HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
Now you are claiming that people who disagree with your assessment of Jan 6th are as bad as the pro-BLM riot people. Suppose that is true: so what? The pro-BLM riot people were rewarded with vast political, financial and social benefit from their actions. Negative consequences were extremely rare, limited to only a very few of the most egregious examples. Why should one be ashamed of an action to which no shame or censure seems to attach?
I'm not sure I'm accurately understanding what you're saying. It seems to me that you're saying it's acceptable to lie about what constitutes violence as long as the other side got away with that lie too? I'm all for holding people to their the standards they set, and as such I don't want to hear one bit of whining about January 6 from people who defended the 2020 rioters. But I'm concerned that some people here seem to be actually believing that January 6 wasn't violent and wasn't a bad thing simply on account of the other side being dishonest about these categories the year prior. I think it matters what's actually true and it's important not to become so focused on pointing out the Calvinball the other side is playing that we convince ourselves that falsehoods are true.
I'm not sure I follow your point about Great Books like Aristotle. It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits. And that's not to mention how impenetrable the prose is (apparently translators always think their job is robotically faithful reproduction instead of their best guess about what a modern writer would have written if attempting to express the same thought.)
You say they "speak to" people in some deep way. I'm not really sure what that means, but if their ideas are that impressive and timeless then surely someone more modern has has said the same thing but without the handicap of an ancient person's understanding of the world and our place in it?
Are you sure "read the classics" is an imperative containing much more than signaling about the speaker's supposed learnedness and sophistication? Because it's always been extremely hard for me to shake that impression, and I'm afraid I'm definitely not disabused of it from reading your response to Hanania. I see no good defense of the merits of reading those works.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
I am anti-immigrant and have had ample interactions with them. They are not just like you and me. If they were, why do they insist on speaking their native language in public? Why do I have to press 1 for English? Why do they wear their old culture's clothing? Why do they congregate in communities with their own instead of assimilating?
I can't imagine immigrating to another country and refusing to speak their language and wear their clothing. I'd be overcome with embarrassment and shame at such a flagrant display of disrespect and hostility to the country that was gracious enough to accept me in.
There are certainly many immigrants that assimilate, but it doesn't take many defectors to change the character of a community.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
I'm going to take the opposite position and insist that schools shouldn't be wasting time on gym at all. I don't think the point of school is to provide children everything that we think is "good". Schools should not be thought of as substitute parents with a broad mandate to produce good student life outcomes in general. Schools should be narrowly focused on basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science.
I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
It seems to me that you are attempting to appeal to common ground and common sense. You are pointing out that this is, in fact, a mob, and that this mob is, in fact, physically fighting the cops, and that that is violence, so therefore this is a violent event. This is true.
That's all I'm saying!
But you are talking to people who have made this exact appeal in the past, in the face of considerably worse violence, and who were told categorically by both their social peers and by the government and knowledge-production class as a whole that what they were seeing was not lawless violence, because the violence was a small minority of a given event, as in fact it is in the Jan 6th video you linked. The common ground you are appealing to has already been burned, and there is no way to get it back. This is the closest to a consensus on political violence that you are likely to ever see. It will only get worse from here as incidents accumulate.
I'm extremely sympathetic to the complaint of the obvious double standard. I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that 1) both Jan 6 and Summer 2020 were violent and bad; 2) Summer 2020 was more violent; 3) people who defended the Summer 2020 riots should be called out and shamed.
Some people seem to have this bizarre need to believe that if Jan 6 is claimed to be more violent than Summer 2020 but isn't, then that must mean Jan 6 wasn't violent or even bad. No! That's not how logic works!
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
Just to scratch the surface, an understanding of evolution, neuroscience, and atomic theory puts the learned modern person's understanding of human nature leaps and bounds above the ancients. Like, have you read some of the things they believed? It's embarrassing, but obviously they didn't know any better. That's my point. I truly struggle to think of something I'm more baffled by than the seemingly widespread idea that we ought to entertain these ancient people's ideas any more than we'd entertain a toddler's.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
If the BLM riots didn't qualify as violence in popular sentiment, then who is to say J6 should?
You are! And I am! As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own. It's fine to say to a Blue Triber who defended the 2020 rioters, "Hey, if you thought summer 2020 wasn't violent, then I won't grant you that Jan 6 was violent. Your rules!" But you shouldn't believe that yourself in the privacy of your own mind merely because you're rubbing your opponents' noses in their hypocrisy.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
Empirical facts about evolution provide us insight into why our minds and bodies are the way they are. They explain our emotions (including love), desires, perceptions, and so on. Everything that makes us what we are is the product of evolution. Atomic theory and neuroscience explain consciousness (although, of course, much mystery remains), personality, and provides good grounds to believe that no soul exists that can persist after death. All of this information informs our understanding of human nature.
Here are a few concrete examples just off the top of my head:
Modern neuroscience allows us to understand (and treat) mental disorders to a significant degree. These would have been mysterious to the ancients. But we understand, to some extent, how things like neurotransmitters affect depression, addiction, anxiety, etc., and that helps us come up with better ways to deal with it and also to sympathize with people who suffer from it.
