Maximum_Publius
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User ID: 780
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
Indeed, assertions by a former high level member of the US intelligence services. You must admit that's not no evidence, especially when considered in light of things like the videos that have been released by the military.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I'd agree with this as a heuristic for where it is absolutely OK to cancel someone. But certainly there's a middle ground? It can't only be either "I can only use reasoned debate to stop this person" or "I can shoot or cancel someone". Surely there's a place at which it would be acceptable to cancel but not murder someone?
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Why wouldn't it work as well here? People would downvote political enemies to suppress their ideas?
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Your claim was that you "find it hard to imagine that to anyone who arrives at their positions by rational thinking . . . could really find an opposing argument well done."
All I'm saying is that a rational person could easily find an opposing argument "well done" if their only problem with the argument was that it began from premises derived from intuitions they don't share.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
Yeah, I certainly agree about the confusion. I'd add that it doesn't seem totally unbelievable to me that the US military would want to keep potentially powerful military tech secret given that a good chunk of those 80 years occurred during the Cold War.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
This seems right on one dimension. I agree that it does feel like older-style forums, without voting, seemed to have better discussions. But when I read sites like SSC that purposely hide comment scores, I find it annoying not to be able to sort by "best" and find myself missing upvotes, without really feeling the conversation is all that better without them. Maybe this is just a function of the internet getting worse in general...
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Why do you say it hasn't worked for LessWrong?
Well in my ideal world you'd be able to sort by top - quality and top - agreement, but if they wanted to keep it simple they could just use the quality metric. I think that's what LessWrong does.
Completely agree about the complexity angle.
Maximum_Publius
9mo ago
This all seems right. Well said and thanks for the post.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
I'm not exactly sure what you mean about this "bullshit" only happening in the USA. Do you mean claims about the government being in possession of non-human tech, or just UFO incidents/etc. in general? Because there are plenty of the latter in other countries, including ones reported by foreign military officials.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
Yeah, I agree with this for the most part. Hoping the fact that the article claims he has been reporting to Congress means that they will get their hands on some documents/hard evidence soon.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
I agree with you that there was a point at which the US had a meaningful culture to defend. My point is that at some point along the line, the waves of mass migration to the US, along with economic ("right wing") and cultural ("left wing") liberalism, destroyed any meaningful, unified culture the country had. Yes, there are people who can trace their descent to the Mayflower, but they are a very small percentage of the current US population (and I also think that a lot of them no longer care about, protect, or even know the culture and traditions their ancestors brought here). Given this situation, I think the benefits of ~open borders (to both the migrants and the country) outweigh the harms. If you talked to me 70 years ago, maybe I'd go the other way, but we're way past the point that Sweden only passed about a decade or two ago and could still meaningfully reverse.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
While agreeing with ymeskhout’s response, I also think part of the issue here is that there’s a whole set of truth statements which depend for their accuracy on the beliefs of a given group. “Defund the Police is a harmful movement because they want to totally remove police officers” is either true or false (assuming a given set of morals), and that in turn depends on what the DTP movement actually believes.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I agree that this doesn't solve the problem of people voting "politically," as it were, but I think it might mitigate it slightly.
As to your other point , I strongly disagree. Rationality can only work once certain premises have been accepted. There is no rational way to choose what premises you start an argument with. In the abortion context, for example, if someone starts from the premise that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life, no matter how much suffering it might experience or cause, they'll reach a certain set of conclusions, and if someone starts from a utilitarian set of premises, they'll reach another. Yes, you can argue about the rational basis for premises to some extent, but at a certain point you just hit intuition. Thus, two equally rational people could reach wildly different conclusions simply because they have different intuitions about the premises of the argument.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
The site is being pounded right now. Link works for me, you might need to try it again.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
I largely agree that cancellation is tactically counterproductive. But one could also say that the Woke left uses cancellation all the time and seems to have amassed a large amount of cultural power, which might indicate that in certain circumstances it is effective.
But even if I thought it would work, I'm against censorship on principle.
