JulianRota
10mo ago
The thing about this, we are constantly told that the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide. Meanwhile, individual hatred and institutional bias against whites is slowly but surely getting stronger, yet there are people (often the same people warning us about how dangerous other types of bias are) who tell us essentially, well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about? Suck it up and quit being such a scaredy-cat.
Why shouldn't we assume that this type of bias is exactly as unjust and dangerous as any other type? Exactly when will it be okay to do something about it more serious than complaining on the internet?
JulianRota
6mo ago
I always wonder, why do we only get this sort of pushback on comments about warfare? I can advocate for fires being fought without somebody talking about how I might not be a very good firefighter. I can advocate for goods being delivered quickly and reliably without being a good truck driver myself. I can say putting a bridge over a river seems like a good idea without being a civil engineer. So how come it's only if I think war is necessary or suggest fighting it in a particular way that somebody will come by and claim that I'm not a good enough warrior myself? What does it matter? Can I say the reverse, that you aren't allowed to advocate for peace until you've actually watched your children be brutally murdered before your eyes by your neighbor and still advocate for peace with them?
JulianRota
11mo ago
I've always thought that for conspiracy theories, it's best to analyze the counter-factual story rather than the official story. Lots of weird stuff happens in reality, but it's hard to tell how much weird stuff is the difference between, this obviously didn't happen that way and huh, I guess stuff is just weird sometimes.
For the moon landing, IMO any remotely plausible counter-factual is far more full of holes than the official story:
-
We were in a bitter competition with the Soviets at the time, who had plenty of space, radar, and radio tech themselves. If there was anything the least bit hinky about it, why wouldn't they have called us out? I'm sure they tracked the trajectory of the rockets and modules, the transmission source and content, etc.
-
Rocketry hasn't advanced all that much since then, but electronics and special effects have. Maybe we could make some nice fake videos of it now, but it probably would have been impossible to fake the video with 60s-era special effects technology. It's also a lot more plausible that, in the 60s, the government was far ahead of the private sector in rocketry, versus being far ahead of Hollywood in video special effects.
-
There's a hell of a lot of people who worked on the Apollo project, and a hell of a lot of artifacts of it lying around in public view. It's pretty implausible that all of it is fake and every single person is lying and has continued to lie consistently for decades, in many cases up to their deathbeds and through various types of dementia, with no obvious signs of massive amounts of money being thrown around. It's probably cheaper and simpler to actually go to the moon than to organize all of that.
I think the moderation is just fine. The Kulak example you gave is actually one of the most wholesome things I've ever seen while debating on the internet. Seriously, I've been writing and debating on various internet forums for decades now. I don't think I've ever before seen a heated argument get started, the mods say "knock it off you two", followed by both posters apologizing for overreacting and restating reasonable points in a calm and civilized manner. Fucking magic!
I actually still remember to this day, one time like 10 or 15 years ago, I got in an argument/discussion with somebody on some forum, I think it was Slashdot. They were very hostile and insulting and I remained calm and reasonable. After 2 or 3 exchanges, I asked him why he was being so hostile and insulting when I hadn't insulted him once and he actually calmed down some and apologized. Not mentioning that to make myself sound awesome or anything, but to say that it's really remarkable and rare to actually move conversations from hostility back to calm and reasonable discussion.
Burdensomcount is the only one on your list who got a harsh-ish punishment. But the explanation from FCfromSSC seems quite reasonable. I don't have access to mod notes and I don't follow everything that goes on here in enough detail to know stuff like that, but I have no reason to disbelieve the explanation.
In every listed case, the mods have calmly and patiently explained their position, even restating it multiple times in multiple places for the benefit of people who could plausibly be claimed to be behaving disingenuously. 99% of the internet that's moderated gets "Fuck off, troll! ::clicks permaban button::" to that behavior.
JulianRota
6mo ago
Look at the expressions of the people who did get it - they were really skeptical and thought they were being set up for something. The one guy who was into it was a Mr. Beast subscriber and fan himself. It's probably like 1,000x more common for a random person trying to get your attention in public to be trying to get something from you or harass you somehow than to actually give you $500 for a trivial low-risk task.