Our knowledge of the cosmos, limited as it still is, allows us to better understand our place in it (or, perhaps most pertinently, our lack of importance within it).
Likewise, our understanding of evolution rather humbles our perception of our species' place in the world. It also provides insight into human universals such as sexual jealousy, coalitional warfare, the primacy of family, and probably a hundred other such examples. As an example of where a lack of this understanding goes awry, you're probably familiar with the Kibbutz - a feeble attempt by the Israelis to, among other lunacies, raise children communally. Evolutionary insight would immediately reveal the folly of that. But without an understanding of evolution, or at least trial and error, how do you suppose an ancient person would know that this project would be unlikely to succeed? Even if they could figure it out (probably by trial and error!) it seems obvious to me that an evolutionary insight into this aspect of human nature is a superior way to nip that sort of thing in the bud.
Also, even aside from advances in empirical knowledge, we have the advantage of two thousand years of history to draw from. For example, the US founding fathers took ample advantage of the history books to learn from prior empires' mistakes when designing the US system of government. All else being equal, people with more history to draw from will simply be better able to find enduring answers to timeless questions relating to how to organize society (politically, legally, etc.) and minimize common failure modes.
Like, honestly, the case you're making appears tantamount to claiming that superior empirical knowledge and a much longer "civilization bug report log" provides approximately zero advantage in understanding and improving people and society. And if so, like, why do you even bother to learn anything? I honestly don't understand.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
I'm familiar with that classic essay, but that's not at all describing what I'm doing. I think the Jan 6 mob's behavior was, on its own merits, worthy of contempt, shame, and mass criminal charges. This is not because I'm lazily applying words like "violent" and letting my opinion of the event be colored by the baggage the word and its central examples come with. I don't particularly care what words you or anyone else want to use to describe it, as long as we agree on what actually physically happened there on the ground (which, alas, I'm not so sure we all do. You seem perhaps more reasonable than some other posters in this regard).
My opinion of the Jan 6 mob also has absolutely nothing to do with the detestable behavior of the 2020 rioters and their shameful defenders in the Blue Tribe. I still can't fathom how one's opinion of the two even could be related. As if our opinion of the perpetrators would change in a counterfactual world where one event happened and the other didn't. That is such an alien moral framework to me I don't even know how to begin to understand it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Reading fiction critically is an opportunity to consider how others or yourself might act (or ought to act) in ways that are analogous or dis-analogous to various actual situations one may find oneself in.
Except fiction can create scenarios that are extremely unrealistic, including in ways that might not be obvious to a young person. For example, a work of fiction that sanitizes violence and its true brutality might lead someone to be more likely to endorse violence in general. Or, conversely, fiction that depicts bad guys being effortlessly incapacitated might lead people to be less likely to endorse lethal violence when it's actually called for. I think, for example, that Hollywood's aversion to depicting gruesome violence (yes, you read that right) contributes to people having terrible intuitions about police use of force. They see movie heroes shooting people in the leg and think that's something police should be doing instead.
I find this a little confusing. What do you take it to mean to refute an author's take?
The author of a work of non-fiction (say, a textbook) might selectively omit certain other historical facts that would have changed how the reader thinks about a particular fact of history, or they might claim certain information is factual when there's actually some dispute about it among experts, or they might make normative claims that are debatable or use language in clever ways to try to sway the reader to the author's point of view.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.
I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining what I mean, so I can genuinely see how you would think that. To clarify, I'm fine with outwardly downplaying J6 because of the new standard that Summer 2020 wrought. What I'm confused and concerned about is that some people seem to believe that J6 wasn't bad on its own merits. As in, if Summer 2020 hadn't happened, it seems some people still wouldn't think J6 was a big deal and that the perpetrators still shouldn't have been charged or even condemned. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.
So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so. So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word
As I explained to FC, it's not that Jan 6 was bad "because it was violent", as if we're robotically applying a flowchart of "matches dictionary definition of violent" -> "is therefore worthy of condemnation and criminal charges". Jan 6 was worthy* of condemnation and criminal charges because of what actually happened there. I don't care what words you want to use to describe it. I care that people see what happened and condemn what they're seeing as harshly as I believe it ought to be condemned. Yet so many people seem to have convinced themselves that it wasn't actually a big deal and that we don't actually see what we can plainly see on video.
* Again, on its own merits. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the new standard of Summer 2020 compels us to go light on J6ers, at least outwardly.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
It seems you're suggesting that women attending domestic violence shelters are concerned that the men there (who would themselves be victims of domestic violence) are going to attack them. Am I understanding you correctly? If so, I don't think that concern is something the shelter should indulge at the exclusion of male victims. I see no reason to suppose women at domestic violence shelters are at an elevated risk of being attacked by strangers compared to walking on the sidewalk.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I haven't thought about this before, so this may be a dumb question, but why wouldn't men go to the same domestic violence shelters women do? I can't think of any sex-specific services that would be required, or any reason people would be more uncomfortable around the opposite sex than the same sex.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.
