FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Reading through the thread, I have no idea which post you are attempting to reference.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo 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.
(This post has been sitting half-completed in my drafts folder for at least a month and a half. Thanks to @fuckduck9000 and @Hoffmeister25 for inspiring it.)
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? Which historical events are a result of its influence, and which are unrelated?
The question of the Enlightenment's central character seems like it ought to be easy to answer, given the ideology's prominence in our consensus origin myth. The Enlightenment is generally held to be the author of the modern world, the philosophy that ended millennia of benighted rule by superstition, ignorance and cruelty, the wellspring of humanistic ideals, of compassion and empathy, of the meteoric progress that has since transformed human civilization beyond recognition, shattered the fetters of hunger, sickness and want. Its hopeful brilliance is contrasted with the strangling dogmas of the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome. Indeed, I expect most of the community here probably holds that describing the nature of the Enlightenment is easy, almost too easy to be worth bothering with.
I disagree. I've tried to present this disagreement numerous times, but each time I've found an inferential gap that swamps whatever the original topic of the discussion might have been, and that required a level of effort that seemed prohibitive. This post is an attempt to approach that gap on its own terms, and at least somewhat methodically.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occured a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and conciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
The American Revolution:
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The American Revolution emerged from an emphatically Christian society; that is to say, a society of serious individual and communal Christian faith welded together by the Protestant tradition. It was a society with a 70% and rapidly growing male literacy rate, thanks largely to Protestant commitments to the necessity of widespread literacy, the better to read the Bible.
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Both Leadership and the public see themselves as explicitly Christian. A lot of the leadership really is devout, those who are not (Jefferson and Franklin most notably) at least pretend to be both in public actions and private deliberation. (It's possibly also worth noting that Jefferson and Franklin were notably sympathetic to France's revolutionaries).
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The revolution's social goals are limited. No universal equality, no abolition of slavery, no overturning of the existing social order. It's not even really a change of government, as most of the revolutionaries and their support structures are already de-facto running things.
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The Revolution consistantly aimed to limit the power of government, even popular government, even if turned to apparently noble ends, against the rights of individual citizens. In doing so, they expressed a deep skepticism for all human judgement, even their own.
The French Revolution:
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The French Revolution emerged from a very different sort of Christian society. Faith appears to have been far less personal and far more communal in nature, with enforcement being top-down rather than bottom-up. I've been unable to find figures for literacy rates, but the references I've found indicate it was considerably lower than in America, perhaps in part due to the linguistic fragmentation of the French populace.
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To my knowledge, the Revolution's leadership were uniformly militant atheists, or else hiding their faith very, very deep. Religious belief was considered obvious superstition. Numerous attempts were made to channel religious impulses into the deification of human reason.
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The Revolution's social goals were extremely broad, perhaps unlimited. They aimed not merely to build a new country, but explicitly a better society, a rational society, a just, free, equitable society. Universal equality of all citizens was the standard. Slavery was abolished. The existing social order was demolished, the monarchy and nobility slaughtered or exiled, the Church brutally subjugated, religious observence suppressed. The revolutionaries believed that they had everything they needed to build, if not an outright utopia, at least the best society the world had ever seen, by far, and they intended to make it happen.
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Given their faith in human reason and scientific insight, the Revolution felt no need to limit the power of government, especially popular government, in pursuit of noble ends, even if this meant trampling the rights of individual citizens. They believed they knew what the right thing to do was, their reason was sound, and checks and balances just got in the way, slowed them down in the fight against their enemies.
Which was closer to the true spirit of the Enlightenment?
My answer: The French Revolution, and by a wide margin. The French Revolution was built around the idea of Progress, of man's capacity to fundamentally reshape his conditions and himself, of his ability to cast off the shackles of the past and move on to a brighter future. It was built on a supreme confidence in human reason, a self-assurance based on what I consider to be the core thesis of the Enlightenment:
We know how to solve all our problems.
