SSCReader
25d ago
Isn't that cutting your own nose off to spite your face? Your opponents finally come around to your position, to the extent they are now willing to violently oppose the Islamic people/world you also dislike and wanted to keep out, which was one of the key disputes you had with them...
And you switch sides to side with the people you were against in the first place?
Why would you expect to be taken seriously? I hate that you won't go along with my position so much, that I would side with the people that we had opposing views on? That seems like simple spite. At which point despite being correct you can't be taken seriously in any kind of political coalition. If you don't get your own way, you side with the people you were against?
Setting aside any moral issues, pragmatically there is no reason for your opponents to ever consider your ideas. If you hate them when they disagree, and hate them when they agree, then you aren't leaving much space for change, even when you are actually right.
SSCReader
25d ago
Sure, if they don't change their mind then that makes sense. But this is predicated on them doing so.
That said I understand now I think. I'd suggest the elites wouldn't be changing their minds BECAUSE you decided you won't fight the Muslims. In fact, given I have worked with what might be called the elite in the UK, I can almost guarantee they aren't thinking about you (and your peers) at all, or that they are trying to take you for a ride at all, because they don't think about people like you or me much at all. (Which to be clear is a big problem, hence why I quit politics, its just not the same problem you think there is).
As for me, I don't think it will come to a fight at all. At least due to internal Muslims. I have extensive experience with Pakistani communities in the UK and they are being "corrupted" by western secular values quite substantially.
To be clear Islam is in my opinion a terrible religion and globally a much bigger problem than Christianity. But I expect it to lose power as its main countries advance and modernize. Reducing birth rates even in Islamic countries show it is not immune. To me the West is clearly the strong horse here. You can bribe native Pakistani and Afghani muslims with Man Utd strips. We've won so hard a tiny Westernised nation can essentially hold off the whole of the Middle East on its own.
Islam is dying. Just as Christianity is. Sunnis and Shi'ites in fight, Pakistan has problems with the Taliban. They are not united.
SSCReader
28d ago
Well y'know, if there weren't cases of pervert men doing precisely that,
This on it's own doesn't tell us anything though. Building a world view in which Catholic priests are just perverted child abusers intentionally trying to prey on children is also supported under this criteria. After all there are cases of Catholic priests doing precisely that.
That it NEVER happens is far too broad a criteria, because it will condemn almost every group where any single member is guilty of some vile behaviour. Police, clergy, trans people, women, men, lollipop ladies, politicians, scout leaders, teachers, French people, Irish people, Catholics, Protestants, German people, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, Humans.
SSCReader
8d ago
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.
So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.
My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?
In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.
SSCReader
15d ago
If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now
Unless the same people also fear nuclear power to roughly the same extent. And unfortunately many people who drive environmental concerns grew up in an era where fear of nuclear power was rampant. The Cuban Missile crisis, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. In other words if you think A will be a catastrophe and can be solved by B, which will also be a catastrophe then it becomes easy to see why people look for options C through F.
The real test is once those people die/retire/age out of leadership roles will the movement reorient itself.
Same as generals still fighting the last type of war instead of the next one.
Notably, they can of course be wrong about how catastrophic A or B might be, but from direct exposure to very many high level "climate alarmists" it is my opinion they are absolutely sincere in being worried about the climate. They are just also worried about nuclear catastrophes. And a whole bunch of other things. In fact I would say the thing that connects them (or most of them), is they worry way too much about a lot of things.
After all if this fear of climate change is driven by hysteria, what makes you think their other fears are going to be rationally evaluated against climate change in order to solve climate change?
SSCReader
29d ago
The left didn't invent this super weapon though. Assuming you are talking about governments creating laws regulating speech. It's been around for about as long as governments. Same with what we call cancel culture today, its entirely recognisable as the same behaviours in early societies around shunning, shaming and sub-judicial social sanctions.
From a leftist point of view they are repurposing an already existent super-weapon for their own purposes. I don't think they should be, but I think they are correct in the view that they are picking up a weapon that has already been used many times in the past in many different places. Including within the UK, from the Ministry of Information, to blasphemy to prior restraint to political censorship to the Profumo affair, super injunctions, saying British soldiers should go to hell getting you fined, or saying murdered police officers deserved it getting you jailed and so on.
