FlyOnTheWall
6d ago
Jews are like 2% of the US population and look white, barely anyone would notice their existence...
No? As I pointed out, they are hugely overrepresented in basically any kind of elite thing. e.g. they make up ~1/4 of all Physics Nobel prizes. I suppose they might fly under the radar for normies, but if you have any kind of intellectual inclinations, you'd end up noticing Jews (our forum is literally an offshoot of a Jewish blogger)
general Israel bullshittery.
But calling it "bullshittery" is kind of begging the question. The usual logic goes that the Jews are tricking the US government into backing a "foreign" (i.e. non-White) state's interest at the expense of American Whites. But this only makes sense if we have already established the Jews aren't really White and are hostile mimics. Otherwise the "Israel bullshittery" is just a specific kind of White advancing the interests of the White race.
FlyOnTheWall
7d ago
To steelman: due to observations of Jewish behaviour, the anti-Semites have rationally concluded that the Jews are attempting (in a disorganised, prospiracy way) to destroy the White race, and displace it low-IQ Third Worlders who would lack the collective human capital to organise against a Jewish elite and Holocaust them.
Given this, it makes sense for a White identarian to prioritise attacking Jews instead of Black people, because without Jews there wouldn't have been mass immigration, the civil rights act, etc anyways.
Having said that, I don't think this is true. I propose a much simpler (albeit uncharitable) explanation: jealousy.
The Jews have better life outcomes than Whites. Both on average, and at the extremes, where they disproportionately occupy positions of power and prestige in the Western world. They also have a higher measured IQ than Whites, and like... I think that's just it (no need for overcomplicated theories about Jewish group evolutionary strategies inferred from Talmud quotations, etc)
Jews do better because they are (on a group-level) smarter, and people don't like feeling inferior. So they become jealous. And They make up complicated stories and theories about why they dislike X that are more flattering to their ego (And ditto for standard Black/Third World "theories" about White overachievement)
Also, I know you don't really care about the JQ either way (nor do I), but it clearly does mean a lot to anti-Semites on the forum. I think this whole pattern of discourse: where an anti-Semite, respectfully and in good-faith, states their opinions and then gets met with Bulverism ("Did a Jew bully you in school?" - seriously?), childish mockery even by actual mods ("Joo posting"), and condescending psychologisations that don't address the object-level argument at all - which has become normal, to be totally against the spirit of the Motte.
FlyOnTheWall
13d ago
Thank you for bringing them up! This seems to be a fairly esoteric HBD claim that is stated very matter-of-factly (iirc you said in the past that you think the Tamil Brahmins have IQ on par with the Ashkenazi) by various race realists from different backgrounds.
I don't think it's an obviously crazy assertion: there are Brahmin STEM nobels, fields medalists, and the Indian per capita income in the US is extremely high: 72k vs 36k for Whites (but as I long suspected, the household income chart showing them blowing everyone else out the water is misleading - they just live in bigger households - they come in 2nd to Taiwanese, also Jews aren't listed, I'm guessing they come 0th)
And the national IQ of India is 75IQ (according to the Lynn numbers), roughly on par with Sub Saharan Africa, and they have no STEM nobels, and I don't think there are any SSA diasporas in first world countries that exceed the White household income significantly.
So I believe it is justified to complicate our model from just a single 75IQ-centered bell curve to a mixture, at least a mixture for Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin. To explain a real and significant difference from a mean 75 population.
Now the question of whether the higher IQ of the Brahmins is actually "high" (75 is a very low bar to be high from!)
The obvious thing is to look stuff up online. There is some guy called Anatoly Karlin who talks a lot about it but doesn't give any numbers. All the actual analysis I can find goes back to this paper: Lynn, Cheng 2018 Mankind Quarterly
It is too late in the night for me to go through this paper properly... so I'll just take the abstract at face value. They claim that Brahmins are more intelligent, by 5IQ points, giving an IQ of 80, i.e. on par with North Africans and Arabs (and they do indeed manage to get STEM nobels, so this feels reasonable to me now)
But wait, there is a point you did not bring up in this comment, but you (and others) bring up elsewhere. What about Tamil Brahmins?
I cannot find any estimates on this online. I suggest a crude method of estimating it though: regress IQ from STEM nobels per capita.
Let's get the Lynn IQ numbers, and also STEM nobels- I define a "STEM" nobel to be Physics, Chemistry, or Physiology or Medicine (so exclude Peace, Literature and Economics) - I got these counts by scraping the wikipedia page for nobels by country. This isn't great, as it lists by nationality instead of race. But just doing a cursory reading I didn't find much sillyness (there's a "Belarusian" winner who is Jewish, and a few Chinese / North Africans for France, but not that much, anyways this is crude - I didn't bother correcting this stuff)
We get the following plot. To clarify: a lot of countries just don't have any STEM nobels (for IQ / low population reasons, those are the red "x"s on the left of the plot. As you can see, the 0s really do span the full IQ range (it's not just SSA countries with red xes), so I think it is reasonable to discard those data points and do a linear regression on the remaining countries-as-proxies-for-races (blue dots)
The red line is just the line of best fit (minimising least squares: beta = 7.47, intercept = 142)[*], so now we just need the STEM nobel per capita for TamBrahms. If we survey the wikipedia page again, I find 4 Indian STEM nobels:
-
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Tamil)
-
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (Tamil)
-
Har Gobind Khorana (not Tamil)
-
C. V. Raman (Tamil)
So 3 TamBrahm STEM nobels[**], but what about the population? This sounds easy, but I literally cannot find it online. The only quantitative information given is in the Wikipedia article, in a subsection about a specific kind of Tamil Brahmin called Iyers (but there are only 2 apparently, so close enough):
They [Iyers] are concentrated mainly along the Cauvery Delta districts of Nagapattinam, Thanjavur, Tiruvarur and Tiruchirapalli where they form almost 10% of the total population. However the largest population reside in Nagercoil, making up to 13% of the city's population
So, if we just use these cities (and assume that is most of the TamBrahms in the world), we get: (102_905 + 58_301 + 916_857 + 289_916) * 0.1 130k population So as a lower bound, let's say 1e5 TamBrahms. And as an upper bound, let's say 1e7 (this is 10% the population of all of Tamil Nadu)
So using the population estimates, and then fitting using our model we get the following IQ estimates for Tamil Brahmins (depending on population size):
pop 1e5: 108 IQ
pop 1e6: 101 IQ
pop 1e7: 93 IQ
So, using this estimation technique, in the very best case, the Tamil Brahmins have an IQ of 108 (clipping the lower end of Ashkenazi IQ estimates: 107-115, and aligning with your claim elsewhere that they are on par with Jews), and in the worst case they are on par with trans-hajnals.