Doesn't that require assuming that society doesn't prefer trying to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems? I doubt anyone who favors euthanasia in these circumstances is any less eager to find nonlethal solutions than people who oppose euthanasia.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Or, of course, you're mistaken about how readable and enjoyable people thought these works were in the past.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
And then there's the Classical allusions: "Achilles' heel," "Trojan horse," "Herculean task," "siren song," etc. So much of our language at least used to be built around what, again, at least used to be a set of common stories and references, such that it can be hard to understand without it
Do you think people need to read the stories to understand the references? I've never read any ancient Greek story and I know what all those references mean. You can explain those references in a paragraph, and sometimes even a sentence.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
I find this fascinating since my experience was quite opposite. Fiction could make issues clear cut in a way non-fiction almost never could.
Have you considered that perhaps that's a good reason not to use fiction to think about issues? There's a reason issues often aren't clear cut in non-fiction. The world is rarely that neat and simple. Perhaps fiction encourages us to think unrealistically about issues. Perhaps the author has biases or blind spots that mislead/manipulate the reader into thinking one thing or another. While that often happens with non-fiction too, at least the events in question happened and the author's take can in principle be refuted.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
According to one survey, two-thirds of people in the US believe that the law of supply and demand does not apply to housing.
Or perhaps they're correctly noticing that the places with the most supply are often the places with the highest prices.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
Some people are only attracted to certain races.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
Except, in my experience, the same people who are sympathetic to the nonviolent members of the J6 mob also howl in outrage when the actually violent members of the J6 mob face criminal sentences for their acts. And again, I'm fine with insisting on there not being a double standard between the J6ers and the Summer 2020 protesters. I absolutely agree there was a double standard, and I'm open to the suggestion that J6ers get off the hook just out of fairness. But these people seem to believe that the J6ers did basically nothing wrong (or at least nothing wrong beyond the realm of trivial misdemeanors), not just that they ought to be treated lightly to keep with the Summer 2020 standard.
That's what boggles my mind - the suggestion that they did nothing wrong. I can only assume these people didn't bother watching the videos, or that they're just that thoroughly mind-killed from perpetual incubation in the culture wars? I really don't know. I don't get it. If you can see all the video footage and think "Nope. Basically just lost tourists. No violence of any significance. No transgression of anything important happening here", then the inferential distance between them and me is so vast as to not be bridgeable.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
For those of you who play video games in the same room as someone else, how do you communicate with each other over the sound of the game itself? My wife and I like to play video games together, but we haven't figured out a good solution to the sound problem. Some obvious possibilities and their downsides:
- We both wear headphones. The problem with this is that we would have to lower our volumes so much to hear each other past the game sounds and the headphones' partial external sound dampening.
- We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring. And even if we had sufficiently soundproof headphones (which cost money we don't really have), microphone delays are just so goddamn annoying because of the unintentional interruption of someone who started speaking a second earlier than you (likewise on Zoom meetings).
- We use speakers. Obviously this is a problem because we're not necessarily in the same location in the game, so each of our game's sound would bleed into each other messily and confusingly.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
Much of the problem in academia has to do with things that people say, things that people are told not to say, and firings and hirings. These are inherently hard to hide from the public, so there's a lot of evidence that academia is doing them.
Other kinds of institutional problems are much easier to hide, so you should expect correspondingly less evidence.
The police literally have body cameras! Much of their activity is also observed out in public, and their records are often public or released on request. It's hard to imagine an institution/occupation whose activities are harder to conceal than policing in the 21st Century.
And the anti-police sentiment you see here on themotte is a lot more nuanced than the political slogans on the news. It's more "the police have serious problems". Pretty much nobody here really thinks that all cops are bastards, regardless of how many do in the activist left.
I'm not claiming that the sentiment here on The Motte and in similar places is anything like the hysterical, lowest common denominator, activism-soaked ACAB stuff. My problem is that I think the more nuanced takes are egregiously false, too.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I don't understand why you don't seem to recognize the obvious problem: that Christianity makes specific claims about reality that we either know aren't true (e.g., creationism) or have insufficiently compelling evidence are true (e.g., miracles, the existence of the Christian God, an afterlife, etc.). How can you expect to convince people to be a member of an ideology that they cannot reason themselves into believing?
You keep mentioning Christianity predicting the dreadful outcomes of Communism, Naziism, the sexual revolution, etc. But there's nothing about Christianity that is required to make those predictions. Nothing would stop an atheist from making those same predictions based on, say, an understanding of human nature.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I don't understand why votes are shown after 24 hours. If votes should be hidden, they should be hidden forever. If the idea is that people will refrain from commenting because they don't want to be downvoted to oblivion, this change doesn't solve that. People will still see how downvoted they are the next day.
The claim that the Jan 6 mob was polite and peaceful is one of the most astonishing claims I see repeated in this otherwise pretty reality-grounded community. I don't understand how you can make claims like this when we have widespread video evidence of how violent the mob was. Like, are you just unaware of the video footage? Or are you of the belief that the existence of some footage showing peaceful and orderly intruders "cancels out" the violence, like some sort of algebraic exercise? I cannot overstate how baffling I find this.
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