Like it or not the UK has a long history of being much more authoritarian on what can be said than the US. Most often historically used against anti-establishment voices in general.
This isn't a new weapon. So creating it can't have been a defection. Though using it might still be of course depending on your pov.
SSCReader
2d ago
This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
Interestingly I think it is the exact opposite. We don't choose out beliefs about reality by act of will, they emerge from our sub-conscious (our "true" self) and then rationalized thereafter. I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs. I simply realized that I believed X, or didn't believe Y (sometimes after someone made a point and I argued against only to realize weeks later, that my belief had changed). I don't know how I would even go about choosing through an act of will to just believe something to be true.
I might also go so far as to say that almost by very definition beliefs cannot be under our conscious control. I cannot choose to believe in God, and I should know because I spent a lot of time trying so that I would fit in. I just could not do it, no matter how I tried.
SSCReader
6d ago
That is, there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science", where the latter is specifically things like what the politicians, media, and every party member in good standing must say in order to not end up in the metaphorical gulag.
Then you may want to angle to speak a little more plainly in my opinion. Tongue in cheek can be difficult to make out via text and using terms like "New Lefty Science" in that manner is just more heat than light when you are (as per the point of the site) going to want lefty people to read and engage with your points, rather than just arguing about whether the science is changing which wasn't really the point of your comment. Though I am not a mod, so you may of course ignore me entirely freely!
My experience with relatives who are addicts is that contra to our resident Indian doctor, it isn't possible to not be an addict any more. It is possible to not be an active addict, but seeing uncles falling off the wagon after decades of sobriety has resolved that for me. That doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal however.
And the difference between alien chest bursters and addiction is the fact that the chest burster kills the host and births a monster, an addict can be a "monster", then return to being normal for years or decades or the rest of their life, even if the monster risk is always hanging over them. It is more like lycanthropy perhaps, if we must find a monstrous analogy.
SSCReader
24d ago
And is Christianity as strong now as it was 400 years ago? Would it have been stronger or weaker without schisming?
Schisming that is not quickly and decisively dealt with is an ongoing fracture point.
SSCReader
17d ago
Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes. Of course then we will need meta-meta safetyists..and so ad inifinitum.
SSCReader
29d ago
Jailed doesn't happen often for speech, fined and community service is more normal. In 94 LGBT protestors (including Peter Tatchell, protesting an Islamist group) were arrested for having placards, and took 2 years to be acquiited. In 98 Tatchell was found guilty under a law from 1860 outlawing protest in a church for mounting the pulpit to give a speech opposite the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 2012 Azir Ahmed was fined and sentenced to community service for speech about soldiers who should go to hell. In 2012 Barry Thew was jailed for 8 months for wearing a T-Shirt that approved of cops being murdered.
Whether you would call them leftists I don't know but, being pro LGBT, anti colonial (or neo-colonial) use of soldiers and being ACAB, seem pretty left coded.
SSCReader
2d ago
Again, you don't choose to accept it or not. You just do. Or at least I do. So possible inferential distance here. Someone tells me something and I FEEL whether I believe it or not instinctually. Way before I would try to work through why I do. And then wouldn't you know it, my rationalizations always support what i felt to be true. Quite the coincidence huh?
I didn't choose to not believe in God. One day I did and the next I did not. Suddenly all the contradictions and holes loomed large. The day before they did not. I didn't make a wilful choice. Now maybe somewhere in my subconscious evidence was being weighed but I don't seem to have access to that process.
Most people aren't rational from what I can tell, and what we believe isn't either. We build our beliefs off what feels true, not from rationally evaluating them. I am pretty sure this is how it works for myself and somewhat confident this is how it works for most other "normies". And acting as if this is true turns out to predict peoples actions better than not.
And indeed I think some of what you are saying actually supports my position. Why do people when weighing evidence weigh some more and discard some or going looking for more? So that the evidence supports the position they already hold, the position they already believed, before they started examining it "objectively". And the same for axioms, they pick those which support their pre-existing conclusion. Which is why people can hold beliefs that are contradictory, because the critical thought is downstream of belief. And why when confronted with contradictory believes they do no simply evaluate and change their axioms. They waffle, they prevaricate, they deflect. What they don't fo generally is willfully decide they are wrong and change their beliefs.
