guesswho
2yr ago
Or maybe, as a non-American, I simply underestimated the strong JewishWorldConspiracy-Nazism-undercurrent in some right wing circles?
Basically yes.
I find it surprising because they align their politics suddenly with the woke blue-haired decolonization genderfluid hipsters they are normally opposed to.
The movement is in the opposite direction. Anti-semites have always had their home hidden under rocks on the right, and the only surprising thing is that some lefties have found a sufficiently oppressed minority that they're willing to reverse course and talk smack about Israel.
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't think the 'inoculation' idea is realistic, those ideologies have been turned towards justifying plenty of atrocities in recent history (slavery, native genocides, etc). I think that any religion could be turned towards those ends if that's what its leaders and zealots want to be doing with their time.
(Well, maybe not the Jains. You always gotta caveat the Jains.)
To whit:
People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under.
I don't think there's really a conflict between these two views, as evidenced by the fact the Christians and Jews who live comfortably in peaceful societies don't commit this type of sadism and murder en masse.
Yes, people need a justification for doing horrible things, something that lets them tell themselves a story about how they are justified or good. Religion is one of several things that can provide this type of justification.
But people also need a motivation to do horrible things. The justification isn't itself a motivation, it just allows you to act on that motive, and live with yourself afterwards.
Terrible conditions are one of several things that can provide this type of motive.
To stop horrible things happening en masse, we can get rid of all the justifications, or we can get rid of all the motives. Or, ideally, both.
I think that working on the motives is lower-hanging fruit, partially because people can just invent new justifications really easily when they want to, but mostly because the motivations are usually themselves stemming from bad things that it is good to fix.
I think that's a lot of the lefty view of these systems and how to address them, and I don't think it's incompatible with these insights into religious justifications. As an atheist, I'm fully capable of intellectually understanding what that perspective would look like to someone who actually believed it, and at the same time thinking that cleaning up the terrible conditions pushing them into those actions is the best way to solve the problem.
guesswho
2yr ago
Why should they be representative of reality?
Like, literally asking, they are not a documentary, nor even an intricately crafted worldbuilding exercise. They're just marketing tools, trying to accomplish a goal.
Obviously one of their goals is increasing recruitment among women, which I'm guessing makes sense in a modern army that's as much about piloting drones and filing paperwork as it is about carrying a hundred pound pack 40 miles through the desert or w/e.
Maybe it was a bad strategy to try to recruit women with that type of ad (though I wouldn't conclude that based solely on this blog's argument), but I don't see why it's bad for an advertisement to not be reflective of reality?
Most ads are not.
guesswho
2yr ago
Not in the UK and my knowledge is only some podcasts I've listened to, but what I've heard from the UK left is that it's mostly about policies of austerity and privatization that decimate state capacity and services.
I think people are very much utilitarians in their everyday lives (or at least consequentialists), and the exceptions you can find to this are rare enough that they fall into the non-pedantic version of the 'prove the rule' category.
Of course, people are very often wrong about their utilitarian calculations, and using all kinds of faulty inputs and premises to do them, particularly about any large-scale issues outside of their personal lives and sphere of influence. And they often deal with this by falling back on heuristics that don't reference utilitarian concerns directly, such as virtues.
But I still think most people have a fundamental instinct towards 'we should do things that make the world better for people, instead of worse'. And that this is the basement level justification for all their types of moral reasoning.
guesswho
2yr ago
At any rate, I agree with Singer that by most formalized standards of morality endorsed by most people, it's farcical that eating non-human animals is widely acceptable, while having sex with them isn't.
I feel less sure if the comparison is to eating them, but definitely agree that factory farming them under current conditions is worse.
In the ad absurdum, letting them live out natural happy lives and then eating them once they've died of natural causes is not very bad at all.
I also think harvesting them from a happy natural life at a younger age would not be very bad, partly because I care about average utility while alive and am not super morally bothered about premature death, but also because most of them wouldn't exist at all in the counterfactual world where we weren't farming them, and the repugnant conclusion partially applies.
guesswho
2yr ago
Sure, I can buy that to an extent.
But the problem is that with the advent of social media, everyone is talking about those issues, even if they're not thinking about them.
And they're putting that non-thoughtful talking into the same information stream that the elites are using to communicate and coordinate norms!
