WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
but if he didn't do it then what's all the excitement about?
If he didn't do it and there's a sinister government plot to frame him, this makes the initial murder out to seem like a much more successful and thus appealing form of rebellion. Not only is the real culprit still at large (so cheer up, kids, if you want to give it a try, you might get away with it!), but if The Man was this determined to close the case by hook or crook, to the point of fabricating evidence against an innocent, then it shows that they're running scared.
ack people just disproportionally appear in advertisements because... They just do! It's not as if there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing 'white prejudice' through mass propaganda. That would be insane.
What planet are you living on? Affirmative Action and the pro-#representation woke block are in no way trying to hide their agenda. Landmark casting of a black Star Wars lead or whatever are inevitably cause for grand celebrations, and the political ramifications and academic justifications are outspokenly praised by the media! The politically-correct "box-ticking" phenomenon is many things, but it is not some secretive conspiracy that the Elders of Zion are gambling the public literally won't notice. Except for the word "Jewish", the overwhelming majority of the online left would happily endorse your second sentence!
(As for the Jewish angle, I think you're committing the usual anti-Semite's magic trick of blurring the distinction between "ideologies invented by people who happened to be ethnically Jewish" and "ideologies deliberately crafted to benefit the Jews as a community". The idea that Freud was playing 5D chess to undermine other races at the behest of his own is farcical if you've ever read any of his writing. He was plainly just an ordinary crank who thought he'd figured out the truth about human psychology. HBD itself, whose suppression you claim is some wicked Jewish plot, would predict that there would be a high percentage of Jewish individuals in the intellectual classes in any era, so it's not surprising that a high percentage of ideologies we inherited from 20th century intellectuals would have Jews in their family tree; you do not need to posit a secret coordinated plot to explain this observation.)
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Huh. I stand corrected. I remain puzzled by his behavior, unless there was some sort of crowd serving as the audience in the moment.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
He wasn't filming anything.
…Wasn't he (knowingly) being filmed? I thought he must be from the moment I read the summary; I can't really make sense of his behavior and incentives otherwise. Perhaps I'm too Internet-brained. Where's the still that illustrates the article from, if it's not a screenshot from a video?
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
That may well be the case. But as I said upthread, I would have had no issue if Steele had been going after a Muslim preacher. What I find outrageous about this anecdote is that he picked, as his target, a woman doing volunteer work to fight Muslim domestic abuse - which is to say, a woman doing what she can in the direction of liberalization! Did she still identify as a Muslim? Possibly. If so, does this reflect genuine faith, or simply very reasonable fear of the social consequences of becoming an apostate? Unknowable. But either way, such a woman should be an ally, not an enemy, to someone earnestly trying to deal with Muslim-associated customs' negative impact on society.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Well, yes. Just because I am very progressive for this website on a number of issues does not mean I am an automaton repeating the maximally woke point of view on every issue, and the dangers of Islamism, and illiberal customs perpetuated by Muslim communities more broadly, are among the things I take very seriously that the current progressive bloc is very bad at seeing for the massive problems they really are.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Not in a private discussion. Where you disrupt a stranger's activities in public and put a gotcha to them to engineer a viral moment, yes, it is bullying.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior. He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head. I think that's plenty offensive enough to make the man a deeply unsympathetic victim of unjust laws, even if the laws are unjust. It's not about what he believes, it's about his actions.
And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse, i.e. the exact societal problem his stupid little stunt was intended to highlight. At the point when point-scoring for point-scoring's sake comes at the direct expense of actual furthering of the goals that points are nominally being scored for, I think you can start to talk about derangement.
I object to the characterization of what I advocated as "assault" - perhaps my reaching for the image of a slap was needlessly confusing. I refer to a slap of the old-fashioned kind that women could once give to men who behaved like cads - not as an act of violence intended to cause physical harm, but as the strongest available signal of public disapproval. Feel free to substitute your preferred kind of public finger-pointing to shame people who behave in horrid but non-illegal ways. Personally, so long as it is understood that the purpose of such a slap is not actually to knock anyone down, I rather wish we brought it back; I mean it very differently from the "punch Nazis" meme, for which I now realize it could easily have been confused. But that's a whole other conversation and not relevant here, so again, perhaps I shouldn't have gone there.
