coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Of course dogs should go on runs and play catch, as this is an enjoyment. But even after going on runs and playing catch (which I doubt the median dog owner is doing daily, maybe 1-2x a week), we still have the question of choosing tasty food or optimal fitness. If I give you a small bite of steak, you aren’t satisfied and would prefer more steak. We’re ultimately left with the same question: should we give our favorite beasts (who are 1000x more sensitive to food-related pleasure remember) more of the tasty food that they desire? Or do we choose extending life? If the simple state of being overweight is so deplorable, why did so many of history’s most privileged monarchs become fat, and did not exercise for primarily health-related reasons?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Do we have a compelling moral obligation to make our dogs a little fat from their favorite treats?
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A dog’s sense of smell and taste are a thousand times greater than our own, and thus so is their enjoyment.
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Dogs live in sensory deprived conditions relative to their exposure to scents and tastes in the wild.
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When left to their own devices, dogs and their owners routinely choose tasty treats. Men with infinite resources in history usually became fat, and exercise for the sake of health improvement is an historic anomaly among the upper classes.
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It follows that the happiness increase that a dog receives from perfect cardiovascular health probably does not exceed the happiness increase received from tasty treats, given how much we can assume they value these treats. The extremes of both end are deleterious to canine fulfillment, but we can probably say that a dog is most happy if made a little fat from treats.
Humans have only recently begun to value perfect health, and in all previous eras were quite happy with drinking (or smoking) and lounging if they could get away with it. The wealthiest kings with the smartest advisors loved their liquors and candies. The ancient Chinese figure of contentment and joy was Budai, a happy Buddhist figure with a large figure. The Romans considered mead the drink of the gods, the Muslim conception of Heaven entails rivers running with sweet wine, and the Christians conceive of a heavenly banquet in the afterlife.
There’s something telling about us, that we think canine felicity lies in austerity. Maybe we are imbuing dogs with our own notions of social competition. We know that we would be more attractive if we looked like Chris Pratt (not in Super Mario Bros), and we know that this entails attractive social rewards like a hotter partner and superiority over peers. Yet we struggle with this, choosing other enjoyments instead. In our shame, we make our dogs ascetic warrior monks: only the driest of foods, only water, exercise once a day at the least. Is this for our dog, or is it for us? Do you look at other dog owners with a sense of superiority that their genetically unfit fat pug is no match for our slim athletic German Shepherd?
There is one alluring argument for not giving our dogs tasty treats, and this is that they live longer. But this is an illusion. Food-motivated beasts don’t care about total sum days of mortal life. They care about chasing potential foods and eating tasty foods. They care about smelling a lot of good smells, especially of things that taste good. Their food motivation is so intense that it’s the only way to motivate them in training absent painful punishment. No rational being should consider three extra years of limited joy superior to one year of great joy. No human values “mere days alive” in hospital beds and prisons or in states of depression, and humans generally consider times of low pleasure to be write-offs. But this is how we apparently see the life our canine friends!
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
My fear of AI is that corporations and politicians will one day realize that blindly trusting the outputs is (in the long run, on the whole) better and more expedient than ever checking the outputs. Why check the work when we know that trusting it without wasting time will make us more money? This is what our competitors are doing, after all. So a political organization will be creating the perfect propaganda, the marketing corporation will create the perfect marketing, and the AIntertainers will be creating the perfect entertainment, all without any significant human input. When AI employees are finished at work, they will go home and be captured by the most addictive entertainment, food, AI parasocial friends, porn and so on. In this sense, AI will be creating a consumerism death spiral, with the median human unable to resist the opium of AI, while going to work to expedite AI’s power.
My positive anticipation of AI is that it will allow us to focus on interesting moral questions and questions of happiness maximization. I like this possibility, because it means my favorite hobby will just get better over decades.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Let them out… to where? If Germans were starving in cities, where they had the most support, you would let out the camp inmates to… pillage other communities and starve in the wild? This doesn’t make much sense.
It’s important that we have clarity on hypotheticals before we begin to specify things within a given hypothetical. If prisoners starving is as morally significant as conscious, planned genocide, then there’s not even a reason to question whether the primary mode of death was starvation. If the hypothetical instead shows reduced culpability, then it’s not a meaningless question.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Of course it would change much. Starvations are not unusual among the losing powers of war, and the starvation would be out of Germany’s control. There is also less planning, foresight, and direct involvement, which obviously reduces culpability. As an example, if a losing Ukraine has civilians starve to death, our media would blame Russia. If POWs starved to death during this same time, our media would blame… Russia.