I'm pretty skeptical myself of what I've written, mainly because of how I discarded all the countries without STEM nobels. But I've been putting off researching this question for almost a year now, so for my own sake at least, I thought it was worth writing down my crude estimates and resaoning on the matter, as someone who has not done any serious reading/research in race science / genetics / etc - so I can test my possibly shady thinking on this (and "quantitative" HBD in general)
So now I ask you - what is your reason to think that (Tamil) Brahmins are high-IQ? (also I would like to ask @self_made_human and @2rafa, as they make this claim too) For Tamil Brahmins is it based on similar calculations as mine? And what about for generic Brahmins? (as I mentioned, online sources just give the generic Brahmin IQ as 80. My model gives a more favourable 88IQ, but even that is not very high)
[*] As a separate interesting point, and sanity check, if we do the regression of log10(stem nobels / capita) onto IQ, we get a beta of 0.048, i.e. increasing a population's IQ by 15 makes each person 5x more likely to be a STEM Nobel. Which sounds... reasonable?
[**] The fact that 75% of the Indian STEM Nobels went to TamBrahms was also why I originally decided to entertain the sub-stratification of Brahmins into Tamil Brahmins. Even at just n=4, this seems so significant, it is reasonable to me to look into this even smaller subpopulation without risking overfitting.
FlyOnTheWall
15d ago
Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.
I claim a better model is that you aren't allowed to make minority characters embody (real-life) negative group-level traits.
There are more counterexamples to your theory than just Gus Fring:
- In Brooklyn 99's "The Box" (S5E14) is an episode solely focused on Holt and Jake trying to break a cold-hearted bastard Black male murderer - but Davidson portrays an affable middle-class evil. He is a dentist who got addicted to pain pills, and most of the episode he is shown outsmarting the interrogators. This is fine by my model, since he is technically a Black criminal, but not a reflection of the typical Black underclass criminal.
- Ditto for Gus Fring. No white guy behind Pollos Hermanos pulling the strings - he is the ultra-competent mastermind pulling the strings (how many times throughout the show did characters remark how evil, but clever, Gus was?). And of course, after his fall, the next business partners for Walt is a savage gang of (White) Nazis covered in swastika tattoos. Ignoring the moral valence of the characters, this is clearly an inversion of the real-world analogue (e.g. South Africa) where actually the White group is pulled down and replaced by a less intelligent Black one.
- In a sillier setting, there is the Black Dean of the other non-Greendale community college (like White Dean, he is an effete queer weirdo)
- In the Good Place, lots of the demons were minorities (Vicky, an Indian female, was the only non-side-character example iirc) But in the humourous self-aware way.
- Brooklyn 99 literally had a recurring character that was a Black male serial carjacker (Doug Judy), but he was again portrayed as an intelligent gentleman villain (sort of like a Black Neal Caffrey), he might make unreciprocated romantic overtures at Rosa, but he's not going to actually grab someone's ass or catcall.
I think my explanation makes more sense: you are allowed to show members of protected groups being villains (this is not contrary to standard progressive ideology), but you cannot show them being villanous in a way that reinforces pre-existing "stereotypes" (according to progressive ideology, the stereotypes are totally socially constructed without basis in reality, so they only exist due to media)
And actually I think it has nothing to do with villainy at all. You also cannot show them fulfilling stereotypes as good guys. In the good place, the main 4 were essentially inversions of their respective stereotypes:
- Jason is a good-looking dumb, borderline retarded, East Asian (technically Fillipino iirc, but he is obviously presented as an East Asian, and looks close enough) - that is fine, because East Asians have a high IQ (but he would not be allowed to be Black/brown)
- Chidi is a Black professor of moral philosophy. He is neurotic, bookish, non-confrontational (except for that time he punches Brent Norwalk... but that was portrayed as a man pushed to the limit and defending himself) and completely out of touch with the real world living in an ivory tower of academia. This sometimes leads to him failing others because he is paralysed by indecision - but that is fine, because it's not the stereotype (I wonder if a Jewish Chidi would be allowed?)
- Tahani is a beautiful dark-skinned upper-class British-(South Asian) socialite. She is bad because she is shallow, status-obsessed and effete. In particular, it is constantly stressed how beautiful (and tall, for some reason) she is, how many times does Eleanor (the older blonde woman) fawn over how hecking hot she is?
- Eleanor is a (White) woman. Her flaws are being lecherous, loud, rude, and gluttonous. Generally she just acts as the oppposite of a woman, and embodies the worst traits of a man.
- Janet is a (White) woman, and a literal robot. A perfectly rational calculating machine (other than that time she fell in love), at one point even consoling Michael as she assures him he has to kill her.
I suspect we'll see plenty of self-flagellation from the US 10 years down the line when it's trying to rebuild up its attractiveness for such people.
