vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing
While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person. While the so called "walking while trans law" law (properly the "loitering for prostitution" law) I'm most aware of in New York was repealed in 2021 after years of efforts going back to at least 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if there are several other jurisdictions where anti-prostitution laws accidentally catch innocent trans people in their nets.
I think part of the problem is that underclass trans women probably are more likely to be prostitutes, and a police officer is going to Notice The Pattern whether he wants to or not, and then he's going to act on his experiences and stop non-passing trans people more often as a result.
I fully admit that this issue could be solved with reforms to prostitution laws, without any reforms of existing legislation around trans people (including transvestite passes), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for underclass trans women right now.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I don't pretend to know what exactly was going on in the heart or mind of Epicurus. I can only speak of the writings of him and his school that come down to us in the modern day, and I would say Epicurus' letter to Herodotus and Lucretius' De Rerum Natura seem to prefigure a lot of modern materialism. While there are a few things a modern reader might scoff at (such as Lucretius' insistence on a flat Earth, at least a century after Aristotle collected the best arguments for a spherical Earth in one place), their basic conclusions about the afterlife, divine intervention and the supernatural are remarkably similar to a modern materialist.
I actually think you underestimate the degree to which the educated elites of Greek and Roman society might have already cast off the highly symbolic world they lived in. Look at Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, where at a meeting of several philosophers of different schools, they just offhandedly reject the traditional concept of Hades as the afterlife, and even call the idea foolish. Most ancient philosophers believed in gods of some sort, but that doesn't mean that their concepts weren't far removed from what the masses believed. Even as early as Socrates and Plato, most philosophers seemed to reject Homeric conceptions of gods as impious and immoral.
If you want to believe that the Greek Atomists couldn't "really" believe in materialism in their heart of hearts because of the culture they found themselves in, then I'm not sure how I could argue you out of that idea. Yes, hypocrites exist in every era, but surely you believe sincere people exist in every era as well, however rare they may be?
A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
See, someone's got to tell the tale
Whether or not it turns out well
Maybe it will turn out this time
On the road to Hell
On the railroad line
It's a sad song
[...]
We're gonna sing it anyway
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Even if our minds are somehow made of soulstuff and not reducible to purely physical processes, I don't know why ESP would need to be explained using soulstuff?
Our eyes somehow get information to our minds/souls, and yet we can explain the basics of sight in purely physical terms. Light bounces off of objects, and hits our eyes. So a physical process gets information into our minds/souls.
Why would ESP need to be a non-physical, non-material process? I could easily see an explanation along the lines of:
- ESP-particles are constantly hitting physical objects, and travelling large distances.
- Our ESP-eye is a sensory organ in our brain that ESP-particles can hit, and much like we have visual processing that takes place in our brains, we have ESP-particle processing that is capable of processing the ESP-particles that hit our ESP-eye.
- It is this process that we call ESP.
Even if the specifics could be a little different from the above, I think it's a good starting point for thinking about what ESP even means in practice. Why do you think that is not what Western science will discover to be the case?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
Maybe Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and Seneca's Letter's? The first book covers the biographies of many important men of Greece and Rome, and the latter explains how to actually put virtue-based philosophy into practice.
Alright, having read part 1, and half of part 2, I'm going to attempt a response. Please forgive me if you've already addressed something I say in your other writings. Based on what I've read, I think you and I have fairly similar trans etiologies and ontologies (even if I emphasize or deemphasize different parts, and might assign higher or lower probabilities to certain things existing or mattering), and the primary point of difference between the two of us is the philosophy of language surrounding the issue of categorization, and the resulting normative theory that arises from that difference.
I doubt I'll "pass [your] philosophy-of-language litmus test", but I'm more rat-adjacent than an actual rationalist, and so I'm not really concerned whether you "lose all respect for [me] as a rationalist."
The issue was that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful). You want to draw your category boundaries such that things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your information-theoretically limited budget of short words on the simplest and most widely useful categories.