It's a dangerous form of pollution that interferes with the ability for intellectual elites to do their job and converge on good new ideas.
guesswho
2yr ago
It's really hard to say because, as you said, most of the public square places where we discuss stuff like this are algorithmically optimized for strife and offense.
The only evidence I have that's not a social media thread is that I've personally discussed Singer with people I know and seen him discussed in college classes over a decade ago. People were mostly pretty reasonable and curious in those real-life settings, but of course those are massively biased samples.
Also, I know you didn't want to focus on the specifics of this one tweet, but a creator I like actually did a video on this specific topic (specifically how Twitter misaligns discussions of this topic), which might be of interest to some.
guesswho
2yr ago
COVID did a real number on young people who were supposed to be undergoing major developmental milestones relating to socialization.
There are children in Palestine, too.
'Hold specific people accountable for their personal actions, don't vilify and attack entire ethnicities based on the actions of a few of their members' has also always been a leftist philosophy (whether or not it shows up reliably in tactics).
guesswho
2yr ago
for themselves
If this were true, it would be a very different situation.
Government telling adult citizens what to do is very fraught.
Government protecting the interests of dependent minors in limited cases where parents are not acting in those interests is well-established law and a sad but necessary institution.
guesswho
2yr ago
In the average case, parents with consultation from doctors are the best persons to make that call, and that's why they do make that call (I'm guessing) ~99.999% of the time.
But sometimes that process doesn't work for whatever reason, and the government steps in.
This isn't weird, it's approximately how things are supposed to work with the legal system. 99.999999% of the time, men choose not to rape or murder or rob anyone; when one of them is an outlier who makes the wrong choice, the government has to step in to correct it.
I don't think it's inconsistent to say both 'Citizens make their own choices' and 'The government fordbids a small corner of decision-space with extremely bad outcomes for other people'. Lots of things constrain a person's choices, including brute physical reality, capitalism, social policing, etc; we're right to worry and fight over how much an individual's choices are restrained and guided, but I don't think it's right to say they're not making them.
guesswho
2yr ago
Canada has proved that conservatives will meme about euthanasia being a slippery slope given the slightest provocation.
It's not like every hospital ward is flooded with sarin gas once a week, I haven't heard any actual horror stories beyond 'someone mentioned to someone that this was one of their many options' or 'someone who was probably a high risk for suicide anyway got to do it painlessly'.
Let me know if you know of something more substantial than that, it's admittedly not something I follow closely but I don't ever remember being impressed by this narrative when I've seen it and gone to read the original source.
guesswho
2yr ago
They don't agree with any of how you've characterized what is actually happening, basically.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think it's ok for the government to make utilitarian decisions on behalf of children when the stake are high enough and the outcome clear enough.
I don't know for sure if this case meets that standard, I'd need to both be a doctor and read an unbiased account of the situation (and no one without a biased take would bother reporting on this case from either side).
But the pitch is: this infant will die shortly no matter what, it's already suffered severe neurological damage that would prevent it from appreciating any potential positive experiences it might have during that time, keeping it alive on life support for a few months is gaining it absolutely nothing except torturous pain and suffering.
Again, I don't know how well the actual case fits that hypothetical, but in a hypothetical like that I do believe that it's in the infant's best interests to have life support suspended, and I would be ok with the government enforcing that. Children need something to protest their interests in cases where parents are acting against those interests starkly enough (even if they do so out of misguided love), and it's possible to invent a stark enough scenario to justify this intervention.
Of course, aside from what it would be right for the government to do in theory, is the question of what powers and policies we want to government to have in the real world, where it's run by often stupid people and we have to live with the full variance of its actions. In a case like this I am cheered by the fact that the judge is just siding with the doctor's strong recommendations rather than judging the merits of the case on his own; I feel like there's probably some system of relying on expert advocates that produces good outcomes in expectation. But I'd be very sympathetic to someone arguing that the government can't be trusted with these types of decisions, and we just have to accept whatever child suffering denying them that power incurs as the cost of preventing even more suffering if we gave them that power.
guesswho
2yr ago
Like, in our non-mod-hat interaction here, imagine if instead of just pointing out to you something you didn't know, I had responded
I wonder if you've actually never seen that, or if you understand on some level that "2S" is so blatantly ridiculous that you have always just assumed any time you saw it that you were dealing with opponents.