Taking what you've said at face value, possibly. If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage (I hedge my bets with the qualifiers because Europeans were the ones to conquer the world a few centuries ago, despite being lower IQ, so shrug)
Of course, you elide the obvious, though politically incorrect, question: What race are the immigrants? As I concede, it may be true that the US will need the best and brightest of foreign Aryans, East Asians and Jews (i.e. high-IQ races) to stay on top - but what of the best and the brightest of the Third World?
I think it is true that, for a sufficiently selective (and then properly enforced) immigration policy, we can have eugenic immigration from the Third World. But, due to HBD, the amount of additional value from Venkateshes and Bhargavas is going to be much less significant (because there are just not as many of them, and just less total human capital altogether to siphon)
On the other hand, once we hop over this fence, there is the constant danger of somehow (fraud, relaxing the bar for "skilled", etc) then allowing a less filtered, and hence dysgenic, influx. This leads to pretty serious harm - either these people assimilate (and hence lower the quality of the nation's gene pool) or you get a permanent racial underclass. In practice, this might lead to, say, your capital city becoming minority White, and the replacements actually being worse on average.
If we are looking at this purely from the perspective of national self-interest, I think this is overall a net negative. There is obviously a moral argument about helping unfortunate people who could thrive in a 1st world civilisation but were born into a low-IQ race, so it is worth the necessary overhead to carefully filter these people out and let them in (and of course, the more extreme one, which is to just let everyone in so everyone in for equality-of-opportunity reasons, and just accept the nation becoming Third World)
With the substance of my reply out of the way: why do you do this? As in, I know you are a high-IQ Third World immigrant, so I'm guessing you are not super thrilled about the recent vibe shift on immigrants: you personally haven't ever done anything bad, how unfair is it that some people implicitly blame you for (or at least associate you with) stuff like Rotherham, etc.
But you've had many conversations in the past with White identarians on this forum, so I'm pretty sure you are aware of this line of thinking, and then decide to constantly post as if you are some bluepilled liberal normie. I think it's bad form to psychologise your interlocutor, so I won't speculate why any further.
I will just ask - is there anything in what I've said that you actually factually disagree with? And I stress the word factually (since your claim that the US would fall behind and later on regret its current immigration policy is a statement about descriptive reality)
Do you not believe in HBD applied to racial groups? Do you dispute the Lynn IQ numbers as being roughly accurate? Do you dispute that IQ is a decent measure of a person's ability to function well in a society? Do you think that it doesn't make logical sense to make probabalistic judgements about groups of people on the basis of race given HBD? Do you think that the issues with Third World immigration that have occured in the past (e.g. Indians in Canada) are actually very easy to prevent if we just do X? etc
FlyOnTheWall
25d ago
Do you have a source for more of the texts? Everything I found online was just the 3 screens in my link.
Right, I had initially thought this was the case because the articles I found never mentioned a long-standing relationship. But I dismissed this as being too insane... it seems not, and the reason there was no mention was because he went out of his way to harass her.
Sure - I'm a "norms enjoyer". Let's have a look at the texts,
I think Jones clearly wishes death upon Republicans (and with the "breeding little fascists" comment, he also harbours an extreme hatred towards White people) And if Gilbert, or any other Republican were assassinated, he would secretly celebrate their deaths.
I think it's a bad thing that the Democrats elected such a person as a State AG. Even though he said he was sorry, the texts were egregiously hateful, so non-progressives will likely see his future uses of discretion as illegitimate, and stuff like this encourages escalation because it makes people feel unsafe.
The only caveat I'd add is that I'm opposed to the leaking of private messages between friends. But the messages were leaked, and we can see them: an immoral source for the evidence does not make the inference drawn any less valid.
EDIT: I misunderstood the (non-existent) nature of his relationship with Coyner.
FlyOnTheWall
25d ago
When I first read it (before I processed you were posing it as a hypothetical) it felt like a threat.
In this specific hypothetical, I personally (where to draw the line is a gray area) think the statement does count as a threat. "You are a bad person and the world would be better off from your absence" would be okay, but explicitly talking about killing, and a specific mode of execution on top of that, seems to cross the line into "directly inciting violence"
But in general, feeling viscerally attacked shouldn't be sufficient to make something a "threat". Often, harsh criticism can make a target feel threatened or even unsafe, since it indirectly encourages violence against the focus of the criticism (if X is bad, maybe we ought to do something about X?)
FlyOnTheWall
25d ago
None of my colleagues strike me as terminally online, and yet the day after his death I heard several of them listing off his "problematic" opinions about abortion and gun control, the clear implication being that he got what was coming to him.
As I conceded to @gattsuru, I was being unreasonably skeptical to your claims. I now believe that progressives (even in the UK) care more about the whole Kirk thing than I had thought.
Still, and maybe this is just nitpicking, I think there is a difference between thinking he was a bad person (who the world is better off without) and celebrating his death. In your own account, you say they call him out for his right-wing positions, but these "impliciations" are dicier and usually requires some level of psychologisation of your interlocutor.
I'm not trying to be willfully obtuse here - obviously what your coworkers are doing is exactly what someone who does support assassination of the outgroup would do. But it's also reasonable that they think he was a bad person, who didn't deserve to die, but still a bad person, and it's unfair for [insert members of progressive coalition] to let down on the criticism, lest the ideas he advanced be given undue legitimacy (an example of the kind of stance I am referring to)
I don't really understand the distinction between celebrating someone's death and saying that their death was "truly poetic".
Firstly it was said by a Russian person, so the language was a bit awkward. Maybe I misread their tone, but it sounded more like: "Due to pro-gun influencers like him, there have been so many pointless deaths, and now, ironically, he himself died as a result of what he preached (killed by a hateful right winger) It's all just so sad, why are humans like this?"
