in the future, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
The majority of Trump voters (let alone the 'independents' who have been deciding our recent elections by flip-flopping between Obama, Trump, and Biden) don't think about immigrants, nationalism, or even gays, in the same way they do.
How do the majority of Trump voters and flip-flopping independents think about such things? How do right-wingers like Auron think about them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.
We disagree. I would say it centers around the conceit that the act of uploading surrenders the innate protections of existence within baseline reality. Why people treat the upload cruelly is irrelevant. They can, because he made himself into a thing to be used.
In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.
Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin. You seem to understand this, but on the one hand think that the better things that can happen are very good, and also that the bad things happening are unlikely. But your arguments as to why they are unlikely seem deeply unsound to me.
You claim that businesses will compete to offer security to uploads. You expect these uploads to produce zero economic value. You expect the business to secure them forever. You expect this to be financed by accrued value from "investments" generating compound interest. So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
So you assume this God Market comes into being. And you assume that you somehow get a big enough nut in it that you can pay for your uploading and pay for your security and maintenance, forever.
This sequence of events seems quite unlikely.
Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent.
I will as well. The Authorities potentially using a quadrillion years in super-hell as punishment for crimes was explicitly part of my argument why uploading is a bad idea.
Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.
It's not enough to only upload to parties you trust. The degree of trust needed is much higher than any peer-to-peer relationship any human has ever had with any other human, and also that trust needs to extend to every party the trusted party trusts, and every party those parties trust, and so on infinitely. You are making yourself into an ownable commodity, and giving ownership of you to a person. But you have no way of withdrawing ownership, and who owns you can change.
Given the stakes, my position is that there is no party you can trust.
There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused. Those who allowed them to get away with it, the cops and social workers and government employees and elected officials who all steadfastly turned a blind eye, nothing of significance happened to them at all, to my understanding. And here, the downside isn't getting raped, beaten, drugged and pimped for a few years, but rather free access and complete control to everything you are for an indefinite and quite possibly prolonged future.
The grooming gangs are a relevant example, because they show that widespread horror is possible with no breakdown in law enforcement or civilization collapse, simply through ideological corruption of an otherwise reasonable, stable system. They are not remotely the worst that can happen when law does break down, as it did in Communist revolutions all over the world in the last century, or in the numerous examples of invasion, warfare, and systematic genocide over the same time period. There are no shortage of examples of failed states.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
And if any one of these assumptions goes wrong, you will find yourself an impotent object in the hands of an omnipotent god.
"The real thing" is a more complex concept than many people appreciate, and a lot of it happens inside the skull and is heavily mediated by that skull's other contents. It is definitely possible to get to a place where "the fake thing" appears to be strictly superior; general gooner behavior is more or less a superhighway directly to this state. Further, this general pattern generalizes to most of the other pleasures of human existence.
The greatest source of joy in my life by far is my eldest child. Interacting with them, reading to them, the joy they radiate whenever they see me in the morning or when waking from a nap, cuddling with them and singing them to sleep at night are profoundly wonderful experiences that I would not trade for anything. But I remember quite well being quite determined to never have children, because they obviously interfered with all the "fun" I wanted to have playing video games and pursuing various hobbies. I do not think there are words present-Me could say to past-Me to convince them of their error; they thought the way they did because their mind was shaped by their circumstances and experiences, and only a change in circumstances and experiences could deliver a change of mind.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.
I'll agree that total abstinence outside of marriage isn't achievable at the population level; humans will inevitably human. In what way is it not desirable or achievable at the individual level? If a guy and a girl abstain from sex outside of marriage, get married, and so cease to abstain from sex inside marriage, what has this cost them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
The Christian God, as generally proposed, is infinitely just. I would not like to see approximately godlike powers vested in a human. They would absolutely abuse them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency, not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."
It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Progressivism's promise is that if it is provided with power and control, it will deliver a better life for society generally. It has been provided with increasing amounts of power and control for decades, to a point where it has visibly approached total sociopolitical closure for the forseeable future, and what it has delivered is stagnation at best and more often a steadily-growing avalanche of crises. Given its track record, it becomes extremely important for Progressivism to silence any attempt to establish common knowledge and chain-of-accountability for its monstrous failures. One obvious method is to claim that its critics only destroy, only tear down, only criticize, without offering any constructive alternative of their own.
It seems to me that critics of Progressivism have no shortage of constructive alternatives to Progressive doctrine. When we have spent seven decades concentrating every scrap of social, political and economic power into the hands of Progressivism, though, almost all of those constructive alternatives are either going to involve demolishing things Progressives have built or routing around them entirely. This is the nature of misallocation: you either have to re-allocate, or simply eat the sunk-cost loss. Progressives have built an unworkable system and then condemn us for not offering an explanation of how to make it work, but there is no reason to entertain this chicanery. I cannot tell you how to operate America's current educational system through tinkering at the margins, but that does not mean I do not have a pretty good plan for how to educate my children, or ideas that I think are positive-sum on how to build a new general education system from scratch. "The current system has to come down" is the fault of the system and its designers, not my abilities as a critic. I can explain at some length how serious engagement with Christianity builds community, personal development, support networks, family formation, long-termer preferences, all the necessary building blocks of durable community that more than a half-century of liquid modernity has destroyed in most other contexts, but there is no way to integrate these insights into a sociopolitical system whose designers explicitly see total exclusion and eventual elimination of Christianity as a foundational part of their social program.
Likewise for economics, rule of law, foreign policy and most other questions of governance. The problem is not a lack of constructive alternatives. The problem is that, at a certain point along the seizure-of-power gradient, all constructive alternatives reflect the common nature of the problem, which is that one faction has seized all the power and escaped all accountability for its wielding.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
I do not think this level of low-effort sarcasm is conducive to good discussion. This is a warning; please do not post this way in the future.
What about "Two wrongs don't make a right?"
One wrong also does not make a right. Then too:
"But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
...but by all means, if you truly are committed to the idea that two wrongs do not make a right, I encourage you to apply this logic to wrongs committed by my side.
Well - if I understand "we're not always capable of evaluating deep connections" correctly, the Christian answer is not even "I don't have time for your stupid questions", it's "I don't know how all of this works myself, but I trust the textbook and you should too".
...With the attendant evidence that trusting the textbook has a long history of delivering net-positive results, sure. Compare that to novel theories with no track record at best, emerging from "science" that is in fact negative-sum social status tournaments with minimal connection to concrete reality.
The ability to admit uncertainty is greatly preferable to false certainty. It's what you know that just ain't so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will.
I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".
But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.
Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.
You accepted violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in. On what grounds do you appeal to the law now?
I believe I've also been pretty clear that I do not consider the law a valid entity, but welcome my opponents sacrificing their values to uphold it when they are willing to do so.
More options
Context Copy link