Well, perhaps predictably, I actually like that comment a lot (although obviously your actual use of an example was very good too).
I feel like I would have taken this as a fair challenge to reflect on how I've interpreted things I've read in the past and wrack my memory more carefully. It might have been enlightening for me (it is somewhat as I'm thinking about it now). It actually is possible that I flag too many things as the result of hostile filter bubbles or toxoplasma or etc and apply 'no true scotsman' to them too regularly. That's a good possibility to point out and ask for reflection on.
Of course, the response might be 'Everyone should always be doing that type of self-reflection all the time before posting anything, so there shouldn't be anything to gain from challenging them like this', but I think that's not a realistic standard to expect from people in general. These wouldn't be cognitive biases if they didn't get regularly overlooked by the people making them. And if we were all in perfect self-reflective equilibrium on all our beliefs all teh time and all our disagreements were only due to different utility functions or disagreements about matters of fact, there would be no mutual benefit to talking about things here instead of just reading Wikipedia.
I guess part of it is just that I really like the Socratic Method, and underestimate how much of a high-trust game that is and how hostile initiating it can look if that trust doesn't exist. I like the conversational style of a long series of short interactive back-and-forth questions and challenges a lot more than two people chucking a couple of walls of text at each other, I think it has a lot more chance of two people actually coming to know and understand each other rather than just representing themselves.
But, again, fair enough, I'll try to watch my affinity for this type of interaction and make sure I'm making myself clear and being respectful.
guesswho
2yr ago
'Ex-gay' and 'gay but desperately repressing it so you can lead a miserable life of permanent chastity' are qualitatively different claims.
The people that CNN is claiming to be debunked call themselves the 'ex-gay movement'. That's the level of claim at question here, at least at the top level.
guesswho
2yr ago
The purpose of identity labels is political organizing and political rhetoric for the purposes of obtaining and protecting civil rights and social respectability.
I agree that, without understanding that purpose for the labels, teh labels are kind of silly and unnecessary. People can just do what they want and say what they do and not need a label about it.
And it's true that gay people specifically have sort of made enough progress at this point that they don't desperately need the political organizing function of the label anymore, which is letting people notice where the label is restrictive or counter-productive or misleading. That seems to me like a natural evolution of this process and what we would expect/want to happen; I strongly believe Gen Z doesn't use orientation-related labels in the same way and with the same context that Gen X and millennials did, and it'll be interesting to see hwo that evolves over a few more generations.
But trans people, fr example, still desperately need a unified label for purposes of political organizing. That label is the shield that gets used to create a unified narrative and cultural and political defense to protect their rights and place in society and give htem all something collective to refer to instead of having to explain and justify themselves each individually. Don't expect them or their allies to put down that shield until they stop facing credible attacks.
guesswho
2yr ago
You seem to kind of have three points shoved in there, let me see if I can get at them:
- 'If therapy works for pedos it should work for gays!'
Answer: 'works' means very different things in these two cases.
The claim for therapy 'working' on gay people is that they become normal straight people with happy heterosexual sex lives and etc after the end of some treatment program instead of just having happy consensual gay relationships.
The claim for therapy 'working' on pedos is that they'll be able to live a sad and unfulfilled life of permanent chastity with enough willpower and constant oversight instead of repeatedly raping people.
These are not really the same definitions of 'working'. It's easy to imagine that you could convince some number of gay people to live sad lives of chastity with enough constant and unending oversight and social pressure (see: clergy). 'Conversion therapy' is making a much stronger claim with much less support.
- 'If we accept gay people, pedos will be accepted next!'
Answer: we've been hearing that for generations now and it's never happened. Literally gay people are adults working at offices now who were born before people started using that rhetoric and they've grown up their whole lies rolling their eyes at it because it never happens.
Yeah there are some weirdos on the internet pushing for it, there was NAMBLA in the 80s, there's always been weirdos pushing this agenda from the fringes of society. It's a lot less accepted now than it used to be, Romeo and Juliet were 13, Stray Cat Blues was a hit in the 60s, etc.