Over and over again, its leaders and the policies they implemented demonstrate an unrelenting, unreflective certainty; they were not experimenting, inching their way through possibility-space in search of an unknown solution, but rather executing a recipe with a firmly-expected outcome. They considered themselves pre-eminent scientists, not because they were actually engaging in science, but because they zealously and meticulously applied the label of "science" to their ad-hoc, utterly untested and (as it happens) completely unworkable social theories. Actual scientific results were mixed: the metric system seems to have been a tolerably good idea, metric time less so. Shutting down educational institutions over charges of inequality and guillotining Lavoisier were perhaps less than perfect contributions to the advancement of human knowledge. Though the lip-service to science, progress and reason never wavered, it is easy to see that ideological commitments to entirely unscientific and even irrational beliefs remained dispositive throughout.
In these features, the fundamental nature of the Enlightenment is revealed.
(The above was written off my best understanding of the two Revolutions, and a moderate amount of googling. Corrections and arguments over the description are welcome as well.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Ben Shapiro says that we should just argue people into adopting our views because it'll suddenly work, even though we've been trying for years and it hasn't worked. Peter Brimelow says we should close the border and have white babies. Curtis Yarvin says that we should put a dictator in charge, or at least whatever FDR was. Caldwell says that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act, even though it's as much a part of our national identity at this point as the Constitution.
Build a parallel status economy.
Every social system should either work for us or not work at all. Actively attack enemy-held institutions by any means necessary.
reject and subvert systems that work against our interests. Deny their power, hamper their operations, refuse their legitimacy, appropriate or destroy their resources.
Focus on outcomes, not process. Process is for coordinating cooperation, and that is not a thing our present society is capable of maintaining.
The goal should be a breakdown of federal authority, and acceleration in the decay of existing systems of social control such as the media ecosystem, educational system, academia generally, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy. Delegitimizing these institutions in the eyes of as much of the public as possible is a good first step.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Does Might make Right? Is Justice as simple as "Whatever the strong impose on the weak"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Given how hard the US right is now pulling for "1. feed Ukraine to Putin 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!"
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
How'd Syria go?
Libya?
Afghanistan?
Iraq?
Iraq the first time?
Iran?
Afghanistan the first time?
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
If you want to defend the interventionist consensus, defend the results it has delivered over the last thirty years through the multiple fucking iterations it has played out, very publicly, at vast economic and social and human cost. Show how all the previous disasters were really just faulty perception, or working the kinks out, or something other than simply a blind-spot in your geopolitical perception the size of the fucking moon. I'll cop to not expecting the Russian army to be a shambolic trash-disaster, and sure, right now we are fairly thoroughly mauling that army for pennies on the dollar, given that Ukranian and Russian lives are considered to have no value in the equation. But what's the endgame, here?
What are you willing to call success, such that we can move on, job well done, no more entanglements and expenditures needed?
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
Because I have heard this fucking song and dance before, where "these next six months are critical" for ten or fifteen or twenty years at a stretch, and my heuristic is that anyone selling that bullshit is either a braindead incompetent or a literal vampire who requires decapitation and a stake through the heart. I refuse to play this game where we pretend that all those previous disasters and betrayals and massacres and atrocities didn't actually happen or were just crazy random happenstance, where we pretend that American foreign policy and leadership should be presumed to be competent and efficient and generally on the ball. I can't pretend that hard, and I have zero respect for those who can.
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
Well, let's look at a concrete example. Does this sort of post seem valuable to you? Because if that's not Darwin, it's someone doing a very, very good impression of him.
Leaving aside the questions of whether that is Darwin and whether Darwin actually posted like that in the past, would you agree that someone who habitually posts in that fashion is optimizing for heat, not light? @Soriek, same question.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot.
You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. We're just warming up here, the election race has barely started! There's a whole year of this to go, and that's just until the election is "over".
Some obvious predictions:
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Trump will be the Republican nominee.