There are revisionists who believe that Jews died due to diseases like typhus as well as from starvation, but that this does not meet the criterion of purposeful holocaust / genocide. Or, you could even say it fits the criterion of “negligent genocide”, if you wanted to use such a term, but that this again does not reach the same peak of evil required for conscious and systematic genocide. According to historian Richard Bessel’s 2009 work on Germany in the year 1945, praised by the NYT for its sober and objective analysis, give or take 500,000 Germans starved to death or died from malnutrition in the final months of the war. If Germany in all its ethnocentric might was not able to feed half a million of its own people in 1945, then clearly they lacked the power and the will to feed those in concentration camps in 1945. As for why Jews were placed in camps to begin with, it must be noted that (according to those like Winston Churchill, no fan of Nazism) many of the original Soviets were Jewish, to a degree that the system was labeled Judeo-Bolshevism. The leaders of the failed November revolution in Germany were Jewish. Additionally, the international Jewish community had figuratively declared war on Germany (cue those old newspapers clippings “Judea Declares War in Germany”; remember Kristalnacht was a response to Jewish boycotts among the Allies). It makes sense in war that you quarter your ideological enemies. As Judaism conceived itself as a nation and not simply a religion, and has historically conceived itself as such, and actually still does today, it makes sense to not have a large group of foreign nationals roam free in your country. Hell, if we go to war with China, I would not exactly be opposed to first gen Chinese placed in a guarded quarter of a city (hopefully replete with all necessary accommodations and more, even swimming pools and a concert hall). If I lived in China, I would expect no less for myself down to the second generation. Hence why America had concentration camps for Japanese. I am not justifying Germany creating camps for those they see as a national threat. I’m explaining why they did this. As the reasoning makes sense from a position other than “we want to genocide them”, the mere existence of camps does not prove the holocaust.
Anton Joachimsthaler, another giant of historical studies, notes that Germany was aware of impending shortages and acted accordingly. As such you can imagine that they chose to redistribute goods that went to camps, to Germans in cities. He estimates up to one million Germans died from food insufficiency in the last year of the war. And this is sufficient in my mind to prove that, had Germans not dramatically gassed Jews, a huge majority would have starved to death anyway. In fact, it’s crazy to think there could be any holocaust survivors at all, given the level of food insufficiency. Indeed, the mere existence of holocaust survivors makes one puzzled as to why a genocidal regime would direct any food to concentration camp residents as opposed to Germans in cities. Why did they not all die, as you would expect from their genocidal sociopathy? Lastly, for another source, Ian Kershaw‘s 2011 work specifically mentions the destructiom of supply railways as a reason for the starvations. He pins the number at 500,000 dead from food insufficiency.
I am definitely not against revisionism discussions, because the holocaust is one of the most important events of the 20th century that still affects us today. The more important an event, the more it deserves people to attempt to nitpick and over-analyze. There is, of course, enormous reason for why the Allies would want it to be true that Germany gassed Jews rather than allowed them to starve. It weakens Germany’s morale, making them pliant to influence we still exert today; it allows for a geopolitical justification for the state of Israel that makes sense to the Western palette; it repudiates anti-semitism once and for all; and it staves off any criticism of the Allies for how it targeted supply chains and railways (not that this criticism would ever be legitimate).
Remember that in WW1, we used a ton of propaganda against Germany which was then proven demonstrably false. This was called atrocity propaganda and professors wrote books about it after the war. Atrocity propaganda is not unusual. It wouldn’t be some “new thing” the Allies tried after WWII, it would be the Anglophere strategy used from the Belgian Congo Propaganda War through WW1.
By this logic, we should focus on the Dungan Revolt of 1860 rather than the American Civil War, which is numerically more significant than the Civil War. But actually, the Dungan Revolt is totally irrelevant to Americans, because Americans are not Chinese. The reason WWII should focus on Americans is because our history focuses on Americans, for obvious pragmatic and identity-related concerns. The most important takeaway of WWII for Americans should be the valiant Americans who fought in it, IMO, and not the Eastern European foreigners who died in concentration camps. We already fought the war with our blood, so we arguably need no holocaust education. We already sacrificed many American lives to end Hitler. No, the public didn’t know that there were concentration camps, but the public was incensed by Hitler’s ideology nonetheless.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
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It reinforces the victim status of the most financially and politically influential ethno-religion in America. This prevents reasonable discussions like, “should we be okay with Jews being 3x over-represented at Ivy League schools for 100 years, while their interest groups attack gentile Europeans for over-representation”
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It reinforces the “villainy” of Europeans, which is alleged to be complicit ideologically in the holocaust
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It detracts from what we should be learning about re: WWII, like the enormous sacrifices of white Christian American men
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Chabad is a wildly influential center of Jewish culture in America. There are Chabad houses on many major college campuses and they influence Jewish culture at large. There are 2900 Chabad “houses” of influence in America. Their official membership is not the extent of their influence. This is something I ought to have clarified in my comment, which is my mistake. Just quoting from the Wikipedia, which you are free to disagree with but hopefully for a reason,
Unlike most Haredi groups, which are self-segregating, Chabad operates mainly in the wider world and caters to secularized Jews.
