coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The goal of the toll lanes (as stated by the state DoT) is to reduce congestion.
Forgot to reply to this, but this is false:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-occupancy_toll_lane
Because HOT lanes and ETLs are often constructed within the existing road space, they are criticized as being an environmental tax or "Lexus lanes" solely beneficial to higher-income individuals, since one toll rate is charged regardless of socioeconomic status and the working poor thus suffer greater financial burden, although some states offer tax deductions or rebates to low income individuals for toll payments.[19] Supporters of HOT lanes counter with the fact that because HOT lanes encourage the use of public transit and ride sharing, they reduce transportation demands and provide a benefit for all.[20] However, HOT lanes have demonstrated no guarantees in eliminating traffic congestion, bringing into question their fundamental usefulness aside from raising funds for private institutions and local governments.[21]
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The top is not just CEO pay, it’s the total C-Suite pay and investor pay. Walmart is actually not as egregious in its CEO pay package. In 2019 at least, more people bought TVs in store than online. See here.
Best buy's profit margin is a measly 7%
That’s huge. That’s 7.5 billion. What is failing in our hypothetically competitive economic system where a middle man — who simply takes technology from Korea and shows it to people in America — can generate 7.5 billion in profit? With its founder being worth more than 2 billion? Are you telling me that if most of that money went to consumers or employees, Best Buy would do a worse job? I don’t think so.
The reason Best Buy can turn so much profit is the same reason McDonald’s can increase prices and turn profit, or Coca Cola can be so profitable when there are cheaper alternatives: the idea of a rational consumer with infinite time / willpower / reasoning is a myth. The consumer will go to Best Buy and be sapped into a bad deal, giving Best Buy more money. Or they will google a list of top TVs which the Best Buy / Samsung marketing have manipulated. The store design and location will be decided by PhDs in consumer psychology to maximize the chance of consumer irrationality. The Amazon top lists will be manipulated.
It’s silly but also dangerous to believe on faith that a consumer is (or even can) make a rational purchasing decision for something like a TV. The majority of people do not have the knowledge to know whether they are making the most efficient economic choice. And this is how large corporations can produce so much profit, by taking advantage of the insane informational asymmetry at play. (Consider Apple earphones for a moment.) Best Buy knows everything about consumer behavior and TVs; the consumer knows nothing about his own behavioral biases or TVs. This is not a fight fair, someone will walk away with a better deal. So why would you reward such antisocial behavior? I say let your friends steal as much as they want from Best Buy, the top do not deserve the money.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
If you’re thinking something like, “BestBuy competes with Walmart over lowered TV prices, when both of these companies face theft they will be forced to increase prices in proportion to the theft; the price of TVs is already as low as it can be, so theft causes an increase in prices”. But I don’t think this is true. If we had a real competition between BestBuy and Walmart, we wouldn’t see as much profit as we see going to the top. It would be a race to the bottom for both prices and C-Suite/Investor profit. I think these companies actually have pseudo-monopolies in their locations, because consumers are unwilling to travel very far for purchases or to spend a lot of mental energy doing cost-saving arithmetic. This is different from your local bodega and coffee shop where a person can walk down the street to a better competitor and where the daily cost of items are more salient.
It’s more likely to me that the cost for TVs is set according to whatever price the consumer will not grumble over, rather than some magical “best possible price”. The price right now is fixed at “as high as possible for the consumer to not decide against buying a TV”. If this is true, theft actually can’t increase prices, because the consumer will opt against buying a TV if it is any higher. If they attempt to increase prices, they would simply lose profit, because the American consumer can just stick to his old TV, or stick to his computer.
If you’re saying, “Walmart will decide against doing business if its profits suffer too much”, I would again point at GameStop as evidence that this isn’t so. Or just the fact that, provided you can make more than the median wage selling TVs, someone will be out there selling TVs.
