JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
6mo ago
Not at all. I think it very much does. There's a stereotype about soldiers and nurses for a reason. We both have a bone-deep understanding of life and death, and an urge to blow off the steam that the repression necessary to operate with that knowledge produces. We have perspective on the rest of our lives that most do not.
It's not exactly the same, but it is parallel.
I think you miss the point?
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
JTarrou
6mo ago
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
JTarrou
8mo ago
It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.
And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.
JTarrou
8mo ago
The American voting system results in two blocks and this fact so mesmerizes people of the systematizing personality that they can't resist fitting a pet theory that must compactly represent the shared symbolic content of these two sides.
Hilariously, you seem to have almost perfectly misunderstood. There is no shared symbolic content for political groups, that's the whole point. All sides have all the binaries, in infinitely complex combinations. Society, the world, international politics is so fiendishly complex because of these interactions, because every binary contains a million different binaries. Countries, corporations, cities, parties, people are not one thing. "I tried to draw the line, but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time".
But in other societies it's more clear that there can be many different factions and the split isn't between two eternal sides.
Yes and no. Yes there are many factions, and in part this whole little shitpost is about how infinite and varied those factions can be. But I think there are always two sides, made up of those many, many interest groups with their own specific combination of beliefs and interests in constantly shifting coalitions with only two real sides. Roman politics had millions of shifts, reversals, revolutions and coups, but the optimates and the populares, the greens and blues. There is a binary there.
Conflict does not end, it only moves, because the tension is fundamental. When one side of a binary that became political or social "wins", what happens? Where does that tension go? Do all the constituent interests, powers, parties and people just evaporate? Impossible. The conflict just moves. After war, conflict moves into politics, war being the continuation of politics by violent means, and peace being the continuation of war by nonviolent means. Germany won a hegemony over continental Europe in peace much more effectively than they ever did in war.
The various interest groups split into constituent parts and vie for power within that binary before reconstituting with other groups in a new political reality. If one group "wins" at something, they usually split into a new binary and one side will ally with the losers from the previous conflict. So the pre-civil war national binary was slave/free, north/south, east/west. When the south seceded, the national binary was then pro-war Republicans and pro-peace Democrats. When the south lost and was reintegrated, the losing faction from the war years re-allied with the south.
Political coalitions are inherently unstable and given to shedding marginal members. The more one side wins, the more the important contest is internal. Think one-party elections where the nomination is the real contest. The more power one side of a political binary gains, the more important their internal divisions are. If one political group destabilizes the interparty binary, they will be split by the resulting tension, new coalitions will emerge and the two-party binary will return in full effect.
This can be expressed in multiple parties, or only within one party. But there will always be a fundamental division within every group.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?
Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.
If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.
Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions.
In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.
JTarrou
8mo ago
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, I'm talking about human nature and you're talking about technology. The fundamental tensions I'm talking about map onto these technological, social and political issues and innovations in unpredictable ways.
Politics may have defeated Christianity, but that wasn't a fundamental tension, politics and religion coexisted for millenia before, and will again. The tension there would be between the moralistic and materialistic human urges. So politics defeats a religion, but it becomes a religion in the process, thereby maintaining the duality. Even atheists need a god and a heaven, even if god is the president and heaven is "gay luxury space communism". This is the tension that destroys materialistic politics, it's why communism never worked and became a cult. It just couldn't get over the god-shaped hole. Politically, this tension gets generalized as "church and state", and it is generally understood today that separating the two is better for both. Render unto the one pole the things that are Caesar's and to the other, the things that are God's.
At sufficient levels of abstraction, some good advice.
which at our scale occurs in thousands of different rough patterns
Many more than this, I think. My point, somewhat garbled perhaps, is not that any group has some eternal essence, much the opposite. We all have the same conflicts within us, these are so numerous and interact in such complex ways that there's no predicting how they'll map onto the future. But if one digs into an issue long enough and defines the terms carefully enough, the basic tensions usually present themselves quickly.
JTarrou
11mo ago
I'm arguing that there's more than one way to skin a cat. Yes, we live in low-grade anarcho-tyranny. But part of that is the ability to circumvent or subvert that system. You just have to be willing to color outside the lines a bit. Lean into the anarchy to contravene the tyranny.
Of course, that risks the benefits of social status granted by the tyrant, which you value and I do not.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Money is a symbol for work, work is operationalized as time, you are buying things with the only thing you can't get more of.
And yes, we all need to work to make the symbols that let us pay for the necessities of life.
But how much is needed and what is actually necessary can vary widely. With less work, you get more time.
you probably figure any real man would take a swing at the cop.
Because everyone not a coward is stupid. A real man would have options, and he'd probably want to exercise them intelligently.
I wonder, as you lovingly recount a just-so movie scene of abject humiliation, what you really feel when you see yourself in that moment. Injustice? Vengeance?
Gratitude that it's a cop, otherwise you'd be expected to do something?
Something more prurient?
Two can read minds, mon frere.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I meant that the guys in the most thorough, dorky-looking safety gear aren’t interacting much with the laptop class.
You mean other than their boss, HR and legal team?
JTarrou
1yr ago
I agree. This is about judging the advertising, not the underlying corruption.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure religion is a more basic fault line for culture wars than race is, and going back further. It's not that religion produces culture war, just that it's a battlefield for it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Selection effects may be strong for a short time, but regression to the mean makes the effect much weaker over centuries, especially given the admixture from other sources.
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
I did too. They all were considered possible, likely or certain by millions of geniuses in their day (except the silly ones, of course). They all had a reason why this time it was for real. They all happened, for some definition of "happen", and they all did not result in the end of the world, humanity, life or anything else so dire. I'm sure AI is dangerous. I'm sure we'll have some colossal fuckups with it that will probably damage something important. When this happens, the frenzy will begin in earnest. Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found, and we will learn to live with it, as we have with nuclear weapons.
Whichever generation of asshole eschatologists alive at the time will write a million books saying they averted the apocalypse. Ten seconds later, it will be something else, and everyone will forget about it. The End of the World is dead, long live the End of the World.
Maybe I'm wrong. Tell you what, if the world ends due to AI, I'll give you a million dollars.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I would also like to point out that it seems a bit odd that you are suddenly conflating urban African Americans with "the seedier side of the tracks."
There we go, thanks for playing.
JTarrou
1yr ago
That's all a distinct possibility, and yet I got the answer I feared. Of all the responses to my query, only one person answered the basic question in a hypothetical scenario, and that very vaguely.
This whole thread is people arguing that the assumptions are wrong, rather than using the assumptions to think about the implications.
Yes, Malthus has been wrong 100% of the time so far. Maybe he'll be wrong forever. But, if someday he isn't, this intellectual performance doesn't make me optimistic about the ability of anyone to solve the issue. People can't even accept the parameters of a thought experiment for the purpose of arguing on the internet.
If there were a reliable test for aggression in combat, the country that had it would be unstoppable militarily. The fact that no one on earth administers such a test implies that it is difficult if not impossible with current science. They all rely on a mix of private violence, training and hazing to try to weed out the squeamish, with imperfect results.
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