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Trump will not take office next year.
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This will, again, be the "most secure election ever".
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A year from now, public trust in the election, the courts, the media, the federal bureaucracy, and the federal government will be significantly lower than it is now. The pattern will hold for subsequent elections.
[EDIT] - To put it more plainly, the point of this isn't to keep Trump off the ballot. The point is that this is a way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. If it actually keeps Trump off the ballot, fantastic. But the actual value is the incremental reduction in probability of an effective Trump administration, verses the predicted cost, which I'd imagine is perceived as negligible. What you are seeing here is Blue Tribe's institutional dedication to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And why not? Look at all these free pennies!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Moreover, the police had probable cause at the time to think that the Rittenhouse murders were premeditated.
How so?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
That would be a foolish way to read it.
You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace. You should value the idea that there is a limit to warfare and strife, that the sword can be sheathed, that people who have fought to the death can reconcile, that bloody civil war can in fact end. It can do this because the people fighting it did not perceive the conflict to be existential, and so at some point they were willing to stop. That is a rare and profoundly valuable virtue, and one that people should not treat with disdain.
You should value the idea of leaders who conduct themselves honorably, even for an evil cause. You should value this because no cause, no nation, no people, not even individuals are ever truly virtuous, as the line of good and evil runs through every human heart. You should value this because people following orders, even bad ones, and obeying what they see as honor and duty, even if woefully misguided, is what makes conflict survivable for a civilization. Fools mock the idea of "just following orders" because they've forgotten what it looks like when generals or the armies they lead don't. Fools mock the the idea of "honor" and "duty" as applied to those they see as villains, because they are stupid enough to believe that morality is a solved problem and that one can simply "do the right thing". Having a historical understanding that amounts to a Saturday morning cartoon, they presume that the moral equilibrium they have received from their present environment via an entirely passive osmosis is obviously and eternally correct.
If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way. If you are unwilling to coexist with your opponents in any way, there is no way to make peace, as conflict becomes by necessity existential. It seems to me that most people advocating this sort of conflict have no conception of the horror they are asking for.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
It seems that you agree that indoctrination is bad; if that is the case, then I do not understand why you oppose a law that prevents indoctrination.
Indoctrinating children with their parents' values is good, and the public schools were created to facilitate this process, via government systems that likewise exist to serve the parents.
Indoctrinating children with values their parents consider alien and evil is bad, and is directly counter to the purpose of both the schools in particular and government systems generally.
Neither the government nor the schools have a valid interest in what children are taught. The valid interest begins and ends with that of the parents, who institute the schools and the government to pursue that interest. To the extent that we do not like what some subset of the parents want to teach, that is not a problem either the schools or the government are capable of handling. Attempting to set up either the schools or the government to correct such a problem is an entirely doomed effort, leading to inevitable failure and numerous harmful effects.
You cannot write a law that "prevents indoctrination" in a system that exists to indoctrinate. There is no neutral viewpoint. What you can do is constrain the actions of a common-benefit system to the areas where broad consensus on common benefit exists, and that is what you should in fact do.
None of this should need to be explained. You do not own my kids. I do own my kids, modulo a few extremely limited caveats that I and most other parents will be more than happy to vociferously un-concede if you try to use them as a beachhead for the undermining of our parental duties and rights.
Do you have kids?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us.
Violent disagreement does not preclude fundamental commonality. Gambino soldiers and Luciano soldiers kill each other, and yet are both members of a single well-defined set. Stalin murdered Trotsky, yet I do not think any fundamental ideological difference existed between the two.
The proper way to draw ideological borders is a non-trivial question.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
This might seem like a hot take, but people generally don't want their leaders to be convicted felons.
Better than felons who are unconvicted because a corrupt system protects them.
Note that we are talking about what ideas are available in libraries, which is not quite the same issue as what is taught in class.
