WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Humans like harming the outgroup, and are very good at rationalization.
That they are. But mark the difference. Clean assassinations targeting Bad People(TM) is what people are openly in favor of. "Vicious terrorist murder" like Oct 7 will certainly be rationalized away or swept under the rug completely - but it's not openly endorsed.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Sure. I was just making the admittedly slightly pedantic point that the phrase "fake asylum claimant" is misleading and I hate it and it needs to die. Anyone claiming asylum is - by definition - a real asylum claimant, whether or not they actually deserve to have their claim recognized. They might very well be a spurious asylum claimant, but a spurious asylum claimant is still a real asylum claimant, in the same way that in a spurious lawsuit, a spurious plaintiff is still a plaintiff.
A "fake asylum claimant" properly defined would be someone who, say, faked paperwork about having recognized asylum-seeker status without actually submitting a request to the government. That kind of fraud might exist, for all I know. But it's not the same thing.
(Does this matter? I think so. A fake asylum claimant, in the proper sense of the phrase, would be willfully committing fraud. In contrast, many an asylum-seeker whose request should be turned down might, nonetheless, be acting in good faith; we can tell them no without lumping them in with the actual criminals. A toy example would be a guy suffering from pathological paranoia, who sincerely but irrationally thinks there are people after him. A serious example would be the scores of claimants who correctly believed their case met the criteria which have applied in recent years. It's not their fault our recent standards have been bullshit, and even if we start turning them away now, we shouldn't treat them like fraudsters.)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
You've misread me. I said, if they had the power to nuke America with impunity. This isn't about nukes qua nukes. My point is simpler than that. When Side A ideally wants me to pay all its bills, and Side B ideally wants my entire civilization blown to atoms, I know who I'm siding with. "They're both crap and I don't care if they all kill each other" doesn't cut it, it's apples to oranges. Israel is an ordinary foreign nation acting out of ordinary self-interest, Hamas is representative of a festering ideological blight on humanity.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Maybe they will. I don't think the SCOTUS decision prevents them from doing that.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Upvoting not just for the very sensible analysis but for "deal with the elderly in a more permanent fashion".
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
I don't endorse it, but decapitation strikes against specific people in power seem like a different thing from "vicious terrorist murder". Mangione would have a lot fewer supporters if he'd disemboweled the CEO's entire family as opposed to 'just' killing the specific guy. Fantasies about assassinating Trump are even further from "terrorism" - they stem from a belief that Trump is uniquely bad and killing him, specifically, will save the country. It's not about terror tactics to frighten off the rest of the outgroup.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Israel would not be interested in nuking America and Western Europe even if it had the power to do so with impunity. Hamas absolutely would. That's reason enough to support one over the other even if you take a very negative view of the Israel/US relationship. Better the obnoxious moocher than the psychotic murderer who hates your guts. Like, obviously. It's not even a question.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Debating nihilists is always a fool's game, but call me a fool…
If you define "good" as "effective at achieving collective aims", that just passes the buck. What is it that defines those aims? What is it that we collectively want that democracy used to be good at achieving? Survival, yes. Hedonistic self-interest, to a point. But humans aren't single-minded selfish pigs, any more than they're perfect selfless angels. Humans have conscience. Secure immediate survival and comfort for a group of people, they'll want to use whatever power and wealth they have left to change the world in ways that they think are 'right' even though they won't affect them personally. Whether that's charitable left-coded "help the needy" stuff, or punitive right-coded "go after sinners and stop them from sinning" stuff. We call this morality.
It's maybe harder to justify the idea that there is a single objectively-correct morality that all those people are groping towards from different directions. But ignoring morality as a powerful force in human affairs, albeit a changeable, relative morality, is just closing yourself off to a major aspect of the human experience, forcing you to make up bullshit just-so stories to explain behavior that's obviously morally motivated. Even Nietzsche didn't go that far - the whole point of his theory is that there is such a thing as "slave morality" that has massive (negative) weight, something that is anything but a convenient name given to what people would be motivated to do by self-interest regardless (because in fact, for good or ill, it causes people to act against their true self-interest).
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
How does one define a "fake asylum claimant"? Looks to me like anyone claiming asylum is, by definition, a real asylum claimant. Whether the US chooses to grant them the asylum they claim, and what criteria it bases its decision on, is its own business.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Seems entirely believable that men are more willing than women to suck it up and do a "gross" job even if it has gotten much less taxing in terms of sheer physical effort. I expect there's more male sewage inspectors than female, too, even if there's no lifting involved whatsoever.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
(Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B
Were the people who started the movement aware of this? I have to think anyone getting such a ball rolling is angling for higher salaries for the plaintiffs in the long term. Seems weird to bother otherwise. Why aren't the women going on strike too, and demanding to be paid as much as the men were before?
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Unless it is used to mean the opposite of "regardless", as it clearly should?
