vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
I think there's the issue of proximal and distal causes here, or just different levels of abstraction to explain the same phenomenon.
When I say "thank you" at a restaurant after the server gives me my food, I'm not really "doing it for the server" any more. I'm doing it because it's a deeply ingrained habit at this point, shaped by a lifetime of social conditioning. I'm sure at some point I heard the explanation that saying "thank you" was the polite thing to do, and I did it a few times and got positive reactions, and I slowly became conditioned to do it automatically as a result.
In the same way, I can actually believe that a lot of women wear make up "for themselves", in the sense that they have no conscious thoughts along the line of "Gee, I wonder if a cute boy will see this and swoon over my amazing make up." But it's not going to apply to all women, and I do suspect there's a bit of denial going on for some.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I have already said words to the effect that I am fine with dismantling the administrative state, if that is what voters want Trump and Congress to do. I am less convinced than you are that Trump couldn't have done this the "right way" with actual laws. Sure, a few Republican lawmakers defecting would scupper his plans, but if they did, that too would be an important check in our system working as intended.
Trump has the bully pulpit. Trump claims he has a mandate. Let him actually do the work of getting the laws he wants passed.
This is a better path for one big reason: If Trump accomplishes his dismantling of the administrative state via EOs, that will mean that if Democrats ever get the presidency again they can just bring the administrative state back even if it will take some doing. This is all assuming we actually have a republic where Democrats could actually get back into power again, of course.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
Let's say for example that you regularly fantasized about some female friend being naked. Furthermore, let's say you never told a soul but did write it in a diary which you kept safe and never let anyone see. Some might say you did nothing wrong. But even so, if your friend decided to snoop in your diary and found that out she would be profoundly creeped out, and the friendship would be seriously damaged. I think the same would happen for a male friend too, of course, this isn't a gender thing.
This is appealing to consequences that only result if you leave records of your fantasies. I don't think it can extend to thoughts without completely changing the underlying situation.
Imagine applying the same standards to almost any other fantasy or imagined scenario you can have with another person.
Is it wrong to imagine yourself in an action movie with another person? How about if you do it frequently, and write it down?
Is it wrong to imagine the reaction another person will have to a gift you plan to give them?
Is it wrong to imagine conversations with other people?
Is it wrong to imagine punching another person?
I just don't see what line sexually fantasizing about another person is supposed to be crossing that these other things don't. I think policing thoughts is harmful and unproductive, and it is better to just accept that people all around you are imagining and doing things with their remembered images of you in their brains all the time. If people remember me at all when I'm not around, I'm flattered more than anything, even if they are remembering me in a negative light, or projecting me into a scenario that is harmful or embarrassing to my imagined doppleganger.
I think at best you could get a norm that amounts to, "If you fantasize about someone you know in real life, don't leave a paper trail."
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.
I don't think this is truly people's objection, whatever else they may say.
I think there are a ton of cases where a fuzzy boundary, usually corresponding to some biological reality, gets bridged with an honorary status. Whether it is adoption of children creating honorary blood relations, or conversion to ethnoreligions like the ex-Muslim Vaishnavite convert Haridasa Thakur or the Biblical Ruth's adoption of Jewish customs and ways.
I think the "adoption" model (which I've sometimes called the "socio-legal sex" model) of trans people is the closest to being an accurate statement of the reality of trans people, and it has the advantage of not requiring any dubious metaphysics. A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child. Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality - they are intersubjective facts about human social relationships and (potentially) associated legal structures
There is no lie in saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son" any more than there is a lie in saying "The United States has 50 states" or any number of other intersubjective human-created "truths." Of course, with these kinds of truths, there will always be room for rivalrous claims. If I say, "There is no King of England", then depending on what I mean by that, I could be saying a perfectly "true" fact. (For example, if I was an anarchist, and didn't regard any monarchical claim as valid.)
I feel like some of the "celebration paradox" could come down to nuance around what is considered to be a specific thing happening.
I could see something like:
- Person A: X is happening, and in my opinion X is bad.
- Person B: No, X is not happening. X', a different thing, is happening, and X' is good.
In this case, Person A may either consider X' to be basically the same thing as X, and so feel like Person B is basically saying, "X is not happening, but it totally is and that's good."
I feel like a good instance of this would be:
- Person A: I'm worried about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria creating a generation of sterilized, lifelong medical dependents in society.