I also object, and more strongly, with continuing to characterize what Steele said as "asking someone a question", as if he had just asked for directions to the post office. He did not "ask the woman a question" in the sense of genuinely seeking information from her. What he did was either intended as a gotcha, or as intimidation - in other words it was bullying. Moreover, as I said, had she been incautious in her answer, it may have goaded her into a response that jeopardized her volunteer work, or even put her safety at risk - which Steele knew perfectly well. Now again. I do not believe that what Steele did should be a crime, any more than I think high school bullies should be clapped in irons unless they get too physical. But it was, to my way of thinking, incontestably bad behavior, and over-criminalization of bullying is not the same thing as criminalizing the earnest expression of political or religious opinions, let alone the criminalization of "asking polite questions".
A lot of these are genuinely shameful, and I'm not about to argue that the following one should actually be illegal, but this:
A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.
strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume @dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim. The linked article describing Steele's behavior as "polite questions" is ridiculous. In the first place, this was clearly a stunt, not some good-faith attempt to have an unprompted theological discussion with a stranger, as that blurb implies.
But more importantly, it was a mean-spirited and counter-productive stunt. If you're actually concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse in Muslim households, a woman currently engaged in an outreach effort whose whole purpose is to acknowledge and deal with the problem - and a volunteer, mind you, not a professional NGO grifter! - is the last person you should antagonize for the sake of drawing attention to yourself. If you've got balls, ask a Muslim preacher. At a push, ask a random woman in a niqab. But for fuck's sake, when someone actually tries to do something about the exact thing you're complaining about, don't put her on the spot in public in such a way that she must either obfuscate and come across as a hypocrite, or own up to an actively anti-Muslim stance. (Never mind that the latter might put her at genuine personal risk: it would instantly destroy her credibility with the very abused women from fundamentalist households that she's trying to coax into trusting her!)
So - Steele's stunt was stupid, cruel, and cowardly behavior. In a common-sense world the appropriate response would be a slap across the face that no one sensible would think of prosecuting as physical assault, but of course, in the age of TikTok ragebait, giving him "minority punches preacher who was just asking questions" as his claim to fame would just be giving him what he was after by other means. Is suing him in a court of law an appropriate substitute? No. But I sympathize enormously with the desire to punish this kind of heel behavior in some way and wipe that smug grin off the guy's face. As it stands, he wasn't charged with anything, just briefly detained, and I think that's probably a fitting level of inconvenience for the offense, societally speaking, though I wish it didn't have go through the justice system.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
In general the mainstream christian views on science don't believe that god has a personal involvement in reproduction. They believe that god created life with intelligent design, but biology, chromosomes, eggs and sperm ... heck even natural selection and evolution are all real phenomenon that stem from god's original design.
That's true where the fleshy aspect of sexuality is concerned, but when we start talking about desires and personality, I do suspect a plurality of mainstream Christians are mind-body dualists of one sort of another, and would balk at the idea that love and desires are purely a matter of physical chemicals sloshing around in a physical brain, albeit a brain intelligent-designed by God. They'd say that this stuff happens in the Soul, which is Mysterious.
(I don't say this to score cheap shots or boo-outgroup. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Hard, dualism is a perfectly respectable position with or without theism, even if it's not mine.)
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I think most people draw a difference between organized killing in war, and murder. Mark that I repeatedly said "murder", except when directly quoting the Sixth Commandment - not "killing".
This is not simple disagreement here. I'd expect something like the redditor response to John McCain's death in that case, where they acknowledged that they disagreed with him entirely, but still really respected him and are sad that he is dead.
The "still really respected him" part seems off. I'm not talking about "simple disagreement"! Sometimes you really do just think a guy sucks. That's fine! That's nothing new! Most folks have people they hate to some degree - and I'd say even more have people they have zero respect for even if they don't actively hate them. That doesn't mean they all support wanton murder. Having nothing nice to say about someone (beyond "he was a human being and as such had a certain inalienable dignity" which is so general as to be meaningless) is perfectly normal, and we shouldn't normalize asking people to lie about this in the event of something unfortunate befalling that someone, on pain of being assumed to be pro-murder. That's just a demand for large-scale hypocrisy.
(Which is precisely how I've always felt about mealy-mouthed statements eulogizing people you were calling anti-American mass-murdering fascist commie crooks ten years ago, to rapturous applause from your base, as having somehow been great respectable statesmen all along Even If You Had Your Disagreements™. If Trump says something nice and respectable about Biden when Biden croaks, I will not believe he means a word of it, but that doesn't mean I think Trump wants Biden killed.)