So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Yes, this seems like a useful distinction. Also highlights how unspecific terms like "homophobia" and "transphobia" are. People tend to use them to cover both social and metaphysical phobias, which confuses these issues. I guess most activists would argue, 1., most people who hold "metaphysical" transphobia tend to have "socally" transphobic ideas as well (probably true), and then also, 2., even if someone only holds metaphysically transphobic ideas, the expression of those ideas will lead to more hate crimes and more "social" transphobia.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
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I agree that this becomes more credible if the MSM picks it up, and the fact that Kean and Blumenthal couldn't get it reported in the NYT/WaPo initially is disappointing, and if they don't pick it up eventually that would be a strike to the story's credibility.
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A fair point.
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My understanding is that he now feels more comfortable saying things because in some appropriations bill from 2022 Senators Rubio and Gillibrand added language providing some whistleblower protection for UAP information. From the article: Grusch "helped draft the language on UAP for the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act, spearheaded by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio and signed into law by President Biden in December 2022. The provision states that any person with relevant UAP information can inform Congress without retaliation, regardless of any previous non-disclosure agreements."
Also, apparently he got clearance to say these things from the DoD? Article says "his statements [were] cleared for publication by the Pentagon in April," and then also Ross Coulthart (Australian journalist) says the same here.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
I largely agree with you except for the fact there have been people who have said things (including this current leaker!) over the years and been dismissed. If you think a few leakers aren't enough evidence, fair enough, but then I don't think it's fair to base your skepticism on the fact that there haven't been leakers when in fact there have.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
I strongly disagree with this characterization of OP's post. The rule states in relevant part that, "we ask that you refrain from posting bare links to culture-war-related discussions held outside of this sub. If you are going to link to another platform we ask that you please put in the work to contextualize the post and explain why it is relevant to readers of this community."
This is not a "bare link" to a culture war discussion from an outside website. The OP provided plenty of context, and it's obvious why this is relevant to the culture war--it's an example of progressive/woke discussion norms and of what is considered "out of bounds" in woke spaces.
The fact that OP is directly involved in this culture war drama should be irrelevant. If this interaction had happened on a college campus between students, with some of the students trying to "cancel" another student for saying what OP said, and someone had given this description of the events along with light commentary describing their thoughts on the matter, no one would have batted an eye. This is classic Culture War Thread content and OP shouldn't be punished for posting it.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
I think your approach is clearly the right one when engaged in a particular debate with a particular person, and OP says as much. But I think ymeskhout’s post is directed more to the scenario where someone is writing about a movement or argument in general instead of engaging with a particular person. In such cases the weakmanning concern is more real.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Yeah, I think, especially with the rise of what I think are more transitioners due to cultural contagion, that the 2-5% detransition number is quite likely a severe undercount (and as far as I know, some of the low detransition numbers were collected from studies that had serious flaws).
The empirical landscape here is really complicated, both because it's a relatively new phenomenon and because the political stakes are so high for any given study that it can be hard to trust the results/interpretation from either side. So I don't think either of us will be able to convince the other by throwing studies/etc. at each other. I will mention that some European countries are pulling back from the affirming care model as more evidence comes out that the mental health gains claimed for transitioning are less certain than was claimed. See, e.g., here.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
The problem is that things that seem morally obvious now weren't always so. In the antebellum United States, there were millions of people who thought slavery was totally acceptable, and many others who thought it was in fact a positive good. I think we'd all agree that someone advocating for a return to chattel slavery (at least assuming they had a real chance of success) would justify the use of "cancel culture" tactics today (if anything could), but this simply wasn't a morally obvious truth in the 1850s. You could make a similar argument about Jim Crow, which wasn't all that long ago. Activists would simply argue that their cause is today's slavery/Jim Crow/Holocaust/etc., and I think to justify why their use of "cancel culture" tactics is wrong you have to engage in the merits of their arguments to some degree
So, you think if you were in Weimar Germany around 1930, it wouldn't have been acceptable to "cancel" Hitler (lol) if you thought that was a tactic likely to prevent his coming to power? To me there is no question it would be legitimate to disrupt Nazi rallies, throw pies in Hitler's face (a tactic Contrapoints discusses LGBTQ activists using against anti-gay activists), etc., if you legitimately thought it would prevent Nazism and the Holocaust. The problem for me with current activists is simply that they've set the bar for using these tactics way too low.
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