It is exactly the same. Schools exist for a purpose: to educate, to shape, to indoctrinate children, preparing them to take on the mantle of adulthood within their communities. Classroom instruction and libraries are two methods of serving that same end. Differences in method are not differences in purpose, and it is the purpose I am pointing to.
The interest is an interest of *individual *parents, not "the parents" as a group.
It is categorically impossible to serve individual parents' individual interests through a public school system, and no part of the existing school system attempts to do so, ever has, or ever will. Public schooling is an industrial process, not an art. Every facet of every school program is aimed at general categories of students, and serves the needs of specific students to the exact extent that they fit the general model. If students receive additional, personalized attention, they receive it because teachers as individuals provide it to them on their individual initiative. The system neither requires nor enforces such attention, nor should it, nor can it. There is no way to codify interested care for another individual.
To the extent that such depersonalized methods can serve parents' interests, it is because parents share interests as a group. To the extent that values-drift results in fewer shared interests, public schools make a lot less sense than they used to. It is hard to imagine how you could think otherwise. Do you likewise think the police have a duty to protect individual citizens?
You seem to be blind to the fact that "the parents" of a school district ultimately constitute "the government"
No, they do not. The federal bureaucracy and the teacher pipeline it accredits are two intertwined systems, among a great many others, that local parents have zero influence over despite their overwhelming impact over the school systems those parents must use. Gender ideology has entered the schools top-down from national-level government and pseudo-government organs, not bottom-up from parents electing school boards to implement it, which is why fucking lying to parents about it as official school policy, and media policy, and local, state and national government policy has become a central aspect of this fight. It is true that some parents in some areas have accepted this imposition, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm. That does not change the fundamental aspect of policy arbitrage that runs through this entire issue: lie to people about what you're doing, and get as much as possible accomplished before common knowledge of the lies is established. Hence, on this issue in particular, school boards objecting to people reading from the books they've stocked the library with at their official meetings with their constituents.
If I understand you correctly, you think we should be having a debate over whether or not something is biased or neutral, acceptable or unacceptable. I have zero faith that such debates can be productively carried out in any principled sense. Either the majority sets policy in accord with their interests, or we're better off not having a policy. There is never going to be a neutral way to enforce the interests of the minority on the majority, my own minority interests most of all. Separation is the best possible outcome. When issues like this one become a debate, the system is already a write-off.
Yeah, this is the same nonsense that I heard from some colleagues when I was teaching: "It is impossible to be completely neutral; therefore, it is fine to indoctrinate my students in my personal political views."
Your colleagues at least have the virtue of being honest about their intentions. If you do not share my values, I do not trust you to engage with those values honestly enough to be paid out of my pocket to teach my children about them. If you are not teaching my children about them, I see no reason for you to bring them up. If this makes it impossible to teach a thing, then maybe you shouldn't be teaching it. Again, none of this should be surprising in any way.
...And of course, none of this solves the problem of teachers pretending that their politics are simply objective fact, as they do and have ceaselessly for decades, as all authorities in the educational pipeline insist they must. Sadly, policy arbitrage is a reality, and the normies haven't caught on yet that the system as a whole is designed end-to-end by ideologues acting in bad faith. Baby steps.
No, it isn't: A teacher, and a school, are perfectly capable of exposing students to varying views on issues, including those with which they disagree.
"A teacher" and perhaps even "a school" may be capable of doing so, in the same sense that "a man" with a severed spine is capable of summiting Everest. I have seen zero evidence that "teachers" and "schools" in the general sense even intend to try, and absolute mountains of evidence that they consider neutrality to be cooperation with evil.
I did it all the time: "Here is a very common argument on one side of this issue. Here is a common argument on the other side."
I am not terribly confident you did it well. If you did do it well, I am not terribly confident that it added significant value to your teaching. If you did it well and it added significant value to your teaching, I am extremely skeptical that this was a codifiable output of the system employing you, rather than of your own virtues. Hostile indoctrination by the educational system is an obvious, severe threat to everything I value. There is no reason to allow gaps in the defense against that threat in pursuit of nebulous and likely illusory benefits of the sort you are advocating.