Though again, I can get behind the idea that if you have nothing nice to say, you should simply say nothing.
then yes, you do actually need to say why murdering is bad, because you just encouraged your friends to murder someone.
But again, what if they genuinely do just believe murder is bad in and of itself, for no more elaborate reasons than feeling "Thou shalt not kill" is carved upon their conscience in letters of gold that no circumstances can alter? What do you expect someone like that to say?
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
The average redditor will say everything nasty that's possible about him, they'll say that he was hateful and said disgusting things on a regular basis, that he made the country worse, that his words were violence against people, that he increased the amount of people ready to commit violence against minorities, that he needed to shut up and get off the campus, that the world is now better because he is dead. But to make it better, they'll say that murder is wrong, so they disagreed with his murder. Well, redditor, you did not convince me at all. You gave me several absolutely fantastic reasons to kill people like Charlie Kirk, but just one really weak reason to not do it (because murder is bad) for reasons that you didn't list out. Do you really believe that murder is bad? Why?
I wouldn't call a fundamental axiom of morality, indeed, one that has been regarded by the Abrahamic faiths as an explicit divine commandment for over three thousand years, a weak reason. And the tacked-on "Why?" at the end seems particularly odd to me - most people's reply to "why is murder wrong?" will be a confused "it just is"; they don't hold murder to be bad for instrumental reasons, but to be inherently unethical. For a majority of Westerners, that is the most important reason not to kill someone, and it is self-sufficient. "Why is murder wrong?" cashes out as "Why is badness bad?".
More broadly, what do you expect someone who disagreed totally about Kirk's politics to say, here? Do you really expect each comment to go on a lengthy digression about the underpinnings of moral philosophy? I can entertain the idea that in such a case (ie "a man you consider horribly evil has been murdered, but you genuinely don't want to come across as supporting murder"), the most decorous, moral thing to do is simply to keep silent and not opine on the event at all. But by definition, left-wing redditors who take that high road are not going to show up in the comment threads you describe. This leaves only the ones who feel compelled to speak at all, and I don't think you can fairly or realistically expect them to say anything else than what they do.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Certainly I can see why someone would think that. Personally I believe that kindness is the overriding moral imperative governing human behavior; therefore insofar as laws serve to constrain and standardize human behavior, they should strive to be kind before anything else. The only thing that you should trade kindness against when designing laws, IMO, is the long-term survival of the legal system itself - which might apply to things like violent crime and even immigration, but surely not disability accommodations.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I actually used "kinder" as well as "better" specifically to be transparent about the fact that I consider kindness an inherently valuable quality for a law to possess, for moral reasons, separately from other ways in which a policy can be "good" for society (i.e. instrumentally). Because I wanted to avoid people saying I was begging the question by simply saying "better" and taking it for granted that kinder laws are better. I'm at a loss as to how else I could have communicated my point at this point.
Not really. My preferred policy would be for disabled people to get guaranteed allocations, which they get to keep even if they then choose to be proactive and get extra money from gainful employment (at which they would not get these kinds of accommodations). This is noticeably different from the accommodations which I believe should be provided to democratically-elected members of the government so as to allow disabled people an equal shot at shaping government policy. I have no doubt you disagree with this, but I don't think it's circular - both halves simply flow from the same underlying premise of "kindness is good".
Most of the judicial opinions that form the law of the land are written primarily not by judges in black robes but by anonymous clerks whose names are nowhere in the text. (…) To even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional.
I think there's an interesting tension here. If we're looking at the position of judicial clerk as just a menial job within a capitalist economy - there's stuff that needs doing, the market selects for the most efficient person willing to do them for what they're worth - then I get you. But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerks genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.
(Of course, some might argue the problem starts at "judicial legal clerks hired off the street have an outsized influence on the law of the land". Perhaps it would make more sense for anyone with that much power to be elected, or otherwise more clearly accountable to the public; we could then restrict these kinds of disability accommodations to the accountable elected public servants, without needing to provide them for the genuinely politically-irrelevant coffee-fetcher.)
