Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
the emphasis we place on individual merit is a key trait of Western Civilization.
“The West” had racial chattel slavery for centuries, which coexisted quite comfortably with a robust (far more pervasive and sincere than nowadays) Christianity. (The same “Western Civilization” very comfortably celebrated hereditary monarchy and nobility, again a slap in the face to “individual merit”.) The “West” you’re grasping at is a phantom. That it existed in the heads of so many does not make it real or coherent.
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
“Racism”, in the sense that Yglesias is using it in the OP’s linked essay, is simply the recognition that although there is a substantial variation among individuals, it is still not only possible to draw reliable probabilistic conclusions about a given individual’s likely traits based on observable characteristics (many of them immutable), but also that in the absence of detailed information about that individual, it’s often necessary (or at least valuable) to make those probabilistic assumptions. Once more fine-grained detail about the individual is available, then it becomes possible to adjust one’s assumptions. This is entirely consistent with a belief in broadly-predictable population-level averages.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
This criticism only works if you assume that the target of it believes that “racism” is a priori a bad thing. What do you say to someone who doesn’t believe that this is the case, or who at least has a substantially different understand about what “racism” is or what specifically about it is bad?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
As I have pointed out many times, Yglesias’s colorblindness politeness norms for white liberals will inevitably come crashing against the rocks, as they always do, the second that BIPOCs refuse to get with the program. All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about.
“Alright, Nikole Hannah-Jones. I and the other white liberals have had a long conversation, and we’ve decided that talking about race is no longer acceptable.”
“Fuck you, honky.”
These social taboos have only ever gone in one direction. They’re a unilateral surrender by non-blacks. What mechanism does Matt Yglesias have with which to enforce his preferred taboos on black people? Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America! They’re not going to stop noticing disparities, nor are they going to stop thinking about the reasons for these disparities! And no white liberal, least of all Matt Yglesias, has ever demonstrated that they have any clout within the black community to even begin to promulgate any “colorblind” norms among them.
It’s not as if white liberals don’t know how black people think about them. White liberals obsessed about the film Get Out, which is a raw expression of the psychodrama blacks experience around white liberals and their labyrinth of strained politeness norms around race, which blacks see as hostile and profoundly dishonest.
Yet Matt believes that by writing Substack posts, he’ll not only be able to get white people to recommit to not thinking too hard about race, but that he’ll get black people to make that same commitment? It’s delusional.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us…
I want to interrogate what the word trust means in this sentence. When we talk about “trust” in the context of human relationships, we recognize that trust is something which can be broken. We recognize that there are degrees of trust — that some people are more trustworthy than others, and that when determining how much trust to extend to another person, one consideration is usually a probabilistic determination of how likely that person is to behave in the way I’m trusting him or her to behave. As I gather more data about that person’s actions, I can decide to upgrade or downgrade my level of trust in that person. Obviously a healthy marriage, for example, necessarily involves a great degree of trust; however, if one spouse commits proven adultery, that necessarily alters the level of trust the other spouse can extend to that person moving forward. Trust isn’t independent of evidence and observation, in other words.
If I pray to God every day to keep me and my family safe and healthy, and then one of my children contracts leukemia and dies, I’m struggling to understand what you think that event should do for my level of “trust” in the proposition that God will “care for us and preserve us”. If leukemia was just something that happened to people all the time, like stubbing a toe, then I agree that it would make little sense to downgrade one’s trust in God based on that occurrence. But since so few children die of leukemia, the fact that it happened to my child specifically, despite my daily prayers to God for the opposite outcome, may very well have some import.
And particularly, if the children of devout Christians who pray daily for their family’s health are, upon observation of data, no less likely to die of leukemia than the children of atheists, then an outsider may begin to wonder what the “relationship” is actually for. What level of “trust” can there be in a relationship if one party is committed to total indifference about whether the other party fails at doing what that party has been “entrusted” to do? It’s an idiosyncratic definition of “trust” indeed if one commits to loving another party with the exact same level of devotion whether that other party behaves well or badly. “Trust” divorced from any expectation of outcomes, and any judgment on those outcomes, seems not to be trust at all.
