fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Congrats.
How many years of misery did you agree to endure? What I mean is, I have a very catholic great-uncle. For 50 years he and his wife hated each other. They had kids, lived in different parts of their house, and with everyone, they had just one subject of conversation: the assholishness of their better half. He forbade her to come to his funeral, so even death could not quell the depth of their feelings for each other. That may have been too many years of contractual pain. No-fault divorce, zero years, is too few. I think 5-10 years of commitment to misery could be the sweet spot.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I think your criticism regarding the rules and my failure to ‘even try to meet the standards” was below the belt, given that I have answered hundreds of your questions in good faith in the course of our long-running discussions . However, as a mistake theorist I am an inveterate optimist and a glutton for punishment, so here’s the next batch.
Indeed. You've claimed that every war has a "Good" side and an "Evil" side, correct?
Both sides can be evil, or neutral. The rest of the section is mostly wordgames. You throw moral condemnation around all the time, it’s only when I use good and evil that I have to start the definition from scratch.
They think it's murder, obviously, but you and I understand that the people I killed in this hypothetical were perpetuating evil, whereas I was acting for Good, so when I shot them for resisting me I was simply doing the right thing.
The situation is this: I give a gun to a slave/jew, and when the sheriff/SS catch us, a fight breaks out, leaving law enforcement dead. Yeah I think that’s morally fine. People are allowed to defend their freedom with lethal force. I hold the policemen responsible for enforcing immoral laws/doing evil, they are not an inert instrument of the democratic will.
The fact that I broke their laws is irrelevant, because their laws serve evil, and are therefore illegitimate.
The laws are irrelevant whether they serve good or serve evil. The laws are just the cliff’s notes version of morality, for those who need a shortcut. If legality and morality conflict, morality should win every time (whether it’s your morality or mine).
I tend to think of gentlemen's duels as "doubly just"
‘Gentleman’s duel’ was ironic, I do not care for southern honor culture, or duels. A gunfight breaking out between a slave and a slaver is a “just war” for the slave, not a ‘doubly just’ duel.
But leaving that aside, why can't one or the other side be good, but mistaken about the other side?
Because you’re never supposed to resolve a mistake by killing the other side.
Would you say that failing morally is evil? Do you think anyone manages to "not fail morally" in this sense?
No, you can fail morally, repeatedly, without being evil. But at a certain threshold of moral failure, you become evil, and that essentially means that ‘the good’ can treat you as an enemy, and no longer give you the benefit of morality. That’s why lying to a nazi policeman is okay.
But of course if one withdraws the benefit of morality willy-nilly, one quickly finds oneself in a war against the whole world. For example, I do not consider you, or most of my political opponents (even nazis), or most westerners, to be evil and vogelfrei. Unlike unconvicted murderers, Lee-rommel and nazi bakers. A key difference is that they have done evil.
And if democracy and discourse fails, you believe that one side of the resulting conflict is blameless, and the other side is evil, and that harm against the evil side should be maximized until their regime and ideology are crushed, no?
No. If tomorrow, your side and the woke declared a civil war in my country, and most people picked a side, I’d want nothing to do with it, and leave. Like a duel between two acquaintances, I’d be disgusted by both sides.
If discourse and democracy gives a result you consider evil, are you still evil to "follow the rules" and cooperate with that evil?
Yes, still evil. The mob’s will is not absolute, and I am not bound by democratic rules to commit genocide. The contradiction in your position is that you appear ready to jettison democracy and discourse, start slitting throats , declare war on your evil enemies, now, for a level of oppression that is objectively far below that of the jews under nazism or the blacks under the confederacy (who apparently are not justified in their rebellion).
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
It comes with a lot more social cachet, but revealed preferences tell another story. The substitute doesn’t need to be superior in every way to displace the original, it starts on the margins. And the margin is some costly, impractical, subpar sexual encounter versus a costless, unbounded, coolidge-effect boosted masturbation fantasy. But there will always be a niche for real sex purists, like the people who weave their own clothes.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
You’re presenting this as asymmetric, but men and women mirror each other here. They all have more and more access to superior substitutes for sex, so their standards rise and their willingness to meet their partner’s standards diminishes. No further explanations necessary. People just need each other less nowadays.