JulianRota
9mo ago
This appears to be a straight copy-paste of the following article:
https://caffeineandphilosophy.com/2017/05/15/the-violent-artwork-of-cleon-peterson/
Written by "C.B. Robertson" on May 15, 2017.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'm inclined by my side of the culture war to be on Penny's side. I think in this case it's pretty strongly supported by the facts. The facts I'm aware of that make me think he acted reasonably are:
-
At least 2 other people assisted him in holding Neely down
-
Nobody is known to have tried to comment or intervene on Neely's behalf at the scene
-
At least one other person, as quoted in the article, also says she thought Penny and the other riders' restraint of Neely was reasonable and necessary
-
Neely did not die at the scene and was moving after he was released - his death happened later as the result of various complications from the incident
An important background fact is that the mainstream media and the activist/protester community is all-in hard on the pro-Neely side. Therefore, anyone who was at the scene speaking out on Penny's side is risking doxxing, social media censure, career issues, harassment, etc. Anyone speaking on Neely's side would be swooned over. Therefore, the fact that at least one other person who was at the scene has come forward on the pro-Penny side, even if anonymously, and nobody has come forward on the Neely side is telling.
I would be open to changing my mind if the facts I cited turn out to be wrong. If it turns out that Penny did infact keep him in a chokehold for multiple minutes after he stopped moving, that would be pretty significant. Or if it turns out that the people helping were Penny's buddies and there were several other bystanders telling them they should let him go.
Ultimately, none of us were on that train, and without good video of exactly what Neely was doing beforehand, it's impossible to judge whether he really did seem sufficiently dangerous to require physical restraint. If all of the people who were there judged that it was necessary, then I think it's best to go with their opinions. I live in NYC myself and take the train regularly. I've seen several people acting pretty nuts. It seems plausible to me that maybe 1 in 100 of them are actually violent enough to justify this.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I think this is a significant enough point that we ought to consider why this doesn't seem to be happening. Notably, pretty much everybody who manages to make it into the PMC Elite one way or another seems to abandon whatever community they had previously been a part of and show loyalty only towards that PMC Elite. They only respect the support and advancement of other more junior members of that community and seem to act only to maintain and increase the power of that community.
The stereotypical MAGA Appalachian coal miner, if they manage to make it into the elite, will pretty much always adopt their values and consider their former neighbors to be unredeemable racist hicks to be sneered at and driven into the dirt.
The black person, whether or not they actually grew up in "the projects" will also adopt elite values and won't ever do anything to actually improve the life and culture of those communities. They'll spout the usual platitudes about "institutional racism", but won't do anything about it except more entitlement programs that only create dependency and more affirmative action style reforms that prioritize racism supremacy and entitlement over actually improving yourself.
Every other "community" that I can think of repeats the same points. I think the Amish are one of the few types of communities that retain strong loyalty to their own community, but they don't seek positions in the PMC Elite. There are also some super-religious Jewish and Christian communities that I think do similarly, but people of those religions who make it into the Elite also show no loyalty to any such tight-knit communities of the same or similar religion.
JulianRota
3mo ago
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society.
Agreed. I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, and in doing so have met and worked with a lot of people who think very differently from the norms expected in "liberal society". It seems to me that there's something of a cult, of people who have only ever been in "liberal society" places and can't begin to even conceive that there are people out there who really do think very differently. They speak of "multicultralism", but all they really know is that those other people sure dress in some cool costumes and have fancy dances and tasty exotic food. The idea that these people also have very different values from them is unthinkable.
The type of person I have described is of course not every single "blue team" person. They're probably a minority in most places. But they definitely do exist, and I've met a number of people like that. I get the impression that their numbers are growing, spreading into more places, and becoming even more strident in their beliefs. I don't know how this ends, but I can't help but think something ugly is going to happen eventually. And along those lines,
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so.
It seems rather funny in current year. Especially back in the 70s or so, there was such a culture of "revolution" and "overthrowing the system" and other such things being cool. They're still in love with the idea of protests and riots. Look how they cheered on the BLM protests of 2020! But then, Jan 6 happens, and oh, it's the most terrible horrible thing ever! Well, when you were talking about protests and riots and revolutions and overthrowing things being totally super cool, exactly what did you think it meant? It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.
JulianRota
5mo ago
In 2017, I think Trump was under the impression that the bureaucracy would behave as though he was the CEO of the country, but it seems to me that he has learned that it doesn't work this way and could plausibly replace large amounts of that bureaucracy.
What bothers me about this point is - why didn't he figure this out 3 months after he took office, if not sooner? If he didn't figure it out and take effective counter-action against it then, why should we believe he is properly prepared to do it now?
