FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
(Helpful reminder to the thread that even off Reddit, we still don't downvote for disagreeing!)
And that's why you don't accept anaesthesia for surgery, I presume?
edit: Ah sorry, didn't see the "you don't want" there. Important factor to be sure.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I'm biased in the opposite direction: My parents are 65 years old. In that age group, there was a 10% chance of death given infection in 2020. If one of my parents (~19% chance) had died, it would unquestionably have been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In comparison, the lockdowns are a tiny footnote of badness. Covid was on an exponential trajectory and there were no vaccines, so I am incredibly glad that the lockdowns happened.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I believe they had hope of stopping Biden. They had no chance of stopping Biden. Intent matters.
Similarly, people say this sort of thing all the time, and then one side or the other makes drama from it all the time; the critical factor is undertaking steps of a concrete plan to bring it about. It doesn't particularly matter if the plan is very, very hopeless, because you want to nuke any incentive gradient that could lead to a better second attempt. Conversely, "we don't like Bush, so let's set a car on fire" is not even based on any whatsoever plausible model of how an election could be overturned.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Well, then let's ask it outright:
How do we (as a society) socialize women to pursue nonsexual value? How do we create opportunities for this to occur?
Personally I think it has to look like absolutely bringing a hammer down on workplace relations, while also pursuing sex-blinded hiring/promotion policies. But that only addresses (if at all) the workplace situation, it does nothing for early socialization, social groups, etc. I have no idea how you'd do it for non-workplace groups.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It's very challenging to take care of yourself without regularly being within six feet of many other humans.
You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?
If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It sounds like you're trying to do an end run around "gay bad, trans bad" by assuming it as given, then arguing "it's abuse because it leads to gay/trans". But this entirely trades on the negative connotations of "abusive", not of "gay/trans".
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Sure, and if someone went ahead and actually threatened to burn politicians' and election workers' cars and houses, rather than undirected violence, I'd fully expect the state to absolutely destroy them.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I'm not sure if the current approaches result in better outcomes? My proposed approach is only half the puzzle; it can remove hindrances but can't solve lack of availability or interest.
"what we care about"
I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different. That's why there's little sense in attaching so much meaning to terminology, and why you cannot convince people by gesticulating at genes and genitals. When you say "obviously a woman is", and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is", we use terms that have 99.9% the same coverage, because they almost cleave reality at the joints - which is why the few edge cases are so difficult. In a distribution where almost every property is correlated, it is very hard to see that actually people might be selecting on totally different properties. For instance, since I spend a lot of time online, voice is a dominant criteria for gender for me, and since I'm bi, genitals are a relatively low factor. I don't have the "whatever makes people want to found families", so genes and womb don't factor at all. But you wouldn't see this by looking at what I call "men" and "women", because it's almost entirely the same as everyone else.
edit: In fact, we could probably formalize this into a law: the more dimensions a group correlates, and the smaller the set of exceptions is, the less people will naturally come to agree about group membership of the exceptions.
FeepingCreature
9mo ago
For most of human history, this has been the case.
Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)
I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.
People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.
I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
But by those rules as you described it, wouldn't then the president taking stuff home be considered spillage in the same logic? Ie. from himself to himself? Then because - because - the president doesn't have clearance to own it anymore, he might actually paradoxically be in the clear to pass it on to journalists?
Like, he now has classified information, but he's not "forwarding classified information" because he's not in a position where he has special authority over classified information to begin with. It's just like a journalist passing a leak to another journalist. And when he had the authority to possess it, he spilled it, but that can't be a crime because, well, he had the authority to do that then. So in the journalist analogy, the president basically acts as both leaker and releaser at different points in time.
If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed?
I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."
We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.
I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.
edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."
I don't think the epistemic position is the same.
It's not that I, as a pro-lockdown person, abetted and ignored the possible genocide of Covid infectees, it's that I had a very strong positive expectation that there would not be a genocide or even a significant mass murder. (And, you know, I was right.) I don't think that can be said for people who supported the Nazi regime.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
There's going to be a "new normal". I think we're still well above it.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I'm not saying it requires zero evidence, I'm saying if you cite that you have evidence, you have a particular obligation to provide it.
Everyone should always have evidence, but saying something without evidence is just having an unjustified opinion. Saying you have evidence and then not providing it is actively misleading.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
you chose to paraphrase similar statements as different in order to justify your one-sided demand for "evidence"
The two statements are:
Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China.
And
lockdowns never made sense at any point w/re to covid; there was zero scientific evidence to support them, lots of historical evidence against them
The second of those marshals "evidence" to support itself; the first does not. Claiming evidence and not providing any is worse than not claiming any to begin with.
Looking forward to your post!
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
There's a difference between "I think lockdowns sort of made sense" and "science says that lockdowns don't make sense." (It's that one of those gets called out on not citing sources.)
If you say "there is evidence", you're gonna have to expect people saying "well show it then."
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Can you actually cite the evidence against, please?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, yes. Sometimes we commit suicide, sometimes cells commit cancer. I didn't say it was good, I'm saying it's not unusual. It's the sort of thing the brain does, just by a longer path.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
There were a lot of deaths. What is your standard for taking a risk seriously?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, I don't know if that's the case, but conversely maybe the poster is only there because their ancestors stayed within the same ten mile radius for the past four generations doing roughly the same job handed down the family line. Even if not, certainly people like that exist; are their preferences invalid?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
How is LOTR gnostic? Offhand, it doesn't seem to match your description at all.
This is funny to me because Christians have been and still are guilty of doing all of those things: cut off parts of genitals, "sterilization", and IMO teaching eternal punishment in hell is at least as bad as convincing them their parents are trying to commit genocide.
And of course the child grooming.
A secular humanist could maybe make this argument. A christian should attend to the beam in their own eye.
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