guesswho
2yr ago
Veganism isn't based on some argument. Either you care enough about animal suffering to do something about it or you don't.
Sure, but no one has a utility function of 0/0/0/0/100.
You can make all types of arguments about why veganism also gets you other things you want beyond reduced animal suffering (maybe it's better for the environment or fights the obesity epidemic or has other health benefits or etc), you can make all kinds of arguments about why it doesn't lose you other things you want (it's easier and cheaper and tastes better than you think, common intuitions about it making you scrawny or low-energy are wrong, etc).
If you care about animal suffering 15, then whether becoming vegan would lose you more or less than 15 in other areas is the determining factor in your decision. And all kinds of arguments are relevant to that calculation.
guesswho
2yr ago
The rules are 'fair' in the sense of 'it is illegal for rich men and the homeless alike to sleep under an overpass.'
guesswho
2yr ago
Reference here for all the people who got really mad at me for characterizing anti-woke sentiments as believing women are not as competent in high-status professions.
Also:
science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels.
Pretty sure it always was, and only doesn't look that way to us because victors write the history books and because there wasn't social media to record and promote all of it to a wide audience.
guesswho
2yr ago
I definitely recognize the behavior in your story, but my reaction is less that it's a rejection of someone being annoying, and more the rejection of an inconvenient argument by fixating on the single least-defensible sentence or part of a sentence in the entire post, while ignoring the rest.
I feel like the very basic design feature of
quoted text
ends up encouraging this behavior a lot. It's such a convenient and coherent way to reply to a post that many people (myself included) use it as the primary organizational scheme for their replies to comments. But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.
And it doesn't help when people (laudably!) like to write very long and engaged posts that cover a lot of ground, making it harder to hold everything about it in your head and respond to the whole gestalt at once, and easier to glaze over and skim stuff until you see a sentence that pops out at you.
I do this myself more than I want to, it's a bad habit that's easy to fall into. And I feel like a lot of people do it when responding to me, and it gets frustrating. It is especially harmful when people are trying to talk across the aisle on some issue, because they ussually have a pre-cached response to at least one sentence in the other side's comment, and firing that off in response to a single quoted sentence really feels like contributing!
But, yeah, I think it limits discussion and is pretty bad for the health of the site.
guesswho
2yr ago
As far as I can tell, the whole Republican primary is about whether something happens in Trump's legal cases, or Trump otherwise does something sufficiently embarrassing, that his support base evaporates or the party drops him from the ticket.
People vary wildly in how likely they think that possibility is, but that's most of the probability space in which anything else happening in the Republican primary matters. All of the debates and campaigning are mostly about who becomes the nominee in that hypothetical world.
guesswho
2yr ago
The best argument against the ‘NeverTrumper’ / Lincoln Project GOP anti-Trump types was the first Trump presidency, because Trump didn’t do anything ‘fascist’
... according to the sincere beliefs of Trump supporters, yes.
According to the sincere beliefs of most/many anti-Trumpers, he did.
So I'm not sure how much that helps.
guesswho
2yr ago
The media is for-profit corporations, not clear how capitalists could not control them under our current economic model, that's basically definitional.
The FBI, CIA, and IRS all enforce laws written by and/or pursue agendas defined by the legislature and/or executive, both of which are heavily influenced by capital.
Any rants of the form 'X controls Y' will necessarily have a lot of similarity to each other. Those rants are correct when they are directed at a thing that does control Y, and wrong when directed at a thing that does not control Y.
guesswho
2yr ago
The correct answer is 'capitalists'.
The real answer is probably 'wokeists' or some similar garbage.
If it actually is capitalists and this was a fakeout, good job I guess.
guesswho
2yr ago
Sure, but I think we were talking about morality and what we think Israel should do, morally speaking. Not what the law allows or doesn't. There are good reasons for those to be different things.
guesswho
2yr ago
So, there's a difference between 'You think these actions were closer to insurrection than anything Trump did, therefore you find it unjust that only Trump was punished for insurrection' vs 'The prosecutors in question thought that those actions are closer to insurrection than anything Trump did, therefore their choice to only punish Trump for insurrection is intentional malice.'
Can you grant that, even if it's motivated reasoning or driven by propaganda and disdain, many of your opponents really and truly believe that Trump committed insurrection?