I was visiting friends, and the heating in my room was on the fritz. I was about to have a sleep-tight jerk-off, but that night I really wished I had an energetically independent, whole lotta woman, instead.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Almost certainly. "jewdefender" got banned I think november 23d, and this guy joined the 24th.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Lazy accusation. Objectively, this data point supports the left’s “loser narrative”, not the right’s, and you should see that. As this place’s median has drifted from a central grey tribe position to a hard right one, it needs to be occasionally reminded that there is another screen, and not every detractor is secretly in agreement and trying to make you doubt your sanity for criminal purposes.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
This all assumes control of institutions, education, media etc, is of paramount importance. Somehow if you can control those, you can re-mould mankind. It’s a very top-down approach, and I don't think it has worked, since the down has not been assimilated by the top.
The obvious explanation for the political disaffectation and psychological health of conservatives is that they are winning effortlessly. There is no meaningful difference between what they want and what they get, unlike the liberals. And so while liberals waste their time in political militancy of dubious value like redefining the vocabulary and adding “representation” to the cultural produce, conservatives can just take the money and grill.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Speak of The Law, and it will appear. I don’t think this is even close to rule-breaking.
If I left out the ‘interlocking wills’ part and presented it strictly as a standard attack on the woke ('them' instead of including the reader in the criticism with 'we' , made the bloodstained innocents the oppressed bipoc minorities, and hypoagency an exclusively feminist/female concept), you wouldn’t be lecturing me on mottiquette, and I’d be upvoted.
Can you name someone who is willing to say that you have accurately described their own thinking?
Tough standard, don't you think? The woke don't like to be called woke, it's called 'basic decency'.
The standard response to a strawman would be to deny that people hold the view, not agree that people (soldiers and bakers) have no agency, that orders should be followed , ‘this is how the world tends to work’, and ‘evil people are actually running the thing’.
The only ‘strawman’ objection to my characterization was “Just following orders is not accepted as an excuse” , and that was heavily criticized.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I thought it was neat, and zeroed in on a deep disagreement between the factions, but the Popular Will evidently disagrees. Am I not allowed to present my interpretation of where their ideas lead to? I thought it was identifiable as a criticism, but even if it wasn't, I quickly corrected the misunderstanding.
I don’t know why you bother responding to me if you’re trying to get me banned for insufficiently docile contradiction of rightism like so many before me.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I expected alt-righters to find the flaws in the reductio ad absurdum and explain how their ideology is totally different from similar woke theories. More progressive posters, if they still exist, to do the opposite. And guys like igi and me to argue and laugh at the spat.
But I think I once again underestimated how widespread those wokish-postmodern ideas have become on here. They don’t feel the need to defend them anymore, they just downvote and move on (ITT company excluded). I think they really do believe a version of this caricature.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I didn't say that. I said one can, and should, avoid heaping evil upon evil. I said it would be better if the evil general was dishonorable coward and a drunkard rather than a competent general, like it is better to be a german thief than an upstanding nazi baker.
You're not answering the question. Did lee, rommel and the grunts make the right decision to fight for their count(r)y ?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Somebody who does what he can, when he can, is just a man.
He’s the weakest man, a leaf in the wind. He is indistinguishable from an amoral man. If he’s lucky, he’s on the good side, his self-interest happens to coincide with morality, so he’s good. If he’s on the bad side, he’s evil.
Sure, people are weak, and you can’t damn most of humanity for weakness. But the question remains: should one carry out the immoral order/fight an immoral war? You “commend them for [fleeing or disobeying]”, and I agree. @FCfromSSC and friends’ position, as I understand it, is that they should obey, out of ‘honor’, duty to their homes, oaths, loyalty to their superiors, because ‘obedience is good’, etc.
Secondly, even if we agree that people are weak, we can expect more or less of them. At the extreme end (and I do see it on themotte sometimes), their hands are metaphorically tied when they face the slightest cost, and their wills are inert.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Standing is the symbolic gesture.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Interesting. Are you claiming that a person doing evil things to evil people therefore becomes good?