So, the consumer stealing from BestBuy is a lot like a free peasant stealing from his lord who has a monopoly over his land. The consumer can’t be assed to travel very far because he’s stressed and has too many commitments, just like the peasant can’t be assed to travel hundreds of miles by foot to possibly get a better deal with his peasantry.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In the oldest collection of the myths, Robin Hood steals from the ultra-rich both for his own enjoyment and to donate to a poor knight. He does not redistribute to the poor in these stories, although he swears never to steal from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gest_of_Robyn_Hode
See:
Little John and the Cook sit down to a fine dinner. Then they break the lock on the Sheriff's treasury and steal all the silver dinnerware plus 300 pounds in coin. They leave immediately to meet Robin Hood.
He instructs Little John to fetch 400 pounds from their treasure chest, and pay the Knight
So that’s your first error. Your second error is interpreting the parable of the unjust steward as a counterexample. Let’s see how the parable ends:
The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.
The dishonest manager (or, unjust steward) is first commended by his master. There would he no reason to include this sentence in the parable if the commendation were not significant, because parables are elongated symbolic allegories. The master’s commendation is of significance then, hence why it is included; if this were a warning on not to redistribute from the wealthy, then we would see the master “throw him into the outer darkness”, which we read in many of the other parables. Shrewdness here is also translated wisely or prudently.
Next we read, to translate into its basic meaning, “worldly people are wiser in dealing with themselves than us Christians”. So there is some wisdom about how this unjust steward behaved. Finally, we have the ultimate purpose of the parable, where Jesus gives us the final meaning:
make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth
Doesn’t get much clearer than that. There’s no symbolism here, we are talking about “unrighteous wealth” or stolen resources. Wealth is not always prefaced with “unrighteous” in parables, but it is specifically prefaced as such here. If the money were a symbol of, say, Godly talents, it would be “righteous wealth”. Jesus specifically clarifies that he is talking about literally money.
so that when [the unrighteous wealth] fails [your friends] may receive you into the eternal dwellings
Because the real wealth is the goodness of a community, ie friendships
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Prices can’t increase more than a consumer is willing to pay, and return policies have always had profit in mind (unless there’s a law / regulation). If you’re telling me that consumers would be willing to pay at a higher point, then it would be priced at that already. If you’re telling me that the price would need to rise as otherwise the business would go bankrupt, that’s disproven by the huge investor/corporate profits which would suffer before bankruptcy. If you’re telling me that every business would increase their price-per-TV in unison in order to maximize corporate profit rather than competing over lowering prices, then that’s a good reason to steal from the businesses. Whether GameStop is raking in the profits by being the foremost video game retailer, or whether they are a tiny retailer with hardly any profit at all due to online purchases, the consumer is paying essentially the same for essentially the same service. The difference is simply that the leadership once made a lot of money, and now they don’t — the service is identical. And their return policy has always sucked, because they can get away with it. Let us let the consumer get away with things too!
corporations pay a great deal of tax despite accounting for a small portion of road congestion
Road wear is why we have tolls, that’s largely caused by trucking and next by employees going to work. Surely the party which reaps the resources from both of these should be the party paying for the road wear. It would be pretty silly if an entry employer had to pay the same for road wear as the CEO of Amazon, when the CEO reaps the most profit of the economic economy which results in road wear
Nature has nothing to do with it.
Nature, uh, finds a way. Like wind. I can say at least for myself, I am literally okay with thievery but would never think about leaving a cigarette butt anywhere outside, even on a city street. For me at least, it’s the sanctity of nature. I can’t speak for others, so maybe you’re right that they have a different motive
The demand for snacks is effectively infinite
The employees should form some sort of demand organization for the implementation of receiving tokens for their labor, which can be redeemed for food items, and perhaps for other items too. They can then decide amongst themselves the proper balance of corporate pay to token maximization, by electing or bargaining with the leadership of the company. Given that the employees are motivated by token maximization themselves, this would naturally lead to a company which profit-maximizes without sacrificizing any employee benefit/quality of life / tokens. Until such a day, I do believe that the employees should be stealing snacks, even hoarding them, and staplers and other stationary on occasion too.