- Person B: The evidence of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is fairly weak. But there has been a rise in trans people for different reasons than those proposed by the ROGD hypothesis, and that's a good thing because it means more people are living authentically and feel safe enough to be out as trans.
I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection. I suspect that most people raising concerns about ROGD specifically are actually concerned more generally about the rise in trans people, and are happy to go to fringe theories to justify that concern. But if ROGD had never been conceptualized, it would have been another fringe theory, since trans skepticism has to be skeptical of the "mainstream medical opinion" of organizations like the APA.
Basically, if you don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities, you are going to rely on fringe sources. You see the same thing happening in reverse with trans activists and the Cass Review.
There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy.
Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power, the same economic system is in place, and the only major difference is that two people of the same sex can sign a contract they couldn't before. Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism - since that system is relatively egalitarian and doesn't care if the person at the top is a man or a woman, gay or straight, etc. You can have capitalists and laborers regardless of how you treat gay people.
We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.
I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!" or "what if people make pedophilia or incest legal?" While I'm sure there are fringe weirdos advocating even those, I think the fact that the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been. I think there were good arguments against these kinds of concerns, and the pro-gay marriage people tended to be right on these specific issues.
I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period and 14,726 minors will have hormone therapies, and annually around 300 13-17 year old girls will have breast reductions a year in a nation of approximately 73 million total children, accounting (all numbers together) for approximately 0.02% of children." My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue, even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood, and plunge our youth into a deep spiritual crisis around gender.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the error bars on some of those numbers I'm quoting are high enough to make your average person worry more about the number of trans people. But I think there's a basic motte-and-bailley happening here all the time. When people want to be alarmist, they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys, or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years, or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough. But when people point out that, as far as we know the actual numbers of kids receiving breast reductions or hormones or puberty blockers is relatively low, it's crickets.
I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that. Even if society evolved to the point where trans people became our palace eunuchs, our celibate priests, our castrati, or our skoptsy, I tend to think that otherwise healthy societies tend to have ways to route around such issues. This article claims 20% American women born between 1885 and 1915 never had children. WWI killed 6% of the adult male population in Britain.
We're regularly producing large populations of people who will never have children, and a healthy society would be able to bounce back, route around and deal with this problem. If that's not happening, then the trans issue is just the straw that broke the camel's back, because we couldn't get enough of our other societal structures functioning right.
Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?
I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.
I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together. We could channel those instincts in more productive ways than taking 1/1000th of the population and throwing them under the bus to make the rest of us more comfortable.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"?
I personally think it would be more helpful to break things down along two axes. The first axis is how one thinks society should deal with trans people, and the second would be one's "trans metaphysics" or how they answer the question of what trans people are, and whether there are any important differences between trans people and cis people.
Obviously, in some people those two would be connected questions. If one thinks that trangenderism is a fetish that children are being brainwashed into to mutilate and sterilize themselves, then one might have a different attitude towards trans acceptance than if one thinks that medical transition is the least bad option for a group of sick people who would commit suicide at an unacceptably high rate otherwise.
I think I'd reserve "transphobic" for people who are illiberal on the social axis, but I think many trans advocates take a wider view, and consider a trans metaphysics that doesn't allow for "transwomen are women" to be a true statement to be transphobic as well.
The first two episodes of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling dropped, and I've got to say, I'm a bit disappointed. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but Megan Phelps-Roper seems to be saving the "juicy" stuff about J.K. Rowling's statements about gender and sex for later episodes. Instead, the first episode is basically the biography of J.K. Rowling that I'm sure everyone has heard a thousand times by now - though with a special emphasis on her status as an abuse survivor, and the second episode focuses on the Evangelical Christian backlash against Harry Potter as it was being released.
This does make the podcast more comprehensive, and allows Phelps-Roper, who is an ex-member of the Westboro Baptist Church, to leverage her knowledge of Conservative Christianity to fill out her subject, but aside from the implicit message that she seems to be developing that Evangelical Christian censorship and Woke Progressive censorship are two sides of the same coin (hardly a novel take), I didn't really feel like I needed a retread of the Evangelical Christian backlash to Harry Potter, which I lived through and was very conscious of thanks to my coming up in New Atheism over the relevant time period. (And it goes without saying that the Rowling biography was a waste of time as someone who went to several midnight releases for the Potter books and movies over the years.)
