Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
"Crack cocaine addicts should not be carrying guns" seems like a rare gun control policy proposal that I could imagine a lot of 2A diehards getting onboard with.
I agree in the abstract, but it's still not a serious enough infraction for me to change my assessment of the situation.
It's weird funny that I specifically asked you why you think this action was "virtuous", and part of your answer is, in essence, that was a wonderfully spiteful act of malicious revenge. Which is quite far from what I typically think of when I hear the word "virtuous".
Spite and malice can be virtuous. Who told you they couldn't?
Virtue is the appropriate response in the appropriate situation. It's not a static table of naughty and nice feelings that can be drawn up in advance. There's no reason a priori to think that spite is never an appropriate thing to feel.
To give a simple example, if a criminal is breaking into your house uninvited in the middle of the night, then the virtuous thing to do is certainly to respond with malice.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Why?
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Why should a father not protect his son when he is able to? This should be the default position (not an absolute position of course, but the default one, at least) - especially for a crime as minor as tax fraud.
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There's something heartwarming about the party that has recently been so obsessed with procedural norms and maintaining the moral high ground learning that there are, in fact, situations where a strict literal interpretation of the norms should be suspended. This may be more of a tactical consideration than a purely ethical one, because it helps Republicans illustrate how absurd the prosecution of Trump has been.
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It's an appropriate parting "fuck you" to a political establishment that conspired to replace him without his consent in the 2024 election.
What a bizarre way of saying "there's no point in having rules or laws of any kind".
That's not what I said, and that's not the position I endorse.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
No, I didn’t. That statement was offered as a premise.
Premises can of course be challenged or supported with further reasoning, as is happening elsewhere in the thread.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.
I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.
The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
We finance Universities because they are supposed to be an unambiguous public good
Well, it depends on what you think a "public good" is, and your own personal tolerance for ambiguity, I suppose.
Do you think a paper on Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories is an unambiguous public good? Hell, do you think Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories are even real? Because this is a representative exemplar of the sort of thing that the university does. And this is from a STEM department, the "useful" half of the university.
I do think it's a public good - it's just a public good of a non-utilitarian kind. This kind of research isn't going to help you cure cancer or feed more people or build the next killer app; but I view it as a public good nonetheless, because it's an integral part of what makes life worth living in the first place.
Perhaps diverting your tax dollars to causes you find nonsensical is itself a public good, if it serves as an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
This seems like the first criteria that you'd want to relax.
I don't actually understand why other men care so much about body count. I mean, I can understand it on an intellectual level, but not on a visceral level. Perhaps that's just a side effect of my general pattern of sexual deviancy. I also have no instinctive revulsion towards incest between consenting adults, for example, although many other people swear to me that they most assuredly do.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose. And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it. Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.
Why make it a gendered thing? Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity. Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture? Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison? Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience). So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.
If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat. If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Dude the GPTese accent is so strong on this one that it barely makes sense.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Why must "real" art be traumatic?
Let me first clarify that I have no interest in policing the boundary between real art and not-real art. I find little use in the distinction between "art" and "entertainment" as well. I think there are simply good and bad works. Even "lowly" works can have many interesting things to appreciate. But there are nonetheless higher and lower works, greater and smaller works - and something about what I said rings true about the greatest works, I believe. It speaks to art's authentic purpose, its highest aim that all the minor tributaries flow into.
Art is the attempt to elucidate the unnameable. It reaches beyond the limits of discursive thought - the logos gives way to Kant's thing-in-itself, Wittgenstein's "the mystical", Lacan's das Ding. All religious and esoteric traditions recognize the element of dread that is inherent in any attempt to transcend this limit. There is the warmth of God's infinite love, yes - but also the vertigo of contemplating God's infinite mind. "And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live."
Contra the later existentialists, Kierkegaard quite perceptively noted in The Sickness unto Death that existential dread is a religious attitude, not an atheistic one. If the world has no meaning and death is the end, then you have nothing to fear, right? You just die and that's it. It's eternal life where things start to get scary. Now the salvation of your immortal soul is on the line. Now there are stakes. Thus there is no religious cosmology that one can seek final refuge in - the traumatic core of reality persists in either case.
Art remains for us a regulative ideal, an unrealized potential, a mere sign. We are still waiting for an art that will fulfill the promise of art. The history of "aesthetic feelings" hitherto is not an ideal to aspire to, but a dream from which one must awaken.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I don't care one iota about the self actualization of architects or about Heidegger. Architects should be seeking to make beautiful, harmonious buildings.
Isn't there a certain tension here?
Why should architects care what you think if you don't care what they think?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:
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No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.
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Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.
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Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.
Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.
You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22d ago
that exchange is mutually exclusive, for the purpose of procreation, acknowledged by the family and community of both people, and lifelong.
But people (non-prostitute people) break all of these conditions all the time.
People date without getting permission, they have sex without procreating, they break up, they date new people. That's a very common course for a relationship to take in 2025, and no one thinks that's as bad as prostitution.
There are trads who disapprove of this sort of arrangement of course, but even they don't compare it with prostitution afaik.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22d ago
I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.
Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum. I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics. It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.
Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
The pod living - bug eating - ESG conforning Woke Capital is a perfect synthesis of the two views, and our elites endorse it fully. It all has to be taken apart simultaneously.
As stifling as the modern university environment has become, it still does support multiple viewpoints. Woke Capital is a big problem, but there are voices of dissent. Zizek is a good guy for example. He's kind of a doofus, but his heart is in the right place.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
If you took the exact same hardware that Sydney is running on now and had it run a different program instead - even just a noticeably worse and less realistic LLM - then everyone would agree that the hardware is not conscious.
It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains
Nothing that I've said implies this.
Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.
special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram
There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.
If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Yes, the concept of intellectual property brings along with it a number of intractable philosophical puzzles. But, so does every other concept that one could name, so it's in good company in that regard.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
It’s entirely unsurprising if they “like the idea”, because CoPilot is little better than autocomplete. It’s no threat to their livelihoods.
Naturally, I think that people who publicly release source code should be able to opt out of AI training.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
I can’t think of how training could occur if you didn’t make a copy in RAM of the images that were being trained on.
Honestly though, that’s a technicality that doesn’t actually matter. The point is that if software developers can reasonably request that their publicly-available code not be used in a proprietary SaaS, then artists should be able to request that their publicly-available images not be used to train AI models.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad.
Sad in what sense?
I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
I previously shared some of my thoughts on love in general here. The most relevant bit is this:
If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
Transactions are a reality; love is an absurdity, if not an outright impossibility. Love has value only and precisely because it is absurd.
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year). This is not at all to say that people shouldn't love; it is only to say that it should be done self-consciously rather than than unconsciously.
It has long since penetrated popular consciousness that "justice" is an open and apophatic concept. Any assertion that such and such an act is "just" can be met with "ah, but what is justice? Whose justice? Is that really justice?" I am simply opening the possibility of a similar discourse on love. At least as far back as Plato's Symposium, it has been recognized that love is not (just) an emotion but a discursive concept which can and should be subject to critique (critique not in the sense of "mere" criticism, or dismissal, or negation -- but rather critique in the sense of a coming to self-consciousness, a laying bare of the groundwork and the conditions of possibility). To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
One can feel and experience many things; but whether and how these feelings can be mapped to concepts should not be decided too hastily.
Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.
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