A really effective conservative President at this point should come into office like Elon Musk went into the CEO position at Twitter. Everyone who might be opposed to him is out on their asses in 5 seconds. Cut every office that is obviously useless and like 50% of the company too, just so everyone knows you're dead serious. Adopt policies that are a little wacky at lightning speed just to be really sure everybody is going along with it whether they like it or not. Etcetra.
Hell, maybe we should do Musk for President. I may not love every bit of his politics, but he has demonstrated the ability to rapidly and decisively break a large bureaucratic machine to his will.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I don't see a strong culture war aspect to this one actually. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone thinks that thing was obviously a death-trap and the CEO was an idiot. There's only a little variance on how hard to sneer at the passengers for being foolish rich people and whether to trash the CEO for claiming he "didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys". Okay, they're foolish, but they've suffered pretty severe consequences for it. And the CEO sounds kinda racist with that statement, but I think he actually cares more about not bringing in anyone who would question the bad design and lax safety practices than their skin color - the staff pics I've seen look pretty lily-white.
A few other notes that I picked up in my reading about this:
The hatch is only rated to a third of the depth they were diving to, and the pressure vessel was never actually proofed to any depth at all. It's made of carbon fiber mostly, which tends to shatter instead of deform when over-stressed.
The life-support limit is a bullet point on a document, and a suspiciously round number. Nobody knows how they actually came up with this number or whether their life support systems were ever actually tested with 5 people for 96 hours. It's not clear how it works either or what its failure modes are. It's possible it could lead to an abnormally high oxygen level, which makes the environment highly flammable, and doesn't appear to have any firefighting capabilities or smoke mitigation systems.
The hatch is installed in the center of the endcap of the cylindrical vessel. It's pretty clearly designed to only be opened on the submersible sled thing it gets launched with. It seems likely to me that if the sub was floating on the surface and the hatch was opened, it would rapidly flood and sink. Maybe slow enough for people inside to get out, maybe not. I guess (if it made it to the surface) being able to maybe get out and float around on the surface in the middle of the Atlantic is better than definitely suffocating, but not a lot. I guess life vests, survival suits, and life rafts would be too much to expect here.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I think your thought is kind of true. To illustrate, consider Blue-team friendly pseudoscience, such as crystal healing, homeopathy, chiropractics, obsession with "chemicals" and "radiation" - not the real kind, like what supposedly comes from power lines and cell phones and such. That sort of thing.
IME, these kinds of pseudoscience get a moderately serious disapproval from the hard science types, and the mainstream culture attitude seems to be somewhere between, they might kind of have a point and it seems cool and interesting, and they're harmless nutters that we'll stick in a corner somewhere and ignore.
Meanwhile, pseudoscience that is perceived as friendly to Red team such as Intelligent Design gets the oh-my-god-terrifying-fascist-threat-to-our-democracy-kill-it-with-fire reaction from the Blue mainstream culture. More mainstream Reds seem to have the same reaction to it as the Blue team does to their pseudoscience - they're harmless nutters that we'll let do their own thing and basically ignore.
CRT in this view occupies an odd position as Blue-coded sociological pseudoscience that mainstream Blue is crazy obsessed with pushing. The Blues that aren't that into it take the position that it's all imaginary and nobody is really pushing it. HBD is even weirder as probably at least sort of real science that Blue doesn't dare to acknowledge the existence of, and even Red mainstream shies away from.
JulianRota
7mo ago
I think at least we can say, Nazism doesn't mean what it means to us to people who lived in Eastern Europe.
One of the more surreal things I've experienced lately was when I asked on the Motte Telegram back around the start of the war (which has a couple of actual Ukranian residents), basically, so what's the deal with Jewish Zelensky having an apparently-actual-Nazi unit (Azov battalion) serving in his army? Taking Western views at least sort of seriously, surely an actual Nazi unit would refuse to take orders from a Jewish President, and a Jewish President would surely boot an actual Nazi unit out of the army he was Commander-In-Chief of. But all the Ukrainian residents were like, yeah, so what, why do you think this is weird? Even for English-speakers who presumably have at least some exposure to the Anglosphere, the idea that Nazis and Jews might not like each other much just seemed incomprehensible to them.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
If you were driving past and saw a friend walking or rolling there [on a sidewalk], what would your first thought be:
“Oh, no, Henry’s car must have broken down! I better offer him a ride.”
“Oh, looks like Henry’s out for a walk! I should text him later.”
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Given that we've already had our bit of Holocaust "revisionism" this early in the week, I thought I'd share some interesting, trivia, I guess that I recently learned of in that community.
