coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
I had understood that their military branch is independent of their ruling branch for op sec reasons
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
Because ultimately all of humanity will be forgotten, meaning what happens has no greater significance, and when you die what you did will not matter, as you will cease existing. If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Thus, when dwelling on the grand scheme of things, you cannot sincerely maintain motivation and purpose.
An atheist can believe that some things are more morally right than others
Can they do this while dwelling on the facts of their worldview? My point is more specifically that while an atheist may perform moral judgment in a distracted sense, being a social organism in a greater whole and internalizing moral judgment as such, their morality is inconsistent with dwelling on their worldview and actually deeply considering its consequences. This is in sharp contrast to theism, where continuing to dwell on one’s worldview is sought out and leads to more motivation and moral action.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
All of those things require that you believe life has a purpose, or else completely ignore thinking about human life as a whole. A reasonable person does not spend a decade building a house that will be immediately destroyed, draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated, or donate a kidney to someone who is immediately going to die. Those endeavors must have a point. Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away? And if there’s no moral reason to ease another’s suffering, because there is no actual moral judge and in any case no one cares about the moral failings of ancient Assyrians? You can get away with literally everything because you will die and it doesn’t matter.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
But I think you need to start from the presupposition that God is maximally loving as an unquestionable dogma. As this was the dogma of Christianity since its advent, pun intended. Lacan’s construction of post-modern God should be of little interest to us, because a “theist-by-faith” can simply say he is wrong by the very first assumption. Once you define God as loving dogmatically, there’s no room for criticizing God by saying he is confused, evil, etc. Now, I accept that there is room for arguing against the epistemic leap to a God who finds us special and listens to our plea — that this forms something of a special pleading fallacy. But that’s a separate argument.
The angle I am coming at is that in the everyday life of a Christian theist, or some portion thereof, there is a willful belief and anticipation that they will meet their Loving Father and creator at the end of their days, and tell Him all about their life — though He already knows — and all things will be accounted for and made sense of. The description in the Gospel is of a heaven like a mansion with many rooms, which Christ the Friend goes to prepare for us. Now, I am not interested (personally) in the argument for this from deduction. I am just interested in how, if someone assents to a belief in this, they can think about their life forever without ever losing motivation and good spirit. Are they “wrong”? Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting. But the theist can make sense and ponder his whole life and even the nature of life (within the realm of faith) and spend an eternity writing poetry about this. As such, atheism is more wrong than theism, because only theism can define “wrong” from a vantage point of significance.
Maybe another angle is to read your comment, which is logical and well-argued, and say (politely), “so what?” If you have argued against God, you have lost the argument because you have now entered a realm where “right” and “wrong” are undefined. It’s a null zone. Nothing has been solved because there is no Ultimate Solution.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
The idea that one is not threatened by a neighboring state because there are other neighboring states unaligned with Russia doesn’t make sense. I am not threatened by five enemies because I have four? But it makes especially little sense given: the important of flat eastern Ukraine for invasion, and the importance of the Black Sea for Russia. America may very well have been threatened by the Saudis funding radical Islam, but that doesn’t mean they can just blow up Saudi Arabia. Instead we settled on lesser Arab countries.
neutrality would have meant that Ukraine will always remain weaker
Ukraine is small, it will always be weaker, but now it will be destroyed. This argument doesn’t hold up to either the predictions made years before (they will be annihilated), or the present data (look at the birth rates). “I will either attempt to be more significant than I am or be destroyed” is a recipe for narcissistic ego death.
Russia violated the
NATO violated the promise not to expand east as part of the negotiations involving German reunification.
No, the invasion has.
