Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Why do we eat meat? Because we like meat. That we like it is justification enough, because humanity alone is the arbiter of right and wrong.
Why use 'we' here? Humanity is divided on this issue or else there would not be a debate. If you want to say 'meat eaters alone are the arbiters of right and wrong' that would be more precise and would sound pretty cool, but I'm not sure it settles anything.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
Okay, so it's theoretically possible for this to not poison the well or destroy the myth/hero which forms part of the identity the person you're talking to, now what?
I don't need to argue that it's theoretically possible to avoid destroying the myth, just that destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions.
if the point was to discuss their "still" worthwhile ideas, why didn't the discussion start there? because the destruction and poisoning the well is the point of this sort of comment
The mythology itself can be an obstacle to discussing someone's ideas. "I'm a follower of Jefferson because he was a great man" is no foundation, "I believe in the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence" is more substantial even if you admit the moral failings of the author.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
instead of faffing around on a child's toy?
Is this a jab at the Europeans who cycle to work?
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
Even in very walkable cities, walking just takes forever.
Walkable usually goes hand in hand with cyclable no? At least in Europe this is the case. 15 minutes on a bike covers quite a lot of useful area if you're living near the city centre, even when I lived in what was considered an isolated outer suburb in an Irish city it took 20 minutes on a bike to make it into the city centre.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
How it works in Europe is that vans and small trucks are allowed in in the early mornings to restock shops and then the road is pedestrianised during business hours.
A van can traverse a cobblestone path if it's wide enough, you don't need a proper road which such a small amount of vehicular traffic.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
You can get rhyming translations that try to maintain the spirit of the poem while making it amenable to English ears.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
and they follow American politics to the exclusion of their own.
While I agree that American politics often spills into Europe (see the BLM and Women's marches), I think this is taking it too far. People in Europe are invested in the really big changes in America (e.g presidential elections or important supreme court cases) and to some extent the gossip and scandal surrounding individual politicians (though I could say the same for the Royal Family).
They neither know much of nor care about anything smaller than that, even if objectively the goings on in a state of tens of millions are as important as the goings on of a European country, but the smallest details of domestic scandals are regularly found on the front page of European newspapers. I've been living in France for the past few months, in April even if you avoided every newspaper and TV station you'd still hear about Macron's pension reforms from the man on the street.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
So from the perspective of you, as an individual, do you inherit both the benefits of an advanced civilization AND the penalties of a history of oppression? How does that balance out in terms of what you're 'owed' in the present?
Thinking more on this it's clear that evaluating how things 'balance out' has a utilitarian presumption behind it, whereas I think the most plausible case for treating historical grievances with importance takes a more traditional view of specific 'crimes' commited which demand redress (greivances based on systemic inequalities where there's no obvious unjust act are a more recent innovation). So, as would be the case with any crime, you demand redress for the specific wrongs done and ignore the question of whether you'd be better or worse off in the counterfactual. Breaking into someone's house is still breaking into someone's house even if you leave a bag of money in their living room.
The most straightforward cases of this in history are the demanding of an official apology, the return of titles, legal rights, or land. The discourse of monetary reparations already veers too far into the murky waters of utilitarian calculations to be workable in my opinion.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
The proposal itself is odd. Why allow taxis to pass freely? How are they better than private cars?
Most cars are occupied only by the driver, a taxi has a big incentive to carry more than one person. If the goal is efficient use of road space then taxis are preferable.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
The purpose of getting someone to admit their hero/myth is flawed is because you're trying to signal to others WARNING: HERETIC and poison the well. If it didn't affect the idea, a person wouldn't lead off a discussion with "this guy is a racist, though, right?"
I'll grant that this is often a reason. I do think we have other genuine reasons of it not being an attempt to poison the well, I've brought it up before but philosophy professors will often start their attempt to impress the value of a thinker upon their students by admitting all the terrible and crazy things about them history has revealed.
When it comes to an adversarial discussion, you might be poisoning the well by referring to a thinker's past crimes, you might also just be seeing if your interlocutor holds any insane beliefs resulting from hero worship or ideological blindness. Ideally they come out of it having established their credibility as someone who will admit fault when he sees it but still give praise when he thinks it's due.
Depending where the debate is on the scale of rap battle to Oxford debate you might be able to trust the audience to make distinctions here.
A man being a great man is the best foundation to follow him or be a follower. I sincerely do not understand what would be a better reason. Without men, ideas are irrelevant.
A better reason would be that you follow his ideas because they work no? There are lots of great men of history that would be hard to follow in any political sense because their ideas are either inapplicable in the modern day or obviously terrible. Jefferson is remembered because the constitution he helped design worked well enough that we still consider his political thoughts relevant (in more than a purely historical sense).
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
Here's a hard bullet to bite: perhaps things don't usually get better.
I haven't actually said they will get better. Dropping out of adult life has a cost, someone might have squandered most of their opportunity by the time they decide to change. My point was just that the addictions we associate with 'checking out' come first (whether or not they're causative).
If you wind up reaching an adult height of only 5'1" and realize that you don't have what it takes to become a billionaire, you're going to be making some frankly rather nasty compromises if you want a partner.