Do you see the parallel to the justice system? Parasitic behaviour, like thieving, on an evil entity (itself parasitic, among other things) is fundamentally good. Plying one’s trade and paying taxes, thereby strengthening the entity, is to become its accomplice.
By enforcing the laws against murder, they align themselves with the evil those laws were protecting, correct?
More or less, but it’s unclear if it’s murder. The northerner just gives the slaves guns so they can answer the guns that keep them in slavery. Turns raw oppression into a gentleman’s duel.
This would seem to imply that whenever a war is fought, at least one side is evil by your standards, correct?
Yes, the good can’t fight a war against a side they believe to be good. There is no ‘doubly just’ war.
I'm curious as to why you believe that Southerners in the pre-civil-war period should have known for a fact that freeing the slaves would harm them less than, say, fighting the civil war and another century of Jim Crow.
Imo your view of the american civil war is too colored by your present CW concerns. I’m not interested in re-litigating that issue, what interests me is the general question of personal ethics under a (universally accepted) evil regime. If the evil of the southern cause is too murky and personal for you, take the nazis or pol pot or whatever.
the disagreement here seems to amount to you thinking that when it comes to morals, whatever is not forbidden is mandatory
Yes, I don’t believe in supererogation. That doesn’t mean all those who fail to do ‘the best’ deserve death or imprisonment, but they have failed morally to a degree.
Someone can deserve death, and yet be spared due to mercy, expedience, extenuating circumstances, etc. This does not make them deserve death less, it merely means that giving them what they deserve must be balanced against our other interests.
Of course. Evidently we’re talking past each other if you think I condemn them all to death, even after the war and regime has ended. That’s just an absurdly barbaric position. I also never implied we should ‘cast aside all restraints’ in defense of the good, a position you keep imputing to me.
That people like yourself have lost all concept of this way of thinking speaks poorly both of your education and of our future prospects as a society: when the serious conflict comes, you will have no conceptual grounding to even recognize the road back to peace.
That’s rich coming from you, the guy constantly saying no peace is possible with his enemies. Have I not consistently affirmed my belief in the resolution of conflict by democracy and discourse, and defended a westphalian peace, against those who think like you on both sides?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Alright, no one is getting it, my bad, failure to communicate, I’m adding an edit. I suspect people agree too much with the parody, so the underlying criticism creates an uncanny valley or something.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Your argument would be that a Southerner who tries to defend himself and his fellow southerners against me, and the lawyer who prosecutes me, and the jury who convict me, and the judge who passes sentence, are all evil in the same general manner as Lee, correct?
And the farmer, and the postman, and the tinker taylor soldier spy. Not the thief.
They have no right to “defend” their “property”, human beings.
believes that it is better to defend the evil alongside the good than to leave the good defenseless.
The good are friends to one another, they do not fight wars against themselves. “Leaving the good defenseless” here means “refusing to fight a losing war that will end up harming them more”.
we're talking about people who you've labeled "Good" attacking people you've labeled "Evil",
Why do you keep insisting that it’s me who labels them evil when you’re out of arguments? If you want to argue that the confederacy and nazi germany weren’t evil, just do so. Your original argument, if you recall, is that the overarching evil somehow does not ‘transfer’ to those who help and carry it out.
I am amused by the fact that in the last thread, I argued that everyone is guilty, and in this thread you're rounding my position to saying that people are innocent or somehow not responsible for their actions
I told you a million times: when you condemn all, you condemn none. Your binary thinking, once again, erases all meaningful distinction. Hey, if everyone is guilty, that means your previous distinction between the good and the evil in southern society is moot, so that baker can be rounded off to evil by your own standards.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
First two points roughly correct.
Lee is evil, but a confederate policeman isn't, because his action is smaller, less pivotal? Would this be an accurate inference?
Even he had agency, and therefore chose to serve, and is, evil, just considerably less so.
Nevertheless, Evil people have no moral right, no defense permitted, no action allowed beyond unconditional submission to the Good.
What does this even mean? If you “unconditionally” submit to evil, you’re evil. If you’re evil, different moral rights apply.