Notably, trans video essayist Natalie Wynn (better known by her Youtube handle ContraPoints) tweeted recently that she has been interviewed for the project, and felt that Phelps-Roper had misrepresented the nature of the podcast before the interview. Wynn believes that Phelps-Roper's status as an ex-bigot makes it easier for her to empathize with bigots, and forces her to believe deeply in their ability to reform, but the result is that her worldview is overly simplistic - leading her to believe that trans activists are just as bad as the transphobes they argue with.
It's hard to say if Wynn's criticisms are 100% correct yet. I will be very interested to see how Phelps-Roper frames that interview (if it ends up being included at all.) The best hint of the eventual direction of the podcast so far, seems to be a statement in the second episode about censorship efforts surrounding Huckleberry Finn, where it was first criticized by racist bigots for showing the races mixing, and later criticized for anti-racist progressives for depicting black people in a negative light.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.
How are you sure this is malicious compliance, and not just a combination of chilling effects and most people not knowing the limits of new, unfamiliar laws?
For your teacher example, I could easily see a situation where they genuinely don't know whether books in their classroom library violate some part of the law (because, say, LGBT content wasn't among the things they screened for when buying the books in the first place), and thus found it easier to nuke the classroom library than it would be to comb through all of them and make sure they don't run afoul of the law.
And in the case of the doctors and anti-abortion laws, it really feels like you're doing the thing so many people do where they assume they live in the "most convenient world" for their worldview. Like, how convenient that anti-abortion laws would never lead to any negative outcomes ever, if not for malicious compliance on the part of doctors.
Just as police officers are not lawyers, and they deserve a little bit of charity when they misinterpret or misapply a law, doctors are not lawyers and it is not at all surprising to me that a new set of laws whose limits haven't fully been tested in the courts is leading them to fail to treat patients even when it might technically be permissible under the law. I suspect that once the dust is settled and doctors are less spooked by the threat of being charged under the new law, fewer women will die this way, but I don't think chalking it up to a "tantrum" is the most likely reading of the cases that have been making headlines.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
It's not hard to build trans acceptance on an equally stable foundation though. It's not a popular move for TRAs, but I've always felt the "socially/legally adopted sex" model of transness is the way with the least problems, since it really doesn't commit one to any particular metaphysical view of transness, which can then be left as a matter of individual conscience. In a liberal democracy, that seems like a totally satisfactory way to deal with trans people.
It allows for "man" and "woman" to refer centrally to mature gametic males and females, and peripherally to those adopting the "socio-legal sex" of the same, the same way that "parent" refers centrally to biological parents, and peripherally to step-parents and adoptive parents.
Obviously there are differences between "adoptive sex" and "adoptive parenthood." First, the legal fiction of "adoptive parenthood" is justified by the good the parent does for the child and the benefit this provides society as a whole, while the legal fiction of "adoptive sex" would probably be best justified by a harm reduction model for the minority of dysphoric trans people (although I think a transhumanist or ultra-tolerant liberal perspective could also work in a pinch - I just doubt that that would be sufficiently popular with enough people to serve as a proper basis.)
The first-person psychology of the two is very different as well. An adoptive parent probably doesn't consider themselves a parent until after the legal process, whereas a trans person usually considers themselves to already be their identified sex before the law has recognized it.
But I don't think this model would be in any way "unstable" and it doesn't ask the 95 IQ redneck to believe any metaphysical propositions to strain credulity. It doesn't even commit us to maximal trans inclusion - we could have a legal fiction of adopted sex, and still distinguish between adoptive women and natal women where we consider it necessary for fairness or safety.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Do you know something the rest of us don't about the woman LoTT got fired?
Rush Limbaugh targeting the specific individuals who were targeting him, feels like a somewhat reasonable and proportional response. What did this random Home Depot employee do to anyone? How is she the correct target? What did she actually do except say some distasteful things online?
On a side note, this is also tying into my experience of becoming quietly convinced that the inability of society to 'reign in' female sexuality in a healthy way contributes to almost every form of social dysfunction we observe.
Depending on the specific object-level claims being made, I might agree with parts of this, but I'm going to push back slightly here.
I think there are a lot of ways that the sexual revolution screwed over both men and women.
Whatever other issues the paternalistic approach to women had in the past, it almost certainly limited the number of vectors of attack from men. If all coed college parties have chaperones, then the risk of a woman being raped on a college campus is almost certainly lower than the modern anarchy of college party culture. This is not to suggest that chaperoning was always successful at protecting the people involved, but my intuition is that when society put more of the burden on men to protect women from other men, women were safer in a number of contexts than they are now. Now, we give women all of the legal freedom of men, but they still take on most of the risks of sex and are thus more vulnerable than they were before.
