WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.
Does it? "Not having a fundamental moral right infringed upon" is a kind of reward, surely. You may as well ask why a traditionalist sexual mores shouldn't simply shoot all transgressors without a trial. I'm sure a practical argument could be constructed on why such a policy would be detrimental to society along some tangible metric, but that's not why any sensible person will immediately reject such a proposal with horror: it's because they feel that killing people is, all else being equal, morally wrong. This isn't "concrete" and it "side-steps the risk-reward framework", but all the same, you can't have a real conversation about the issue without bringing it up.
In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want; and doubly wrong to force them to do things they don't want to do. Society naturally has to mandate a little bit of each to keep itself running, but that's a trade-off from the word go, and you should only add more restrictions and duties with the understanding that you are doing harm to your citizens with each new bylaw by infringing upon those basic rights, so the payoff had better be damn good. Traditional sexual norms include a fair bit of forcing women to do things they don't want to do, and positively enormous amounts of preventing people of both sexes from doing things they want to do. There's an enormous penalty in the "cons" column on that basis alone, and in a world where STDs and unwanted pregnancies are under control, the fuzzier benefits just don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of making up for it. It's like asking what kind of subtle improvement to demographic statistics would be worth mandating that people whack themselves in the knee with a hammer every morning.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
If you really believe that begging might save you, there is an argument for it, but otherwise, no, I can only despise the "morality" you advocate.
You expressed skepticism earlier that it would inflict guilt-ridden nightmares upon the executioners - but supposing it provably did, would your stance change? Or what if your death is to be witnessed by the public? If you think you're being unjustly put to death, it stands to reason you dislike the regime doing this to you, and want to use what little agency you have left to raise the odds that it'll be toppled or reformed. This is to say, it stands to reason that you want to make yourself a martyr. All else being equal, making as much of a stink as possible when they drag you to the gallows increases the odds of your death having consequences for your killers, whether it makes them second-guess themselves or drives public opinion against them.
Notably, this needn't take the form of whining and blubbering; you could also try and make an impression on the basis of fighting spirit, struggling and cursing your murderers until your last breath, to try and inspire others to show the same rebellious courage - even if you have ~0 odds of actually freeing yourself or injuring your captors. Much manlier, but also very different from "facing death with dignity".
I guess it depends on what kind of role you have the look of. e.g. if you're a nebbish-looking student protestor, or a woman, you'll probably make a more memorable martyr if the cameras capture you as a weeping victim slaughtered by merciless monsters. If you're a big strong guy, going out as a fiery revolutionary might be inspirational and make you look the bigger man, while a sobbing breakdown, rightly or wrongly, might indeed look pathetic.
(To be clear, none of this is about Hlynka's behavior, I'm just curious about the meta-argument.)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
If you want to achieve this in the real world, you need to lock some people up for the rest of their lives on those grounds alone, and I think letting them kill themselves might well kinder in some cases.
Holding out for a miracle cure is a gambit at the best of times, but still - I think "how likely is it that we'll have unprecedentedly effective antidepressants by, say, 2050" has to be considered. There is a difference between locking people up for life as the stated goal, and locking them up indefinitely until we help them better. If you think there's a decent chance of a cure being developed within the patient's lifespan, I think it's worth the chance.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
When they're canceling elections because the wrong candidate won, arresting opposition candidates, legally penalizing speech, and building government-run digital panopticons, the claims of "civilization-preserving" start looking more credible.
I find this difficult to believe, at least in the case of Western Europe. British police are rarely armed. The idea that, if UK citizens fought back against the censorship laws, the government could bring lethal force to bear against the unarmed crowd is… I mean, I just don't think it's in the Western European Overton window. It never gets as far as asking if the citizens could fight back.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
The threat of turning the place into Gaza is the deterrent.
Is it? I mean, sure, that's the steelman. It works. But is it actually the mainstream Red Tribe belief? I feel like most gun owners who cite the "safeguard against tyranny" argument think of it in terms of the Spirit of '76, not mutually-assured destruction. And I don't think support for one necessarily implies support for the other.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
And do you want to live in Gaza? "Guns would allow us to overthrow a tyrannical government and restore a real democracy with first-world living standards once the unrest is over" is a decent pitch. "Guns would allow us to survive indefinitely outside the tyrant's control as starving guerillas in a bombed-out wasteland", not so much.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
It may suggest foul play rather than coincidence, but that foul play could more parsimoniously be "his lawyers bribed guards to let him commit suicide like he wanted" or similar. Murder is only the obvious theory if we accept the premise that Epstein was a prolific pimp with dirt on a metric ton of people in high places, and that is what OP's post pretty successfully disputes.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
It depends on specifics, but in a lot of casting-couch cases I think the actress who's been offered the deal has a credible fear of retaliation if she says no - not just that she won't get the job, but that the spited producer will pull strings to get her blacklisted and ruin her career, leaving her much worse off than one who was never offered the deal in the first place. While you can still view giving in as the morally worse option, I think even an actress who gives in to that kind of ultimatum deserves a lot more sympathy than one who tries to sleep her way to a job of her own volition, with no expectation of actively negative consequences if she doesn't.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Homelessness, for example, remains a big problem, and it's typically worse in areas controlled by progressives doing so many things. Just this evening my wife did not want to use our nearby park to put the baby in a swing due to the homeless being all over the playground area (normally they're more broadly dispersed)
I can't help but notice that it sounds like your problem is "the homeless", more than "homelessness". Progressives, on the other hand, are trying to solve or alleviate "homelessness" - ie the problem experienced by the homeless where they, er, don't have homes. Keeping vagrants out of parks would solve the problem of "the homeless" from the perspective of more fortunate people who are inconvenienced by the presence of the homeless, but it wouldn't do shit to solve the problem of "homelessness" from the perspective of its actual victims, the homeless themselves. Indeed, it would make their lives fractionally worse than they already are, by further restricting their freedom of movement. Certainly if I was homeless it would make a big difference to my already-degraded quality-of-life and dignity whether I was allowed to hang out in pleasant green spaces or not.