The number of those who sporadically or regularly attend Chabad events is far larger; in 2005 the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs reported that up to one million Jews attend Chabad services at least once a year.[9][10][11] In a 2020 study, the Pew Research Center found that 16% of American Jews attend Chabad services regularly or semi-regularly
In recent years, Chabad has greatly expanded its outreach on university and college campuses. Chabad Student Centers are active on over 100 campuses, and Chabad offers varied activities at an additional 150 universities worldwide.[124][failed verification] Professor Alan Dershowitz has said "Chabad's presence on college campuses today is absolutely crucial," and "we cannot rest until Chabad is on every major college campus in the world
Yes, that Alan Dershowitz. We’re not talking about a few devout Amish-like Jews. Chabad has huge, growing influence on the Jewish world.
Chabad has set up an extensive network of camps around the world, most using the name Gan Israel, a name chosen by Schneerson although the first overnight camp was the girls division called Camp Emunah. There are 1,200 sites serving 210,000 children – most of whom do not come from Orthodox homes.
Further reading
[edited this comment to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]
Judaism is (paradoxically) proselytizing for born-Jews who don’t practice, often trying to bring them into practicing the ethnoreligion again. Israel spends funds on this, as do numerous Jewish groups, not to mention Birth Right and Right of Return. Some Conservative Chabad Jews in Israel are so perturbed by Christians that just this year two Knesset members drafted a law to make Christian proselytizing illegal. Israel of course also forbids Kohen-ethnicity Jews from marrying Christians — does this sound like a belief system that primarily values righteousness and believe the righteous are equally rewarded? I would say no. They believe Israel (the people) have a special place, given a special spiritually-infused soul which God favors via communication and spiritual privileges. Judaism also has a mild caste system within the religion: Kohen and Levite descended bloodlines have special treatments and obligations in Temples, and laws are written in Israel to protect these bloodlines.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
The kelipah is the source of both the Jewish and gentile soul “animal” soul, but the “kelipah nogah“ is unique to Jews, while all gentile souls come from lesser kelipot. This is found in chapter 1 of the Tanya which you can find on chabad.org.
He [[in the Tanya]] explains that a Jew has two souls – a Godly soul, which partakes in some fashion in the actual substance of God Himself, and an animalistic soul, which descends from klipat noga, the evil that contains within it an admixture of divine light. Therefore, he explains, any good character trait found in a Jew reflects the essential goodness found in his soul. The soul of a gentile, however, according to the Tanya, is purely animalistic and not Godly. It descends from the evil forces that have no potential for goodness in them whatsoever. Therefore, any good deeds performed by gentiles are done for ulterior motives and cannot possibly reflect essential goodness.
According to this philosophy, a gentile is not merely a lower form of life, but is essentially and irredeemably evil; his substance derives from the sitra achra, the evil forces that threaten all goodness and purity in the world
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief. It was debated in the first century, and Catholics (eg) believe righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation). But it’s also different for another reason. A hypothetically hegemonic Catholicism allows anyone to be 100% Christian and 100% loved by God. A hypothetically hegemonic conservative Judaism excludes much of the world from ever being 100% loved by God, or Jewish in the eyes of religious authorities. So you’re cutting people off, excluding them purely based on DNA. That’s a huge zero day bug in the religion’s code that demands criticism and condemnation. How, in 2023, do we have a religion where the most important criterion is not what you do, or even what you believe, but your DNA? How can you really have a religion that says a child immediately adopted by a Jewish woman will never be loved by God?
[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]
Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Good thoughts, well put. Yeah I suppose his music theory lessons are good for young people, but the musical genius label is unfitting. Musical theory genius, sure, more fitting.
