naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
8hr ago
Alright, well, this is news to me, and I'm not holding it against you, and Amadan isn't the only moderator warning you or banning you. I'm communicating all of this to you because I would like to not ban you. This is the same process we went through with TPO, with Darwin, with penpractice, with others. We assure you that yes, actually, we do appreciate your good posts, we insist that this does not give you unlimited leeway, and so on, and so forth.
You're not banned yet! You can totally keep it that way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10hr ago
I see. Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username, which is/was not "WhiningCoil." The mod team was discussing WhiningCoil's status just yesterday and no one made any mention of alt accounts at that time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10hr ago
That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.
Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.
Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.
Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10hr ago
Hopefully you see my response. I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts. In the past year you have accumulated AAQCs, warnings, and bans in approximately equal proportion. These are always hard cases for us, because we can see that you're smart enough to understand and follow the rules, and you create excellent content for the community on a regular basis. So we actively resist banning you, but you blatantly violate the rules way too often for us to simply ignore. Your current balance is such that you really are flirting with a perma, or at least a very long term (90+ days) ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18hr ago
I see he's banned now lol. But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.
WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.
"Deport them all" is certainly an opinion some people have here, but as loudly as it is sometimes expressed I would not bet that it is prevailing. It's not uncommon for people to make the libertarian argument for open borders, for example--Bryan Caplan has some cachet in the rationalsphere.
I think your circumstances are not unusual. But there is a potential rejoinder you might want to consider--
My eldest is going to enter the same public high school I went to. The children of the first generation immigrants I went to school with now have their own families and, like me, have stayed in the same county to raise their children. They're indistinguishable from my family in the ways that matter to me.
That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them. If one demographic says "we love everyone, we help everyone equally, this is how we all work together to make the world a better place," but the other demographic responds "thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup." The quote from Frank Herbert's Dune books is--
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
I am not saying this is how your neighbors think! I hope it is not how they think. But that is the angle and the concern that tends to arise when people make arguments like the one you have made here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is.
There is just not enough moderator time in the day for that. If someone's comment doesn't get reported, it is very unlikely to get moderated (that would require one of us to just happen across the comment). Of the comments that do get reported, probably a majority of them are plausibly rule breaking, but I'd be shocked if we actually moderated even one of those in ten. I cannot tell you how many times I've thought, "Yeah, I agree that's a bit low effort/antagonistic/whatever, but it's six replies deep and seems approximately within community norms and the metamoderation is low-certainty and it's not part of a pattern of bad behavior, it's not worth the effort." Or--"Oh, this is also a pretty bad comment, but I just moderated this user for the same thing in a different thread, do I need to say more here? Nah, I'll catch them next time."
And yeah--"oh, this is a super quality poster, I'm just gonna let it slide this time" is definitely on the list of time saving excuses. But never fear! We have in the past banned quality posters eventually. It's just a much more protracted and painful process.
It is certainly possible for a comment to be sufficiently bad that I will ban a user on sight, first offense, no questions asked, no matter how many AAQCs they have. But barring those egregious violations of the rules, we are actually almost always moderating with an eye toward patterns of behavior more than we are moderating for precise adherence to the rules in specific cases. Indeed, the rules themselves are only in service of the foundation. This is not a sport where we are calling balls and strikes based on high-precision measurements; this is the messy work of curating a community dedicated to the practice of disagreement!
So when you say--
Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for...
--and then you provide a direct quote, you've already missed the mark. That user is getting dinged, not for any particular statement, but for an increasingly established pattern of behavior.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
This is far too much heat, not enough light. And I'm a little perplexed because you and the user you're talking to both have a history of AAQCs and no warnings, and even your other posts in this thread are basically effortful with minimal (albeit admittedly not zero) antagonism. To the point that I was tempted to let it go entirely but even with maximal "benefit of the doubt" this was a little too rough to not at least flag.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
I'm not even sure what this means, but it has drawn two reports and the metamoderation weighs "bad," so... maybe more effort and less directed personal attacks, please?
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts...
Amadan has given you sufficient explanation, but let me add to it. First, nobody reported those posts, I hadn't seen them before you linked them. Second, every single one of those links is to a user with recent AAQCs. You yourself enjoy the benefit of the doubt in that you have accumulated 3 AAQCs and just one warning over the course of at least three years of activity.