I am given to understand that the most "mainstream" source of Holocaust revisionism is an organization called the Institute For Historical Review (IHR). They appear to be a pretty standard research organization in some ways, publishing papers and web articles and holding conferences and such. While they do not claim to be solely dedicated to the subject, they sure publish a good bit of material that's highly critical of Jews and their influence on the world, the history of the Holocaust, and apologetic towards the Nazi regime. I understand them to be the original source of many of the standard Holocaust denier talking points involving such things as "resettlement in the east".
It turns out that, way back in 2009, the director of the IHR, one Mark Weber, published an article titled "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?" in which he basically admits that the mainstream historical view of the Holocaust is accurate. He hasn't really changed his mind that much - no indication of some cabal "getting to him" somehow. Rather, he now takes the position that while "Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community", the Holocaust basically happened the way it's described, but it's not really that important of a factor in "Jewish Power" and it's not a good use of their time to attack it. Here's a pull quote that I think is representative of the basic point he's making:
In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.
Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.
There's also a 30 minute video interview with one Jim Rizoli, a considerably more enthusiastic Holocaust denier, in which he expresses basically the same view and goes on in more detail about a few points. IMO, he comes off as pretty calm and reasonable, while Rizoli comes off as rather unhinged and obsessed.
I think I agree with him in the sense that, if you wanna try and make a point about the role and influence of Jews in today's society, go ahead and make it, but quibbling over the details of exactly what happened to how many in the Holocaust is pointless.
JulianRota
3mo ago
getting killed seems a bit of a reach
Shortening the description of what happened like this IMO really does a disservice to understanding the incident. At no point did anybody, Penny included, set out to kill Neely. No weapons that were not appropriate to the situation were deployed. No physical techniques that were not reasonable considering what was happening were used. He was merely physically restrained for a brief period to make him stop doing whatever it exactly was that he was doing. This was highly likely to have been reasonable and appropriate. That he died from it is an unintended consequence, most likely due to him being in comprehensively terrible health.
The class of people that Neely represents has wildly different health than anything most regular people can conceive of. Which touches back to the giant hole concept that HlynkaCG was talking about. These people start out severely mentally ill, the type that would likely be institutionalized for life in another era. They do lots of illegal drugs, not checked at all for purity or cleanliness. Possibly including injected with dirty needles. They probably sleep on the streets somewhere most of the time. Constantly in and out of jail and hospitals. You can bet they never follow up on any health or legal suggestions offered in those places. Eating whatever comes to hand, no thought to it being clean or healthy.
I know there are legal doctrines covering this sort of thing, which I'm not meaning to debate right now. But morally speaking, exactly what responsibility do we have to this sort of person? If you're both so crazy that you're antagonizing and scaring people on a train, and also so unhealthy and fragile that a brief period of mild restraint is at risk of killing you, then what exactly do we do with you? I have a hard time feeling like society has any responsibility towards such a person.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I did learn, or at least learn to pay more attention to, one interesting fact on the last Motte pro/anti car argument I was involved in - substantial parts of the world routinely experience weather for extended periods that precludes all but the most hardy people around from doing extended outdoors work, like walking for 20 minutes while carrying a few days worth of groceries.
JulianRota
5mo ago
In my experience, they mostly get a fairly negative response, if not necessarily right away, assuming they actually are bad. As do most comments advocating for other types of general bias against any type of identity group. Can you link any that you don't think got enough pushback?
Arguing about things you really care about can be challenging here, as you need to maintain high standards even against whatever viewpoint you hate the most. I tend to recommend that if you feel a certain category of generalized negativity against a group personally offends you due to your identity, you refrain from responding to those posts, as you are likely to make poor arguments that attract downvotes and bans. Find some other things to discuss instead. If you see something like that, just note it and come back to it a few days later, and you may be pleasantly surprised by the responses it has gotten.
In my opinion, if there's any identity group that this board is a little too hard against, it's women. I feel a bit weird about how highly upvoted comments I've made critical of feminism get. I know at least one woman has left the board because of it. It's a shame, but we have plenty of other great female posters here who can take that in stride.
JulianRota
7mo ago
I want to double-down / confirm the comment about working conditions and the ability to do things. I've worked at some Large Bureaucratic Organizations. I've seen too many times as an Individual Contributor where I or a colleague of mine comes up with a nice idea to make something work better or be cheaper or something, tried to get it done, and it gets stonewalled at the management level because the real decisions are made 5 layers up from you and there's no way to get any idea up to them through all the layers of middle management in a way they'll actually care about.