Yes, the invasion that was promised for years because of the sequence of actions that NATO + NATO-influenced Ukraine took. This is like when the Mongels invaded Iraq and destroyed Baghdad after Baghdad slew their emissaries. Sorry Baghdad, you don’t get to “be sovereign” against the Mongols, just like Cuba and Iraq don’t get to “be sovereign” against America. This isn’t how reality works, and indeed it has never worked like this in the whole history of nations. Cause and effect is a much clearer way to understand what is best for America and/or Ukraine.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
An exercise to the reader: 65% of men in Britain walk more the 3 miles a day, but only 40% of men in Ethiopia do the same. The top 20% of Ethiopian walkers walk on average 20 miles a day (and over grueling terrain), whereas the top 20% of walkers in Britain average only 4 miles (over sidewalks). Which population is more likely to be negatively affected from the problems of long walks? Clearly you are very smart, or at least you wish to indicate that, so I do not need to explain further. Whether the above distinction also applies to Japan versus Israel is an empirical question which you lack the intellectual humility to even consider, whereas my take is “let’s try to find the data”.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
Not to prevent a threat to the agency but to prevent a threat to American security and territorial integrity.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
I had asked the OP for evidence regarding Columbia but yeah, the video in the Twitter thread is from a Yale courtyard. There is no evidence he is being blocked from entering a building (at 9pm).
about access to a building
No, it is clearly a courtyard. We would need a longer video to prove anything more than that.
It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.
You would have to argue that regarding the obvious and clear special concerns of a student-led protest movement
court case
Well, Meinecke did not engage with any counter-protesters and had his own location where he was protesting.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message
This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.
a public forum
The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities. Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it. But I’m not familiar with the layout of the university and where the video is taken.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Nonviolent protesting is historically treated as a legal grey area in American history, which the admins of Columbia are well aware of, their own university having a history of it. It’s treated that way because the alternative is non-nonviolent protesting, which is much worse. Not everything moral and immoral is codified in law
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I agree with you that repealing IP laws would increase competition and lower prices significantly — look no further than Stanley Cups, why should one company make so much profit on cups just because they have the funds to psychologically manipulate the public’s desires — but economies of scale come in and demand centralization. One or a few factories producing Ozempic will always be more efficient than a dozen or two dozen, no? It could be this way with fast food giants, as well. McDonald’s and a couple other giants simply due to economies of scale and accumulated institutional knowledge can uniquely lower food prices, but it’s unlikely this will ever happen because nothing enforces the competition past a certain point (“lower than grocery stores and not painfully higher than competitors” is all their profit needs to be, but they will never willingly race to the bottom for prices because they can anticipate lower total profit as a result)
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
In the thread there’s the tweet:
dude is The Vitalist on the site that must not be named
And I think this phrase alone will bring a few thousand to the forum
acting like they're too cool
I think it’s totally reasonable to deny association with the forum given the content that is sometimes posted
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
I feel like the topic of the discussion has moved from “Gay’s comments indicate calling for genocide is okay” all the way to “statements about Palestinians reclaiming land count as genocide and should be punished”. (The Hooven thing was supposed to prove that someone was punished according to the rules mentioned in Gay’s answer, but that did not happen.) This wasn’t really my interest, but can you see why it is problematic to punish Palestinians who want their land back, or a one-state solution, or to have a West Bank free from settlements per international law? We would also need to punish Jewish students who verbalize support for settlements, either in West Bank or Golan, if we are intent on punishing students who verbalize opposition against them, both counting as genocide. Or any Jewish student who supports Likud (who believe “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”).
But sure, I mean, if some Palestinians are shouting “from the river to the sea, there will be no Jews”, that should certainly be punished and classified as call to genocide… but is anything like that happening? I don’t know of every protest call that’s happened this year, but I’m going to say no.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
Where is the part about the rape? I can’t find it searching through the CSPAN archives
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
The sound of a jet corresponding to the hospital blast surely counts as moderate evidence in favor of an Israeli airstrike. The remnants of the intercepted rocket still being visible in the air post-blast is strong, novel evidence against the blast having to do with the intercepted rocket. It’s only ~72 hours after the event in question, so new information is not FUD. FUD would be if someone were to imply something like, “let’s not consider any new information, the previous narrative is just too compelling”.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
What is the non-sequitur of holding one million children hostage until an independent terrorist group releases their hostages? Think about how this rule could be extrapolated. What would Afghanis not have been justified in doing to America to free the 150 innocent men who were literally tortured in Guantanamo Bay for years? Or consider that the Nazis infamously blamed all Jews on the few thousand or ten thousand Jews who were involved in the Soviet Revolution and the failed November revolution. This moral rule blows. How about we just don’t threaten to starve (or “thirst out” or whatever) one million children.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Is Joe more immoral than Fred if the action Joe takes is of the same quality Fred would take, were Fred in Joe’s position? The weight of moral philosophy says no. At worst they are equally immoral. But Joe can’t be worse than Fred, if Fred would do the same thing. Joe is only morally worse than Fred if he would behave worse than Fred.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Which accomplishment on that list do you find the most significant?