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
It’s a specific type of relationship, though. It’s a relationship in which the purpose of the therapist is, ultimately, to just be a sounding board to which one can vent one’s problems. The therapist has no power to materially affect the situations about which you’re complaining to him. At best, he can offer helpful advice on how you should psychologically frame those situations. He’s just there to help you better order one’s internal life. Not to actually change it, except to the extent that one’s outlook and emotional state can change one’s problem-solving approach. A valuable contribution, to be sure, but one very different from what one would expect from a God to whom many great miracles and divine interventions are attributed.
And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
In the sense that a Christian martyr’s death might serve as a useful example to other Christians, sure. “That man bore his persecution with dignity and stuck to his principles. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.” I just really struggle to understand what positive message or example you expect us to glean from the instantaneous, terrifying death of several hundred thousand people from a freak natural disaster. Those people didn’t have the option to choose otherwise, as, for example, a Christian martyr might choose to recant his faith to avoid suffering. They didn’t even have time, in the fleeting moments between normalcy and calamity, to reflect on Goodness and to make peace with it. It just doesn’t seem to carry within it any positive, hopeful, or moral message. Maybe there’s just some fundamental psychologically dismally between you and me — either cultivated or innate — which explains why I cannot glean a message of hope, and of a confirmation of trust in God as my shepherd, in the way you can.
I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
This seems directly in contradiction to your statement that the Bible teaches that suffering and death are admirable “and desirable even.” If the message of the Bible is that one should be indifferent to one’s suffering, then why bother to buckle your children’s seatbelts, let alone your own? God wills what he wills, and your child’s death could be desirable per God’s plan! I don’t really understand the purpose here of taking actions to forestall the potentially grisly fate God may — for reasons which you’re content to allow to remain inscrutable — have in store for you and/or your loved ones. If God wills it, it will be, and an ostensibly “bad” outcome actually isn’t any worse than an ostensibly “good” outcome! It’s all a matter of outlook!
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
“If we can’t entirely eradicate pain, then we should actually be fine with infinite pain, and actually a God who causes us infinite pain is no worse than a God who causes us no pain at all.”
There are obviously degrees of pain and suffering. If I stub my toe, or have a mildly unpleasant interaction with a stranger, it does not produce within me an existential crisis or cause me to curse God. But if I developed a terribly painful disease, through no fault or action of my own, which led me to suffer daily, and a Christian told me that this is good, actually, and that the God who either willed this or failed to prevent it is benevolent and that his actions toward me are rooted in love — that I should trust such a God — then, again, I have to wonder what the words “love” and “trust” mean in this worldview. I would like to be able to “trust” that a God of immense power and benevolence could proffer to his adherents — those with whom he has a “relationship” — at least some degree less suffering and pain than that which is meted out to those with whom he doesn’t have a relationship. Otherwise God really is nothing more than a therapist — valuable, but not the King of Kings.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
The popularity of bodycam footage on the right is directly correlated to the turn against it on the left. Both are, frankly, gross.
What’s gross about it?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
they are a small sect which has not been terrible successful as a meme
Zoroastrianism was the official religion of multiple dominant empires spanning over a millennium. Its influence didn’t wane because it was “an unsuccessful meme”; the final Zoroastrian Persian empire was militarily defeated by Muslims, who then ruthlessly persecuted the Zoroastrian holdouts, forcing them to flee to the Indian subcontinent, where, even as a minority religion vastly outnumbered by the populations around them, they managed to maintain their religion over a thousand years later. I don’t think it makes sense to treat it as some obscure sect that “lost out on the marketplace of ideas.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
My kids are healthy. I routinely pray that they will stay healthy. If they don't stay healthy, and in fact if they were to die of a sudden illness, I would not expect this to damage my faith, because I do not "expect" my prayer to ensure their health. I do not view my prayers as a way to gain leverage over the material world, and I don't think doing so is the correct way to practice Christian prayer.