Let’s not necessarily rehash that discussion just from that narrow aspect. In my view, you, pal, are also guilty of ‘clouds above’ postmodern thinking and denying people’s agency, making Lee, Rommel and all the nameless followers your bloodstained innocents.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Right. You explain it to them, because I’m not getting through. Doing the right thing isn’t supposed to be costless. Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I do think part of the left sees power as illegitimate (automatically defending ‘the weak’, and inferring from it an oppressor/oppressed relationship) and the bloodstained as innocents. The interlocking wills, people’s lack of agency, and the irrelevance of ideas/ ease of manipulation is a frequent narrative of the hard right on here. They also defend the carrying out of immoral orders (I had multiple debates about Lee and Rommel's moral character) without blinking.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I denounce all of the above, which is a parody of ‘woke oppressor/oppressed’ and ‘helpless paranoid alt-right’ beliefs.
Your ideas matter. Your actions matter. Your crimes are your own, even if you were ordered/influenced from above. Your will is not inert, it reacts with more powerful wills, you can refuse. Power is legitimate, and you have some.
The Illegitimacy of Power
In the beginning, the world was just, populated by true equals. Injustice was born when a Will first imposed itself upon another. How? Power. Is it possible to learn this “Power”? Not from the Good. Might makes wrong. Might as well submit, and take your righteous place in the great chain of...
The Interlocking Wills
With Power, the original Will comes down from above, and as it passes through inert Wills, is transmitted losslessly to the bottom . An ukrainian supports war on his government’s orders, itself a vassal of the EU, itself a vassal of the US, itself controlled by the CIA, the telephone company, boomers, elites, jews, rich cishet whites, billionaires, english royalty, the NWO, or you-shall-name-and-blame-it. Whoever He is, we are all NPCs in the Prime Mover’s single-player game. His shadowy Will reigns supreme. Fear not and rejoice, for it means we are...
The Bloodstained Innocents
We have no agency, pure victims even as we victimize. Our crimes are His crimes. Passing them down the chain, and guilt up the chain, we are a perfect conduit of power. Can’t victim-blame the helpless oppressed. As absolute power corrupts Him absolutely, utter lack of it frees us from corruption. Free to dance and sing and reach for...
The Clouds Above
All our ideas are at best irrelevant, at worst another manifestation of His Will. As we are powerless, it appears he manipulates us through media and everything else for the hell of it. Or an epiphenomenom, the illusory superstructure rising from the base like a cloud of smoke.
edit: I do not believe any of this.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Hard to dislike such a brilliant man, especially since his ideals seem so much closer to mine than those of his enemies. If there wasn’t the appalling death toll. I try to cut him some slack due to the Supreme General Curse.
Goes like this : To ultra-competent warriors like Napoleon and Caesar, almost any ‘fair’ peace terms the enemy offers look like shortchanging, because he alone knows he’s very likely to win the hypothetical war the peace is supposed to avoid. To achieve a meaningful compromise and lasting peace with such a man, you need an enemy wise and ego-less enough to know his own inferiority (as in the case of fabian tactics, which I always found fascinating) , and love of peace from both sides.
I think liberalism would win anyway, but I’d rather not have The Eastern Front, Civil War Edition , if all it takes to avoid it is closing the border and telling imams they can’t teach death for apostasy anymore. As you say, islam is so weak that expansion by the sword is not even an option for it, unlike nazism and communism. So the wolf is not really at the door-door, we can just tell him to fuck off. It would be a huge own-goal to import a problem that’s so easily avoided. Let liberalism and islam duke it out in their countries, and they can have their algerian civil wars instead of us.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
For the New Atheists, Christianity was the out-group.
Nah, that’s not it. Harris and Dawkins took tons of shit from A+ and the rest for being ‘islamophobic’. They know full well that Islam is far worse than Christianity (or Jainism, to take Harris’ favourite comparison), they just aren’t ready to compromise on liberalism (eg, free speech and immigration restrictions on muslims). They hope that liberalism will work like it has worked so many times before, even as it faces a more formidable enemy. An enemy whose primary weapon, death for apostates and critics, is designed to counter liberalism’s weapon, free speech. Sadly, I think the compromise is necessary. The risk is just not worth it.
That’s nepotism. If she’s driven to succeed in her chosen industry, any self-respecting mother would wish to stand on her own four limbs without having to rely on her son’s patronage.
More options
Context Copy link