There are no solutions, only trade offs.
I am sure there were trade offs we made when we decided that society should have the shape that it does today. Porn is freely made and shared online, porn-adjacent professions like Twitch pool streamers exist in "kid-friendly" spaces, and even though fewer people are having sex, the general attitude is a permissive one. All of these things come with trade offs for men and women. Men slowly learn the lesson to never give money to begging women - basically, reality slowly burns the simp out of them, but there are new foolish young men born every minute. Women learn that they have value in society and on the dating market, but that the value is of a very limited and proscribed sort.
However, I don't necessarily think that the trade offs we have made are more bad than good. Society certainly looks different than it did in the more paternalistic, puritan past. Rich people are more shielded from the consequences of sexual license and hedonism than the poor - as it has always been. But I think we should seriously consider whether making people more miserable in exchange for freedom is worth it. Certainly, a strict utilitarian might say "we crunched the numbers and traditionalism is the better overall system", but not everyone is a strict utilitarian and if we value human flourishing more than simple pleasure it might be the case that our system empowers more people to flourish, even as it factually causes more suffering than other ways of arranging society that make different trade-offs on the freedom-risk spectrum.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
I suppose I didn't make myself clear. I am somewhat sympathetic to motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists of 1954, and I don't have a great argument for why they should have seen political violence as beyond the pale given their island's relationship to the United States. The ordinary means of political redress were denied to the Puerto Ricans, and violence seems reasonable enough under those circumstances, even if I prefer if Congress would not be attacked by people for the sake of stability.
While I don't think January 6 posed all that great a risk to the country given how badly executed it was, I tend to be less sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. A big part of this is because I don't think the thing they were angry about - stolen elections - were a "legitimate" complaint, if we don't engage in a motte and bailley about what we mean by a "stolen election."
However, what makes one "acceptable" and one "unacceptable"? I would prefer if there were easy and widely accepted principles for when political violence was considered acceptable, but the mainstream answer seems to "never, except in retrospect."
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
The intelligence-worship falls apart, because even the most intelligent are slaves to political conflict. You can't ignore it or pretend you are above participation or taking sides and only care about IQ, evidence, and reason.
I think you're kind of assuming too much.
I think it is perfectly consistent for Scott to chose to sacrifice any gains in the HBD space, for all of the other gains he could get everywhere else in the Overton window. That kind of pragmatism isn't a repudiation of mistake theory, it is an example of living it out.
If a position is truly poison for those who profess it in the public sphere, then it makes sense to me that a good mistake theorist will plod along in the background, working on fixing the policy issues they can openly and safely speak about without risk of reputational damage.
The reputational damage is caused by opponents engaging in conflict theory, but nothing says you have to stoop to their level.
vorpa-glavo
8mo ago
I mean, Homer rambled.
Did he? I've only read him in translation, but he's never seemed particularly rambly to me.
I'm from Colorado, and I've had mail in voting for basically my entire adult life (the bill was passed in 2013), and I would be immensely disappointed if we ever got rid of it. For me, it is and was the status quo and I would not enjoy a change in the social contract because of some heady intellectual concerns.
I can understand some of the concerns people had in 2020, with sudden, massive changes to many states' voting systems, where there might not have been adequate provision in place to ensure that it wouldn't be a massive magnet for fraud and questionable tactics. However, I tend to think that in places where mail-in ballots are the norm, it's not so much of an issue. I fill out my ballot, drop it off in a box under 24 hour surveillance, then check online to see that it has been received. It's all a very straightforward process.
There are certainly good arguments in favor of the secret ballot, but America had public ballots up until the 1890's, and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period. Mail in ballots are more private than voting was in this period, but less private than walking alone into a voting booth, and I don't actually think there's a compelling reason to prefer one to the other. If gathering ballots is such a big concern, pass some laws regarding that, but leave mail in voting alone unless it becomes obvious that it is an issue in practice in a given state.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
There are 17 states that have passed anti-trans healthcare laws for minors. You could consider moving to one of those places, if this is really a big concern for you.
