FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.
It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
The later appears to me to be a mainstream position, not "the absolute vilest possible relevant thing you could say."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle, that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement, and that their conflict with each other is fundamentally an example of the narcissism of small differences. To the extent that I understood his arguments, he also appeared to be correct about Hobbes vs Rosseau.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.
It's Chesterton, not Lewis, and the argument explicitly is not that people should beat old men because they don't cross the street fast enough. The argument addressed is:
Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.
and
you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.
and
Just as the sight of sin offends God, so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and...
For this particular brand of argument, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that. There is no stronger version. That's the position, one can either accept it or reject it. @BurdensomeCount wrote quite a lengthy and well-argued post hammering on this exact thesis not too long ago. It's the point of view people argue from here when they cite Nietzche and start throughing around terms like "slave morality". It's the steeliest man of this particular viewpoint that there is.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?
[Didn't realize this was the small question thread, reply was more appropriate to the Culture War thread.]
There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith.
I'm your huckleberry.
The popular understanding of Materialism is obviously bogus, and is protected from a rapid descent into absurdity by nothing more than irrational social consensus effects. It is exactly as ridiculous as flat-earth or young-earth creationism, for exactly the same reasons.
Note that the above does not apply to Materialism itself, which is an entirely reasonable position, but is considerably less attractive and persuasive. The difference between the two is that the popular version derives its force from a circular argument about the nature of epistemology, evidence and belief. The popular formulation holds that belief in Materialism is derived strictly from an impartial assessment of the evidence, and also evidence against Materialism can't possibly exist, so if evidence against Materialism appears to exist, it can be discarded without explanation.
Without this circular argument, Materialism is merely another faith-based argument that has retreated into the gaps of unfalsifiability. With this circular argument, of course, Materialism is obviously true by definition, and anyone who disagrees has volunteered for mockery. As long as people don't twig to the circular nature of the argument, the social effect is self-reinforcing. The many legitimate benefits Materialism claims to encourage, by contrast, are in fact equally available to non-Materialists, whose faith generally does not prevent them from designing rockets and microchips in any way.
"Objectively false" is an interesting phrase. I'm not aware of anything in the Bible that is "objectively false". On the other hand, I'm pretty sure everything Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is in fact objectively false, and yet people bought it entirely for a hundred years, and many people believe it to this very day. It seems obvious to me that Determinism is as close to "objectively false" as you can get, and many people here still believe it. It seems to me that belief in "objectively false" things is actually pretty common, and examining the phenomenon can teach you a lot about how human reason actually works and what its limits are.
The short version is that belief is not driven by evidence, but by acts of individual will. All significant beliefs are chosen. This is as "obviously true" as anything can be, but choosing not to believe it makes it easier to choose certain other beliefs that some consider desirable, and so those people generally do that. This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment.
A lot of what we think and do has some of its roots in the Enlightenment. There are notable exceptions, a lot of those exceptions cluster in thought-space, and they form the foundation of Red Tribe.
The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American.
America (together with Britian and their progeny) appears to me to be a clear outlier in the range of Enlightenment societies, throughout the entire history of the Enlightenment from its founding till now. It is nonetheless true that America has much of its roots in the Enlightenment, though, and I would argue that is why America is doomed. We didn't get enough of the Enlightenment to wreck us on the spot, but we got more than enough for the social equivalent of cancer, which we are now dying of.
Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
In the first place, he is not here to defend himself, so it seems rather unsporting. But I am here, I am better at maintaining decorum than he was, and I'm willing to defend most of his arguments or make similar ones of my own. If you think taking my arguments seriously leads to absurd results, feel free to elaborate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Putin just woke up one morning and decided he wanted an invasion, and the rest is history.
I watched people predict this war at roughly this time well over a decade ago, so no, I'm pretty sure Putin didn't just wake up one morning and decide he wanted an invasion.
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC.
I have come across pictures like this, and contemplate that some day in the not-to-distant future, they could very well be my wife and children. But you are claiming certainty. Okay. What are the intermediate steps? What happens, specifically, between here and there? Make your predictions, and we can see how it goes step by step. If it doesn't go the way you're thinking, you can hopefully recognize that you are being irrational. And if it doesn't go the way I'm thinking, I can recognize that I've underestimated the threat. Either would be a positive result, no?
