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FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

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joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

				

User ID: 675

FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

20 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 675

Scoundrels should be oppressed. The fact that honest people can be falsely portrayed as scoundrels, and the necessary mechanisms of justice turned unjustly against them, does not change this reality. Auto-immune disorders can't be resolved by simply switching off the immune system.

That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.

It's not pedantry. Beliefs are a central example of an action. They are a thing you actively do. People are not computers, and human cognition is not deterministic. If they were, if beliefs were not subject to the will, arguments between humans would work very, very differently than they do.

I understand that this runs counter to what a great many people have often said, but you can literally observe the effect at both small and large scales, all around you every day. It is not subtle. We weigh evidence, and that weighing is fundamentally subjective, and the biases, priors and axioms of that subjectivity are derived from discrete acts of will, either from ourselves or from those around us. We choose what to question, how to question, whether an answer satisfies us, where to look for more information, when to move on, what to listen to. Any question of substance leads to a web of further questions, infinite in branchings, and we choose a finite set of those questions to explore before drawing conclusions. People observably draw different conclusions based on similar evidence every day, even when examining the same evidence in good faith! You can follow the branchings to any conclusion you wish, if you want to. When you stop at any particular conclusion, you stop because you want to, not because the evidence forced you to. How could it be otherwise, when there are always more questions available?

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

what you've provided is an assertion. table stakes is some examples of lighter sentencing, though actual statistics would be better. My sky is blue with scattered white clouds; in point of fact, I think I probably agree with you that first-nations criminals get lighter sentences. but arguments need to be backed up with evidence, not mere assertions.

Okay, so what's the actual effect on sentencing?

I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history...

What evidence directly supports the concept of "deterministic history"? What testable predictions does the concept of "deterministic history" allow one to make?

It seems obvious to me that "deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept, but rather an axiom. People believe in determinism and deterministic history because doing otherwise would be incompatible with their axioms. Determinism has been used to make testable predictions for many decades, and all those predictions have been falsified. All the evidence we have available to us directly contradicts determinism, none of the evidence we have directly supports it. Each of us has a lifetime's immediate, personal experience of Will, of making free choices moment to moment, of making decisions and struggling to choose one thing versus another. All of this evidence is simply handwaved by Determinism, not based on contrary evidence, of which there is none, but because if it is not handwaved Materialism is invalidated.

And all this is fair enough; axiomatic reasoning is the only reasoning we have available to us. The problem comes when people act as though their axioms are obviously evidence-based, when they are not.

When did it have a notably negative impact on society, though?

...I've just finished one big debate on censorship, and I'm not really up for jumping into another one. I know the consensus is supposed to be that censorship is very bad, m'kay. I observe that large amount of censorship, through a variety of methods and with a variety of targets, appears to have been the norm throughout our nation's entire history, excepting perhaps two decades bookending the turn of the last century which were unusually permissive, and which were immediately followed by an acute decline in social conditions.

I know how this all is supposed to work. I am skeptical that it actually works that way. I note that a lot of the standard narrative about censorship conveniently ignores most of the censorship actually happening in the past or present, and gets pretty hand-wavey about nailing down cause and effect.

Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent.

Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.

They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent.

They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.

The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective.

What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.

The British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.

That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.

In a hypothetical world where this happens, they go hungry and head back to where they were born to work the land.

By the time serious hunger arrives, it seems to me that it's too late to do that. By contrast, it is not hard to imagine the authorities getting reports of people abandoning their farms to flood the cities, doing the simple math, and trying to prevent what seems like an obvious crisis in the making. Serious famine is very, very bad. Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks. I stand by to be educated.

We needn't pretend that medieval aristocrats were enlightened despots when we can very much see they were no such thing.

Neither do we need to claim that the miseries of existence are imposed by human design, or that a human action being unpleasant proves that there was a better option available, and that the people involved should have known about it. If you want to claim that the laws were pointless and evil, make the argument, don't just assume it.

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.

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?

I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?

Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.