[EDIT] - And one more time, none of this should be at all surprising. Arguments over bias have been a fixture of the culture wars for most of both of our lives. Those arguments have never resulted in an actual solution to bias, anywhere, ever. If you think such a solution can be practically secured, you ought to explain what you'll do different than every previous attempt.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity, in the same way that Gambino and Luciano soldiers believe in "their thing", and Stalin and Trotsky believed in revolutionary socialism. That their understanding of the realities of racial identity and what it means are opposed doesn't make any more difference than it does with the mafioso or the revolutionary communists.
Stalin and Trotsky doubtless had many finely crafted ideological differences, but their ideology was largely bullshit, and none of those differences actually cashed out into differences in action: both men believed that they were the champions of an unstoppable progressive force that justified a practically-unlimited amount of murder and destruction in pursuit of "the greater good". As it happens, one beat the other in the power struggle, and the loser got exiled and then killed. The fine ideological distinctions appear to me to be meaningless trivia, because they never cashed out in actual differences in action. I am not persuaded that the details of Trotskyism as an ideology actually explain why he lost, or indicate that he would have been any better if he had won.
how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy? The progressive left demands discrimination against whites and Asians as racial groups, the white-identity right demands discrimination against blacks and hispanics as racial groups. How is this not Gambino and Luciano, Stalin and Trotsky?
I do not believe that racial identity is necessarily important or inescapable. I believe that it is at least possible in principle for people of different races to live together in peace without either top-down race-based tyranny or bottom-up racial predation. This is a distinct difference between my ideology and that of both the progressive and white-identity types.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Without endorsing the theory, one could consider a country's crime rate as a multiple of the country's capacity for law-enforcement/general socialization and the innate criminal tendency of the population. The claim then would be that Europe's relatively lower crime rates are almost entirely a consequence of the tendencies of their population, and in fact their law-enforcement/socialization are relatively worse, not better; if they had the USA's demographics, their crime problem would be worse than that of the USA.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself. Not a tall order really.
Neither you nor anyone else here can support this statement with evidence, because the necessary evidence does not exist. This despite the fact that many, many people have affirmatively claimed that it existed, that they knew exactly where to find it and how to demonstrate it, were granted vast resources and many decades to confirm their claims, and had all their predictions uniformly falsified.
You, like many before you, are confidently asserting that the evidence supports you, when in fact zero evidence actually supports you, the version of your statement that made falsifiable predictions has been falsified, the version you employ here has been meticulously selected for unfalsifiability, and even this is only maintainable by discarding the strong contrary evidence via axiomatic reason.
To the extent that "facts" can be said to exist, the above is simply a fact.
And as I point out each time this comes up, none of the above is actually a problem. The problem is that you don't seem to recognize the obvious mechanisms of your own reasoning, the mechanisms underlying all human reason. What you're doing here is what everyone does when they reason about the world. There is no other way to do it. The problem is pretending you aren't doing what you very clearly are doing: accepting or discarding evidence based on pre-rational axioms, rather than through some objective, deterministic process-based assessment of the evidence itself.
You have adopted Materialism as an axiom. You discard as inconsequential all evidence that conflicts with or contradicts that axiom, as is proper, because that is what axioms are for. But the fact that you choose the axiom over contrary evidence demonstrates that the axiom is not itself the deterministic product of evidence, but rather is chosen by you for non-evidence reasons. If you can select or discard evidence for non-evidence reasons, why should others not do likewise?
"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
6mo ago
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
I picked that one because it popped up in the feed within a post or two of your reply, and seemed a reasonable example of the fundamental problem. It was convinient, in short.