I know most of the people on my floor personally or by reputation
I would consider it immoral then to steal snacks from them, then, yes
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The TV and IKEA examples only affect the pocket of the owners and investors, who make a lot of money. The employees are unaffected. I would argue that road tolls, while not affecting only the wealthy, are immoral, and that the costs should be taken from the wealthy owners and investors of corporations/cities whose goods are being trucked on the roads.
littering while driving
But nature is valued itself as something innocent and fragile. Literring is bad because it harms nature. Nature is a totally different cognitive space from social contract kind of stuff. It has a semi-divine status in the American imagination (rightfully).
snacks from the break room
These are white collar people, right? The employees should file a complaint to the multimillionaire C-Suite that they want more snacks. I agree that for a small business this would be pretty immoral. But the break room is also used by just random people you will never meet who work at the company, right?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Some of your examples only negatively affect the very wealthy, and so are morally permissible in Western thought, both in folklore (Robin Hood) and in religion (parable of the unjust steward).
A key difference between sociopaths and the petty rule violator is that a sociopath may betray you even if you’re in a genuine community with him. Americans don’t belong to a community of those who use highways, they only share an economy, and this only occasionally, and the highway is also shared with his class enemies. What’s more, there’s uncertainty about what is law and what is norm: perhaps in his community it is considered normative to drive in the bus lane, it just happens to be against the law. And we obviously lack the pride and homogenity of the Japanese, which enables them to turn conformity into a civic virtue.
The question becomes difficult. How do you get a rag-tag group of stressed humans to obey petty rules under the threat of rare, intermittent monetary fines? Or, how do you get them to care about absolute strangers so much that they obey small rules? I am not sure if you can. Humans are not designed to do that, our sphere of identification and sympathy is not designed to spread to absolutely everyone.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Let’s use the example of child labor. If much of the world is employing child labor — and not only that, but only some Europeans and a few select other places have developed convincing religio-philosophical arguments for why it is wrong — then if you also employ that labor you are not committing a moral infraction. Why? Because it is agreed upon as morally permissible between people, and because you have not been convinced of the philosophical argument to the contrary. (Let’s recall that the scientific view in the 19th century was that blacks were genetically inferior, and also that inferior people like the mentally ill do not necessarily have a right to freedom. The arguments against slavery were largely religious in nature, with the southerners talking about “science” in their arguments and the northerners speaking about the dignity of God’s creation).
For an action to be immoral requires (1) something approximating a consensus of norms or moral points of reference, because it is a social group which decide what is moral, and (2) the actual common knowledge that a thing being committed is immoral. The histrionic comparison of one epoch to another can get pretty silly without remembering these two things. The people of the 19th century were not magically more good or more evil, they just had a lower level of knowledge, different views on the sanctity of the individual, different inter-group norms, etc. Reading 19th century journals will convince you that, if anything, the emotional intelligence and compassion of the average middle class person was probably greater than those today. So why would it be likely thay they were more evil (in the sense of accruing blame for actions they are responsible for), versus less knowledgable?
With the slavery of Africans, given that everyone enslaved belonged to a group which practiced slavery and found it permissible, they would have behaved exactly the same way as the slavers had they the oppprtunity. Tribes enslaving other tribes. So they have no moral argument against their enslavement, in the sense that whites as a group owe them something. They were being treated according to their own principles.
Should white people have realized that black people are also humans like white people? But they eventually did, and then we had a civil war because they cared so much about it. This is run of the mill pre-20th century moral progress. It’s not like the Japanese didn’t think they were superior in the 19th century when they were killing all castaway European sailors, or the Chinese when they were killing European embassy delegations, or the Arabs when they were castrating their African slaves, etc etc.