Thinking more on it, this is kind of a gray area. If we are being maximally charitable, progressives are just misinformed about what happened (given that the motive was "Kirk spread too much hate" and the shooter had a trans girlfriend, this was actually a left wing act of violence), and you could come to this conclusion by just consuming selected media outlets. But at what point does it just become willful ignorance? A meta-level "hack" where by maintaining ignorance, you can be allowed to support a violent act by your "side" but also not have to openly support violence against the outgroup.
Also the person who said it was a woman (in the normal sense of the word: an AFAB, uterus-haver, etc), so I'm more inclined to believe she wasn't celebrating death.
Soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again.
Well, the facts on the ground are that we should have low expectations from these kinds of people on a group-level. If even the maximally charitable "they are exactly like everyone else, it's just that everyone else treats them badly because [reasons]" counts as "bigotry", then I don't think it's possible to not be a bigot.
How did Charlie Kirk cause harm to the LGBT community? Meanwhile, how many LGBT Palestinians have been executed (judicially or otherwise) because of their sexuality or gender identity?
Broadly speaking, he was a popular political influencer who pubicly and proudly took an anti-LGBT stance. This helps shift public opinion to be more anti-LGBT. And this leads to things that make life materially worse for LGBT people (the general public is less accepting of them, anti-LGBT legislation is passed, pro-LGBT legislation isn't passed, etc)
Unlike a progressive, I concede this is a fully general argument that also means, e.g. Obama caused harm to White people. But I claim this argument is valid (and in particular, is valid in the Kirk x LGBT case)
The LGBT people harmed by the Palestinians are all in Palestine. It is pretty reasonable that LGBT (and their allies) in the West would focus on people who cause harm to Western LGBT people (even if said harm is a lot less than the harm caused by Palestinians in Palestine)
You're correct. I just wish that progressive people would acknowledge...
I echo @PutAHelmetOn. I assume that the smarter progressives (college professors, politicians, etc) are aware of these tensions in their own mind and internally make these tradeoffs. But they also know that, on an open political stage, it is unwise to admit these facts, because it gives legitimacy to people who actually just reject gender ideology wholesale.
But I agree it's an unecessary evil that normies who lack any influence choose to do this too. It would be nice if it were more normalised to "cordon off" these sorts of private interpersonal interactions, and just allow people to sort out the truth amongst themselves instead of having to speak "tactically" all the time.
FlyOnTheWall
26d ago
I initially only believed that this stuff was happening irl in the US, but not the UK (since Kirk was an American influencer), I was under the impression UK progressives had entirely forgotten about the Kirk thing (the account I gave was the first and last time this topic was brought up irl in my presence)
Since it was just @FtttG saying this (from the UK), and it felt "two steps removed" from my own experience, I wondered if he had misinterpreted things and blown stuff up in his head by overthinking. But then @self_made_human's account was also in the UK.
The most parsimonious explanation is that my progressive coworkers do have these sorts of discussions, but not around me (because we don't spend time together except at lunch), which makes sense. I guess it felt "off" to me (hence that part of my comment) because it seems quite far from how they behave with me at work, but then my behaviour / opinions in private is quite far from when I am at work, so I should expect that they also have some "hidden" part to themselves.
FlyOnTheWall
26d ago
Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion.
First, I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
The leftists at my workplace (the kind of place where "Trump is [generally] bad" is just in the groundwater) were very unsympathetic to Kirk. But none of them actually celebrated his death, they (quietly) discussed how he was a bad person, and that he had sort of brought it upon himself (I'm given to understand this is because he was pro-guns) To cherrypick the very worst things said (I'm paraphrasing):
- Someone said it was a truly "poetic" death
- Someone questioned how far one is willing to take the principle "we should never commit political violence" - is it okay to assassinate Hitler? (but they didn't explicitly say Kirk was like Hitler, and if if they had, that wouldn't quite be celebrating his death)
But everyone to my recollection affirmed that it is bad that a human being died. And this general direction of discussion was lightly shut down by another progressive.
It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian. [therefore if we Kirk is a bad person who deserves to die for his wrongthing, then certainly so are the Palestinians]
But Charlie Kirk was an individual, who personally held the "misogynistic" and anti-LGBT beliefs of a "modal Charlie Kirk" - not all Palestinians share the sentiments (or crimes) of the mode. I'm not saying group punishment is axiomatically immoral, but it is clearly a gray area because it involves punishing innocents. I think it is much more straightforward morally to support punishing a bad person for personally doing a bad thing (I'm not saying Kirk / Muslims do a "bad thing" by holding these views, just addressing this particular line of inference you drew)
But the above is my own disagreement to your logic. If we are looking at the world through a progressive lens:
- Kirk is privileged (as a White cisgender heterosexual middle class able-bodied male, a citizen of a developed country, etc etc) - so unlike the Palestinians he has no excuse for his regressive worldview. He never had to worry about starving, getting shot, etc - he had the luxury to educate himself and be a force for good.
- Unlike the Palestinians, people actually listen to Kirk's views on LGBT, etc. He actually causes harm to the LGBT community in the West, in a way the Palestinians don't.
I don't think they are. I think they're primarily thinking about the main culture war flashpoints, almost all of which involve male people in women's spaces.
The bathroom stuff is only one of the flashpoints. Respecting pronouns, concerns about the growing anti-trans (or "transphobic", if we are pathologising it) sentiment, access to hormones, trans children, trans men, non-binary individuals - these are all pretty clearly "flashpoints", and none involve males in female spaces.
My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.