I don't have an opinion on Darwin or any other user getting banned; that's on the mods, and I decided a long time ago never to argue nor concern myself with mod decisions, other than to make a good-faith effort to abide by their rules. As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt. What I object to is the idea that he was providing a valuable service to the community by presenting alternate points of view. He did provide alternate points of view, very occasionally. What he did the rest of the time, in my experience, was degrade every conversation he participated in. As with the post I linked, he rarely provided evidence or even a coherent argument, just endless faux-polite smuggery wrapped in multiple layers of indirection designed to make engagement as infuriating and unproductive as possible while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability.
Maybe my experience or my impressions are wrong. Maybe I'm biased. I don't think so, though; I spent literally years trying to get a productive conversation out of him, and came up empty. I have in fact managed to have productive conversations with quite a few other people, even in the face of profound and irreconcilable disagreements. I saw a lot of other people flame out and eat bans from trying to engage with him before a general understanding of his technique proliferated enough to become common knowledge. In any case, I object to the idea that he was a reasonable or even a net-positive contributor, and I strongly object to the idea that people just couldn't handle having their ideas challenged. He was a troll, and he burned every scrap of good-will that ever was extended to him.
It is impossible to completely serve individual parents' interests...
No, it is impossible to serve their individual interests at all. Only their group interests can be served, because the system, like all abstract policy-based systems, only recognizes groups and classes, not individuals.
...but which comes closer: 1) permitting the majority to remove all library books that express ideas with which they disapprove; or 2) forbidding that? Obviously, the latter.
No, obviously the former.
If individual parents want their kids to have a book, they are free to supply their own kids with that book. If parents don't want specific books in the communal library, there is zero public interest in those books being in that library. The library cannot contain all books. The library is a public institution, intended for the impartial service of all, paid for by the taxes of all. To the greatest extent possible, it should contain only the things that everyone agrees on, which is a content pool many orders of magnitude larger than its shelves can contain. Such institutions were created in a time when such broad agreement could be assumed; the loss of such agreement is yet another consequence of chronic defection against our social commons. Not getting a book you want placed in limited public space with limited public money because more of the people with an equal right to that space and who pay an equal share of that money don't want it there is not a legitimate harm. If you want the book, you can buy it yourself. If people start weaponizing such objections to strip all books from the library, then maybe a library isn't a thing you should have.
No one has a right to use public money to express and amplify their personal views or values. That this principle is routinely ignored by various governmental and pseudo-governmental organs is a travesty.
Yes, yes, and what does that have to do with the topic at hand?
Because parents controlling what their children are taught is a good thing, and parents not being able to do that is a bad thing. Since parents can't all agree perfectly on a curriculum, we go with the points of unanimous consent. Where we need to go outside unanimous consent, the majority should rule. If majority rule is repugnant, it is because something is being shown that parents want not to be shown, and not because parents are unable to show something that they want to show. Parents can show whatever they want to their own kids. They have zero legitimate interest in showing things to other parents' kids over those parents' objections. Speaking collectively, neither teachers nor the bureaucrats behind them have any special insight into rearing children superior to that of parents. If the parents do not want their kid exposed to something, the school has zero legitimate interest to say otherwise.
As I said, parents elect school boards, and school boards set curriculum, and candidates routinely pledge to eliminate "bad" ideas and then do so through altering curriculum.
Yes, and this is entirely acceptable.
If they also remove books expressing views they dislike, then "parents" are indeed "the government" and are engaging in precisely the destruction of individual parental interests that you claim to be concerned with.
Parents acting through their local government are less "the government" than the unaccountable bureaucratic institutions fighting those parents for control of the curricula with those parents' own tax dollars.
There is no right to having a school library at all. No parent has a valid interest in ensuring that their prefered books are featured in such a library. The library is for the interests people hold in common, not for the interests of individuals. Nor is satisfying such an interest possible; there are too many different people with too many different opinions. Neither school libraries nor schools themselves are platforms for the presentation of one's personal views. They are shared institutions. They are supposed to be neutral. The only practical approach to neutrality when it comes to a field as varied and charged as books is subtractive. If subtraction results in an empty library, that is an acceptable outcome.