In the meantime... Do you live in a Blue area? If so, you should move. Do you own guns? If not, you should get them, not because they're particularly useful in a fighting-the-blues sense, but because you should have the means to protect your family. More than that you should be building skills and cultivating social networks. I worry about my family being burned alive, but not by looters, because I don't live near potential looter populations, the local authorities look favorably on armed self-defense, I have a strong social network, and my wife and I have plans to improve our position over the next few years.
Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
Why? I hate Blues so much it often keeps me awake at night. But you are claiming you think they're going to kill a significant portion of the US population, and so you need to do it to them "first". Okay, how are they going to do that? What's the sequence of steps? Because we're talking about the power and water going out and the trains stopping, and also incidentally dozens of millions of your friends and neighbors dead. That means you get real poor real fast. that means crime goes through the roof and probably stays there. That means everyone's life gets fucked for the foreseeable future. If you're certain something bad enough to be worth all that is coming, you should necessarily be certain about how we get from here to there. So, how?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all.
And that's why the only possible response to someone cursing you out is a mag-dump.
You don't need to be frothing at the mouth and shooting every minute of every day, but it needs to be the goal you base all your other plans around reaching or it will never happen, just like writing a novel.
Salami slicing is an actual problem. Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
Let's say a man with a pencil mustache and a dapper black suit hands you a button. You press this button, and a randomly-selected two to five percent of the US population is abruptly mulched, the trains stop running and the power and water goes out for the indefinite future. There's also a 75% chance that the American Blue Tribe ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force, and a 25% chance that the Red Tribe ceases to exist.
Do you pressing that button right now is a good idea?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.
I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future.
The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.
For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
What profits a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his soul?
If you are already willing to embrace annihilation, I can't see why you should fear the future. Either things are going to be generally okay, or opportunities for abrupt death will only grow more plentiful.
I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs.
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
- There is a very large, probably infinite amount of pieces of evidence for any possible question.
- For any given piece of evidence, there is a very large, probably infinite number of connections to other pieces of evidence.
- Pruning this infinite sea of data and data-connections to a practical subset involves collecting and assessing each piece and its connections for "relevance" and "weight". Neither "relevance" nor "weight" has any objective measure, and all but a vanishing fraction of the available evidence must be discarded. Consequently, there is no objective scale by which one pile of evidence "outweighs" or is more "relevant" than another. This process is irreducibly subjective.
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to assume infer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.
But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
naw, it's a repeat of a repeat of a repeat. Wouldn't have made it if it weren't a direct response to a question. It'll come back up in the main thread soon enough.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
C.S. Lewis apologists generally don't believe the only escape is death.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
To your mind, is there no difference between the various flavors of social democracy and communism?
Would a difference between the two be that social democracy doesn't see capitalism as "the problem", and communism does?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?
Because they were prefatory, and the sentence I quoted appears to be the conclusion that follows from them.
Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?
Because he doesn't seem to see that statement as an obstacle to attempting solutions to all our problems. He says institutions can never resolve all the conflicts, that Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. And then he concludes that the Revolution should proceed anyway, endlessly, and that this is a good thing. Doesn't he?
"Limits" stop things. This "limit" stops nothing, instead it "drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom", and he seems to consider this a feature, not a bug: "it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced". "Revolution" is commonly understood to mean the seizure and exercise of power. He claims that "revolution" will never end, and that this will plausibly deliver benefits indefinitely.
I do not see how this statement cashes out in a practical limit to socialist ambition. To the extent that it proposes a limit, the limit is entirely theoretical, and it appears to explicitly claim that such a theoretical limit will and should be ignored.
That's my understanding at least; am I misinterpreting him? What am I missing?
If you want to argue linguistic precision, I'd say this falls under "problems we can't solve aren't actually problems". I don't see anything here equivalent to "we can't solve some problems, and we need to accept that and not try."
The AuthLeft and AuthRight are defined by a belief in the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint - all members of the AuthLeft and AuthRight believe this, and furthermore members of other political ideologies don't believe it, and This belief is the most salient factor in determining identity among political ideologies
Why would any other feature of an ideology be more salient than a belief that "we have the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint"? What does it matter what you call it, or what theory you use to justify it, if that is where it cashes out?