As I suspect you are aware, progressives assign a different meaning to the word "woman" and "man" than you do. It is a reference to one's gender identity, and can be unrelated to their chromosomes, sex organs, appearance, etc (i.e. "transgender")
None of these policies benefit men - they benefit (trans) women (at the expense of cis women) One can argue that this is a bad definition, but it is the definition used by progressives - it is what they mean when they say "man" and "woman". So there is absolutely nothing "incoherent" about being feminist and pro trans rights.
Also, on top of that, it's not even incoherent to oppose violence against AFABs and support trans rights. It is possible to have multiple moral goals, for those goals to come into conflict, and to have to choose one over the other:
- Is it contradictory to want gay rights, but also to be anti-racist, given that POC tend to be more homophobic than Whites?
- To value women's bodily autonomy, but also be opposed to abortion, if you believe that fetuses are humans too?
- To value people having freedom and pursuing happiness, but also supporting the incarceration / execution of a criminal who finds his bliss via serial rape, robbery and assault?
- To oppose male violence against women, but also oppose the mass extermination of the entire male sex?
FlyOnTheWall
30d ago
I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.
So I did consider animals when I wrote the definition, which I why I carefully worded the condition as: "want[ing] to die" instead of the more sophisticated "wishing to commit suicide", etc. For animals, I am working on the assumption that they will express a death wish as going crazy and just thrashing about / attacking people / etc.
It's not a perfect solution, but unfortunately once an entity is unable to communicate verbally, it's hard to definitively rule out that it is not in some kind of terrible agony (see also: "The anesthesia only partially worked. The patient is unable to control their body, but feels everything"), so I think this is the best we can do.
I didn't really consider babies. I don't think it is an oxymoron either. But I think my definition still works, because we can try and reasonably infer if it is in agony, primarily by asking if the thing we are doing to it is painful (and, as I mentioned, there is the caveat of if you love the entity and are trying to help it, so medical procedures on newborns is not torture) - this is even less cut-and-dry than the animal case, but again I think it's just a hard problem to evaluate suffering on a living thing that cannot communicate its thoughts (and in fact probably doesn't even have "thoughts" in the way normal humans do)
If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me
Actually this is an intended aspect of my definition. The primary goal of my definition is that I find it disturbing that intelligent beings are able to inflict extreme "unnatural" levels of pain on living things, and sometimes it is in their benefit to do so.
In general, it feels "unnatural" to ban a state from inflicting any kind of suffering on someone, because a "baseline" level of suffering just exists without states (people/animals starve to death, creatures get eaten by stronger ones, etc), so why just disallow inflicting suffering in just this particular kind of circumstance.
But for torture, this is a thing that only happens if you have civilisation (lions don't torture gazelles or other lions, they can't because they are too stupid) - so I think it should be considered always immoral to torture.
As you yourself have mentioned, sometimes there are good and necessary reasons to kill someone (a criminal just starts attacking people and refuses to surrender), so we can't go so far as to ban killing for any reason (plus what about killing animals, etc)
So my definition comes out as the best coherent imperative that can actually be adhered to in any circumstance, but also rules out a particularly egregious class of suffering: i.e. a fate worse than death (if whatever is happening to someone is truly a fate worse than death, under this rule, they have the right to choose death instead)
In your particular comparison - the strong willed person is personally experiencing whatever is happening to them as a fate not as bad as death. As long as they are always given the option of choosing death (consent can always be taken away at any point, etc, etc) - I don't think I can do any better without my axiom becoming non-universal.
Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of.
I think you're right, I went too far with my previous statement. What I do believe is that this is less worrying than wanton suffering, but still, being able to actually act on the philosophy I propose for animals with a real animal, even for a useful purpose, is still worrying because he was able to ignore its suffering / lacked the empathy to realise its suffering.
but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking
I agree, it is quite slimy he lied that way. I already mentioned it was bad he covered up his rule breaking, but you're right he also went out of his way to mislead people into thinking he was pro animal rights by having a pet.
Though I think misleading people into thinking you hold a particular ideological stance is less egregious than actually breaking a rule (thought crimes vs physical crimes)... but I guess I'm biased, since (like many others on this forum, I imagine) I personally mislead the people around me to believe I am on-board with progressive ideology (but in my defence, I will say I have tried to keep this deception implicit, I don't go around with dyed hair and pronoun pins)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder
In general, I am also unequivocally opposed to "torturing" animals.
But "suffering" is a spectrum, ranging from getting wet in the rain to the kind of stuff drug cartels do.
My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. With an exception if you sincerely love and care for them (to avoid classifying extremely painful things that eventually lead to something good for the "victim" as torture)
And this situation does not seem to be torture. If it were really on the level of torture, I think the dog would just wig out and attack Hasan. A dog that sits still in discomfort for a long time is just suffering a "reasonable" amount. I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.
And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here
As I said, I don't think this particular thing amounts to torture. But I agree that it is causing suffering to the dog, and it should make us worried about a person if they wantonly cause suffering to living things because of what it says about their ability to empathise, but:
- This doesn't mean the person is actually doing anything morally wrong. It's just that they are actively doing something that makes the people around them (who cannot access their true state of mind) update their priors to think they will later do a separate thing, that is morally wrong.
- In this case, I don't even think we should be worried* He wasn't shocking the dog for fun, he was trying to make his property stay in the right place for his livestream. In your teddy analogy: your guy is not ripping teddy bears apart with his teeth, but decided to use one of the button eye as a spare for his jacket. No need to worry about a missing empathy response - he probably did feel a little uncomfortable but understood the discomfort was irrational.
[*] Well, at least not worried he's a Ted Bundy. It is antisocial behaviour for him to break a rule and then hide his rule-breaking behaviour (even if the rule itself is bogus)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
There are animals that we let trained people butcher for meat and do not think much of it, or otherwise subject to harsh conditions for our utility, and there are animals that we cherish and pamper, or at least respect.