Then what are prayers for? What do you expect them to “do”? Do you expect them to produce any outcome, either in this life or the next, that’s more tangible than simply a lessening of your own internal anxiety? Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
In short, it seems to me that Christians, generally speaking, have all the same data you do. Speaking generally, we draw different conclusions because we are operating off different axioms, not because we are ignorant of the facts in evidence.
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion. Some of those epicycles are fairly persuasive and do a pretty good job of repelling certain criticisms — clearly there are many poor arguments against Christianity, and against other religions as well — but some of the epicycles (and again, I think the ones dealing with theodicy are the chief example here) are genuinely pretty unpersuasive in the eyes of those who have not already taken to heart the centra faith-based axiom that Christianity, despite its myriad apparent contradictions, is true.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Yes, I know what theodicy is. I’ve thought a lot about it too, and I’ve looked into many of the various answers which sincere Christians have offered as solutions. Maybe, though, the fact that over the course of 2,000+ years of Christianity (and, of course, centuries of Judaism before that) so many people have had to come up with so many different answers points to something: None of their answers have been very good! None of them have made much sense, or satisfactorily answered the problem at hand without highlighting important contradictions within the logic of the faith.
The core dilemma here is that Christianity is very explicitly dedicated to, among others, two key claims about God: 1. He is benevolent, loving, and invested not only in the future of humanity as a whole, but in the well-being and spiritual life of each individual living human. 2. He intervenes, at least subtly, in the lives of individuals, to effectuate positive life outcomes for them.Those two claims are what make theodicy so incredibly difficult for Christianity specifically to deal with.
Paganism has no problem explaining why something like a natural disaster happens. The various gods and supernatural entities are capricious, they’re in competition with each other, they frequently act wrathful or even tyrannical, and humans’ primary relationship with them is transactional. We propitiate the gods by offering them praise and things of value, so that we can remain in their favor and persuade them to intervene helpfully on our behalf, and to not curse us or slaughter us. This view of the order of the world leaves much to be desired emotionally; it offers little in the way of a message of hope, love, inspiration, and salvation. But if nothing else, it makes it very easy to explain the wanton suffering which so many humans experience — and not always at the hands of each other — without producing any cracks at the heart of the religion.
Judaism, too, famously has a certain fatalism and moral ambivalence about God. The Old Testament, as you note, features many episodes in which God acts wrathfully and in a way which, if a human ruler acted the same way, we would recognize as tyrannical or even monstrous. (Of course, Judaism also offers an explanation: We deserved it then, and we’ll probably deserve it again in the future. God doesn’t especially love the Jews, even if they are his chosen people, and he’ll gladly throw any individual Jews into a shredder if they disappoint him — and that’s to say nothing of what he will do, or instruct the Jews to do on his behalf, to the gentiles!)
In contrast, I think Christianity is really at a loss when dealing with natural disasters of this nature, though. Theodicy is uniquely corrosive to the doctrines of Christianity, which is why so many of its theologians have obsessed about it, and why they’ve reached for such contradictory answers. Of the three explanations you put forward, at least two of them are wildly insufficient to deal with a problem of the magnitude of the example I offered. In fact, one of them —
Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.
— doesn’t address natural disasters at all! Sure, I can totally understand and appreciate the idea that a world in which humans have free will is necessarily a world in which humans have the power to murder each other, to make war on each other, to firebomb each other’s cities, etc. That has nothing to do with a natural disaster, though. Whether or not humans have free will would have made no difference in the outcome of an earthquake or tsunami; again, the only “free will” any human exercised was the “choice” to happen to be in its path. (Not a choice at all, of course, since nobody could have predicted it nor seen it coming.) It isn’t even a “problem of evil”, since “evil” implies intention, and a tsunami has none. Any supernatural entity which did intentionally send that tsunami toward blameless human habitation would indeed be evil, and any supposedly benevolent supernatural entity which could have prevented it but chose otherwise is, at best, ineffectual.
As for one of your other proposed explanations —
Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good.