First, I want to say that I think you have an overly narrow conception of category drawing. Humans are very good at coming up with new categories on the fly, even when those categories don't always have good words for them. When academics are being responsible with terminology, you'll get discussions of emic (insider) vs. etic (outsider) terminology, and acknowledgement that some word or phrase is being used as a matter of convenience and not because it refers to a particular well-conceived or robust category.
Heck, look at something as "frivolous" as TV Tropes wiki. While some of the "tropes" they identify were named and recognized before the wiki started, a lot of the tropes are just patterns in stories and storytelling that people picked up on and decided to name, and when people notice a similar (but different) pattern they have to decide the boundaries between the two "tropes" they identify. The entirety of the wiki is an exercise in human categorization of an essentially endless and unresolvable set of category questions. The only thing keeping it somewhat sensible and stable is a respect for precedence, and a desire to settle on some set of useful vocabulary that outweighs people's desire for endless debates about category boundaries.
I think if I was trying to steelman something in the realm of "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", it would be in this context. I frequently have conversations where there's some idea I want a short word or phrase to refer to, and a suitable one does not exist. It is easy enough to drill down into the features I want to call out, and try to come up with a good label for it. This is a very fluid thing that happens naturally, and I assume it's being done casually, all the time, throughout human conversations. It's easy, and part of the fun is working out conventions on-the-fly with the people you're having the conversation with so that a conversation can happen in the first place.
I think this is part of why I'm less insistent on the idea that words must mean one and only one specific thing. If I'm talking with someone, and it becomes clear that the semantic scope of some word that's important to a discussion I want to have is different for them than it is for me, then as a practical matter I will have to come up with a new word or phrase for both of us to use to fruitfully have a discussion anyways.
My position is less, "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", and more "while it is useful for common, everyday words to cut reality at the joints, it's not the end of the world if you have to come up with a new convention on the spot that sets aside terminology disputes you're less interested in having." That process is about as free and fluid as "words meaning whatever you want them to mean", but with a specific pragmatic goal limiting the scope of the word creation process.
Aside from that, you make some specific claims about human cognition and psychology that I find dubious, such as:
Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in a sentence about my cosplay photos depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to lie, exactly. It's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning," what trans women are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example. But it is forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" cluster in configuration space), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is ignoring the interesting part of the problem. Gender identity's claim to be non-disprovable functions as a way to avoid the belief's real weak points. [Emphasis mine]
First, it's not obvious to me that this kind of word usage actually confuses anyone's mental maps of the world. Consider a phrase like: "Toy elephants are elephants."
I think even a child understands to their core that toy elephants and actual elephants differ in important regards. If you ask them if toy elephants breathe, or have working organs or a thousand other questions, if the child answers honestly they will admit that a toy elephant has none of these features. I think if someone took an analogous stance to the word "elephant" as you take to the word "woman", then we'd insist on always calling them "elephant-shaped toys" or "toys a human creator designed in the image of an elephant" or something silly like that.
But no one is confused. No one's models about the world are distorted. Everyone with any sense understands that a toy elephant might be an elephant, but it isn't a "real" elephant.
I don't think it "matters" whether toy elephants go in the "elephant" cluster or the "animal-shaped" toy cluster, because my intuition is that everyone's pre-linguistic understanding of the situation is fundamentally the same regardless of what words we decide to use for the situation or where we draw strict category boundaries.
Now, I admit that the social norm that it is wrong to ask about a person's genitals or what surgeries they have undergone, combined with other social norms that hide people's genitals from sight does create a situation where people might genuinely be confused about how the world actually is as a matter of fact. But I think those are the the primary issues, not the fact that the phrase "trans woman" doesn't offer specific insight that would overcome the ignorance that our social norms might produce.
The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".
I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
I think you and I approach the implications of your last sentence here from different angles. I agree that predictions matter more than raw words, and I believe that you and I would make similar predictions about a number of things related to the trans discussion. I think you and I could even have a fruitful discussion on trans issues if we made a short-term convention of "useful" terminology that neither of us found objectionable.