Instead, most of the project proposals that come down from on high are for stuff that people at the ground level can see is clearly unworkable, but it gets pushed anyways. When it proceeds to go nowhere, as predicted, whoever pushed it can dummy up a powerpoint that makes it look like it went great, which never actually gets checked, so they get bonuses and promotions anyways.
After a while working in a place like that, it can feel like a huge deal where a good idea at your level gets a quick "Okay, do it, here's the money", and the really dumb ideas get ruthlessly shut down. You might put up with and excuse a lot to be allowed to work at your full potential on something that's actually awesome instead of being a bureaucratic drone putting forth 10% on something completely pointless.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I don't have anything great on the trans depiction thing. But a looked-over aspect I did want to note. So Uhura is black in Star Trek Original. (I haven't seen much of it to be honest, so I'm going on a few assumptions, but I could be completely wrong about her depiction). This is shown as a neutral thing in 2 ways. 1 is the obvious, that nobody treats her differently or as less than equal because they see that she is black, or female. The equally important IMO but more subtle way is 2, that she doesn't have a chip on her shoulder about it, i.e. constantly (mis)interpreting every minor mistake or social faux-paus as somebody being racist against her, every bureaucratic snafu as the system being systematically racist, being automatically more trusting of any other black person she encounters no matter what their official position is, etc.
Both of these serve as a social message, to non-blacks that blacks are perfectly fine ordinary people who deserve equal treatment, and to blacks to get over obsessing about historical injustices and just be a regular part of the team.
On a grand strategy decades-long view, our society has done an excellent job at drilling point 1 into the majority of white people. We don't seem to have done so great and are arguably regressing on point 2.
I suppose this does also apply to all other maybe-political minority depictions, including trans-ness - it says something whether or not that person correctly or incorrectly interprets bad things that happen to them as being done due to their minority status.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I'm actually not sure that's the important point here. There was infact sufficient WMD materials to make the claim that, yep, we did in fact find WMDs (links: 550 metric tons of Yellowcake Uranium, thousands of US troops injured from chemical weapon cleanup, weapons captured by ISIS, as referenced in this Reddit comment). Granted, it wasn't a pile of shiny, new, ready to fire gas shells and bombs, but it seems to me it was enough to support a claim. So the question becomes, why did the media narrative become "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever"? Perhaps the CIA etc could have faked more evidence, but exactly what evidence could they have faked that would plausibly change the narrative? It would certainly have to be at least better than what they actually did find. Or did the Mainstream Media decide in advance on the "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever" narrative and interpret all evidence in favor of reporting that line.
I also think the lack of enthusiasm for future such adventures are more down to how totally bungled the aftermath was. The administration narrative pre-war was that the Iraqis all couldn't wait to be a peaceful stable Democracy, all we had to do was bump off Saddam's regime. If that had turned out to be actually true and Iraq was a nice stable democracy in 2004, I don't think anybody would care much to what extent the WMDs claim was actually true or reasonable believable at the time. The reluctance now is IMO more due to the fact that Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a bunch of millennia-old religious and tribal beefs that promptly blew up in our faces and we didn't have the slightest clue how to handle, and it took a decade and tremendous amounts of blood and treasure to get things sort of kind of stable. Who wants to repeat that?
JulianRota
4mo ago
I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.
Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.
So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.
Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?
JulianRota
7mo ago
I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it. I think everyone was talking about it in rather generous terms, mining it for the most truthful and insightful things and only talking about that. I think that's excesively generous, considering it came to be known to us thanks to a homicidal terroristic bombing campaign. I think it deserves to be cut to the core of it's true arguments that he believed justified his bombing campaign. And I also think that if you actually do so, it's pretty low quality. Here is the original text of it if you care to verify or make a counter-argument.
The core of, and most important thing to remember about Industrial Society and it's Future is the Power Process argument, as written starting in paragraph 33. TK's argument is that in order to be truly happy and satisfied with life, a person must need to exert substantial effort, labor, and creativity towards satisfying the most basic physical needs of food, water, shelter, and security. Exerting their creative efforts towards other pursuits, including art, science, engineering, etc. isn't good enough, it's got to be for core survival. Exerting substantial effort in a conventional job, earning money, and using that money to purchase the elements of survival is also not good enough, it has to be direct. This is his definition of "freedom" - one is "free" in his opinion if they need to exert substantial effort directly towards basic survival. Thus, industrial society is fundamentally destructive to "freedom" in this definition in that it enables the majority of humanity to satisfy their needs of survival very easily and reliably, usually by doing things that have no direct relation to those needs. See him doubling down on this in paragraph 94.