That said, I think this kind of worrying and paranoia is a bit overblown. Even with a double-digit percentage of Gen Z fashionably adopting non-binary identities, the number of minors actually receiving HRT, puberty blockers and surgeries is still pretty small. This Reuter's article says that there were 42,000 gender dysphoria diagnoses in 2021, and a quick search shows there were 26.2 million children in the US in the same year. Even if you assume that every child diagnosed with gender dysphoria gets the full suite of trans healthcare including surgery and sterilizing hormones, that's a 0.1% chance you kid will actually end up medically transitioning.
The odds of your kid dying in a car crash in their lifetime is ~1%. The odds of someone in the US dying of an opioid overdose is 1.5%. The odds of dying of cancer are about 14%.
I'm sure as a father, you've thought a lot about the many possible risks your child may face. But my overall advice is worry more about other more likely risks your child may face, and don't spend so much time on something that is exceedingly unlikely. I'm not even sure that trans ideology is the most likely way that your son will end up "sterilized" - environmentalist doomerism, feminism, etc. all seem like much more likely ideologies to capture a young mind, and even if you try to raise your son in a socially conservative environment, you'll never be able to keep the world entirely out.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time. Light brown-skinned Hispanic people are increasingly identifying as just "white" in the United States and their voting behavior is becoming more correlated with assimilated white Americans, for example. There's a long history of things like blanqueamiento in the Latin American world.
I think there are a few basic levels of intersubjective truth claims:
- Tier 1: Things some group of people (perhaps as small as a single family, or a friend group) believe.
- Tier 2: Things a slightly larger group like a tribe or subculture believe.
- Tier 3: Things larger groups like a nation or civilization believe.
- Tier 4: Things that transcend tribe or nation in some way.
Trans people might arguably be at the level of Tier 2 - if one is willing to talk about "progressives" as a tribe. So far as I know, transracial people in the Rachel Dolezal style are still at Tier 1. These tiers aren't about making a thing "more true" - since I think social "truths" like "dollars have value", "The United States exists", or "So-and-so is the true king" are all operating more at the level of fiction. If you want to be nitpicky, I think they could all be called false in a strict sense, in the same way that saying something like, "Harry Potter is a wizard" is false - there is no such person as Harry Potter, and no such thing as wizards. But everyone who knows how to speak and use words also knows that "Harry Potter is a wizard" is a more felicitous sentence than "Harry Potter is a fire-breathing dragon."
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.
Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.
I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.
I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?
I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture. That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
Do you believe there are ever any circumstances where it is okay to attack the US congress? Do you believe that there are any actions that the US congress could commit that would ever make violence against them acceptable?
I think the difficulty I have is that we in the United States aren't a nation. The United States isn't and has never been defined by being a single ethnic group sharing a common birth. We are a civic state, defined by our ideals and institutions. (This is the reason American conservatives are so different than "blood and soil" European conservatives. By and large, even the conservatives are classical liberals in the United States.) Because we got our start in a bloody revolution justifying itself based on a conception of natural rights, it must be the case that there are circumstances where it is alright to attack a government and its representatives. But despite this being a core part of the ideology under-girding the United States, I'm dissatisfied that the vast majority of people seem to think that it is never okay to rebel or engage in violence against the state and its actors.
If one of the justifications of the 2nd Amendment is that capacity of violence against the state needs to be preserved to lessen oppression and tyranny, why is it that in practice the set of "tyrannical acts that would justify violence against the state" seem to always be an empty set? Is it because America truly is the freest country ever conceived with no hints of tyranny and oppression anywhere in its 200+ year history? When is violence against the state ever justified?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
While I agree materialism was rare in the past, there are still groups like the ancient Greek Atomists (such as the school of Epicurus) and the Charvaka school in India that believed in it. I'm more familiar with the Epicurean philosophy, but they are remarkably similar to contemporary materialists in their beliefs (except with a strange insistence on a "swerve" in atoms that is supposedly the foundation of a form of free will.) That said, Epicurus didn't deny the existence of the gods - he just asserted that they were made of atoms and didn't intervene in human affairs.
That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?
And if you believe in angels or demons or spiritual beings of that kind, why do you think that they wouldn't work in fundamentally similar ways to how we do? Maybe they wouldn't have bodies and brains exactly like ours, but if angels can "see", then surely their sight would rely on "spiritual atoms" bouncing off of their "spiritual eyes"? Otherwise, I'm curious what you think would be happening when an angel sees something? How do they come to a knowledge of what is happening in their surroundings, if not in a fundamentally pseudo-materialist way?
It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.
I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.
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