You appear to be approaching the question from a context of laws and other highly legible systems of formal rules. If I'm understanding you correctly, the idea would be that there's a clear separation between the legal rules and the justice system, and the various sorts of informal social consequences for lesser transgressions, with the idea being that the latter are perhaps less important and can more or less be ignored. If someone's not breaking the law, they should be left alone to do as they please, and we should in fact maintain a broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live.

The problem, as I see it, is that people can do harmful and selfish things that make life a lot worse for everyone around them, and it's not possible to actually codify law against all those things. There's always going to be leaks, cracks, failures of encoding or enforcement. Also, there's a lot of social interactions that the law is simply too slow and regimented to meaningfully police. I observe that social consequences, even very serious social consequences that ruin or even end lives, have more or less always been part of our social structure. My guess is they always will be.

Society needs cohesion to function. broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live was tried. It collapsed very quickly, and it is not obvious that it can or should be rebuilt. Live-and-let-live failed because it allowed a variety of social harms to spread unchecked, until people found the situation intollerable and began throwing their weight behind various forms of crackdown. And this is the pattern: your laws and social systems have to actually keep things running smoothly, or people will simply tear them out and replace them wholesale.

Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.

It is not obvious to me that this is actually true. I know that libertarians and Enlightenment idealists of the first water think it's true, and even desperately want it to be true, but many of the arguments they present seem to me to cash out in various forms of just-world fallacy. Censoring people doesn't seem to lead to you getting censored in any sort of causal fashion. Riding roughshod over the law to secure necessary results doesn't actually force woeful outcomes. Sticking it to the outgroup doesn't by any means result in someone else getting to stick it to you, thus restoring the balance. The Soviets broke every rule, and simply won, killed everyone who got in their way, ruled half the world for the better part of a century, and then more or less quietly died off. There was not and will not be any triumphant counter-revolution that does to them or their posterity what they did to others. Lincoln cut down a variety of laws, because the situation seemed to demand it... and his side won, and imposed their will on the losers, and there was no consequence of any significance that resulted.

It's very comforting to imagine that those who exercise power receive strict karma for the way they use it... but this does not appear to be the case. If you use power benevolently but ineffectually, others can take power away from you, and how they use it has nothing to do with how you used it.

What protects honest people is a cohesive society of other honest people who share their values and their understanding of who is and is not a scoundrel, and are willing and able to punish defectors appropriately. Lacking that, all the laws in the world will not save them.

Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.

The distinction does not seem sustainable at our present social scale.

The problem is that the "not atomized communities" can just be (hypothetically) glassed and population-replaced by the atomized communities that use that atomization to build modern technology.

That's certainly one available interpretation of the available evidence, and it's not one I can conclusively disprove from our present position. I strongly suspect that it's wrong, though.

I would agree with you that "liberal" and "atomized" are at least somewhat orthogonal, in that you can have an illiberal society that is still quite atomized; I think the Soviet Union did a pretty good job of creating such a society. What I don't think is that atomized is itself particularly sustainable, and I don't think technology actually helps. Put it this way: a Colt 1911 decisively trumps fists in a standup fight, but the person with the 1911 can still lose the fight if they are so mentally ill that they decide it's a good idea to shoot themselves in the head instead.

The tech that you cite as providing atomized societies a decisive advantage over non-atomized societies stops providing that advantage if the atomized society turns the tech on itself, and atomization provides an abundance of incentives to do exactly that. I do not think we have hit the end of this particular slope, and I do not think most people are doing a good job of anticipating what the approaching reaches of the down-slope look like. I don't think the Amish have much to worry about.

...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.

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.

indeed. I got your post in the raw dump, btw.

sadly, the page with my reply on it was the one I refreshed.

Professional Managerial Class.

...Assuming this is based on your own direct observation, maybe it's just different local populations? I have no problem believing that in a place with a relatively large asian population, most of the people one saw wearing masks would be asian-american.

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."

I don't think a single person here has ever argued that the blood spilled in avdivka is on Ukraine's hands. I don't think I've ever seen that point of view put forward anywhere, ever. It seems possible to me that you're arguing against a fictitious position, at least outside Russia itself.

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.

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?