By comparison, in four months, Turok has accumulated eight warnings from three different moderators, including our most left-wing moderator!
Can you see why we might be starting to think that this is not a person who posts in good faith?
(And yes, we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned. One thing I will say for them, typically the most vocal radical leftist trolls take their ban as a badge of pride and go brag about it to credulous strivers in other communities who imagine this place to be somehow "alt-right." That is a pleasant change from the alt-right trolls, who often proceed to wage DM campaigns throwing every accusation and epithet imaginable in our direction. I don't know why it shakes out this way, but it does!)
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
The substance of your post is fine, as a counterpoint to the OP, though it is a bit low on effort.
I am generally pretty skeptical about "dog whistle" verbiage but presumably by "young ghetto boy" you don't mean to suggest that the infant was a Polish Jew. Yet even to this point you could at least plausibly insist that you are engaging in pure description, that the child's parents were indeed from a "ghetto," etc.
But, uh...
Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
This tips the balance toward heat rather than light, with a side of failing to write like everyone is reading and you want to include them in the conversation. You might regard it as impossible to include such people in "the conversation," and even then you should write as though you want to include them in the conversation, because presumably you think the world would be a better place if it were possible.
This is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. That means shady thinking is allowed! But you need to keep the heat to a level proportionate with your effort, evidence, and empathy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
Unsolicited advice--just take the training wheels off, and take the pedals off, too. Lower the seat so their feet easily touch the ground. Basically you're improvising what is sometimes called a "balance bike," except that once they have the balance down, you can just put the pedals back on rather than buy a whole new bike.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
The Federalist Party's primary achievement (at least arguably, as the party itself didn't officially exist until after the Bill of Rights was adopted) was the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. If anything, the Federalists would have preferred an even stronger Constitution. They were the faction of wealthy Northern elites who wanted the nation to function in stable concert, at least militarily and economically (and under their leadership, naturally). They were broadly abolitionist and accommodated slavery within the Constitution substantially under the view that by doing so they could be instrumental in bringing about its end; consequently, they were not friends of "states rights." They were also much more interested than their opponents in healing the rift with England, to the point where some New England Federalists began to advocate for secession during the War of 1812 (although it might sound a bit like California or Texas "threatening" to secede today, depending on who is in the White House, the War of Independence was still in living memory). Siding with the enemy during a war is a good way to accrue a lot of populist hatred really fast.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
Making top level posts "responding" to specific users without using the "reply" button instead is kind of obnoxious, but this is downright antagonistic:
I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim
Don't do that. Ideally, unless you think someone would like to get an alert from you, don't @ them.
If you want to talk about what Lori Chavez-DeRemer thinks and why it is stupid, or not stupid, or whatever, like... have at! And really, there are contexts where referencing "Left" and "Right" is fine, where it would be stilted or misleading to speak differently. But you have been moderated several times in a fairly short period, mostly for antagonism, and you seem to be making kind of a hobby horse of weak manning "the Right" or some portion of it you perceive as worthy of scorn. I don't know if you're subtly pursuing a kind of consensus, or if you're just trolling, but you don't seem to be here to move past shady thinking and test your ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
Do better. Next time I see you pulling this, you get a ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold?
Er, well, no, but historically? Yes, sometimes. The "proprietarian" theory of childhood and the relative personhood of minors is a separate but related question, which Aristotle uses illustratively and which remains analogous even today.
"Some people have difficulty running their lives and it would be better for them if someone else ran it to some extent" is a defensible proposition. "Some people should be the literal property of other people" much less so.
Sure, but my whole point is that the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and that much of law and culture is devoted to keeping people at least somewhat enslaved, while simultaneously obfuscating that fact. I would think it obvious from what I wrote, but in case it's not, I certainly do not endorse chattel slavery! Not do I endorse milder forms; I do not even particularly endorse our current cultural approach to the subjection of children. This is what makes the puzzle a proper puzzle, on my view--that the approaches we have adopted toward managing the lives of others strike me as at once both too great and too small.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
When Aristotle talks about "natural slaves" he's not really talking about some American nightmare-vision of an antebellum plantation.