I believe this argument is fundamentally nonsensical. Perhaps our society is lost and missing something, but I'm doubtful that large-scale hunter-gatherer societies (or at least as large scale as such societies can be) are overall substantially happier and more satisfied with life. It may be true that some individuals who are disaffected from mainstream society for various reasons are happier in such a situation, but I don't think society as a whole is. I frankly doubt it for individuals too - how many such people ever truly disconnect fully from industrial society and stay that way? I don't think TK is has any experience in anthropology, or has spent any significant amount of time with societies that currently do live in ways similar to what he advocates. Maybe he should have spent a few years living with the Amish or something before going on a bombing campaign, or visited some primitive tribes that are still around in various parts of Africa and South America.
He has some other interesting observations, but that's the core of it and why I wholly reject the philosophy.
One of his other points is around how society tends to bend people to fit it, rather than adjusting to fit people. Maybe there's a little point in how hard it sometimes tries to bend people. But there are plenty of options out there already for other ways to live, if you are willing to go looking for them and actually adopt them. In fact, it's not really "society" trying to bend people in my opinion, it's usually the people themselves or their close family members trying to fit in. Are "we" supposed to go find the guy who thinks he should try anti-depressants to fit in better and tell him he really ought to try joining a sailboat crew first instead? Maybe it's your job to realize you don't like your place in society and change it. And however you decide to deal with your disaffection with society, what gives you the right to claim you know what's best for everyone? Doesn't the fact that you are disaffected from society fundamentally mean that you don't understand it and aren't by any measure qualified to speak for it?
Speaking of people not fitting into society, what happens when it goes the other way? If we actually adopt his supposed preferred lifestyle and it goes exactly the way he hopes it does, I'd bet anything at least a few people would think that running water, grocery stores full of food, and antibiotics are actually pretty nice, can I please go back to that? Will the result of that just be, tough shit, this is all there is, starve and die if you don't like it? Has he done any sort of research or experiment at all to determine that 100% of humanity will actually be happer living like this, even when some of them starve to death because a harvest or hunt went bad for some reason and there's no such thing as long-distance trade, or they watch their loved ones die of things that are fixable in industrial society but pre-industrial hunter-gatherers are helpless against?
I think the bigger point though is - what do you want for the future of the Human Race?
If we go TK's way, we will be hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo around and picking berries forever. Your kids and their kids as far into the future as you want to go will never live any better than you. Some day, the rising output of the sun will destroy the Earth's biosphere, or maybe we get hit by an asteroid or gamma ray burst or something, and the entire human race goes extinct. We won't have a prayer of even knowing it's coming, much less doing anything about it, because being too busy working on basic survival to notice or think about such things is apparently the correct way to live. We were given this tremendous gift of intelligence, by evolution or God or whatever you believe, and we're supposed to just throw it in the trash because some guy was sad?
Or we go our own way and take industrial society as far as it can go. Maybe we build awesome spaceships and colonize the stars. Maybe we conduct diplomacy as equals with alien civilizations. Maybe we turn ourselves into a global hive mind somehow. Or maybe we blow ourselves up with antimatter bombs or get turned into paperclips by our superintelligent AIs or get enslaved by hostile aliens. Who knows what the future holds, but it sounds a lot better than being hunter-gatherers forever.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I'd agree that it's political. The political situation is either A) You know the Feds will stop you, so you be a good boy and do nothing. Your meek compliance gets you zero enthusiasm from the right, and whispers start that you're an open-borders sympathizer, or B) You do something like this, stick to it as long as possible, make the Feds physically stop you. It'll help for a little while with the actual situation, and being seen to try to do something is good for his political support. Forcing the Feds to actually physically stop it and showing video of them doing that will help his political situation, making the case that he's on their side and is a fighter, and it's the Feds' fault that it isn't working.
When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them. Well, here's us starting to slide down that slope. Make up any rule you want, call it a "public health order", and just maybe it will stand and actually be enforced.
I really hope this doesn't stand, because it will only accelerate us towards a regime of government executives actually ruling by decree without regard to the Constitution. And what'll happen if a Red team executive in a Red state copies the pattern, maybe doing something like closing down all gay bars and other meeting places as a "public health order" to stop Monkeypox or Aids or something.
More options
Context Copy link