That's why the minority needs the books to be kept, because those books are written by them, from their perspective.
Public school libraries do not exist to spotlight particular minority perspectives. No common interest is served by doing so.
You are trying to present this as protection for minorities, but I know that my minority interests will never be protected by the principles you are appealing to. School libraries in NYC absolutely are not going to stock back-issues of Guns & Ammo, or allow students to watch Brandon Herrera or Garand Thumb or Demolition Ranch on the library computers. My religious views are of course entirely verboten, and many of my political views are banned as hate speech or for fostering a hostile environment or for making people feel "unsafe" or any of a thousand other workarounds to the vaunted principles of tolerance. I know that this has a roughly zero percent chance of changing in any way in my lifetime. Consequently, I have zero interest in taking your appeals seriously. If your principle cannot be implemented in general, and it evidently cannot, it isn't worth a damn. Given that I cannot get protection where I am a minority, I do not concede to such protections when I am in the majority. Why should I do otherwise?
I don't know why you are talking about values. I am talking about political and economic ideas.
Values are where political and economic ideas come from, and values are why some people are trying to put these books in the libraries, and many more people are trying to keep them out. It hardly matters, though; the same reasoning applies to the ideas as well. If you think my ideas are garbage, it would be very foolish of me to pay you to teach them. I would rather you be silent than use my money to advocate against me, openly or not, subtly or not, consciously or not.
You provide a number of examples of how a teacher can teach both sides. My answer to them all is the same: I would be a fool to trust teachers to do this in a fair and neutral fashion, so I do not want them doing it at all. Atheists felt the same way about "teaching the controversy" when the issue was teaching evolution, if I recall correctly. Were they wrong then?
A teacher can teach, "crime is caused by racism" or they can teach "here are several common theories about the causes of crime."
Sure. And my expectation is that those who teach "crime is caused by bad individual choices" probably have worse career outcomes at a statistically-significant rate. I know that my prefered version will never be allowed to be taught, so I have no interest in other peoples' fictions being taught instead, even as part of a variety sampler.
Can it be done perfectly? No, which I already said. But that does not mean there is no duty to try as best as possible.
If parents get together and enact law restricting you from doing so, it is your duty not to do so. If your claim is that teachers can and should produce liberal tolerance and a charitable urbanity in their students, I invite you to examine the world around you. Either they cannot or they absolutely will not; it hardly matters which.
Which is why it is important for teachers to always present opposing views.
Teachers cannot be trusted to do this. It is better to give them an official script and demand that they stick to it. It is better still to fence off broad topics that they are not allowed to talk about. Certainly there are no shortage of such fences for me at every office I've worked in.
And, the last time you walked into a classroom was?
Well, probably a couple months ago when I was volunteering to teach art and bible classes, but presumably you mean in a formal, institutional setting. Longer since then; I get my impressions from the news, and from the friends and family members who teach in public and private schools and at the college level. And of course, my taxes pay for the system in question, whether I want them to or not. I do not believe that my impression of teachers and school environments generally is inaccurate.
Teachers can get fired for ignoring curriculum policy, including policy on controversial issues.
Yes, and that is a good thing. Public school teachers have zero legitimate interest in engaging in controversy. They are not generally equipped to do so competently, and their performance in their actual job does not benefit from them doing so. No legitimate right is trampled by preventing them from doing so; not their right, not the parents' right, not the students' right, because none of those rights exist.
And, again, the issue is what teachers and schools should be doing; your position of "the majority of parents can silence all ideas they don't like" is hardly going to improve the problem.