— you must recognize why non-Christians find this answer so exasperating. Suppose I’m a child, and I break some sort of rule. To punish me and to teach me a lesson, my father strangles one of my siblings to death in front of me. Obviously if a human father did this, we would universally recognize it as psychopathic. No benevolent person acting out of love would do so. So, if the Christian God did indeed intentionally make the tsunami happen, in order to teach people a lesson, what does it actually mean to say that this same God “loves us”?
That leaves your third explanation — the one you put first, which may be seen as implying you lean toward it:
Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it.
I mean, isn’t this getting pretty dangerously close to paganism, or at best Henotheism? There are many powerful supernatural entities at work in the world, and God is, at best, only arguably the strongest? He can intervene in people’s lives sometimes, to help with relatively quotidian issues — you can pray to him before an important job interview, and maybe he’ll subtly help that interview go well for you — but he can’t reliably do anything about the really big stuff if there’s some other entity, like Satan, who’s directly working against him. This is, again, satisfactory to me as a plausible explanation for how the world actually works, but it seems to be in contradiction with some of Christianity’s stronger claims about God’s omnipotence.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying any of this because I hate Christianity. I’m not some fire-breathing atheist like I was when I was younger. I would like very much if Christianity were true, and if someone could provide to me an answer to these questions which I could psychologically wrap my head around. I’ve prayed to God myself, and even explicitly to Jesus Christ. I’ve no idea if any of these prayers produced a tangible effect on the world, although I do know that they produced some level of internal comfort within me.
Still, though, the 2004 tsunami, and then Hurricane Katrina the very next year, made a very profound effect on me. Seeing that level of wanton suffering (some of the footage of people being swallowed by the floods is still seared into my brain) delivered to people who had done nothing particularly wrong, while so many individuals who were so much more blameworthy continued to prosper unharmed, put theodicy at the very front of my mind at the very point in my life in which I was first starting to ponder these religious questions. Christians seem two-faced about the issue. When confronted directly about it they’ll claim that God isn’t as omnipotent as we think, and therefore he simply can’t be expected to step in and save people from things like this; in their own lives, though, they routinely pray for God to intervene on their behalf in issues which have, comparatively, so much less importance.
@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death, but this is directly belied by Christians’ actions. God can help you get a raise at work, but he can’t help you not get hit by a car? Christians pray for each others’ safety and health all the time. They pray before surgeries, before flights, before risky endeavors, etc. If they don’t expect these prayers to do anything, then is God no more than a therapist? Just there to be a sounding board for whatever’s making us anxious, to help us order our internal lives and soothe ourselves? This seems highly unsatisfactory compared to the loftier claims which the Bible seems, to me, to make about God’s capabilities.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I’m very confident that Christians pray that, for example, their children with leukemia are delivered from it, or that their child survives an impending major/risky surgery. This seems flatly incompatible with the claim that Christians don’t expect prayer to change the hour when death will arrive.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
To be clear, I don’t “support the regime”, at least not unconditionally. I’ve criticized Trump many times in this very forum, calling him an idiot, a retard, a fat Boomer braying incoherently. I voted for him in 2020 and 2024 because I believed he was best positioned to achieve the major policy goals I have regarding immigration and policing/jurisprudence, but I think most of the other things he does and says are somewhere between empty bluster and actively harmful.
I don’t believe I’m immune from deportation because I’m pro-Trump; I believe that there would be both no legitimate motivation for any regime (far-right or far-left) to deport me, and nowhere to deport me to, given my extremely deep ancestral ties to this country. Other than shitposting online under a nom de plume, I don’t participate in any political activity, and may even forswear voting in future elections. I’m a normal middle-class educated person, I pay my taxes, I don’t give the regime (or the previous regime) any grief. The vast majority of the people currently quaking in their boots about being sent to El Gúlag are similarly situated to just shut up and live a normal unobtrusive life, if they chose to do so. And Trump has shown no indications of wanting to take any political action against average citizens who are not themselves immigrants.
It's the favoritism, the "one rule for the ingroup, a different rule for the outgroup".