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
The secular anti-homophobia and anti-racism can indeed be seen as virtues, or at least the tenets of a moral code. So they do check each other’s behavior, which is a point against my assertion that talking about virtue has died out. But these virtues are not rooted in a shared experience (attempted imagining) of the Greatest Being. The virtues wind up being political (trans rights) and rule-based (never misgender). There’s no interest in growing the antiquated virtue of caritas, pure love for others, because there’s no attempt at collecting in the mind the idea of Perfect Love, and there’s no unitive story of love that binds the community together. So the virtue of authentic love for others degenerates into adhering to political rules, merely to not be publicly crucified by your friends for something politically incorrect.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
I mean, I might just agree. Why shouldn’t we motivationmax? If we admit all three characters are making leaps then we might as well judge which one has the superior leap. Which athlete is motivated to leap the highest? Now we just have to ask who has the most satisfying “why”. Is it the person who believes humanity should be maximized as an article of faith, or a person who believes there is a greatest possible being to conceive who has decided that humanity ought to be maximized as an article of faith and who judged you. Which one is, well, better for maximizing humanity? I vote against the mere “humanity maximizer” because there is no judgement apart from social standard and self-guilt, which is inferior to judgment from the perfect being.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
You’ve already brainwashed yourself into believing that “human flourishing” matters, when objectively it does not as all of humanity will die and be forgotten — mere blip on the timeline, an accident, a nanosecond to eternity’s year. So I’m asserting that there is a superior way for you to brainwash yourself for maximal happiness.
When you imagine the perfect Father-Son relationship, is it one of smothering? If not, then you haven’t even succeeded in imagining a perfectly loving deity, let alone trying out belief. When you imagine perfect justice, do you imagine shackles? If not, you haven’t succeeded in creating in your mind the image of a perfectly just creator. By definition, imagining a perfectly loving deity can’t make you feel smothered. It would make you feel “loved such that there is no greater experience of love”, that’s what perfect means.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
In the absence of objective morality, or in other words, a final judgment, then a thinking person would not “prefer to follow rules”. Why would they? They would prefer to feel good, right? What would be the point of feeling worse, if there’s no reason to? They would not conclude that following the rules leads to feeling good, because every time they have the choice of either following the rules or feeling good, they would choose feeling good. To prioritize rules over feeling good, following the rules must have existential importance. Otherwise what would be the purpose of following the rules?
But, perhaps an atheist can will himself to believe that following the rules actually does have existential importance. I intuit that you might have done this, as you go immediately to “lead to maximal flourishment of humanity”. (There is no reason to care about this in atheism, because it doesn’t matter. It feels good to give to someone you like, due to evolutionary prosociality, but it does not feel good to construct rigid systems of maximal flourishment of humanity, which is artificial.) I suppose I agree an atheist can have this kind of faith. But at that point, they might as well maximize the benefit of faith by believing in a Just and Loving God.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
What I am getting at is that the things which we value most in life — betterment of things, morality — do not seem to value in a thinking atheist worldview. If a thinking atheist wakes up every morning to dwell on the nature of life, there is no reason for him to pursue betterment or morality. A theist who believes in a Loving Judge, however, will be motivated toward betterment and morality. In a hedonic philosophy, if feeling good is the only motivator, then we can do things like ignoring guilt to pursue more pleasure. It becomes very easy to lie to others to obtain what we want. In Abrahamic religion, the very foundation of human life is a repudiation of this temptation — man tried hiding from God only to be discovered, naked.
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
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