I disagree. The problem is that the educational apparatus has engaged in large-scale, sustained defection, using public resources for partisan advocacy at the cost of their core mission. I am not worried that parents will try to stop teachers from teaching math, and any parents stupid enough to do so deserve what they get. I am worried that teachers will continue to use their position and the public resources they've been granted to indoctrinate children with values hostile to my own. Parents being able to silence the teaching of all ideas they don't like is pretty close to lossless for me, since all the ideas I'd personally like to see taught are banned anyway, and the objective, obviously valuable stuff that the school exists exclusively to teach won't be getting banned. I do not recognize a downside.
Public schools do not exist to unlock each child's unique potential. People who believe they do have been deceived, by themselves or by others. Public schools exist to allow parents to work without a kid underfoot, and to teach the kids basic, generic skills at a minimal level. They routinely fail at even this minimal objective. There is no reason to pretend that any higher goal is being pursued through official policy, though individual teachers will always be free to go above and beyond. There is reason to ensure that those teachers who want to go "above and beyond" do not neglect their core mission or violate parents' trust in doing so, which they have done quite frequently.
It is trivially easy to present the major arguments on most political, social, and economic issues that are likely to crop up in a K-12 classroom.
It is also trivially easy to put one's thumb on the scale. I have some experience teaching the young, and engaging in adjacent activities. I am therefore aware that teaching is fundamentally manipulative.
The question is not whether it added significant value to my teaching; the question is whether it was necessary in order to respect the rights of students and parents.
...In what way is it respecting the "rights of students and parents" to teach the students something a majority of the parents don't want you to teach them? Again, it is impossible for all topics to be covered equally, or even for all topics to be covered at all. Individual parents do not have a right to have their particular and peculiar topics or interests covered. Certainly mine are not part of the standard curriculum. The curriculum is for everyone, so it should include the things everyone agrees it should include, and it should not include things whose inclusion is contentious. If such things must be considered, putting it to a majority vote is an entirely reasonable solution, if an imperfect one. Demanding that minority views get inclusion over the objection of the majority is impossible to implement fairly, and repugnant when implemented unfairly. Doing so has nothing to do with "respecting the rights of parents and students", since the rights purportedly being respected do not exist and could not ever be satisfied if they did.
Hlynka was, in my opinion, one of the best posters this community has ever seen. I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence. What he had to offer, this community needed quite badly, whether the members recognize it or not. I'm quite sure he was right about most things, and of the few I'm less sure of, I'd still rather bet with him than against him.
That being said, I am pretty sure he knew the ban was coming, and was in no particular hurry to forestall it. My impression is that he just got tired of the bullshit, a situation with which I sympathize even if it doesn't change the outcome. We ask questions to find answers, and having found them, the purpose of a space designed to facilitate question-asking falls rapidly to zero, and it is time to move on. Godspeed, good sir.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
You are focusing on details that don't matter, and have never mattered, instead of looking at what people have admitted, and what that means for what they will never admit.
If they don't matter and never mattered, then the "mules" movie would not have been made, having been made would not have become popular, and having become popular, would not have been cited by commenters here as evidence that the election was stolen.
I also believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate. That belief does not preclude certain claims as to the specifics of its illegitimacy from being falsified.
If the courts are incapable of doing anything about it, I judge that to be a failure of the courts, and not of the charges, because I know the charges are true, and I won't be argued out of them.
Provably false claims of election interference do neither you nor I any favors, do they? Neither does a retreat to the unfalsifiable. My conclusion that the 2020 election was illegitimate does not stem from the "mules" movie or its claims, so debunkings of that film or its claims do not challenge my conclusions. Why should one think otherwise.
The reason you get ire and downvotes is because you conspicuously highlight which side of the friend-enemy distinction you've chosen.
People should not come here to read things that they agree with written by their friends. They should come here for sound arguments well-made. I think @ymeshkout's arguments have a glaring blindspot in them. But until I have the time and energy to make my case with evidence and arguments, he's under no obligation to make the case for me, and I have no right to object to him making other cases based on his own evidence and arguments.
He thinks this specific movie is lying. Why is he wrong? If he's not wrong, why would you object?
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?
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