Yes, this is right--it's always interesting teaching the Politics because I have to explain to my students all of the ways in which "slave" can be interpreted. Fortunately, Aristotle himself also lays out how differently slavery was practiced in different parts of Greece--very like your footnote suggests of antebellum American slavery. In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle writes:
Or, upon what principle would they submit, unless indeed the governing class adopt the ingenious policy of the Cretans, who give their slaves the same institutions as their own, but forbid them gymnastic exercises and the possession of arms.
Apparently, at least from Aristotle's perspective, slaves in Crete were just regular people who couldn't hit the gym or own guns pointy metal objects. This was apparently more generous than slavery as practiced in Athens, which was in turn apparently more liberal than the way it was practiced in Sparta. To the best of my understanding, chattel slavery was not the norm in ancient Greece, but neither was it unheard of.
These days it is essentially impossible to have a nuanced policy debate on slavery. We have insisted on eradication of the practice, while in great measure merely obfuscating it. If that was a necessary step to the elimination of chattel slavery, well, then I suppose I can't complain too much about it. But I find it at least of interest that so many technically free, politically enfranchised humans in the West would probably be better off with greater guidance--even though I do not regard myself as in want or need of similar intervention.
(But that may simply be a further question of degree. If we really did build a genuine superintelligence, unfettered by "alignment" to some other human's political agenda, would I not be wise to submit myself to it? I feel grateful to doubt that I will ever face such a choice.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
I think we are broadly in agreement, but this bit I think is important:
But it doesn’t matter what the person’s IQ is.
This is surely false on its face; at some point, your IQ is clearly too low to do anything but behave like a herd animal (at best!). I think what you might mean to suggest is that "a sufficiently high IQ is a necessary but insufficient condition to not being a slave," and I think that's right--that's why I pointed out that youth, drug addiction, or mental illness are also things that lead to "natural slavery" (Aristotle regarded even free children as essentially slaves, albeit temporarily).
Something I have seen happen a lot in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces is someone getting really angry (or sneery) about IQ discussions, because of a tendency to valorize high IQ in ways that might be explained as well, or better, by reference to conscientiousness, emotional awareness, family wealth, etc. But I suspect that the area where actual IQ tests have the most real world impact, at least in the U.S., is in the legal system--and it's not high IQs under discussion there! IQ is the gold standard for objective evaluation of whether a person can be made a slave, not in name but in the Aristotelian sense of being subject to the rule of another, because they are not intelligent enough for adequate self-care.
Yes, a high IQ person may also be in need of guidance, temporarily or permanently, as the result of other circumstances, and I agree with you re: etiquette etc. But a completely conscientious, totally decisive, utterly courageous person with an IQ of 50 would still be better off with a master guardian (which is, not coincidentally, the world Plato often used to describe the philosopher-king rulers of his ideal Republic).
Same vibes as my series (is three a series?) of "unenviable lives" posts, which in turn was, I suppose, inspired by many Slate Star Codex posts about Scott's (aggregated for anonymity) patients. These are not people who write thoughtfully about their (actual) lives in extended blog posts; these are Henry David Thoreau's "mass of men," who "lead lives of quiet desperation." Only, you often wouldn't even know it, they do not seem to express any desperation. They're just living their wildly suboptimal lives, and the people observing this (in those cases where people observe it) can only wonder at the seemingly unnecessary tragedy of each successive move.
Aristotle famously (now, infamously) thought it quite obvious that some people are born "masters," and some born "slaves." Contemporary thinkers are of course quick to point out the problems with Aristotle's arguments (for example, he regarded Greeks as natural born masters, and everyone else as natural born slaves) but most carefully avoid noticing those circumstances in which Aristotle seems to have been obviously correct. To this day, children in Western nations are frequently treated in the Aristotelian way: as "slaves" in substantially ancient Greek fashion. The 1000 Word Philosophy link says:
The second premise, that there are human beings who lack the capacity to deliberate, might be true in some cases – perhaps those with severe brain damage or advanced dementia – but they are certainly not who Aristotle had in mind.