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. (…)
I don't disagree with your analysis in terms of the current state of affairs, I'm just saying, this isn't a law of physics. Give them another hundred years, then what? Two hundred? Five hundred? It's not as though they have to independently invent nuclear weapons or anything, just stockpile. It just seems inescapably foolish to me to say "it's not ever going to be a problem to have a population of a billion who fervently believe it is their duty to wipe out the West from the planet for the glory of God even if they destroy themselves in the process". Maybe we'd better ignore them for the time being, but something's got to give eventually.
Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me,
I do not think this set of preferences is compatible with tolerating a religious movement which aspires to world domination and glorifies achieving that end through holy war. You may not be interested in what fundamentalists do in their own countries, but the fundamentalists in far-off countries are interested in you. Or, at any rate, will grow interested in you once they've secured their power-base at home.
Now, of course, in practical terms I'm no kind of Middle-East hawk. In the aggregate, interventionism in the Middle-East has proven counterproductive when it comes to curbing the threat of muslim extremism - infamously so. But in the truly long term, "let them sort themselves out" can only be a temporary solution - it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West. Barring that assumption, if we're letting them be for now, it can only be for one of two broad reasons:
- we hope that they'll organically become more liberal over time and the existential threat will peter out, à la USSR collapse;
- in the long term, we intend to get our ducks in a row and figure out an effective interventionist approach at some point before the jihadis get their ducks in a row and overwhelm the free world.
with #2 further subdividing into a comparatively peaceful "we'll figure out how to do secularization in a way that sticks" option and a maximally pessimistic "we'll crush them and salt the earth if it comes down to it" option. Plus an AGI-truther "we'll hit the Singularity before we need to worry about any of this" addendum, I guess.
But it cannot be because we should just reconcile ourselves to the existence of fundamentalist islamic theocracies for the truly long term, as an acceptable state of affairs for the planet Earth. That's just shaking hands with that nice Mr Hitler in 1938.
(Setting all this aside, I do have a basic moral objection to the existence of muslim theocracies qua muslim theocracies. But I think that's really neither here nor there. "Just close the borders to immigrants from muslim theocracies" remains a bad plan even if you value the welfare of Middle-Eastern women, homosexuals, Jews, Christians, etc. at exactly 0.)
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
I'm not sure if it's an assumption about what Iraqis wanted in 2003, so much as a claim that after a generation of two of being ruled by a secular US-propped government they'd learn to like it and the islamic death-cult would die out. Which other experiments eg Afghanistan have of course shown to be… optimistic at best. But it's something, and it's probably the best we've got if you don't want to despair of human nature.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
Its like a trolley problem where the only options are "hit this button to kill them more or less instantly, therefore minimizing suffering, or don't hit the button and they die anyway, but hours or days later, maybe in agonizing pain."
I'm inclined to argue for the second on ethical grounds, honestly! If they ask for a mercy-kill it's a different matter, but I'm skeptical of the humaneness of "putting people out of their misery" when they haven't asked for it. Maybe they'd rather spend their remaining hours praying, thinking back over their life, or whatever else suits their conscience. Certainly I'd want to be given the option if I was in their place.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?
I think there's two separate questions here. There's things rich people do because they're genuinely pleasant, but which overcrowding would ruin; and there's things rich people do purely as a status symbol because few people can afford them. I think the world genuinely gets better if no one is buying gratuitously expensive brands anymore, and people instead focus on buying clothes, accessories, etc. that they actually like for their own sake. Whereas it would genuinely be a shame if vacation spots became so popular that there was no way to enjoy mostly-empty nature anymore.
The problem with Biden's mental decline is that while him not remembering signing the order could mean that a staffer signed it for him, it could also mean that he forgot he'd signed it/didn't know what he was doing when he signed it. Which aren't good either, but are legally trickier to overturn if he hadn't been declared incompetent at the time.
I can understand both these positions, but I don't understand how you can hold them simultaneously. Either Ukraine's local culture is good and deserves better than to be subsumed by the standard Westernized global culture, or Ukraine is a shithole and adding it to the EU will further dilute European greatness in the same way as adding Turkey would have done; but I don't see how both can be true at the same time.
Though speaking of questionable dichotomies,
while I've had this thought before, I think a reasonable steelman is "Russia is collapsing but hasn't collapsed yet; we're still in the danger zone; that's why it's important to keep it quarantined long enough for it to completely fall apart". A wounded bear that hasn't stopped fighting yet is a dangerous thing.
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