To answer your specific qualification though,
in which some number of forced child brothels exist […] something that could have happened to them in their society
No no, slavery was much more endemic in Western Africa than “some slavery existed”. There’s little if any evidence of serious moral knowledge that slavery is wrong in Western Africa. Remember that slavery is unfortunate is not the same as slavery is a moral wrong.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
They knew the results of the system they proposed in advance
All the negative consequences of an immorality fall on the person who instigated the immoralty. If meritocracy is the morally correct way, then whoever introduces the notion of affirmative action bears the shame and guilt of having supplied immoral benefits to millions of people. The party which corrects a moral deficit in society is often wrongfully blamed for its negative effects. We see this with the issue of slavery and discrimination: despite every race or tribe discriminating against other races or tribes, enslaving them or worse, it’s white people who are solely blamed for black slavery in America. Yet, given that the blacks enslaved came from a culture which practiced much worse slavery, this is an absurd and ridiculous attack: the whole word bears the same “blame”, or in other words no blame at all. White people, being perhaps the first race to decide that other races do not deserve eternal subjugation, should be praised for their moral advancement, not shamed for the immorality of everyone else. This is an attribution fallacy: the bad luck of the blacks enslaved does not entail that they are victims at the hands of whites, because the blacks themselves came from a culture which believed slavery was permissible and did not have a moral argument against it. The feeling of pity for bad luck is misattributed as a harm against a group by another group.
No one buys an answer like this, or should
I buy it. I’ll do one better: the ivy’s are stocked with 1st to 3rd generation Africans, not the descendants of former slaves, which means we can tell the descendants of former slaves that the descendants of their original enslavers are no longer getting wrongful benefits.
The African American community of the late 1950s and early 1960s felt, with justification, that they were a humiliated underclass inside America
Segregation was actually a way to correct this, by completely separating the races and then putting black taxes toward black things and white taxes toward white things. But in actual fact, white funds and white resources went disproportionally toward the benefit of blacks, due to a collection of factors like military security / better policing / better development / cities etc. Were blacks actually given their own nation they would be Haiti or Liberia, but America attempted to effectually give them their own nation and allow them the fruit of white labor where it didn’t interfere with white civilization. Yeah, maybe you wince when you read that, but then I’d like to hear your argument against it: there was nothing stopping blacks from building their exclusive towns and cities in segregated America (look at the Mormons), yet they chose the obviously advantageous position of living in segregated sections of cities built by people 1000 years more developed than them. I would do the same! To get back to the point, segregation was supposed to allow blacks to compete with other blacks and whites other whites, not to put the races against each other. They were supposed to be totally separated social hierarchies (hence: segregated), not one social hierarchy. IMO this failed mostly due to really really bad argumentation on half of the segregation side, not due to anything necessarily immoral about segregation provided that one side’s majority wishes to live out their destiny separately (after all, this is literally the basis of every single polity with immigration restriction, aka most countries).
What does he mean by "freedom of association", "reservations" and "power-sharing arrangements
I think I see where he is going — we can effectively have white-only communities by going extreme on freedom of association, thus decreasing the social neuroticism about race. I pretty much agree that this would be good, total freedom of association for any descriptor one wants solves all the hysteria. But you will still have to face that eternally leftist voting block, the unmarried women of America who once consumed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and now consume Te Nehates Coates (sp), who believe that when people exclude other people based on heritage they are committing a racism. You need to solve that issue before you can implement some kind of extremism freedom of association policy.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
violently
In the year of our lord 2024, we should not believe political activists when they claim an event was violent without videographic evidence. Given that the event was hosting an IDF soldier and director of the Kohelet Policy Forum (the think tank responsible for Netanyahu’s judicial changes), it’s reasonable to assume many of the students in attendance were Jewish/Israeli ethnonationalists — so, political activists in the purest sense of the term. The group hosting the speaker, Tikvah, explicitly “espouses the repatriation of Jews to their homeland, Eretz Israel,” so these students don’t even believe that America is their home, showing their extreme political stance.