I find the whole ranking of animal species business pretty suspect morally.
But fine, that is a self-consistent framework that justfies meat eating but not pet abuse (assuming you would be okay with someone abusing a pet from a "meat" species)
In principle - I have no good answer to the whole animal rights conundrum, namely:
A: They are living beings, even if they are not as smart as humans. It is not okay to kill them - would you be okay with a human cattle ranch of mentally retarded people?
B: This is indeed an ugly thing: I don't want to live in a world where the weak and stupid have no right even to their life if their death would cause some positive utility to one of their biological superiors (especially when "weak" and "stupid" are relative terms...)
B: But sadly, there is no good resolution to this. If we really wish to avoid this ugly notion of biological inferiority/superiority, "a great chain of being", etc - then we are forced to extend our compassion forever downwards, below the cattle and dogs, below the rats, below even the ants, bees and wasps - down to the level of unicellular organisms: on just your fingertip lies millions of bacteria, each time you wash your hands is a genocide. The only way to avoid actively harming innocent beings is the death of the entire human race, each breathe we take to prolong our murderous lives is an atrocity.
B: So, if we wish to continue living, and wish to retain some coherent notion of morality - we must accept the drawing of a line somewhere. So we must be able to say X is so low on the "chain" it is acceptable to take its life. And yes, this unfortunately puts the question of whether I deserve my own life onto the table.
This is a self-consistent rebuttal (and is the argument I personally believe in), but it's also exactly what an evil person trying to justify their evil would say in order to continue being evil ("Look, maybe being a cartel hitman is actually not a nice thing to do. But also, it's the only life I know, and I'd probably be killed myself if I stopped, and also coincidentally I have this neat philosophy that actually makes it kosher!"), so I often have doubts about this.
I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this (I have seen similar things written elsewhere, but never exactly this)
But - to go back to the original point: wider (meat-eating) society accepts the fact that animal lives are lesser than a human's. In particular, we kill and eat animals (okay, more realistically - we sponsor their killing by buying their meat in a supermarket), and not even for survival reasons. It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison ("it was one thing to kill and eat all those people, but when you trespassed into that lady's house to hide in her shower, you crossed the line")
I don't think it makes sense to oppose mild animal abuse unless you are a vegetarian (and even then there are other issues, but being vegetarian seems the bare minimum for holding this sort of position)
By the same logic, if I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) put a bag over your head and chained you to a bed, you would still be doing better than, say, a migrant labourer in the UAE who is worked to death in the blazing sun. That may be true, but we are talking "lesser of two evils" and not "this is fine, this is okay, what is everyone making a fuss about?"
If I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) kidnapped you from your home (and also a bunch of other humans), put you on a farm, eugenically bred you with other humans with the goal of making succulent offspring, and eventually slaughtered you, butchered you, and sold your flesh for a profit... you'd actually be worse off than even the migrant labourer. Actually this is the plot for an especially disturbing horror movie - so if we're comparing animals to humans this way, you (and I, and everyone else who eats meat) are at an off-the-charts level of bad.
FlyOnTheWall
5mo ago
Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person?
If we accept that personhood is truly subjective, then asking if it's okay to kill someone is an ill-posed question. Because personhood is not an objective quality of a biological entity.
I (and you and @Owlify) all have separate judgements on the morality of any given killing, which depends on whether we morally see the thing being killed as a person (in the most extreme case - I doubt even you would view a fertilized egg as human)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?
Firstly there is a difference between understanding someone's actions and being okay with them. I also understand why John Wayne Gacy tortured all those young men (he was incapable of human empathy and felt an intense sexual pleasure from his actions)
In the case of genocide, the (honest) argument is that the victims are human - but they are somehow biologically inferior or otherwise harmful to the host society (on the group level - bell curves, etc, etc), so they must be liquidated for the sake of self-preservation. So we have the moral grey area of 2 groups with competing interests.
In the case of abortion - I'm making an even stronger claim. That there is literally no fetus (not even a +4 sigma one) that counts as human, or even comes close to it. I am fine with looking at your side's propaganda photos of an ultrasound of a 24-week-old and saying that that thing is just not human. It has the capacity to grow into a human (like a sperm cell) in the future, but in its current state - it is a mere animal that lacks any kind of thought or self-awareness.
Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?
I have a definition of personhood (just like you do), which is that you need some amount of intelligence (in a very weak sense - I'm not asking our prospective personhood-haver to integrate sec(x), I'm asking them to show they are capable of thought at all, are aware of their own existence, etc) - and I accept there is nuance about where we draw the line and how to measure these things. But based on everything I know about fetuses, including what I've heard from the pro-life side, they do not come close to what I've described. Not as a group, not even if we just ask for a single exceptional individual in the far right tail.
I think you agree, under my definition, that I'm right. But then that definition I gave was just based on my own personal moral "vibes". You have your own definition of personhood that makes fetuses people. Neither can prove the other wrong*, because we are looking at the same map. That is why, despite how distasteful it sounds, personhood is just "subjective" (as is genocide, dignity, freedom, etc) - otherwise we just play word games and make contrived analogies that "prove" our morality is objectively correct (this is a good tactic if actually waging the culture war, but it does not help to discuss it)
In case this sounds too glib / edgy, I want to say I do understand the gravity of this disagreement. From your perspective, I am a horrible person advocating for killing left-handed people ("How is this thing a person?"). But this is what I honestly believe, and if there is evidence, even anecdotal, that contradicts my understanding of the mental capacity of fetuses, I'm happy to hear about it.
[*] Unless it's a religious thing. In that case it is a disagreement over the nature of objective reality, and it could (at least in theory) be resolved by logical arguments.