Indeed if they did, I would suggest there would be little need for the rationalist project at all.
SSCReader
6d ago
Can you suggest a simpler and more plain way of indicating this? I thought the caps and everything did the job. Maybe a (TM)?
Well the problem is it comes across as sneering at your (presumed) outgroup. For a start is it really lefty beliefs? Our resident Indian Mod-Doctor is not left wing and he thinks you can be cured of being an addict. I am centre-leftish and I think you can't. If you think that the general zeitgeist is that addicts can be cured and it didn't used to be, you can just say that. No need to posit any left/right belief unless that is part of your point and you then flesh it out, otherwise it just comes across as being an unnecessary sideswipe.
Sure, anyone in theory might become an addict, until they try cocaine or whatever they won't know. Someone who is an addict has tried X and then been addicted to X. My observation of relatives (and work in social care in the past), is that the desire for whatever substances they were addicted to never goes away. If it is possible for that desire to permanently to go away then I would agree they are no longer an addict. So the definition is "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to X AND still has that desire." In practice I have never seen someone who lost that desire. However it might be possible for treatment in the future to remove that. I just haven't seen any evidence that current treatment really can. What it usually does is give coping strategies for avoiding relapsing in my experience.
Now there are grey areas here, what is the difference between someone who tries cocaine, likes it but is never addicted, versus someone who tried it, got addicted and then is able to resist that desire to use it again? If both people never use cocaine again is there a difference between them? i would suggest yes, in that if the latter's willpower is eroded (through tragedy, being put on painkillers during a hospital visit etc.) then they can relapse into addiction, while the former is not at risk of that.
SSCReader
24d ago
But the split happened in Europe. If that made Christianity stronger why would the effect be more pronounced in the US?
Hell my own country had so much zeal we are still murdering each other even now (though much less frequently thankfully). And the percentage of non-religious is almost identical between the US and Northern Ireland (27 or 28%) which is also similar to the EU (25-26%).
So it doesn't seem to be much better at keeping adherents anywhere. Just in the US selection effects means it is more geographically concentrated.
A Christianity that did not have ruinous wars and splits I would argue would be stronger. Because it showed to adherents that whatever lofty claims were made Christians were willing to kill Christians over doctrinal differences. A united Christianity that stretches from Moscow to Constantinople to Jerusalem to Rome to London to Rio de Janeiro to Washington would be a much stronger world force than it is now.
A schism that is resolved quickly might increase strength and fervor, one that rumbles on for centuries and then schisms again and again over smaller and smaller differences is hard to portray as a stronger, I would say.
To be clear though I am not saying either Christianity or Islam will fall entirely tomorrow, we are talking decades to centuries. To paraphrase the old saying. There is a great deal of ruin in an organized religion.
SSCReader
6d ago
I observe myself exercising my will without apparent restraint, and making choices through the exercise of that will. Near as I can tell, this is what everyone else observes as well. All effective methods of human social organization assume that humans have free will, and then proceed with methods to either convince them to choose cooperation, or trick them into cooperation, or else nullify their choices through the exercise of power against them. No effective methods of social organization have been found that allow one to simply engineer cooperation from the uncooperative, and this despite many trillions of dollars and millions of human lifetimes spent explicitly trying to achieve that exact objective.
So I don't exactly disagree with you, but the things that give me pause are things how people change after brain damage. Each individual (assuming they experience things similarly to me) seems to be making their own unrestrained choices through free will. I agree with your assessment here, as far as I can tell I make my own free choices, and since everyone else says the same and generally acts like me it seems likely they are too. Yet a man with a particular type of brain injury will now seem to make decisions he never would have before. Presumably he sees those choices internally as exercising his free will. It's just he now wants to be an angry drunk rather than a nice family man. Or you can give women testosterone and they get more aggressive. So I think at the very minimum the material medium in some way constrains or shapes free will. I might not consider hitting my wife, but jam a needle in my brain and I might choose just that. And I will probably think it is my own free choice.