The Kohelet Policy Forum collaborates with the Misgav Institute, which writes stuff like:
We arrive at the clear conclusion that claims of ideological and political distinction between Hamas and the people of Gaza are baseless.
Israel must transfer as many Gazans as possible to other countries; Any other alternative, including PA rule, is a strategic failure. Therefore, Gaza's population should be transferred to the Sinai Desert and the displaced absorbed in other countries.
I looked at all the videos on Twitter and see no evidence of any violence.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Pew Polls and some other pollsters mail a questionnaire to a home address, which I really think slants their findings against the most technologically-addicted young people who also happen to be the most liberal.
Haredi […] broad society
There was a recent case of brilliant demogaphic wizardry which showed that at home Yiddish speakers have a birth rate of 7. The Haredi will be pushing well above their weight in staffing high positions. For example the head of our cybersecurity directorate is a devout Haredi Jew, Anne Neuberger; she is the one who will be deciding whether a hack comes from Iran, so quite the important position. She got her position shortly after her family fund donated to AIPAC; Anne’s husband works at AIPAC. Her parents were once hostages that were saved by Israel (actually Netanyahu’s brother) during the Entebbe raid. Her father George Karfunkel is one of the richest Americans — somehow he was able to invest in Kodak at the same time the Trump admin gave them a government contract during COVID. (Kushner’s family is a big haredi donor, perhaps he learned through that channel?). He then transferred his 180 million kodak stock into an inactive, newly created haredi school just for tax deductions. This comes as Haredi schools in NYC were found to be stealing billions in school funds, ignoring requirements like teaching English…
No, the Haredi will not adapt to broader society. But they actually don’t need to! They can better maintain a strong influence on society while retaining maximal tribalism.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Of course that does not, as you imply, mean going around like some autistic robot spouting random true-but-horrible facts at random children.
But why not? If truth is indeed a higher value than comfort, or equanimity, or peace of mind, or any other potential terminus, then it would be more important that we fill every animal with facts rather than wellbeing. That would be for their greater good, because knowledge of truth is the greatest good. We would desire to raise non-functioning children who play a very mean game of jeopardy, even if they have poor wellbeing.
it still gives me no reason to believe in things I have no reason to believe in except they would make me feel better
This is kind of circular in the way it is phrased. If a belief is conducive to greater personal and social happiness, and if our terminus value is something like “greatest happiness and human flourishment”, then it intuitively makes sense that we believe the thing which maximizes our most important value. There would be no reason to cling to non-beneficial truth, because we already established that goodness is a superseding value over truth and truth is merely instrumental to goodness. The “reason” for a happiness-optimizing belief is that it optimizes happiness. There is no “reason” to believe something that is true-but-useless, as it doesn’t bring us closer to what is most important.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
That’s probably because you’re interested in diverse ideologies as a personality trait, which themotte userbase is generally selected for. I’m fairly certain that the median social media experience consists of people following accounts they agree with and which propagate their sense of identity. Consider also that in many healthy straight relationships, a person would be reasonably upset with their partner following a prostitute / pro-promiscuity egirl. If this is true, then I do think a whole class of people in healthy monogamous relationships with rules are much less likely to see the poll link, let alone participate in the poll.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data? Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity. Many happy monogamists who find polygamy disgusting would never subscribe to her or follow her. Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied with monogamy, and her polygamy followers are preselected with finding polygamy satisfying (hence why they are following a promiscuous woman who talks about it all day). Her most die hard followers are the most likely to take the survey, even just because they see the link more often, and the followers are those who have found the most benefit regardless of how it affects the median polygamist. “Just in, atheists are unsatisfied with atheism, as proven by a survey of atheists who follow Bishop Robert Barron on Twitter.” Am I missing something?