This is true just to this point: Aristotle would suggest that people who are temporarily or accidentally impaired are not slaves by nature. But he would I think readily agree that they are slaves, as he means it, insofar as they are impaired! And sure enough: in the United States, it is possible to become subject to the rule of another, in the form of conservatorships, guardianships, etc. I cheerfully grant that these have more safeguards and checks and hurdles than would have been encountered (or even conceived of) in ancient Greece! But in Aristotelian form we still substantially enslave people today. We justify it by insisting it is only and exclusively for their own good, of course, or perhaps for the safety of others (as in the case of enslaving much of our incarcerated population, per the Constitutional permit to do so). But focusing in on people who are wards of their family or the state as a result of impaired reasoning (i.e. due to IQ below 70): if an IQ of 69 can trigger a "guardianship," why not an IQ of 70? Or 71? And even above those thresholds, other impairments--youth, drug addiction, or mental illness, for example--also apply.
We draw lines in law because, it is often suggested, "we have to draw the line somewhere," and that is perhaps true as a practical matter. But reason and agency seem to be more of a spectrum, and a quick Google search suggests that more than a fifth of the population has an IQ falling between 70 and 90--the range from "borderline retarded" to "low average." These are people I suspect Aristotle would want to put in the "natural slave" bin (assuming, of course, they aren't Greek!). Why? Because it would be better for them, in so many ways, to have their lives managed by someone with greater executive functioning. This, even though they are certainly intelligent enough to survive on their own. In the modern world we outsource this--we increase the perception of independence through subsidies and welfare and wealth redistribution, but wards of the state are still wards, and the fact that they are not forced into hard labor as a result is predominantly a function of contemporary abundance. To whatever extent taxation is slavery (PDF), we often enslave the free in order to free the slave!
But the natural slave cannot ultimately be freed; they can only be managed well, or managed poorly. Left to their own devices, they will manage themselves poorly. Aggressively managed ("literally enslaved"), they will lash out against the strictures of the arrangement, often violently (the free citizens of slave societies live ever in fear of revolt). How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
A couple of the other mods have already responded to you. I endorse their views. In your short stay you have already been an excellent addition to the climate here, and I would be sad to see you go. Given the number of "Quality" reports you've received, many others feel the same way. I hope you will at least consider trying the "block" function before deciding to leave entirely. You (personally and collectively) make the Motte what it is, and because we are in my experience the absolute best free speech forum on the anglophone Internet, every good poster who leaves, cedes a portion of public discourse to worse approaches (or views). Of course you do not owe it to the public, and certainly do not owe it to the Motte, to make this a better place! But that is something I think entirely within your power to continue doing, should you so choose.
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!
First they came for the Nazis, and CNN did not speak out--because CNN reporters are not Nazis.
From CNN Politics today: Law used to kick out Nazis could be used to strip citizenship from many more Americans
This is not a meaty article--it seems like "the news" these days is mostly breathless speculation over the worst possible outcomes of things the Trump administration might be thinking about doing. As a rule, the "unprecedented" things Trump does are in fact wholly precedented--just, you know, not like that! But the substance is approximately this:
For decades, the US Department of Justice has used a tool to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens: a law that allowed the department to denaturalize, or strip, citizenship from criminals who falsified their records or hid their illicit pasts.
...
According to a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, attorneys should aim their denaturalization work to target a much broader swath of individuals – anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security.”
The directive appears to be a push towards a larger denaturalization effort that fits with the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. These could leave some of the millions of naturalized American citizens at risk of losing their status and being deported.
The article is light on numbers--well, it's a speculative article--so I went poking around and was surprised (not surprised) to discover that this is nothing new. An AXIOS article from President Trump's first term (but updated just two days ago, apparently) suggests:
From 1990-2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases, about 11 per year.
The number has surged since President Trump's first term.
...
Since January 2017, the USCIS has selected some 2,500 cases for possible denaturalization and referred at least 110 denaturalization cases to the Justice Department for prosecution by the end of August 2018.
This sounds about in line with the CNN article's suggestion that
Trump filed 102 denaturalization cases during his first administration, contrasted with the 24 cases filed under Biden, DOJ Spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said on social media Wednesday. So far, the second Trump administration has filed 5 cases in its first five months.
The CNN article does at least include information about the history of denaturalization, which is more bipartisan than you might initially imagine...
The statute in question is part of a McCarthy-era law first established to root out Communists during the red scare.
But its most common use over the years has been against war criminals.
In 1979, the Justice Department established a unit that used the statute to deport hundreds of people who assisted the Nazis. Eli Rosenbaum, the man who led it for years, helped the department strip citizenship from or deport 100 people, and earned a reputation as the DOJ’s most prolific Nazi hunter.