Granted, seeing homeless people is by definition evidence that the problem of "homelessness" has not been successfully solved, so your anecdote isn't without value. But "the city (…) won't keep the drug-using vagrants away" is a non sequitur. Setting aside the continued existence of the vagrants, the city's willingness or lack thereof to keep them away from parks says nothing about how effective they are or aren't at solving the problem they're actually tackling, which is "there are human beings wasting away outdoors", not "well-fed well-housed people might sometimes have to set eyes upon the starving wretches, who are gross and scary", or even "sometimes well-fed well-housed people might be in legitimate physical danger if they get too close to concentrations of starving wretches". Improving the actual homeless people's lives is the outspoken priority of progressive authorities, and even if you disagree with that priority, you don't get to call them ineffective because they aren't very good at solving a completely different, if related problem that you think should be higher-priority.
(Another notable element is that the "drug-using" bit is the crux of the problem. For most of human history, it didn't use to go without saying that a bum is by definition a bug-eyed junkie who could at any time freak out and bite your nose off. The problem of "the homeless" is really an extreme case of the general societal problem of "drugs".)
Well, about donations, a deontologist might very well say "the correct choice for me today is to donate to the starving kids; if Hamas steal some of my donations tomorrow, that is their own evil act, exercising their own free will, they could have chosen to do otherwise and I do not bear the blame if they choose evil, however likely that is". So might a utilitarian who thinks about the very big picture, and thinks maintaining a global norm of "if any children are starving anywhere on the planet, the developed world will intervene; we Do Not Do famine anymore, we have outgrown it as a species, end-of-story" has better outcomes in the very long run than examining each particular famine and determining if there could be unintended harms from intervention - just as most utilitarians agree that in practice you have a moral duty to abide by any law of the land banning murder, instead of calculating the moral cost-benefits of killing someone for the greater good all by your lonesome, because the outcomes from everybody taking it upon themselves to decide who lives and who dies are inevitably a blood-soaked hellscape.
(Similarly, America might choose to stay out of the war for virtue-ethics reasons - "it sullies the soul to ally oneself with a side that would starve children to achieve their ends, even if the other guys are also horrible barbarians" - or maintaining-global-norms reasons - "banning war crimes in a genuinely effective way that disincentivizes committing them can only be achieved if we hold to precommitments about withholding aid to people who commit them, even if those people were historically our friends and we don't want the people they're currently fighting to win".)
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
It's coherent but you are invoking a moral truth, whereas I am discussing realpolitik
Perhaps you are, but I think talking about "human rights" in terms of realpolitik is a category error. I was originally springing off of 2D3D asking what entitled Palestinians to Israeli food. "Moral rights," I replied. Your jumping to say 'what are these human rights worth, if no state actually enforces them?' is the equivalent of bringing up gun ownership and effective self-defense in the context of a conversation about whether innocent people getting murdered is wrong.
What can that moral correctness without leverage really accomplish in the moment?
Even if it can't sway Israel (let alone Hamas), it can influences the choices of people on the sidelines ie the rest of the world. Whether we're talking about the big picture of "should America support Israel's war effort even though it results in starving children", or the small picture of "should I, personally, donate to that online fundraiser to send help to starving little Abdul".
Do those human rights exist if neither side chooses to enforce them?
Well, if you aren't a nihilist, yes. The morally correct course of action remains the morally correct course of action even if nobody implements it. Under most western ethical philosophy, the right thing is under no cosmic obligation to be easily achievable for people who are also trying to secure geopolitical goals. Sometimes doing the right thing for the needy means you risk your own comfort and safety, and that's just the way it is.
We instinctively understand this where individual life-or-death situations are involved, eg running into a burning building. But somehow when we're talking about whole populations, both sides of the conversation pretend that a case that XYZ is the right thing to do also needs to prove it's the advantageous thing to do. No. It's perfectly coherent to say "The right thing to do is to prevent children from starving. It might in fact result in losing the war, but it's the right thing to do anyway. A victory that can only be won by starving children to death through inaction would be morally bankrupt and is not worth pursuing."