Yes, I believe that individuals whose families have lived here for multiple generations should be treated preferentially by the government, relative to those who are immigrants, even if the latter have obtained legal citizenship. I don’t believe that mere legal citizenship — let alone temporary residency — entitles one to be treated as precisely morally/legally equivalent to a Heritage American. This doesn’t mean I have any animus toward any given immigrant! There are probably a few million immigrants whom I would consider better people, and better contributors to this country, than millions of Heritage Americans are!
But I do think that if you care about justice and democracy and the Constitution, you are obligated to care whether two US citizens are being treated differently purely based on political affiliation.
That is not what has happened, and I believe that there is zero compelling reason to believe that it will happen. There have been temporary residents who seem to have been treated differently based on political affiliation, and I think this is basically fine. I believe that immigrants to this country, and any other country, should basically be expected to act as apolitically in their public-facing lives as possible. If I immigrated to Japan, it would be absurd for me to believe that I should have any say in the political life of their country. My responsibility as an immigrant would be to present myself as unobtrusive. Not to attend public anti-government rallies, to accuse my host country of perfidy, etc.
”yeah, well, maybe he will and maybe he won't, but it's not our problem. have you tried not being an unpatriotic shit-stirrer?".
I don’t care if immigrants are patriotic. I’m not especially patriotic. I think there are certain foundational ideas enshrined in the Constitution which are naïve and basically disproven by history. I don’t care about “our national identity”, I don’t subscribe to the “propositions” which supposedly define our “propositional nation”. I simply believe that immigrants’ obligation to their host country is analogous to a house guest’s obligation to his or her host. There are things I would say about people in privacy, behind their backs, which I would not say out loud if I were invited into one of those people’s homes.
Now, one potential outcome which I do think is plausible is something like: Trump offloads a large portion of American death row inmates, and even potentially prisoners with life sentences, to El Salvador’s prisons. There, they would be exempt from many of the onerous protections and endless appeals which they enjoy here in America, due to our absurd squeamishness about the remotest possibility of false conviction. This outcome would be ontologically good, but could potentially produce a massive backlash which would have the potential to permanently discredit the Law And Order coalition in American politics. While I believe this outcome to be unlikely, it’s at least more plausible than the outcome of Trump deporting liberals who criticize him on Bluesky.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I’m intrigued about where Australia and New Zealand fit into this. I’m not super knowledgeable about their internal political conflicts, their economic situation, etc. Naïvely, they both strike me as highly functional societies, whose restive minorities could easily be subdued if shit truly hit the fan. Australia at least is massive, with huge capacity to accommodate a growing population. I don’t know how likely Australia would be to get sucked into a major world conflict involving China; if it sat such a thing out, it seems like it’d be well-positioned to thrive in whatever world order grew out of the resulting ashes.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
What’s ugly about it? I straightforwardly don’t think there’s any plausible scenario in which I’d ever be considered for deportation, under the governance of whichever party you can imagine taking power in the United States. The same is true for basically everybody in this world whom I care significantly about. I think you and I both agree that it’s both unrealistic and unfairly-onerous to ask a person’s circle of concern to extend infinitely. Can you explain to me why I am obligated to extend it to everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I recognized it as definitely Germanic in origin, but assumed it came to us in this case via Yiddish.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Oh certainly, I’m not denying that. The key difference being that both police and the judicial system, at least in a Republican jurisdiction, are very likely to have your back if you shoot a mugger in self-defense. They will not have your back if you open fire in a crowded area because a bum made a creepy noise, or asked you for money, or even if he made a vague verbal threat to you.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it.
If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect. Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun; even if the bum is thinking in that way, I would assume he’d also recognize the likelihood of an otherwise-law-abiding citizen would fire his gun on the subway as very low, and therefore not weight it significantly in any cost-benefit consideration.
I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.
The correlations you’re observing are simply an artifact both things being true under Republican government. As @hydroacetylene notes, Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy, and these areas also independently tend to support expansive gun rights. The former policy has a lot to do with curbing the behavior of bums, whereas I believe that the latter policy has very little effect.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
I’m not sure what you’re even talking about. The man who was deported is not an American citizen. His wife, who is, married an illegal immigrant — presumably aware that she was doing so — and bore him a son. Don’t you think she should have foreseen, as a reasonable outcome, that he would eventually be identified as an illegal immigrant?