Okay so, reevaluating your premise again: it is not impossible that a single exposure to a social event can change a young person’s interests and then trajectory. A young person might go see a baseball game and that sparks a lifelong interest in baseball. Or they might have seen a cool juggler, then gone on to juggle as a hobby. Or maybe they saw V for Vendetta and became infatuated with the idea of anonymous figures and rebellions, and then decided to form a hacking collective…
Fight Club presents an attractive image of young men forming an identity around primitive masculine fighting and tribalism. It’s also a great movie. So this can absolutely affect a young person’s life, who has just been exposed to a persuasive argument for masculine bonding and detesting female-coded safe spaces. Young people are also hardwired to imitate cooler older guys, and the movie stars prime Brad Pitt.
Now I would argue every young man should watch fight club, but that’s a separate point.
edit actually for an even better example, fight club influenced early early 4chan, instituting the norms of anonymity and secrecy, the anti-mainstream ethos, the “operations”, and some early memes. So that’s a good example of how one movie can influence something larger. But also, your post could easily have been read as “coloquial exaggeration”. Like someone posting, “did I ruin my life by choosing a culinary institute over Harvard?” Obviously not, but the person is really asking whether they’ve done goofed sufficiently to feel bad about their decision and readjust their future decision-making.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think a good example of this is “Leave the World Behind”, the Obama-produced Netflix movie. The social dynamics are engineered in order to reduce the positive valence and social status of whites. This is accomplished through the following:
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The nice, wealthy home where the white family and black family stay is owned by the black family. The white family is in disbelief, and the black guy brags to them about his board seat at the metropolitan opera. So immediately the white family is coded poorer and racist, and the black family coded socially superior. What’s interesting is that the viewer learns to associate Mahershala Ali’s phenotype with the highest social class. If I tried to pull that off with Chet Hanks, you would laugh at me, but the viewer learns to ignore his own learned and often accurate intuition about phenotypes because he is black, which affects a total increase in social status and positive valence for blacks.
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The white husband is coded as a naive, easygoing guy; the black homeowner as wise, deliberate. The white husband’s wife flirts with the black homeowner. As an interesting aside, the first Netflix CEO and cofounder Marc Randolph is related to both Freud and Edward Bernays, the latter of which was an expert at changing the behavior of the masses through subtle psychological manipulation in imagery.
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There is a curmudgeonly white conspiracy theorist who withholds giving medicine to a child in need. Because of course. Although he does change his mind in the movie, the overall sense is that he’s a bad person.
Something else interesting in the movie is that — in this Obama-produced, star-studded title — the enemy is a joint Iranian/Chinese invasion that starts by hacking the American grid.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
You need something stronger than an argument for the historical usefulness of Christianity to give people the “type of benefits that religion classically provides”. Because so many, perhaps all, of the classical benefits require belief. If Christianity is just an elegant story from the past, then there’s no expectation of reward, no reason for prayer, no judge of behavior, no individual and communal purpose, and nothing that can bond people together under the dominion of a Great Leader. Belief is a prerequisite for all the tangible benefits of religion, like stress reduction, delayed gratification, peace of mind and better communities. (Maybe this is why Jesus’ healing in the gospel is always predicated on faith). The most that a “Christian atheism” can say is that behaving Christlike is best for the common good, by making the dead Jesus a role model for the community. The immediate problem is that no one is motivated to imitate “just another Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and was killed for his troubles”, to quote Ben Shapiro. Even atheists can see that Jesus was a moral paragon, but this hardly compels them to study his words or imitate his moral character. Let alone stave off nihilism, etc.