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly.
Well, that's the question. Hamas would certainly attempt October 7 constantly. But "Oct 7 was a fluke caused by an unforced error in the Israeli defense strategy, Hamas did not have the capacity to achieve regular Oct 7-level attacks and Oct 7 itself could easily have failed if Israel had put in a bit more effort" is a reasonable claim.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food?
Well, human rights come to mind. Rather, they're the reason individual Palestinians are entitled to food generally, whatever it takes to get it to them - not Palestine as a political entity, and not Israeli food in particular.
I didn't mean that there was no wokeness in museums, just that the "memorials being forgotten about in renovations" thing doesn't necessarily/inherently seem like an effect of it. As per my anecdote, I've seen the same thing happen for no political reason at all, just because the bureaucrats who oversaw some alteration or other to a building or organization didn't care to preserve them in the switchover. (I do not say this to exonerate them. Frankly, all else being equal, the thoughtless lack of respect appalls me more than any deliberate attempt at damnatio memoriae. Actively wanting to destroy the legacy of your enemies is at least an understandable human emotion.)
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine)
I think this still counts as things happening to you "personally". A series of mishaps and disasters affected your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors, and this gave you a subjective sense that civilization was falling apart blah blah blah. @cjet79 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I parsed "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy" as very much including "my friends and relatives and neighbors have rarely if ever suffered life-ruining events of the kind you described as having affected your family, neighbors, etc.".
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
Rape is more sensitive, I guess.
Especially with regards to CSA, it definitely leads to a lack of clarity at times. If someone tells me "oh, Alice was abused as a child" it can be pretty tricky to decipher if they're telling me her parents used to beat her, or that she was groomed by a creepy uncle - even when I am actually intended to take the hint by the speaker (as distinct from them deliberately obscuring the facts to protect Alice's privacy).
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
I'd argue "passed away" is a more precise term than "died". "Passed away" means died peacefully. If I get a call that tells me my father passed away last night, I instantly parse it as: ah, he died in his sleep, guess age caught up with him at last. If the call instead tells me that my father died last night, I'm as likely to imagine that he had a car accident as anything else.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
I get the "marriage equality" thing, but honestly I'm fine with that term too -- if you believe gay marriage is meaningfully different from straight marriage, obviously you think it's unequal, and should be so legally,
Well, one sticking point is that it used to be a major conservative talking point on the topic of gay marriage that the word "marriage" means "a man and a woman getting hitched", exclusively, fundamentally; that so-called "gay marriage" is not marriage at all, and granting queers the use of that word even with a qualifier is already surrendering half the battle. Precisely analogous to the anti-trans contingent's reluctance to use a term like "trans woman".
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
Firstly, unless you're a complete nihilist, "black lives matter" is a true statement. So's "blue lives matter", and so's "all lives matter". The controversial ideological position behind BLM's name is the claim that white cops don't believe black lives matter and are consequently shooting innocent blacks left and right. Conservatives believe that this is baseless slander, that most cops value human lives as much as anyone without racial discrimination, and that the supposed spree of extrajudicial police killings is an illusion at best, a deliberate lie at worst. Nobody except a few mad edgelords disputes the literal meaning of the words "black lives matter". The implicit BLM claim of "black lives matter, and yet white cops are racist and don't believe that", meanwhile, is so contextual that simply saying the name "Black Lives Matter" does not, in any conceivable way, constitute parroting that claim out loud.
More salient, however, is the fact that while "black lives matter" is technically a "message" with a "direct plain meaning", the same can hardly be said of the words "george floyd". You are not endorsing any particular idea by mouthing or writing those syllables, except that there was a human being by that name involved in the event at issue, a truth-claim which I… hope you would not deny as a matter of objective fact.
That second bit is making it especially hard to take you seriously.
For what it's worth, speaking as one of the most left-wing people here: I found it very interesting, I believe you wrote it in good faith, and I have a lot of sympathy for you, so I'm glad you did go to the effort of writing it.
(Of course, it doesn't convince me. The impression I get is that the universe has played a cruel trick on you - that you've been tremendously unlucky over an extended period of time, Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers-style, and this has inevitably and understandably skewed your intuitions in a very deep way. If I had a chronic heart condition, and got "treated" by three or four of Scott's anecdotally-psychopathic cardiologists in a row through pure luck of the draw… yeah, I might wind up with a deep-seated intuition that there's got to be something to the inherent rottenness of the profession, no matter how eloquently people tried to talk me out of it. Confirmation bias giving undue salience in my eyes to the ordinary failings of ordinary cardiologists would do the rest.)
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
Reminds me very much of Scott's misophonia essay.
Well, maybe you're not but here is an appeal to authority that the devout Amish, at least, should acknowledge.
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