However, if predictions matter more than words, then where words don't actually confuse people (as I believe they do not in this case) there can hardly be an objection to using a particular word for something. Ask me any empirical question about "trans women", and I believe I could answer in a way where my predictions would largely line up with yours, perhaps with some differences due to different research paths and life experiences.
I get that you were burned by the rationalist community, since they seemed to get what you consider a very easy question wrong, and consistently did so in a way that undermined your belief that they were sincerely applying the principles you though they were trying to live by. I get that this is important to you because you've lived with this set of emotions for years, and have felt like you were going crazy when no one else seemed to be able to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that you seemed to observe in them. But I'm not actually convinced that this is as big a deal as it has become in your head. If you already "know thyself" on this topic, and feel like you have a reasonably good read on what the world is in fact like, why blow your life up over an unimportant word quibble?
I'm trying to work through your posts from the beginning before I get to the most recent one you posted here. But I did want to chime in to say that I've long advocated for a "socio-legal model" for gender, ahead of the common "identity model" that many activists advance, in part because I cannot deny that some people who want to live as the opposite sex also seem to have a fetish of some kind. (Even if I'm somewhat open to the argument that many women are also autogynephyllic in some way, and thus autogynephilia might be compatible with the "intersex brain hypothesis.")
I'm not a huge fan of nebulous metaphysics, and the socio-legal model of gender only requires as much woo-woo as the concept of adoption or marriage does. I say this even as I acknowledge that there are plenty of cultures without adoption or Western-style marriage.
I have a strong confidence that autogynephilia exists at the very least, since I have a non-gender-related transformation fetish and I have incidentally seen a lot of captions and stories with AGP themes in them while searching for my preferred content. Now, that isn't yet strong evidence that AGP and being trans are connected in any way - I have no way of knowing if most of the people who like MTF transformation stories self-identify as males or females, but I do know at least a few transwomen who also have MTF transformation fetishes on various sites.
That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics.
I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.
There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.
I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.
I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.
There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim.
As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support. I condemn the killing of civilians by Hamas last weekend, but then I see United Nations OCHA data like this, where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period), mostly from air-launched explosions. I see people talking about supporting "the Jewish state’s justified but often brutal response", which so far includes blowing up a Palestinian house full of civilians with no warning, killing those inside, blowing up marketplaces and mosques, and attacking the Jabalia refugee camp.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
To simplify it: A Napoleon movie which isn't done by the French for a French audience is cultural appropriation.
I'm sure you're not being entirely serious, but this is a silly thing to say. When Europe looks like this at the height of your power, I would say you're fair game for almost any European nation to have a take on. That's not to say that I think any one country has the monopoly on truth when it comes to opinions on Napoleon, but just because modern France and the French people are the inheritors of Napoleon's legacy, doesn't mean that they're the only or best ones to tell his story. It doesn't even mean that a French filmmaker would make a "better" or "more accurate" biopic.
I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.
A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?
Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen.
I think this phrase conceals a lot of different things, not all of which should be considered in the same breath. All of the following are different:
- A private software company deciding to include a pronoun prompt.
- A private Hollywood movie studio deciding to include a trans character in their next movie.
- The Federal government making discriminating against trans people in housing, public accommodation, employment, and banking illegal.
- Companies doing the bare minimum to comply with Federal laws.
- Companies going above and beyond to comply with Federal laws.
- Your local hobby community having enough scolds to make it difficult to talk about trans people the way you think is most accurate.
I'm sure I could split out thousands of more specific scenarios, but you get the idea. My overall response would be that where "society" is doing something you don't like, it is important to distinguish between private individuals, groups of private individuals, private companies, or the government. If your complaints are about the first three, then I don't really know what to say. Society is allowed to drift from social norms you would find preferable. I don't like tipping culture in the United States, but I do participate in it in spite of that. You have to choose how much you're willing to interface with larger society, and dealing with the consequences if you step away from the most common social norms around you. You can make the choice to be the guy who never tips anyone out of some principle, but you'll deal with the social fall out of that choice.