SSCReader
14d ago
Or perhaps more generally, what makes you think they're even capable of rationally evaluating fears in the first place
Exactly. People aren't generally rational, especially about their fears. And especially not people who have been shown not to be rational about their fears. So condeming them for not rationally comparing fears and thus saying they are operating in bad faith is just double dipping.
Fighting climate change and nuclear catastrophe are not about improving lives. They are about stopping them getting worse (or ending entirely!). Teslas are nice..but they are still (in my view) inferior to a similary luxurious petrol car. If climate change is a real problem, then the deal may be tackling it at a cost. Lives may not get better. It entirely depends on how bad it will be and what the cost would be. Maybe we would have to spend 10% of world GDP on some huge geo-engineering project INSTEAD of making peoples lives better in the short term.
Now, are people hypocrites? Do they struggle to make the sacrifices their principles tell them they should? Do they fail to rationally compare their dislike of Musk to whether his cars help their ideals? Yes to all of those. So it goes.
SSCReader
16d ago
I don't see any external enemies around right now and life is generally better than it's ever been,
Which suggests that in a climate without external threats safetyism does lead to (or contributes to) life being better than it has ever been? If there is no-one to compete against then your people don't need to be taking calculated risks (which will presumably lead to greater levels of injury/death).
In other words you only need to pull the goalie when you are losing. If you are winning, play safe.
SSCReader
28d ago
Why would you expect trans activists to do better than an organization dedicated to serving the highest moral agent?
Like you say, its the normal tribal reaction to your own side doing something wrong.
Which means it doesn't really tell you anything about the merits of the group using it. Presumably you think the Catholic church is more right than the trans movement, but if they both fell into the same trap (and I agree it is a bad look!) then using it as a weapon just looks like you are holding the side you don't like to standards your own side could not live up to.
SSCReader
29d ago
8 months for a t shirt?
And note Rowlings comments are bring said not to contravene the law, so it may be narrower than you think.
SSCReader
29d ago
This is counter-signalling. He knows defending them makes him look like he is on the other side (and so his arguments will be reflexively ignored), so he must counter that signal by also making sure to point how how much he doesn't like them.
SSCReader
6d ago
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"?
You probably could, simply say someone who has that addictive desire yeah. I was just editing your example definition, to point out, that there was a potential exit, in that I could be wrong so that someone who once was an addict and no longer has that desire I would consider no longer an addict. For addiction you can't generally know if you will be an addict until you have experienced it, whereas a pedophile can (and usually will) have those desires before they ever abuse a child. A pedophile who never abuses a child is still a pedophile, but there is no such thing as a cocaine addict who has never tried cocaine because the experience of what it does to you and how it makes you feel is part of developing the addiction.
My point is the zeitgeist already was that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, I am in my 50's and that is certainly what we were taught about addiction when I was a kid. "Not even once!" Whereas current doctors (like self_made_human) seem to think addicts CAN become not addicted to drugs. So is there some kind of "new science" and does it run the direction you think it does?
My experience would say the opposite, that we USED to believe addicts can't be cured and now we are beginning to believe they can. Which could mean that there never was a really settled zeitgeist in the first place, for things to move on from. And therefore politicians and activists can simply use the version that best supports whatever position they are trying to argue in the moment (or more charitably that whatever belief they have is WHY they are taking the position they are taking).
SSCReader
6d ago
Like surgical removal? Freezing them in hypersleep? Harvesting them for Royal jelly?
I like an Aliens reference as much as the next guy but having an alien parasite that bursts from you and always having to worry about relapsing even if clean for say 5 years don't see all that similar personally.
SSCReader
8d ago
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine.
I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.
To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.
Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.
Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.
Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.
SSCReader
13d ago
/* Don't @me, you know it's a safe assumption on this issue!
I'm confused because the answer to your question seems to be no, it did not take urban liberal Jewish lawyers to deploy it, because the lawyer in question seems to be a Catholic black latina? Whom you quoted. You don't need to make an assumption at all!
Is this new science though? The old saw is once an addict always an addict and I've heard that for decades. That alcoholism and drug addiction have no cure just treatment to stay clean.
Saying addicts need treatment is not the same thing as claiming that treatment is a total and peemanent cure. Don't confuse what the science says with what politicians or the media say the science says.
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