mdurak
11mo ago
Do you really want people who don’t care about the future of humanity (as you claim) reproducing and passing their values on to the next generation?
mdurak
11mo ago
Good points. So why are the eco extremists risking jail time for mere clownery rather than bona fide terrorism on the level of the Houthis?
mdurak
11mo ago
The fact that there is a strong taboo against nuclear weapons today is for the most part the result of a deliberate conspiracy of scientists to make nuclear weapons special
From my reading of Nina Tannenwald’s The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, it appears that while the scientists were generally opposed to widespread use of nukes, and while they did play a large part in raising public consciousness around the dangerous health effects of radiation, they ultimately had minimal influence on the development of the international nuclear taboo compared to domestic policy makers, Soviet propaganda efforts, and third world politics.
I see a lot of doomer advocacy as an attempt to manifest AI's own Operation Candor.
According to that book at least, far from trying to stigmatize nukes, the Eisenhower administration was very much trying to counter their stigmatization and present them as just another part of conventional warfare, due to the huge cost savings involved. Seen in this light, Operation Candor was more of a public relations campaign around justifying the administration’s spending on nukes rather than a way to stop nuclear proliferation.
So if history is any indication, the scientists can make all the noise they want, but it’s not going to matter unless it aligns with the self-interests of major institutional stakeholders.
mdurak
11mo ago
I’m coming to this discussion late, but this assumes that discarding bourgeois morality will be better at achieving your goals, when we see from BLM and Extinction Rebellion that domestic terrorism can have its own counterproductive backlash. How do we know they aren’t entirely willing to give up bourgeois morality, they just don’t see it as conducive to their cause?
mdurak
11mo ago
Then aren’t we all going to simply choose to believe what we’re going to believe?
mdurak
11mo ago
Ah, given your repeated emphasis on how democrats need to apologize, I interpreted you as meaning they stole that one too
Haven’t heard of this one. What pill was it, and what men did those women get attracted to instead?
And what if a post-human species is just as capable of experiencing such emotions? Would you still privilege humans? (As a hypothetical, since you don’t believe non-humans to be capable of such emotions.)
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