IMO there are only three viable avenues for reintroducing religion with all of the old benefits among the desacralized West: (1) A willful, poetic, decidedly unscientific faith belief, which comes from pure unadulterated social influence and contagion. I think this can be accomplished with social pressure, but I don’t think this is preferable, because it will always result in the negation of science. (2) Debunking scientific thinking where our evolved social nature is concerned; this would be an argument against rational thinking where rationality has no utility. This is complicated, will not persuade normal people, and is not a positive argument for Christianity specifically. (3) An emphasis on symbolic and mystical truth: the events in the Bible are believed because they mysteriously represent the reality of human nature. They are non-literally true, yet truth is “revealed” upon belief, like a mathematical proof may be revealed under assumed premises. This allows someone to believe in their heart that Adam and Eve are the first humans, while also believing that materially speaking humans evolved over millions of years. I am partial to this last one.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
But I don’t think that absolves them of their crime, because as per my OP, I think all of the players involved are complicit and not only YouTube. If our culture wanted they could make this music require an 18+ identification card for consumption, but there’s too much money to be made and they don’t care about the consequences of their actions.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
We could imagine a scenario where a parent serves their child a reasonable amount of alcohol in their presence. But clearly, in this context, “a parent allowing their child to drink alcohol” isn’t referring to that. This is a discussion on illicit drug use, so a reasonable reader would interpret that in its intended meaning, as an illicit act. But I can be more detailed, if that’s important:
As a parent doesn’t escape jail by saying they only allowed their children to drink too much alcohol when they were not around
There we go.
Guilt and shame isn’t equivalent to jail time
But what do they have in common? They are considered the just responses to an infraction. Our society deemed it an infraction to allow children to drink alcohol illegally, and parents aren’t excused by claiming they merely permitted it and merely had the alcohol out in the open for easy access. Now, at least among many people, showing young people a glamorous depiction of drug use by their idol is considered shameful. The YouTube CEO is not excused from shame by merely permitting it and merely having it in the open for easy access.
So the analogy is comparing the relevant commonality of the two cases. Analogies are by their nature simplifications to save time. But your analogy re: college didn’t work because the expectations of freedom of speech on a college campus are distinct from the expectations on an app used by young people and children, from which the CEO derives profit per view.
Algorithmic service isn’t the same as actually providing drugs
Is it the same as providing a desirable lifestyle of drug use? Why or why not?
How would you react if someone went up to a teen and showed them really cool depictions of drugs? That would be pretty shameful, right? YouTube does this knowingly using middle men.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Does YouTube allow the “promotion of opiates”?
Yes. From their website: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mRTV-j87wOo
Yea I do them drugs, I don't give a fuck What u think
I don't eat food but I take blues
You can hear more of his lyricism in works such as Overdose, Benz Truck, and Giving Girls Cocaine. All on YouTube. He is not the only rapper who glamorizes opiates.
videos explicitly encouraging illegal opiate use are probably banned
Not if they encourage the drug through catchy lyrics and interesting music videos designed to be memorable to adolescents.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Colleges are environments specifically designed for intellectual inquiry among adults. And even then, a speaker whose entire shtick is “drugs are good and fun” should probably be prevented from speaking without serious warnings and counter arguments. YouTube is an environment for young peoples’ entertainment, which is very much unlike a college. The content is algorithmically fed to young people, and YouTube profits off of it. As a parent doesn’t escape jail by saying they only allowed their children to drink alcohol, a content server should not escape guilt and shame by saying they only allowed impressionable young people to watch music videos glamorizing opiate use.
Notably, YouTube bans holocaust denialism, which is a less bad thing than the promotion of opiates.
But can you really justify your belief in truth when it comes to our social purpose in life, our social feeling in the world, our emotional health and our deepest evolutionary nature?
I sense that you are a “truth terminalist”: you believe that truth is our terminal value. It’s easy to come to this view because of the vast utilitarian benefit of truth. When we use truth instrumentally, we can make life easier and more pleasant: better food, less disease, better mental health treatment, etc. But the instrumental use of truth is not truth valued unto itself. In fact there are wildly different terminal values at root here.