I agree, but doesn't this logic follow through to literally every "freedom"? When someone exercises free speech to advocate for X, they deprive those opposed to it from living in a ~X society, etc.
That is how I view the notion of "freedoms" (i.e. incoherent because you can just switch framings to switch what is/is not a freedom) - but it seems that some right-wingers like you and @AvocadoPanic think freedoms make sense in general (and sexual degeneracy in particular just doesn't count)
Could you give an example of an act of moral degeneracy that would still count as freedom? (Otherwise, I think we should just use the word degeneracy, since that is less ambiguous than "freedom")
The actual "utility numbers" come about from the fact that we always have some kind of preference between 2 hypothetical futures.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Human minds don't run on integer math, and neither do they run on pure rationality, and neither are they very good at modelling future states. I'm pretty sure it's easy to get people to express preference loops, where they rank their preferences as a > b > c > a, for example.
I was not making the stronger psychology claim that a good model of human behaviour is to assume that everyone is maximising E[u] for some personal utility function (but I am claiming that this would be the best way for an agent to operate if it had oo computational power)
When I spoke of the utility numbers, I was referring to them existing as an abstract concept, which may be totally unknown to any human mind (similarly, the 10^100th digit of pi also exists) - it's just that they can, in principle, be calculated.
Your example of people "having" preference loops (scare quotes because it might just be self-deception) just falls under humans sometimes being wrong about stuff. We don't need to reject arithmetic because I said "2+2=5".
Do you agree that utility functions exist in the abstract? (I agree they are often unhelpful to reason about things in practice, and sometimes they can be an intentional overcomplication to trick people)
It makes you reliable, which makes you attractive in several senses of the word, which helps build a "we" to keep you out of such situations in the first place
I think you're right - and I didn't consider this initially since, in my case, I don't think I have anyone in my community who would reward such behaviour. But if you do have strong bonds with precommiters, it makes sense for you to act this way.
What assurance do they have of the King's honesty?
They don't have an assurance, but in my experience interacting with people, being nice and apologetic (even if the other person is in the wrong) can only make them less mad (even if they are still mad) - I would apologise to the king because maybe he would be content with having humiliated me and leave me alone (or maybe he might just kill me without being tortured - which I would value massively)
And even if he is honest, what are the remaining span of their lives worth? Even in terms of pleasure, what are they worth, compared to the pleasure of spite satisfied? What the king wants, he will never have
Well, this is kind of my problem with this Hylynkian philosophy. As I conceded, it makes sense for you to adopt this kind of attitude as a shared culture with your ingroup. You should stand up to unfairness because otherwise you'll be seen as cowardly.
But on an individual level (my friends are also non-Hlynkians) - if I keep spiting the various kings I encounter in life, I'll just keep running into trouble and it will add up and make my life worse than it would be otherwise. Isn't it better to focus on our own happiness than to try and punish people who do bad things? If I literally had no control over anything else, I would want to spite the king, but in practice (even in this example as I said above) - we can usually significantly lessen the chance of us getting in trouble if we just swallow our pride (e.g. when someone in real life who isn't a close friend or family says that what I just said is offensive, I just apologise instead of pushing the point)
and it is fitting that the cruel should suffer for their evil, that the scales should move toward balance in all possible ways.
I fully understand this impulse (and have felt it myself!), but I think this is an immoral view to hold, and we should try and repress this desire. I will elaborate.
I think that suffering is always a bad thing, no matter how bad the entity is that is suffering. Of course in practice, for instance with criminals, we sometimes have to make them suffer (to alleviate the suffering of their future victims), and since they can so easily opt out of the suffering the state imposes on them by not comitting crimes, I am okay with making them suffer prison/execution (and I don't advocate for making jail cells into fancy hotel rooms, because if there is the money to do that - it should be spent on the non-criminal public)
But if we weren't constrained by resources (or we were in a situation as you describe, where the suffering is not a means to an end, but the end itself) - I would not want anyone to suffer. In this story (it's a lot longer than Heather Ale, but I think it helps convey the "emotion" behind the "suffering is always bad" worldview, like HA does for precomittment), I find the serial killer sickening, and it feels like he should atone for his wrong-doing... but why? His victims are already dead, and no one will see what happens to him, so there is no use in "making an example" - isn't it just "better" if he goes to heaven? (And then you feel even more sick when you imagine if you were one of the victims, but the logic still holds!)
(unless you're attuned to what seems to be tacitly acknowledged to be a genuine racial dog-whistle)
To my awareness, there is no racist meme in which you list someone's name and just say "oh". If we are really reaching, I suppose this falls into the general paradigm of "Noticing" (that would be a dogwhistle, since it's just a normal word that has a secret related meaning that was arbitrarily assigned to it to allow for people to make controversial statements that sound innocuous to someone unaware)
There is no shared context you are missing here. Just the common context we all have from living on the same planet.
Maybe I have to brush up on my linguistics, but I still don't see any notable connection between that name and any region, let alone any political stance.
There probably is a way that a linguist could deduce much more than just him being Black from the name alone, and there's probably also some jargon that could help precisely describe what about the name "sounds SSA". (If I think about it a bit, I suppose the consecutive consonants "Nt" in particular sound SSA)
But we do not need any advanced linguistic machinery to make this inference in this case, anymore than someone needs to understand General Relavity (or even Newtonian gravity) to infer that if I let go of an object in mid-air, it will fall to the ground.
I had the same reaction as @EverythingIsFine
As I said, I don't think this is really the reaction any of you had to the comment. Charitably, I think that you feel this way consciously, because you dislike racism, and so you avoided letting your mind make this hard-to-explicitly-articulate, but obvious inference.
