Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.
Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.
georgioz
3mo ago
Sometimes it is interesting to which depths this phenomenon runs, how self unaware people can be. Famously Marx extensively used the word ideology as a pejorative descriptor for ways ruling class keeps workers in the dark in the class conflict. Of course he piled all that criticism while keeping Marxism itself outside of such framework, as if it was implicitly true and correct stance and thus it could not be considered an ideology by definition.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.
I have seen this argument before, where literally in the same sentence somebody can say that other people argue about morals, while he just wants what is good for people. You do realize, that moral philosophy on basic level talks about distinction between what is good and what is bad? As soon as you use the word good or bad, you are making a moral argument.
There seems to be certain myopia for many people, where they hold some moral positions without acknowledging them as such. They pretend that their morality is objective and rational, not even warranting defending it - as if they read it from facts of the universe, they gleaned it from the proton number of atom of carbon, or from trajectory of Jupiter or something like that. It is similar trick adjacent to Russel's conjugation in much of leftist thinking - our moral philosophy is true and fair and outside of critique, while your moral philosophy is just a hideous ideology.
georgioz
3mo ago
Sure, there can be a weird twist when in let's say 50 years what constitutes an undesirable group can change quite radically. The unpredictability of lebanonization of a country.
georgioz
3mo ago
Britain already has history of shipping various prisoners and undesirables to inhospitable places in name of expansion. Who knows, history could repeat itself.
There's a pretty decent number of women authors who just write male-focused or general fiction, especially for teen and young adult audiences.
I recently delved into LitRPG/Cultivation sphere, which I think is somwhat newish offhoot of scifi/fantasy genre and is at least adjacent to YA scene/audience. And to be frank, I start to think that female protagonists like in surprisingly interesting Azarinth Healer series may work better in that context. The male protagonists in many of these stories are some combination of weak whiners, being overshadowed and constantly scolded/humiliated by female side characters, having weird fetish/harem sidestories and more.
The pet theory of mine is that feminism is basically projection of male virtues/characteristics on females. Terrible girl-bossing is just projection of what feminists view as toxic masculinity on women: aggressive know-it-alls, emotionless or even cruel leaders etc. If the author can do modicum of work to reign that tic at least a little bit, they can actually end up with decent formerly male character only in skirt. With female protagonist you will not see her being literally hit on head if she says something "dumb", scolded for being a creep, being told that she is an idiot, humiliated or womensplained for not knowing something or any other type of terrible writing now so prevalent with male heroes. Or to me more precise even if they are addressed like that, they have a mature response to it.
It reminds me of the story how the character of Ellen Ripley from Alien was originally written for male actor and how it surprisingly worked well for female - especially in a world where only women are allowed to have oldschool male traits/virtues.
georgioz
3mo ago
So give me your sources. The AI gave me Gitnux and 2date4 love or Worldmetrics as sources. I don't want to research that stupid shit too deeply, if you have other numbers just send it. The point still stands, sex is relatively easy to purchase for almost any single male.
Hard disagree. Sex has to be really bad before I would prefer to just crank my hog.
Even in that case, you can easily satisfy yourself using hookers. According to quick AI search the prices ranges from $20 per hour for street hookers to around $150 for average escort to $300 plus for high end hooker in USA. For a price of your average car lease, any single male can have a different hooker every week, getting his body count to triple digits easily thus matching any redpilled macho. And we are not even talking about sex tourism, where you are a cheap flight away to some 3rd world country where you can enjoy orgies for really cheap.
The OP's point of course still stands - even if you satisfy your sexual desire, there is still the social aspect that many people fill parasocial relationships. Although even those are not the only options. There are hookers who act more like your lovers where you are something like a sugar daddy. They have stable clientele of multiple men with their own schedule, so you can visit regularly and get not only a sex but also massage or even homecooked meal.
To be frank I find this as highly distasteful and unsatisfying relationship but I used it only as an example. In the end there is not much more difference between people obsessed with sexual conquests or people who obsesses about masturbation or people who just chase hookers. The difference is only in degree.
"Do you feel emotions as physical sensations or intense thoughts?"
I'd say that most people feel emotions physically - e.g. you are so anxious before an important event so that you want to throw up. You are so angry that your hands tremble and maybe even contort into fists. You are so ashamed that you feel your face and ears turning red in wave of hotness.
In fact I think there was some post possibly back in reddit TheMotte days, where there was somebody promoting a theory of polytheism being born of these particular physical foci of emotion. I do not remember it that well, but the gist of it was something about the fact why you had god of war or lust and so forth with specific rituals and physicality - down to actual representation of that emotion in vocabulary: like the words heart, bile, spleen, gut, stomach etc being associated with courage, hatred, anger, anxiety, fear etc. The theory was that your actions were driven by that particular emotion associated with that part of you body related to a specific god who had domain over it. In order to be integrated you had to appeal to this multitudes integrated into you being. Monotheistic religions like Christianity integrated all these emotions into one person, putting reason/logos on top of all of it, as the ultimate ruling principle.