Because if so, that's sufficient to say that they are being honest (even if not fair/just) in prosecuting Trump for things they believe to be insurrection, but not prosecuting others for things that we all agree are not.
guesswho
2yr ago
I ussually agree with mod notes like this one, but in this case, OP was asking a yes or no question about other people's personal experiences.
guesswho
2yr ago
Planning to finally start Blindsight when I get on the plane tomorrow. It gets so much praise that I don't know if it's going to be one of those highly-praised books that's really good, or one of those ok books that everyone decided to ostentatiously praise as part of some mutually-reinforcing social phenomenon at some point.
Hoping for the best.
guesswho
2yr ago
That's an ok argument for why Israels actions are ok. It's just not the argument I was responding to:
The Palestinian people as a whole are not being punished as a collective, they are just collateral damage which Israel doesn't care about. It's a different thing.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yes, but only because they live in places with high cost of living.
When you compare them to white people living in the same location, they're not actually doing better.
They just cluster in coastal cities for historical reasons (which have their own White Supremacist aspects, but I'm not an expert on that).
guesswho
2yr ago
Palestine in whatever shape it exits, continues to get in Israel's face.
Hamas does, yes.
But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.
This is along the same lines as 'men need to police other men' and 'men need to teach boys not to rape'. It's along the same line as holding all Christians accountable for the Westboro Baptist Church and the evangelicals who got Roe repealed. It's along the same lines as making all white people pay for reparations or take a back seat in hiring until racial inequities have been repaired. And etc.
Which are not things I'm necessarily against! To me, the main difference between these cases is consequentialist, in that on one hand people are maybe being shamed a little and maybe receiving mild financial penalties, and on the other hand thousands of innocents are being killed.
But, people who argue this type of logic in the case of Palestine and Hamas, should realize how the logic applies to other cases where they might be on the other side of the issue.
Intellectual honesty is a well-defined and commonly used term. I think "intellectual bravery" should be part of that arsenal as well.
There's already a word for that. We call it autism.
I kid, but only kind of. Usually when someone is being 'brave' in this sense, what they're really doing is not understanding that speech is a consequentialist act designed to accomplish specific goals on the world. They don't understand what other people are trying to accomplish with the things they say, or what the consequences or their own 'brave' speech will be.
As I and others already pointed out, the reason people talk about Israel stopping instead of Hamas stopping is that we have diplomatic levers on Israel such that saying they should stop might actually get them to be careful about collateral damage and ratchet down the civilian body count, whereas us saying that about Hamas has no way to affect them and will instead muddy the waters in ways that give Israel more leeway to commit atrocity.
Someone who had no understanding of that might notice everyone saying one true thing while not saying another true thing, make up some half-assed sinister explanation for why, and then be 'brave' enough to say the thing everyone else isn't saying, really loudly and stridently and all the time.
Without realizing that they're the one who doesn't understand what people are actually doing in this conversation at all, and that they're a bull in a china shop causing damage they probably wouldn't endorse if they understood it.
Which is not to say contrarian speech is always bad! It's not at all uncommon for the public perception of an issue to get fixated on an incorrect or misguided model, where people are manipulating their speech in ways that are unnecessary and harmful, and it is useful for someone who recognizes that happening to push back.
But that should be a considered and sober decision by someone who understands the stakes and intentions of everyone involved and what effects they intend to have with their contrarian speech. Not someone blindly trying to be 'brave' by saying the thing no one else is, as if everyone else couldn't possibly have any kind of good reason for all arriving at that decision at the same time.
The phrase 'Would you jump off a bridge just because nobody else is' comes to mind. That's certainly a type of bravery, but one that we want to be careful about encouraging.
(and, although I don't know that this board is very concerned with ableism in general: I've taken the assessment tests on my own, I would probably be diagnosed low-level autistic if I wanted to get a diagnosis. I'm not just sneering at outsiders here, I'm sharing faults I've found in my own thinking and spent decades trying to learn to compensate for, which I recognize in others at times)
guesswho
2yr ago
The idea that it's ok to kill thousands of innocent people so long as you were indifferent to killing them instead of wanting to kill them, is exactly why everyone needs to get the fuck away from virtue ethics before it does any more harm.
guesswho
2yr ago
Bad metaphor. In this case you're not saving the 'patient' getting the chemo, you're saving their neighbor.
If your cancer could be cured by giving your neighbor chemotherapy, maybe you could ask for their consent to undergo it to help you, or maybe you could pay them.