I guess I'm also being a little obtuse here though. I think what you guys are getting at, is that it is unfair to make an inference based on the professor's race, as opposed to his work, because he has no control over the former. If he doesn't want people to assume he hates White people on the basis of his work, he can try and address this by softening the tone, or even reconsidering the substance - but if someone assumes things about him because of his race... what is he to do? It's not like he can stop being Black.
And I agree (at least from the perspective of the person who is being discriminated against) it is really unfair and sucky to be judged on the basis of something entirely beyond your control and decided at birth (whether that is your race, sex, disability, etc) - and on this basis, you can make an argument that, as a society, we should uphold this tacit norm where we avoid acting on, or even openly acknowledging, the information given by these characteristics (and instead wait for them to tell about their nature through their behaviour)
But this is a pseudononymous internet forum whose principle goal is truth-seeking (or at least acknowleding the truth when presented before us), even when said truth is offensive, hurtful or upsetting. So even if we want to maintain the "no-Noticing" social norm for society (I have mixed feelings about that), I strongly disagree that we should do that here, because it prevents us from seeing the true nature of reality.
FlyOnTheWall
7mo ago
No, physical possession does not entail deprivation
Wait, what? Then how are you defining the word "deprivation"? Surely, if I am using an object, I am not allowing others to use the object at the same time, i.e. I am depriving them of the ability to use the object.
FlyOnTheWall
7mo ago
So kill them? That's what you mean, right?
I think this is uncharitable. I assume he just wants to dispossess the "elite parasite class" of their land and assets (and redistribute them to poor people), and then convince them of the error of their ways (if you hold his worldview, then they will just understand how much better it is to share once we let them see what a society unshackled from the notion of "ownership" looks like)
Because people have tried this, and it didn't become "clear" what remained to be done except continue killing until you run out of people to steal from, limp on in totalitarian misery and eventually give up.
I think this is what would happen in practice if OP's idea of abolishing ownership was actually implemented. But I don't think this is his intent, I think he just has a different model of human nature and societies than we do (if I don't believe in germs and I sneeze on my immunocompromised friend, and he dies, that doesn't mean I wanted to kill him, or had any kind of malicious intent towards him)
FlyOnTheWall
7mo ago
I don't think so, no. Utilitarian calculus breaks down with infinites, and this is about infinites
The actual "utility numbers" come about from the fact that we always have some kind of preference between 2 hypothetical futures. And we could effectively encode the idea of -oo utility by just making all these "above utilitarian calculus" things be -10^10^10^10 utilons (and having the mundane and tangible be on the scale of 10s of utilons)
But I suppose this is kind of a nitpicky point (you may as well do "calculations" by treating the idea of liberty as something with its own calculus if the numbers cannot overlap) - so it's just a matter of perspective if you want to see it as a utility thing or not. I'm happy to not use the utilitarian lens here - I'm just trying to point out that it can be seen though this lens in principle (like how, technically, any maths proof could be formalised into Lean, even though this is usually unnecessary and impractical)
It's well-known that small compromises lead to larger ones, and it is in this fashion that one moves from compromising to being compromised
But what can you do in situations where you have no leverage over the compromising party? What is there to do other than give them whatever they want, and hope they will slightly nicer to you (even if "nicer" just means taking all of stuff instead of torturing you to death and then taking all your stuff)?
I know what you suggest - which is to stubbornly refuse like the Picts in your poem, and get tortured to death. What does this achieve (the King presumably just doesn't care, so he won't abdicate the throne or anything)? These principles Hlynka proposes only seems to bring misery and suffering to it adherents in these sorts of extreme situations.
Precommitment, in other words, the most durable sort of commitment. And such commitments are often decisive, especially in a crisis
[Heather Ale poem]
I understand this as a strategy, and I think it even makes sense in various real-world cases (e.g. MAD with nuclear weapons) where you have a reasonable chance of overcoming your adversary (I'm not a pacifist - I don't think a nation should just lie down and accept being conquered if a similarly-powered neighbour invades them, for example)
But in the situation of you acting as an individual, against an entire government, I don't see what good precommitment will do. You have no threats or leverage over the person violating your rights. The "Heather Ale" poem is basically my point - the dwarfs died (and the father was presumably horribly tortured too) , and that was the intended outcome of the father's "trick". I agree in this sort of situation, it's very unlikely that the king will just let the dwarf family live happily ever after once they give up the secret, he'll probably keep escalating his demands. But we don't just how far he will go yet - why not give in for now, and if things actually get really bad, the dwarfs can just kill themselves? (killing themselves now just closes options)
FlyOnTheWall
7mo ago
I really need the money, too. Maybe even more than you do. So, where does that leave us?
We don't even need to use hypotheticals as @sarker did. There are people all over the world who need your money more than you do (you could save a child's life with a malaria pill for just 1 dollar)
There are various reasonable arguments for why you deserve the money more than these children do, but I strongly suspect you don't believe in any of them (but I'd be happy and surprised to be proven wrong!)
So why aren't you donating all of your money to save these lives? What gives you the right to, in your own framing, "deprive" all these sick, unfortunate children of urgent medical care? Even if you totally bankrupt yourself, you could go on welfare or just be homeless and live off the kindness of strangers (you'd still be better off than all those children)
I mean, I agree. But this argument is fully general for any descriptive position on reality I think is wrong (doesn't what you've said also apply to, e.g. religion?) Their reasons only appear irrational from our perspective. And symmetrically, the rest of the forum are irrational people unwilling to question the mainstream narrative.
So, if we allow people to do this sort of stuff, at best it leads to a one-sided soft-censoring of certain topics (you can advocate for X, but then you get no protection from others by the mods but are still held to the rules yourself), or worse it leads to discussion on a topic becoming totally devoid of object-level content, just both sides explaining why their opponent really said what they said.
More options
Context Copy link