But I still think that rational thinking is a reflective stance, there is still a need to control the emotion on a physical level in order to analyze it. But the underlying physicality is still there - how could it not be. Stress or fear reaction are famously related to various levels of hormones with large impacts on physical state. Just because you have more experience controlling them does not mean they do not exist physically.
I even think that a good way of controlling/regulating your immediate emotions is to disassociate yourself from these physical effects - you posit your ego as an observer of physical impact of your emotion as if you are some curious anthropologist of yourself, not fighting or appeasing them directly from within the paradigm.
georgioz
3mo ago
I'd say that I am mostly with you here. I however have an additional position which can give animals moral worth - if they impact humans. This is I think Kantian position, where animal moral worth is derivative from humans. E.g. we give pets more moral worth compared to nonpets, because killing pets impacts their owners orders of magnitude more. Additionally animal cruelty by perpetrator may make them more cruel to people, so we may regulate that behavior somewhat. Of course this argument can be hijacked by somebody claiming any animal suffering causes them a lot of harm. So it is not a sure thing, but it is directionally correct for me so we can have some basic prescriptions when it comes to animal cruelty while not morally equating [some number of] animals to humans as some rationalists do.
georgioz
3mo ago
My two cents from old cooking books - poultry was treated as inferior type of "meat". Many recipes had additional ingredients - such as bacon or ham or other "higher" level meats added to poultry in order for it to be considered a proper meat meal.
georgioz
3mo ago
In elementary school grammar classes, students are admonished for saying things like “Me and Tim played baseball yesterday”.
I always thought about it in a way that if the sentence makes sense with just one person, then I should use I. For instance: I went to school yesterday means that I should use My brother and I went to school yesterday. But when the original sentence makes sense with "me" I should also copy it. E.g: My mother gave me a cookie changes into My mother gave a cookie to me and my brother. I am not sure if this is correct, but that is what I use as a heuristic.
The hypercorrection makes sense, except given how English language forms it means it will actually be acceptable very soon. Similarly to how literally/metaphorically are now basically synonyms, except when they are not.
georgioz
3mo ago
I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.
I know that this is off-topic - but can somebody explain what is this sentence structure? Is it something similar to the word literally now also having the meaning of metaphorically? So similarly as now it is okay to use X and I in all the formulations - even in those where it does not make sense - we now even upgraded to it into X and I's Y?
Would you rather be 95th percentile in Lesotho, or 40th percentile in America?
I think it would actually be quite competitive. 95th percentile in Lesotho would put you into literal top 100,000 people in that small nation. We are talking about a country with Gini coefficient of 0.44, being part of top elite would mean being very rich even in nominal terms - probably scion of some well connected family a respected local businessman or government official who studied in South African university (5,6% people have university degree in Lesotho) and goes there for shopping trips. Not to even talk about things like social status or what you can afford - things like your own maids and servants, housing etc.
georgioz
3mo ago
There are additional suspicios angles with Epstein murder - specifically that Epsteins associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced for 20 years for sexually abusing minors, and so far she is the only one sentenced. In fact even in the official government website there was at least one other person involved in the scheme:
In the later phase, from approximately 2001 until at least approximately 2004, MAXWELL and Epstein enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, minor girls to visit Epstein’s Palm Beach Residence to engage in sex acts with Epstein, after which Epstein, MAXWELL, or another employee of Epstein’s would give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash. This is all highly suspicious - we are talking about trafficking many girls over the span of at least a decade and there is nobody else involved.
georgioz
4mo ago
There definitely woke things which are centrally defined and driven, especially if it is implemented withing government. These are things like hate speech laws, various DEI labor requirements etc. Additionally even oldschool Marxist were constantly infighting, especially in power vacuum before some faction solidified their power: think about bolshevisks vs mensheviks or Stalinists vs Trockyists etc.
georgioz
4mo ago
Candance Owens was a hot star in conservative commentariat - a black well spoken conservative woman. She built her own following then was also part of Shapiro's Daily Wire until they went their separate way after conflict about Jews/Israel after October 7.
As for what is happening - did you ever crack some edgy jokes in your friend group, maybe something like "Hitler did nothing wrong" etc. only to find out that this one guy actually took it literally and did not get it as a joke? That is Canace Owens for you when it comes to some of her stuff including Obama/Macron being transgender. It is a meme going on way back like when Joan Rivers offhandedly had a remark that Michelle is a tranny.
georgioz
4mo ago
So in other words Israel's only strategy would be creating a giant refugee crisis 300 km from Europe.