If you broke into their house with a gun and abducted them to get chemo tied down in a basement until you were healthy again, that's not exactly an unalloyed good that everyone should grudgingly endorse as necessary.
guesswho
2yr ago
We have diplomatic relations that we could use to pressure Israel into stopping the assault. Israel has a recognized and legitimate power structure with leaders who we can negotiate with and who could change their policy if we convinced them to.
There things are not true of Hamas. It would be nice if they surrendered, but there's no singular leader or group who could command that to happen and be obeyed, and we wouldn't have meaningful diplomatic relations with them if they would.
Speech is usually a consequentialist act designed to achieve a specific outcome.
Remember the story of the madman, who wants to hide his madness and decides to say only true things; after he has stopped 50 people on the street to emphatically tell them that the sky is blue, everyone knows he is mad for sure.
People don't just go around saying every true thing they know just because they're true; they say the things they think will accomplish what they want in the saying.
Saying that you wish Israel would stop is not very likely to end the violence at this point, but there's at least a clear and straightforward causal mechanism by which it might minorly contribute to something like that happening in the future.
Saying that you wish Hamas would surrender (as an American at least) has no clear path by which it could have any effect on the ongoing conflict. If anything, the most likely outcome of people saying such things en masse is that it splits the conversation into 'teams' (arguments as soldiers) over which side should be responsible for ending the conflict, thus taking responsibility away from Israel and weakening the international pressure on them to stop.
Thus, it is reasonably interpreted as a wish for Israel to continue its attacks, since that would be the most straightforward strategic outcome accomplished by insistently pushing that narrative into the public conversation.
That's why people aren't saying it.
guesswho
2yr ago
Are you saying these actions (which I disagree about, but that's not important at this step) amount to insurrection?
Is your claim that they planned to use these charges to stop him from taking office in 2016, and somehow maneuver that to themselves staying in office instead?
That claim doesn't make any sense to me, even if they somehow succeeded in getting the Congress to impeach over that, Pence would have become president. There's no clear path from any of that to an overthrow of the entire order of succession.
Or are you saying they did that in an attempt to make him lose the next election so they could win it instead?
Because, that may be scummy and improper, but it's not insurrection. Lying and doing unethical things to win an election is very bad, but it's also very common, and the most it could amount to is election fraud. If you are legitimately winning an election, it's not insurrection.
guesswho
2yr ago
Lager and escalation are not the same thing. And what it would take for me to feel a way is not the same as what it would take to 'convince anyone' of a thing.
I think that losing a Supreme Court seat is consequentially larger, has a bigger impact on the world in terms of things I care about, than whether the first- or -second ranked presidential candidate from the same party wins a single election.
That doesn't say much about what is or isn't an escalation in political brinkmanship, or whatever we're talking about here; escalations on that metric have more to do with how unusual, unjustified, and blatantly rules-breaking or self-serving something is. I don't think that type of escalation can meaningfully be measured by 'number of SC justices lost' or 'Number of ballots removed from' in the first place, because it's hugely dependent on the context and justifications.
I think that removing Trump from this primary ballot is less escalatory than Garland because there's a more convincing legal justification for it, and a more plausible non-partisan motive (especially considering the suit was brought to the court by Republicans. If 5 other states removed him using similar reasoning, that would still be only a bit more escalatory; if they did it for different reasons that make less sense, that might be much more escalatory, but that won't specified in your hypothetical.
I agree that most of our discussions here are about convincing other people, but you asked me for my personal opinion and to personally stake a goalpost about it. I interpreted that as you asking me to essentially make a reputational stake ahead of time about what would personally change my perspective about which of these events was a larger injustice, which I interpreted to mean larger consequentially (either because that's what you were implying by 'larger', or because that's the metric I personally use to guide my feelings and you were asking how I felt).
If you actually meant all those words to mean something different, or something less well-defined than what I interpreted, then we've had an unfortunate miscommuncation. It really felt on my end like you were asking me about my personal feelings about a specific metric at step one, then misinterpreting my answer into a different context and metric to make me look unreasonable at step two. Most likely we just didn't understand each other.
guesswho
2yr ago
First time:
What number of states removing Trump from the primary ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice?
Second time:
You're not going to convince anyone that it's not an escalation unless 500 states remove Trump from the ballot.
Don't move the goalposts and then call me a freak for aiming at the original ones. I answered teh question I was asked, not the new standard you made up here.
I declare your utility function to also be a religion and therefore not engaging with, if that's how we're playing the game today.
Or maybe instead, we could recognize that the utility function and the decision theory are distinct objects, and continue to talk and argue about the decision theory as per usual.
More options
Context Copy link