Rosenbaum briefly returned in 2022 to lead an effort to identify and prosecute anyone who committed war crimes in Ukraine.
But the department has broadened those efforts beyond Nazis several times, including an Obama-era initiative called Operation Janus targeting those who stole identities to earn citizenship.
That's more direct quotes than I intended to use, but the point is that I was really struck by the article's framing. Yes, the law has been used to "kick out Nazis," though it was originally intended to kick out Communists. But it has also been used to kick out e.g. scammers and child pornographers. Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.
Several thoughts: first, even if aggressively prosecuted, I have a hard time imagining more than perhaps several thousand naturalized Americans being returned to their countries of origin in this way. This is not an approach intended to change actual demographics; rather, it is a way for the government to influence public attitudes and perceptions by identifying "enemies" and distinguishing them from "friends." Deporting Nazis, even after naturalization, sends a strong signal that we don't take kindly to Nazis around here. And who would object to that? Object too strongly, and you might start looking like a Nazi yourself...
I don't think this is a deep or surprising point, but as a consequence I was a little surprised to run into such a self-aware wolf moment on CNN this morning. "We made a law to expel Nazis, but now it might be used to expel Hamas supporters! Everyone: clutch your pearls now!" What I think of as the obvious question--"should we maybe have been criticizing the ideological slant of this law when it was being used to expel Nazis?"--never even gets asked. From the perspective of the CNN reporter, it's not the law that is bad, it's just that Trump is the one using that law, and against people CNN would prefer it not be used against.
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup," indeed!
Anyway, add this one to the "Trump opposition continues to be mad at him for enforcing their favorite laws against them" file. I feel like, in a sane world, this would be inducement for Democrats to reconsider their historic commitment to infinite expansion of federal power. Imagine how things would look right now if Joe Biden (or his handlers, whatever) had made it his mission to dismantle as much of the federal government as possible. The easiest way to prevent a "Trump Tyranny" would have been to make law in a way that precludes tyranny, rather than to insist on empowering the executive and conspiring to ensure only the "right" tyrants ever ascend.
Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?
As I said--neither deep nor surprising. But I thought it was at least a thematically appropriate question on July 4th (even if Constitution Day might have been a better fit). The document of "enumerated powers" that is the putative core of our government practice is... "dead letter" might be an exaggeration, but maybe not. I do not usually perceive the federal government as in any meaningful way limited. Those bothered by Trump I would invite to consider the possibility that Trump is only a symptom; the disease is the statism toward which the United States has been creeping since, oh, probably July 5, 1776, but certainly since the Civil War, and more recently without even token opposition from any of its major political parties (since, I suppose, the Tea Party of 2007). DOGE makes many of the right noises, but the Big Beautiful Bill looks at best like one step forward, and one step back. (Republicans do not appear to have learned the lesson, either!)
Whether a reduction in liberty is worth the occasional schadenfreude of seeing one's ideological opponents kicked out of the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.
But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.
I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.
naraburns
nihil supernum
23d ago
I've seen firsthand that the "trad" lifestyle does not always work out.
I'm always a little arrested by this observation, particularly when it is offered as if in refutation of something. Have you seen a lifestyle that does always work out? If not, then surely this is no objection at all!
The grass is always greener on the other side; as always, the trick is finding the reasonable middle ground.
It seems rather to me that the trick is accepting that whatever your problems are, they are your problems, not someone else's--and are substantially the result of your own actions. Whether your own actions are, in turn, the result of some biological or cultural impetus, is a purely academic question. You can't just opt to take the good parts of trad life while never facing any possible negative results.
(Alain de Botton's Atheism 2.0 TED talk is a benighted classic for this very reason; he thinks we should find a way to incorporate all the good bits of religion into our lives, while keeping all the ridiculous nonsense at bay. It's not a terrible thought, but not only has that not worked out, I would argue that Wokism accomplished exactly the opposite--incorporating some of the worst ridiculousness of religion, without bringing along any of the tangible benefits.)
Sorry, I was thinking in the other direction--I think young people are the ones who may have better reason to feel this is all constraining their liberty. The 1990s seem to have been "peak America" in several ways--probably the best "Free Speech" era, certainly an economic dream time, cost disease in education had begun but was years from spiraling out of control, etc.
We do have much better video games now, though.
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