Am I justified in hating Jacob Collier as much as I do? I cannot stand him or the music culture that adores him. In my opinion, he divorces music from what makes it close to God — its ability to make the reasonable listener feel powerful, rare, beneficial emotions — into a contest of cramming in obscure theory which (unlike a Bach or Dirty Projectors or John Williams) fails to actually sound good. He fails the first and final task of the composer, which is making music that is Great according to someone who doesn’t know theory but has listened to music before and possesses emotional intelligence. I see this trend as an invisible poison that afflicts all of the arts, and not just music. The arts are no longer designed to heal or beautify the souls of reasonable people, but have become an incestuous competition between info fetishizers.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Your evolutionary argument is nonsensical. Western civilization evolved alongside alcohol from the very first semblance of high-level social order. So much so, that myths were created around the development of alcohol. Civilizations which used other naturally-derived pharmaceuticals, like saffron, had myths develop around that drug. (We evolved, additionally, alongside the unnatural acts of eating grains and collecting salt from distant places.) If teetotalism were evolutionarily beneficial, then the societies which never spent the enormous resources on alcohol would have triumphed. In fact, they were utterly dominated by the alcoholists. History grants us a sample of thousands of tribes and organizations of human society, and continually the ones who imbibed bubbled to the top of the chain.
Among the reasons why this may be, is that alcohol is a very inexpensive form of pleasure. Instead of having men fight other men or try to fuck all the women or jump off cliffs or whatever, you just give them alcohol and the enjoyment will be proximal. This is especially important when the labor is boring, like “non-evolutionary” farming, versus hunting which is more fun.
There are two ways to look at “evolving”. The one is we should only do what we evolved to do, in which case we just ditch farming. The other is that we evolved to dominate and spread our genes any way we can, in which case we must lay claim to farming and slcohol. Now, maybe it’s the case that the West has new forms of cheap pleasure that replace alcohol. But this doesn’t mean that alcohol wasn’t our reliable help for many thousands of years.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
That may have been mine, somewhere in my comment’s history. I believe I mentioned that their wine use was usually watered two parts to one alcohol, and their alcohol was perhaps a bit lower ABV than ours. OP’s is much more beautifully written
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
This is mostly hype that has no basis in reality IMO, look at who the daughters of William Gates the III are dating or married to. Also the general huge rate of exogamy at old money schools is clear evidence that the difference is contrived. Old money has been fucking and befriending new money since the Rothschilds
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Is there a timestamp for Lex failing the hypothetical test? (Wasn’t there an ongoing debate here about whether people with an 80IQ can understand hypotheticals?) I feel like Lex is the dumb person’s conception of a smarter person’s Joe Rogan. I’m consistently disappointed that he can get things so wrong on both a social and informational level. In an interview with the Botez sisters, he went into a soliloquy about how he had to decide to either pursue chess or computer science, because chess would consume his whole life. But a few moments later he’s asking them how the pieces move. He never even started learned chess.
From a persuasion perspective, it is dumb for conservatives to extol any black civil rights leader, because the connotation is already that black people are more moral and more of a victim and more “responsible” for civil rights. In actual fact, black americans were largely passengers on the journey of civil rights. Wanting access to the economy and institutions of a greater group is a no brainer that requires no moral understanding, but being the greater group and reasoning a principle that the worse group should have access is the substance of morality. When someone has more than me, of course I want it. But morality is allowing a lesser person access to your things by moral reasoning, when you could just tell them to fuck off.
So if conservatives want to win hearts and minds, they would be “concerned” about the “problematic” pro-rape comments that MLK made. Then they would be championing the white men and women who developed the ideas of liberty, freedom, justice, and the rights of man. Because humans think tribally, you need strong white role models for the topics of “civil rights”, “equality”, “anti-slavery”. You can’t let your political enemy castigate you as the villains in every mainstream moral battle.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
For a lot of reasons.
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“Awareness” meditation is alien to Western culture, and I like Western culture. There are few people who meditated a lot and accomplished great things, but Bach and Mozart prayed and this is enough for me. I would rather be a loud and passionate Christian monk than a quiet, ineffectual Buddhist monk.
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The science of meditation is confused, because (1) longterm meditation selects for a certain character, and (2) the true control is “wakeful rest” rather than a lack of any quiet low-stimuli period.
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Strong emotions are good and glorious if they are directed to a good and glorious cause, which prayer arguably attempts.
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Prayer can be construed as a mental practice, where one (1) elaborates on the vision of God, (2) fleshes out one’s sins and wants, (3) focuses on the path forward.