Truth valued unto itself would mean that it’s as good an idea to teach a toddler about the horrors of rabies infections and typhus, as it is to teach a toddler to be loved. Truth valued unto itself would mean that a life where everyone memorizes facts despite deep emotional anguish is better than a life with less trivia but perfect emotional health. Truth valued unto itself means that suicide and murder can be done without guilt, because humans no longer have any rational reason to listen to the voice in their head that has hitherto introduced guilt. “There is no rational reason not to murder, only a social-evolutionary reason that I can ignore if I really desire to,” says the truth terminalist. Truth terminalism means that we should sacrifice untold human life if it means the acquisition of a single factoid. It would mean that the scientist who counts blades of grass repeatedly is as valuable as the scientist finding a cure for cancer.
Truth terminalism is, in actual fact, not really subscribed by any living being on earth. Instead, they subscribe to some shade of “pleasure/good terminalism” in either a stoic or epicurean or ontological sense. Now if what I’ve written is true, this means you actually need a utilitarian reason based on the good/pleasant to justify your lack of participation in non-factual social movements which produce preferable emotional states and communities. “It’s not true” is not a rational justification here.
(An ancillary argument: religions create in the heart of the adherent a practical knowledge of love, devotion, and community. This knowledge is true in the sense that there are actually true social facts being collected. In what way is this information less true than the movement of the stars? Some angelic being observing earth would see no difference in truth value between social information and the movement of the stars.)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
It’s quite simple: YouTube allows drug glamorization culture and music videos to be watched by young people. For vulnerable young people, there is a straight line from idolizing a rapper to doing the drugs of said rapper. See: Lil Peep (1 billion+ views, mostly teenagers). Some of these rappers are a walking advertisement for drug use. When you’re then at a party listening to their music and there’s drugs available, you are more likely to participate in taking drugs.
dealer, manufacturer
— are not engaged in a sophisticated emotional manipulation campaign to get adolescents to find drugs cool.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Why would kids listen to a teacher and not the famous, status-signaling rapper than shows up on their YouTube feed glamorizing drugs? One of them is presenting a way to money and power, the other one is giving them homework.
Indeed, YouTube complicity in the opiate crisis is why I consider this death the least bad possible opiate death. While still a tragedy, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving parent. I only wish that all parents of opiate victims worked in the music industry.
Your essay is way too long for how little point you are deriving. I read four paragraphs before deciding it’s more efficient if I just briefly argue why hip hop is harmful in a comment, than divining what your argument is.
Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this. This means we can judge music not just by how well it accomplishes its intended emotional result (its technical skill), but whether the resultant emotional space is beneficial or harmful to social life.
Rap, a normal selection of popular rap, focuses on self-aggrandizement, pride, antisociality, and lust. If you were to literally ask yourself, “what is the worst emotional orientation to promote in the youth?”, you would come up with a litany of themes that occur in rap. What would be worse for the youth than to hyper-focus on lust, consumerism, killing people who slight you, and narcissism? Okay, well that’s most popular rap songs. Were satanists to be producing good music (again), it would probably wind up more prosocial than hip hop.
But don’t take my word for it. If you had a teenage daughter this month there’s a good chance has heard
You haven’t “discovered” anything special when you notice that your most debased and primitive animal self enjoys the fantasy of power and sex. Every 10 year old can imagine this. Someone who thinks this music is good is as tasteless as a foodie who tells you sugar is the most exquisite because it makes his mouth feel the best. The music is bad, because the spirit it produces is bad. Yes, it may be pleasurable, but you wouldn’t say the best medicine is heroin, would you?
The lyrics are only one aspect of music. The BPM and rhythm can also induce in a person a sense of patient thought or a sense of urgency. Rap combines sin with urgency.
An unwise person may reply, “okay, but like, The Beach Boys also sang about hooking up with girls…”
In a totally different phenomenological space that promotes delicate emotion, love, fidelity, and not lust, which is communicated via the slow beat, the instrumentation, and vocals.
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