What's always missing from this formulation of how your opponents view the world is the concept of victims. You have an analogy based entirely on sexual liberation, without any of the other context.
Which is crazy because tomorrow it will be talk of how actually the progs are total prudes who hate sex because of #MeToo and 'enthusiastic consent' and the like making modern sex and dating an impossible minefield. Progs are obsessed with sexual victimization and finding and protecting and creating through rhetoric victims of sexual abuse, but you completely overlook that when trying to blood libel other sexual minorities by talking about how the progs are totally going to love pedos and make them the next big thing.
This is, charitably, extremely silly.
guesswho
3yr ago
I think maybe the appearance of conflict comes from imagining someone who says 'I am attracted to women, but that person who is calling themself a woman is not the type of person I am attracted to, they are faking and must be a man'.
Of course, stated like that, the answer is pretty obvious: you don't have to be attracted to every woman, and your attraction is not necessary to validate their identity.
guesswho
3yr ago
Re: first two paragraphs:
So, I think you have to sort of take claims in the context they're being made, rather than trying to universalize them. I do wish people were more careful with their language so that this type of interpretation isn't needed, but we'd be living in a very different world if people actually talked that way.
Is it possible that a thousand years from now, we'll have advanced neurosurgical techniques that can totally rewrite any part of your personality or preferences into anything you want, including making you gay or straight or whatever? Sure, that seems likely to me.
Does that mean it's wrong to say that the idea that you can change your sexuality has been 'debunked'?
Not when the context of that statement is on a political reporting show talking about a politician and his links to a specific group, Exodus, that made specific claims about specific ways to change sexuality that have been debunked.
Not when the larger context of the statement is about modern-day politics and public policy and lifestyle choices and culture war and all teh ex-gay and conversion therapies people actually have tried and actually are advocating now, rather than what scifi devices we might have in a thousand years.
I will admit to being somewhat hypocritical here, in that I just made a comment denouncing blanket statements because they're always wrong, and advocating more careful language. Saying 'the idea that you can change your sexuality has been debunked' is the type of blanket statement that will always be wrong, because it's too broad and anything is possible.
But really, that means that the sentiment they're trying to convey was stated informally, not that the sentiment they're trying to convey is wrong. Normal people can appreciate the context and understand what they're saying. Being rational is great, but it shouldn't lower your ability to comprehend communications below that of normal people just using their intuition.
Re: third paragraph:
There's certainly a conflict there, but the conflict is in the map, not the territory.
It's absolutely true that there are different ways of using language and different ways of modeling sexuality that are at odds here. But the disagreements are all about semantics and models, not the reality.
The reality is that most people are pretty stably attracted to certain categories of people.
The gay rights movement built a taxonomy to talk about that around the terms man/woman, but now the trans rights movement wants to build a different taxonomy around those same words. That makes it hard to talk about coherently until one side 'wins' and new language gets ironed out; maybe we'll settle on 'masc' and 'fem' for orientation stuff, I hear a lot of young people using those these days. Or maybe people in 15 years will just say 'I like dicks or 'I don't like dicks' and cal it a day. I don't fucking know anymore.
But the point is, that's all about language, not about which people are attracted to which people. That's just a stable thing in reality, and there's no particular conflict about it in regards to any of these issues.
if I want to call every song I like 'Rock and Roll', and someone else wants to call a song they sing 'Jazz' even though I like it, then we have a semantic conflict. And if for some reason politics gets involved, maybe we'll get incredibly angry about that semantic conflict and scream about it for decades and pass laws about it.
But I still like their song and they still like singing it. There's nothing weird or inconsistent happening in reality there.
guesswho
3yr ago
Retelling now is mainly born from corporate request based on ideology and not from the necessity of adapting a foreign work to the local audience.
Gen Z is 49% non-white and 21% LGBT.
Just because the location hasn't changed doesn't mean the audience hasn't changed.
This is about adapting to the local audience. That local audience just isn't exclusively you and me anymore.
I mean, between 'every person who want to have sex with animals owning one animal in their home to have sex with' vs 'the entire global factory farming and livestock industry in all it forms', I'm gonna guess that the latter produces many orders of magnitude more zoonotic disease risk.
Sometimes an objection being common doesn't mean it's good, and I don't think every objection deserves a mention every time you talk about something.
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