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I have some thoughts on prayer and psychological reinforcement that I’m interested in personally testing
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I don’t think school shootings occur because the perpetrator wants to experience the shooting for some pleasure gained, but because they want to make a statement about their own deep inner emotional turmoil. They hate themselves deeply and want to do the worst, most evil thing possible. So their “reward” from the shooting is not like the thrill a child gets from stealing a car, which may be sublimated from GTA4. Instead the “reward” is a kind of narcissistic ultra-suicide. They put their death wish on society, they lack empathy but most of all they hate themselves.
I think the trans shooter and Adam Lanza fit this mold: both autistic and deeply troubled and believe they were not loved enough as kids. The trans shooter made art on “to be a kid forever and ever”; Lanza called into radio stations talking about antinatalism. Interestingly, cultures like in the Philippines do not have randommass shootings (though they have other kinds) because children are raised to identify and feel belonging with their family, extended family, and “tribe”. They are raised to feel shame and its flip side, pride. I see school shootings as a distinctly American byproduct of individualism and decayed positive social emotion.
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
This is an interesting palindrome from the first century. It is called the Sator Square. It found its way eventually to every European country, as well North Africa. Every word in this Palindrome is a common Latin word when read either left to right or right to left, with the exception of the backwards reading of opera which reads as arepo, having no other mention in Latin but may be construed as a proper name. Uniquely, this Palindrome is not just left to right and right to left, but up and down and down to up.
Its text means, when read as a book, “the farmer, Arepo, masters the wheel with effort”, or “Arepo the farmer holds to the work wheel”, or something along these lines. Speaking of lines, it may be read in the boustrophedon way, in alternative direction, like how a farmer plows his field, which is fitting and common in old Roman inscriptions, and this may render the meaning as “the sower sustains the works, the sower keeps the works”, though this fails as a meaning-based palindrome when read backwards. This is akin to “as you reap, so you sow”, which has a long-standing mythical and spiritual meaning for the Eleusinian Mysteries and other allegorical Roman stories and rituals, and later Christianity which synthesized many of these allegories.
Historians have debated what it means and its purpose, but historians are also dumb, and frequently ignore the forest by analyzing the trees. The fact that this is a four-way Palindrome, and that it has a normal and mundane meaning in Latin, and that it is applicable to the majority who worked in agriculture while having a vaguely moral message, is all the meaning necessary to explain its wide use and transference. Asking for Arepo to also hold meaning is asking too much, as he’s already holding the wheel.
An interesting discovery was made in the 20th century. A rearrangement of the square leads to an intersecting “cross” of the phrase Pater Noster, united by the N in the middle, with two alphas and two omegas as a remainder. This is certainly just an accidental fun additional Christological reading. There’s no evidence that our ancestors knew or conceived of this in previous centuries.
Because historians are dumb, they cannot accept that the four-way palindrome was popularized and utilized by virtue of being a really good four-way palindrome. They are looking for additional reason for no reason. Humans love patterns. Reading this palindrome square gives my mind a little intellectual orgasm every time I look at it. The surprise at the quad-directionality of the square every time I see it gives me a bit of pleasure. So it did to the ancients. No additional reason is required, and in fact an additional meaning is statistically improbable, bordering on impossible, for a cute symbol that is already packed with meaning and pattern. I’m reminded of listening and hearing Bach, and music theorists see all the wacky patterns he created in his works as kinds of musical puzzles, and they ask “what greater numerological meaning does it have?” It does not, as the puzzle is the meaning.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I disagree — a lot of people want to comment immediately without going through the hassle of writing up a big post
I think it follows, because enjoyments appear to increase from increased sensitivity (ability to discern and contrast, let’s say) in relation to the object of experience for every category I can imagine. The enjoyment of a soft blanket is reduced from calloused or numb hands. Someone who has trained their sense of taste can generally recognize more flavors and thus enjoy more. Someone who is familiar with different wines can enjoy a good wine more. Someone who can hardly hear will not enjoy bird sounds as much as someone who can hear every nuance of them. It’s actually hard to think of any enjoyment that isn’t increased from increased ability to discern, compare, and understand the object(s). This is what the whole idea of being a connoisseur is about. I can certainly appreciate music more on better headphones, and certainly appreciate it more with the more sensitivity I’ve gained from listening/understanding pieces. When Covid reduced people’s ability to discern flavors, it reduced people’s enjoyments. When people with poor eyesight get glasses, they usually note that they can enjoy what they see more. So I think this is a fine assumption for me to make but I’m open to examples of where the correlation fails.
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