Further, you seem to be implying that this is about labels, that Libertarians or Christians don't suffer this problem because they're Libertarians and Christians, as though it is the label that provides the immunity. People can absolutely hold this belief while calling themselves Libertarian or Christian. I can point to a lot of Libertarians and Christians that don't hold this belief, and I can point to core axioms of the two ideologies that directly contradict this belief, and thus plausibly provide some immunity from its contagion. But the question is whether or not it is present, and the labels applied are entirely superfluous to that question. Libertarians do not have a long history of governance to examine, but people who called themselves Christian have in the past and do in the present absolutely hold this belief. That is something I would dearly like to help solve, by providing strong arguments as to why they shouldn't.
You're using these idiosyncratic concepts "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight" whose applicability to broader political discussions is questionable.
I'd be interested to drill down on why you think it's questionable.
-
Do you reject the idea as incoherent in and of itself?
-
Do you grant that it's coherent, but don't see the connection to the examples I've provided?
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Do you see the connection in those examples, but think I'm overstating it?
The space of possible political positions is much broader than you give it credit for. I would encourage you to read some of the original works by any of the thinkers we've been discussing lately - Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and see if there's anything in there that surprises you.
I look at the history of the modern world, and I see a lot of mistakes made. I notice patterns in these mistakes, a correlation, a commonality between apparently disparate theories and ideologies, that seems to explain things that are otherwise mysterious. Why is this a bad idea?
Which makes more sense: Using the theory to understand the practice, or using the practice to understand the theory? The point of philosophy is to teach, to shape the minds of other humans, individually and collectively. The shape of the minds at the end of this process is the best measure there is of the quality of the theory, is it not? What those minds say and do is the best measure of how they have been shaped, is it not? We have three hundred years of history available to us. Why appeal straight to the sacred texts? Is that how you treat ideologies you don't have a personal sympathy for?
...Let's suppose I'm wrong. Let's suppose that I should be looking at the text. Here's a sentence out of that paragraph:
Here is the limit which drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom : it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced.
...Nothing here is surprising me. Nothing in the rest of the paragraph is surprising me. I've gone and read the chapter it's from, and I'll freely admit that I'm not confident that I understood it all, but what I think I grasped didn't surprise me. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm totally missing his point, or that I'm falling into confirmation bias, but he seems to be advocating permanent revolution, with an assurance that This Time It Will Be Different. Am I wrong? What am I missing? How is this incompatible with "we know how to solve all our problems"?
So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?
If #2 actually is as you seem to be intending him, then #1 is the odd man out, because #2 does not actually believe the axiom that "we know how to solve all our problems is shorthand for. Free market democratic capitalism observably doesn't solve all our problems, ASIs don't exist in the present tense, and wouldn't be "we" even if they did. As you seem to intend him, #2 doesn't claim that we have the tools at hand to solve, say, racism and poverty, or indeed any other problem, doesn't claim authority to use those tools, and doesn't blame people for getting in the way of the fixes he doesn't have. All of these contradict the description I laid out.
On the other hand, if #2 is a "Libertarian" who believes nothing matters as much as solving the alignment problem, or is scheming about "pivotal acts", or believes that we should export "free market democratic capitalism" to the rest of the world at gunpoint so as to make the ASI arrive sooner and thus shorten and minimize the death-agonies of our non-utopian existence, then there's a fair argument he actually does believe that "we know how to solve all our problems", and #3 is the odd man out.
If someone actually believes the axiom I'm summarizing as "we know how to solve all our problems", they can be a lot of different things, but whatever they are is flatly incompatible with both Libertarianism and Christianity, at least as far as I understand the two concepts. The axiom is a claim that one has the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint. It is not a subtle thing.
I don't actually care whether the plan is Marxist revolution or Pivotal Acts purportedly aimed at preventing unaligned AGI; either is inimical to my values, and for the same reasons.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Forceful arguments tend to generate forceful responses.
Which seems more vile to you?
"We should maximize the devastation of the war to get more women outside the war zone"
or
"we should maximize the devastation of the war to maximize the number of Russians killed and Russian wealth destroyed"
...Like, where is the "vileness" supposed to be coming from? We're well past the point where people here make straightforward arguments in support of maximizing the misery of others because it provides benefits for ourselves.
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