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Could be an exact-words thing. The informant is anonymous and his exact words haven't been made public. Therefore the U.S. government has not produced the evidence, though it claims to possess it.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
In this case, it's not so much "the next town over" as it is "home"
Okay, so let's say he dumped me back in my home town. But I left all my stuff at his place before he deported me and, since I intended to stay in town for the night, I had dinner reservations in the morning. No matter how you slice it, being unexpectedly moved across borders at short notice is a serious inconvenience at best, and the government ought to make it up to people if it forces it upon them by mistake.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
(e.g. the neighbor house party should be a strict invite only event, and you only got into it because you literally snuck through the window)
This comment-thread is about how to treat non-citizens who were legally on US soil and are then mistakenly deported. Which may or may not describe this particular guy, but we'd moved beyond talking about him in particular.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
I will reiterate: why doesn't he request assistance from his home country where he actually has citizenship?
Because it's the US who wronged him and have a responsibility to make it up to him.
I'm NOT certain if it then follows that they can demand that the U.S. return them back to U.S. soil.
Why not? If they were allowed to be in the US, and the US expels them erroneously, surely it's not fair to them to ask them to front the cost of the trip back, which they wouldn't have needed if not for the government screw-up.
Suppose I'm at a neighbor's house party. The guy gets drunk, mistakes me for a personal enemy of his who snuck in uninvited, punches my lights out, then drives me to the next town over and drops me off at a bus stop before I come to. Once he sobers up and realizes, I think he owes me more than an apology over the phone and invitation to come back over if I want. I think he definitely owes me bus fare at least, and probably some extra compensation for my trouble. I've got no absolute right to be at his house whenever I want, but that's not the point!
There's no such thing as "razing" an institution in a democracy that swings back and forth. Anything one party can slash by executive order, the other party can resurrect by executive order. It's either an actual bloody coup, or you accept that the best you're going to get is slowing down the other side's reconstruction when they're voted back in. Stopping it altogether is a fool's errand. With that in mind, I think appointments would be 'stickier', on top of being more pro-social.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
The point of my thought experiment was to demonstrate that in principle there can be cases where it's correct for a humanities teacher to mark down a student based on the positions they hold, and not just the quality of the argument. I'm not convinced that "any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar". Perhaps bringing HBD into it confused the issue - suppose a student handed in a paper arguing that the pyramids were built by Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta. Wouldn't that be pretty analogous to the flat-earther geology student? Wouldn't you want a serious history teacher to mark down the paper relative to an equally-eloquent one that presented a basically sane theory of the pyramids' origin?
Right, if the history teacher is assuming this to be true, in good faith, that speaks to a truly horrific level of incompetence and bias by the history teacher, in terms of epistemic certainty about history or sociology or the humanities in general.
This is probably the crux of our differing views on the history-teacher thought experiment. The way I see it, for better or for worse, "HBD is noxious pseudoscience on par with flat-Earth and ancient aliens" has been successfully taught to a vast majority of the population. That is, in fact, what HBD advocates complain about. So long as it's the case, it's not a random humanities teacher's responsibility to buck against that. We can't expect him to know that all mainstream geneticists in the country are participating in a vast conspiracy to suppress a genuine controversy, any more than it's his job to guess whether NASA is faking space imagery of the round Earth. If there is blame to be assigned, it goes to the architects of the conspiracy, not to people in unrelated fields who go by the mainstream scientific consensus. And if you go by the mainstream scientific consensus, then "racism explains Africa's subpar development" is trivially false and dangerous misinformation, in the same way as "the Earth is flat".
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Ah, all fair then. I think we're basically on the same page.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
I agree! See "while I understand how they got there, I would like them to get rid of it and revert to a principled stance". I have more common ground with the pro- than anti-trans movement at the end of the day, but I am very happy to criticize the current Standard Trans Message, which has been optimized for winning PR battles, not for truth.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.
In Thought Experiment Land, sure. But in the real world, it would be clear that the student had started from the bonkers conclusion and worked backwards, and I would want the teacher to mark him down, both to make it very clear to him that the claim is nonsense he should un-learn ASAP, and to teach him that you shouldn't assume the conclusion in the first place, let alone a crazy one.
In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat"
That's a fair point. But to the extent it holds, to the extent that homophobia or racism are moral issues and therefore different magisteria from science - then students shouldn't be "arguing in favor of" them either - any more than teachers should be looking for the converse.
So when you wrote "arguments in favor of homophobia or racism" I assumed you meant answers to questions of fact where some claims are designated as racist or homophobic - "claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it,", as you say. "Why is Europe more successful than Africa" is a valid historical question, for example, but one for which some factual answers would be deemed racist - eg "because blacks are genetically dumber and more violent than caucasians".
(You might, of course, believe there is something to that, as a question of fact. But assuming we take the opposite to be definitive, demonstrated scientific fact on par with "the Earth is round" - or, simply, assuming the history teacher believes it to be so in good faith - then it doesn't seem to be wrong on the history teacher's part to mark down an essay which takes it to be true, no matter how eloquent it is.)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?
This was construed as supporting a murderous racist, not just a pro-guns position.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.
Not black and white. But black and grey.
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