PokerPirate
24d ago
This is a straightforward example of my claim that "basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting the doormat failure mode", and so whole-heartedly disagree with you :)
PokerPirate
1yr ago
An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.
PokerPirate
17d ago
I respect their willingness to defy arbitrary rules.
This one sentence has done more to help me clarify my thoughts on illegal immigration than everything else written in this thread. To the extent that there is an "American spirit" that has been consistent over the past 500 years, it has been the desire to defy arbitrary rules.
PokerPirate
22d ago
Yeah, I was discharged from the navy as a conscientious objector.
PokerPirate
24d ago
There's a reason there's no Oakland Amish.
There's no Amish, but there are self-declared pacifists. See for example https://oaklandcatholicworker.org.
This is not an argument against the values described, just a note on their evident limitations.
I disagree this is a limitation of pacifism. No body wants to live in "Oakland" (which I'm assuming is metonymy for any violent place). I claim that pacifism has better outcomes than non-pacifism for someone who must live in such a place. I don't think these are always strictly better outcomes for the individual, but that these better outcomes are society-wide.
Pacifism works when you live with other committed pacifists.
You imply that it doesn't work around non-pacifists, which I disagree with. Although the disagreement is probably about the aims that we should be working towards.
Distance can replace walls and spears.
Most reasonable people would prefer to be away from violence. So I don't think this is a unique jab at pacifism.
The implication is that pacifists cannot strategically interact with violence in a way that achieves their aims. But there are plenty of pacifists who would strategically reduce their distance to conflict in order to effect change that cannot be accomplished with spears. The AFSC ambulance units that helped combatants and non-combats on all sides in WWI and WWII is a standard example. In my own life, I've lived in North Korea trying to reduce conflict between them and the US.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
That's a good point, thanks. I'm guessing that insurance costs are up, and it'll be hard to get a reliable quote before actually purchasing.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I'm going to buy a house in Southern California (LA area) sometime in the next 3 years. I'd like to time the market a bit, and I'm wondering if anyone has any insights to what housing prices might look like in the Trump admin?
My naive analysis is that prices will trend downward for a couple of reasons:
- if immigration goes down then there will be more supply and prices will go down,
- interest rates have gone up recently, and that drives house prices down, and the market is still catching up to this trend (I'm more concerned about the overall price than the monthly payment for various reasons).
PokerPirate
4mo ago
The song came first, but I doubt Stallman or any of the fellow GNU folk had that song as an explicit motivation.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Oooh.. Ben Hur. I hadn't heard of that before, but it sounds fantastic. I'll have to watch it with my wife, and maybe with my kids when they're a bit older. Thanks!
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I'm "down" to 3ish cans/day. That's still a $10 pack every other week = $250 / year. That feels like a lot of money to spend on water when the tap spits it out for free.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.
Two comments:
-
The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.
-
What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
I agree. That's exactly the type of book that JTarrou should write.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.
Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?
PokerPirate
9mo ago
This doesn't make sense to me. Why would "the middle drop out"?
I assume that most people who believe that voting is a waste of time also believe that the major candidates don't reflect their preferred policies. This makes these "drop outs" by definition very far from median.
Dropping out should only matter if the two extremes do them at different rates. If dropouts are uniformly distributed or distributed at the extremes, then there's no change in the stability of the results.
PokerPirate
10mo ago
This finally explains to me why Patrick Rothfuss hasn't finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. (The first two books definitely exhibit the "chauvanism" you're describing, but book 2 of the trilogy was published in 2011 and there's no signs of book 3 ever coming.)
PokerPirate
11mo ago
It's astonishing to me that people still think giving them "no strings attached aid" ...
Academic exchange is not "no strings attached aid". It is a mutual relationship where both parties benefit from the arrangement.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Which is why authoritarian movements tend to use female-coded language- "equity" and "safety" are the two popular ones-
It's hard for me to see why these words are "female-coded". For example, they were explicitly two of the main reasons for the founding fathers of the US to launch their revolution, and I don't know anyone who sees the founding fathers as female-coded figures.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Ehh... I think you're being inconsistent/missing the point.
You previously said:
Fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris, might look impressive from the outside but it is ultimately mundane.
and then called these things "something of a cheap thing", to which I wanted to know what you think is "expensive".
The "fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris" absolutely have to "live with the long-term injuries and the PTSD" just as much as any infantryman.
PokerPirate
2yr ago
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.
There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).
There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.
PokerPirate
2yr ago
Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.
Christianity has a pretty strong tradition of requiring the "consent of the ruling authority" in just war theory. For example, Thomas Aquinas describes three criteria for a "just war", the first of which is that it must be waged by a proper authority. (The second is that the war must have a just cause and the third is that the soldiers must have a just intent.)
PokerPirate
23d ago
Where is your line?
I'm not able to articulate it. That's largely because I've never liked the framing of there being a spectrum of bad things that can happen, and everyone draws a line somewhere, and violence is allowed below the line but not above the line. In this framing, pacifism is a totally passive thing that just places the line somewhere very low.
I think if pacifism is going to be viable, it needs to have a much more positive framing than merely as rejecting violence in some circumstances.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
That's fair. I've known plenty of churches like that as well.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
This is nonsensical. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for his liberation theology, he was still teaching that "the basics of faith" are the Catholic catechism. Liberation theology---whether you agree with it or not---was obviously an edifice built on top of that.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
That's certainly a common right-wing interpretation of liberation theology. And there's relevant critiques of liberation theology that it only became popular due to Soviet covert influence. But the major theologians/leaders are all card-carrying Catholics that buy into all of Catholic spirituality.
Sorry, I don't know any text versions of the songs for reading :( My guess is that you would still find it to be heavily Marxist, but that doesn't mean the people singing don't literally believe in the miracles they're singing about.
This writeup doesn't inspire much confidence in me. The only details they have on their methodology are the following sentence:
But how were these "likely voters" determined? Random phone calls? Knocking on doors? Are they all from Portland or spread out over the US? Are they rich or poor? Were they paid for the survey?
They don't even answer how many of these "likely voters" they survey actually voted or voted by mail!
Based on this incredible lack of detail, it's hard for me to take these results seriously. If there's a more detailed writeup somewhere that I missed, I'd love to see it. I didn't see any link to one though.
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