Other countries do that. Syrians do that, Sudanese do that, Pakistanis do that. In a sense Palestinians from Gaza are peanuts when it comes to potential issues and resulting refugee crisis right know in the whole Sahel region.
Nobody wants that. Israel is a small state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
Not really. Many of Israel's neighbors - like Egypt or Saudi Arabia - don't give a single shit about Palestinians except for some platitudes. In fact it is Western countries who are more active in this sense. Plus I think that this is already old news, Israel will be considered a bad guy no matter what - there are people who still throw 1948 expulsion at them
I'd say that the definition of woke is much better grounded than what leftist define as fascism or neoliberalism or even capitalism. It was beaten again and again including parallels with Marxism. Woke uses the same oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, marxist dialectic and interplay of Theory(Critical Theory) and Praxis (Activism) as old Marxist. They also use similar concept of consciousness as Marxists do with their class consciousness. The easiest way to make the parallel is that wokeness expanded on the concept of property/capital, which now includes other types of property that oppressing class possess. In the same way bourgeoisie possess the property of capital, white people possess the property of white privilege, men possess the property of male privilege and cishetero people possess the property of [cishetero]normativity.
But again, all these are high-level academic definitions and one can argue them. But this is far from the extent to which we are talking about. Wokeness is an ideology, even secular religion in similar way to let's say scientology. Woke people have their own ontology of what is man and a woman, what is justice, with their own prescriptions of how society should work with their own sins such as racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia or homophobia. On ground level woke people do not need to know the nitty-gritty details of how the ideology is developed. But it is the same with other religions - not all christians know bible passages by heart or know the main church doctrines. This does not prevent people to call them Christians as a useful descriptor.
Being brutal against the locals is not an effective way to win.
You just cherrypicked several unsuccessful attempts even in relatively late times. Croats literally performed ethnic cleansing of Serbs under NATO umbrella and were successful. Czechoslovakia and Poland were absolutely brutal toward native Germans living in the area for 500+ years and were successful in solving the "German problem" creating ethnically homogenous states. Plus don't forget about ongoing war in Ukraine with "war crimes" aplenty.
What you described is all poxy/colonial wars with little to no investment of local population. The comparison of Israel as a colonial power similar to France in Algeria is absolutely misguided, millions of Israelis cannot just pack and leave such as French from Algeria or Americans from Vietnam or Soviets from Afghanistan. Again, just look at Ukraine war where Russians are willing to shoulder losses two orders of magnitude higher compared to their previous colonial military engagements. It is a completely different game.
georgioz
4mo ago
Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way.
Yeah, she acted as a porn actress employed by a well know porn director in his porn film. What else would you call her other than a porn actress? If somebody murdered "grand total of one person" or somebody only burglarized "grand total of one house" - then such a criminal would only be "technically" murderer/burglar? What is this. How would you call her? I am genuinely curious.
PS: As a wise person once said - you may have built thousand bridges and only sucked one dick. But forever more, you are not going to be known as a bridgebuilder, but rather as a dicksucker.
georgioz
4mo ago
"Ominous" how?
Probably ominius in the same way Arabs in Palestine saw it as ominious, when their neighborhood changed its "vibe" over the decades in first half of 20th century. Or maybe how American natives carefully watched their new neigbors with strange culture. And ultimately they were correct.
So we are back to square one. It seems to me that you are truthitarian and not a utilitarian, which is fair game. Let's investigate it on my previous example of Kant's axe murderer asking for you wife. Since she can be destroyed by [you telling] the truth about her whereabouts, then she should be destroyed, right? Because telling a lie can hamper yours and murderer's ability to correctly calculate the utility in the future with immense impacts. Or you should tell a lie, because death of you wife would be more negative utility compared to whatever impact on correct calculation of utility is there from telling a lie. What is your answer to the axe murderer? Is the truth the ultimate value that should destroy all and everything in its path? Or is it subordinate to other values such as your best estimation of utility in a given moment?
This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.
That is why amended Sagan's mantra:
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be - except if it clashes with some other higher value (e.g. causing negative utility), in that case you should not destroy that thing by the truth.
Hard disagree. Left uses audio-visual tools to push their agenda all the time. This photo of a drowned toddler did more for triggering mass immigration acceptance back in 2015, than any other rational argument at the time. Sam Alinsky's Rules for Radicals explicitly calls for tactics like this - such as using small provoaction in order to garner "disproportionate" attention that can be then captured and used for propaganda. If anything, the right is way behind this tactics mostly because it is leftists who are now in power and who are to large degree prone to this sort of asymmetrical warfare. Although even that is questionable as long as the left can keep pretense of them being the underdogs.
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