There are guys who are 5'1" and there are guys who are so ugly they are hard to look at, but even amongst guys who don't have romantic success or were bullied in highschool, these people are the minority. Even amongst the cohort of sexless young men they are the exceptions.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
I don't disagree in general though I'd say that some people don't ever acclimatise, or else it happens as a result of strong social pressure that allows them to rationalise the decision (I'm in my 30s and need to find a wife/husband before I get old!).
Some of my friends and I have had some long dry spells before we found women who we were really attracted to, of course there's social pressure against introducing an ugly partner to your friends so maybe that was in play too.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
I've only read the first chapter but I just bought No More Manifestos by Eisel Mazard based on what I've seen from his Youtube channel.
On paper he should be very off-putting to me: a committed vegan and atheist who argues that the American continent is built on genocide and it all needs to be rebuilt from the ground up on Greek democratic principles, with an often dramatic presentation in his Youtube videos that can come off as cringey. But the positives are too intriguing for me to not want to read this book (and even buy it a second time after I lost the first copy):
(i) Very well read in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
(ii) A degree of commitment to his political goals and personal asceticism which gives him the motivation to learn dying languages and live in 3rd world conditions to really see the inscriptions on the temples in Laos and Cambodia and really talk to the monks that live in them instead of having a substandard education in a university.
(iii) A degree of skepticism that allows him to reject the modern study of Buddhism as being full of frauds and religious partisans after sinking so much into it himself, reject his hardcore communist upbringing and become a harsh critic of that ideology, and criticise the vegan movement as practised despite agreeing with its goals.
This skepticism also makes placing him into a leftist box a very poor model for predicting what he is going to say next: very pro gay-rights: very opposed to trans surgery, very atheist: acknowledges that religious people are some of the closest to himself in adhering to strict standards of personal behaviour and doing the practical humanitarian work which he sees as so important, very sympathetic to American blacks and natives: harsh critic of BLM as a movement and charity.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
If I'm understanding you right you're arguing for race based admissions on the basis of efficiency. My counterargument is that efficiency isn't that an important factor if something is cheap in the first place, and so to answer your question this leads to the claim that it's unfair and unwise to exclude otherwise qualified people for the sake of saving some small amount of time and money when they would likely contribute much more to the country than that initial cost.
You're cutting costs when you streamline the immigration process, but you're also getting fewer quality migrants as a result (and there might be a separate argument for this being a good thing! But I don't think it'll hinge on the efficiency of the immigration process).
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.
It might be more efficient, but is the thing you're improving efficiency on really that much of a constraint in the first place?
Like it would take X amount of time for 100 immigration officials to thoroughly sift through 1000 applications. You're suggesting we save those 100 people a lot of time by implementing a race based admissions system, why not just double or triple the amount of immigration officials? It's not like they're a big item in any country's budget.
I don't think protecting safety precludes protecting freedom. We cage people for coercing others i.e unjustly limiting their freedom, even in cases where the victim's life or health hasn't been injured. You could say coercion implies the threat of violence and so this is really about safety but the concepts have melded together at that point. You've also got cases like blackmail where you're unjustly constraining people's choices without the threat of violence.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I'm not a vegan but there does seem to be a moral difference between killing something intentionally and it being an unavoidable aspect (even if it can be improved upon) of staying alive.
Certain hunter-gatherer groups might satisfy the latter when killing animals but for the rest of us eating meat is a matter of convenience and pleasure.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
My interpretation is that he's saying the solution to all this crime has nothing to do with public transport. His take on why the crime is happening is a bit simplistic, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with offering solutions that rely on upstream problems already being solved by someone else i.e "given that you guys can sort out your massive crime problem, I'm going to talk about all the cool things you can do".
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
If data comes about that demonstrates I'm wrong, then that's a learning experience, not a choice to change my view.
You can also ignore the data and remain committed to your view despite the evidence. I'm not sure if that's a 'choice' in some philosophical sense but there is more than one way this can go.
What proportion of modern day Asian Americans are descended from the stock that lived under these laws and what proportion came after?
Wikipedia tells me that immigration picked up a lot after 1965, and pew research shows a population of only 980,000 in 1960 compared to 3.5 million in 1980, and 12 million in 2000, but I'm not American so I may be missing something obvious.
If the argument is that historical discrimination creates damaged cultures within certain races, the seemingly contradictory good behaviour of people of the same race who came after the discrimination ended isn't a refutation.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
The only way for the world to function is for society to assume parents have their biological children's best interests at heart, which they do 99% of the time.
I don't think society functions any less well when we admit that parents can get it wrong out of stupidity, laziness, pressure to conformity, or more serious issues. Parents have their kids' best interest at heart.. and yet there are a lot of fat kids.
I don't know why Europe industrialised while China didn't, the latter are in the same boat as other more warlike peoples for failing to do so.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I think in that case it's more a matter of moral motivation than moral clarity. Disputing what is good vs knowing the good but failing to act on it.
Christians don't kid themselves here and readily admit that they are flawed relative to what God demands of them, the rest of us might at least take the lesson that the path to the good life may not ever intersect the path of least resistance.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I don't think that personal aesthetics become morals just through multiplication. Whether it's one person or many, you need more than a head count to substantiate a moral claim.
Possibly the most popular right wing thinker today, Jordan Peterson, advocates a meat only elimination diet for health reasons.
If pickiness about food hasn't been a thing amongst conservatives until lately, I'm sure lots and lots of them are thinking about it now.
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