We separate criminals from their spouses and children every day. Inmates don’t get to bring their wives and children to prison with them, and presumably you would not advocate for them to be permitted to do so. Similarly, we separate illegal immigrants from their citizen spouses and dependents when we deport them. This is a totally reasonable outcome. Don’t marry illegal immigrants!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.
You never answered my question about what specifically liberal gun laws are doing to facilitate this state of affairs. Is there even a single recorded case of a transit rider firing a gun at a homeless person in Houston? If there is, do you believe that this would be the correct course of action for a gun-carrying rider on a bus? (Homeless guy asks me for money, I quick-draw my gun and start blasting, and hope none of the bullets hit anybody else on the bus?) I’m as anti-homeless as anybody on this website — I’ve argued that they’re an inherently parasitic class with essentially zero legal rights, and that an appropriate course of action might be to round them all up into something like concentration camps — but this strikes even me as a dangerous and wildly irresponsible overreaction.
I maintain that you continue to posit causal relationships between different things which are, in reality, only correlated.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened
The consensus among whom? Which proponents of the Enlightenment today do you believe would earnestly claim that the Jacobins better encapsulated the positive core of their beliefs than the Founding Fathers did? Surely you’re aware that a substantial majority of the users of this site would self-identify as fans of the Enlightenment, broadly construed; of those users, how many do you believe agree with the supposed “consensus” that you’re claiming exists? My support for the Enlightenment is guarded and contingent at best, so perhaps I don’t count, but I would certainly say that the naked bloodlust evinced by the Jacobins — the ardent, unthinking zeal with which they pursued their aims, the hasty and slapdash nature of their kangaroo courts, and the resulting devolution into vengeful recriminations and purity spirals — pretty clearly mark them as failing, in a catastrophic way, to hew to the better natures to which the Enlightenment purports to urge us all to aspire. (Note that I’m no great booster of the American Founding either, so this isn’t meant to let them off the hook.)
Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down
This strikes me as a disastrously shortsighted comment. You’re just begging to end up looking foolish, making predictions like this. I see no signs that technological advancements (“bedazzling” or otherwise) are slowing down any time soon. My accusation of Traditionalism Of The Gaps is, I’m sad to say, somewhat vindicated by your comment.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Yes, this could potentially work. Maybe also have that user select 3-5 of his or her Motte posts which are most representative of that user’s output, or about which that user is most proud, and maybe also have that user select either a specific post or, more broadly, an idea about which he or she has had a change of heart or been persuaded out of by another Motte poster. This could showcase not only that user but also highlight the value of the Motte as a place for genuinely valuable intellectual exchange.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
I’ll be honest, I was always terrified of being nominated for that. I have my particular areas of interest, about which I’ve done a moderate (by this forum’s standards) level of research; however, there are a ton of topics of interest to the Motte user base about which I know little to nothing, and thus have no valuable opinion. (What do I know about the future of LLMs? Why are you asking me?! I work a dead-end normie job! I’m just a guy!)
If we were to bring it back, I think it would need to focus on the selected user’s specific areas of interest, and maybe probe those in a sort of interview format. Otherwise it would just end up selecting for only the users who feel most confident at expounding upon the widest range of topics.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
But you should have some damn sympathy for a fellow citizen's suffering.
Progressives, especially post-Hart-Celler, have diluted and deconstructed the meaning of citizenship to such an extent that there are tens of millions of individuals in this country with whom I share almost nothing in common except for a legal fiction. There’s a good chance that the people you’re talking about do not even speak the same language I do, nor have they even needed to learn to do so in order to be considered citizens. They and I have no common bonds of kinship, of culture, of social context. Nothing!
I extend to them the basic human empathy I’d extend to any non-American, and I wish the situation were not such that this sort of nothing needs to happen to them. But the fact that they have a piece of (digitized) paper saying they’re as American as I am means nothing to me.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.
I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.
The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.
There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.
Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!
Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.
The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.
Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.
Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?
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