If it's the government's actions, or their follow on effects then the answer is "simple", but not "easy." Organize, win over the hearts and minds of the voters, convince the Supreme Court to undo all the laws you hate. There are plenty of laws I don't love in their current form, but if they're relatively small burdens on me I don't spend a ton of time worrying about them. If Federal trans legislation is hurting you personally, then find specific places you can move the legal regime in your favor and work to make it happen.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I read through your excerpt from the Summa, and I don't feel like it properly dealt with my main objection.
The passage from the Summa that most directly touches my line of inquiry is:
The ancients, however, not properly realizing the force of intelligence, and failing to make a proper distinction between sense and intellect, thought that nothing existed in the world but what could be apprehended by sense and imagination. And because bodies alone fall under imagination, they supposed that no being existed except bodies, as the Philosopher observes (Phys. iv, text 52,57). Thence came the error of the Sadducees, who said there was no spirit (Acts 23:8).
But the very fact that intellect is above sense is a reasonable proof that there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
However, I don't accept the "fact that intellect is above sense", and so I can't agree with Aquinas' conclusion that this proves there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
I also can't help but think that most of the angels of the Bible seem fairly corporeal. Did Jacob/Israel wrestle with a non-corporeal spirit that somehow broke his hip?
Aquinas supposedly deals with the objection that angels must be both spiritual and physical later, but I'm not actually convinced he's on good exegetical grounds here.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I do think it is hard to design public debates that function as a genuine meeting of minds and not just a spectacle for good rhetoricians to flex their skills. But even so, I think ymeskhout's proposed format is a good faith effort to make something that will lean more towards the former than the latter.
You don't need to be a lawyer to take down a lawyer. Someone who did speech/debate or forensics in high school, who is a reasonably competent public speaker, and who has the weight of evidence on their side would probably do a reasonably good job arguing against a lawyer who is bullshitting all their points.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives.
I've read widely in the libertarian, minarchist and anarcho-capitalist traditions, and while I think they are often good at identifying certain problems of government, and I'm convinced by the arguments of Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority and Ellickson's Order without Law that these forms of government could potentially work in the real world, I still find myself more attracted to social democracy as a set of principles for organizing society, especially since it's actually been tried in the real world and seems to work reasonably well.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very sympathetic to the view of government that it is just the largest and most successful gang of thugs in an area, and that there is actually little moral grounding for the idea of political authority. But I'm a pragmatist and a consequentialist, and I'm more willing to shrug and say, "if the big bullies take care of the little bullies and make people more free, that's better than the alternative." I tend to agree with Noah Smith's argument in The Liberty of Local Bullies that there are many "intermediate" groups between the government and the individual that often have just as much power to reduce your liberty as the government does.
Imagine a devout Jehovah's Witness in high school refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because oaths are against their faith, and constantly being punished by their overzealous home room teacher for it. The only way to resolve the issue in a way that preserves the liberty of the Jehovah's Witness to not say the Pledge is to go over the teacher's head, via school administrators. But what if the school administrators support the teacher over the student? The only way to force the teacher to respect the student's religious freedom is to go a level higher to the government, and hope that they will force fines or other coercive measures in order to protect the student's rights.
I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom. Obviously, it would be foolish to claim that centralized governments with high state capacity always results in increased liberty, but most of the countries I can think of that are good places to live in are some form of liberal representative democracy with free markets and a government with enough state capacity to secure people's rights, and create money transfers and social safety nets (even the United States.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) is on strike as of May 2nd, after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down. While most of their demands deal with the way pay and compensation in the streaming era is structured, on the second page towards the bottom is:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
- WGA PROPOSAL: Regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.
- AMPTP OFFER: Rejected our proposal. Countered by offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.
I think this is an interesting first salvo in the fight over AI in creative professions. While this is just where both parties are starting for strike negotiations, and either could shift towards a compromise, I still can't help but see a hint that AMPTP isn't super interested in foregoing the use of AI in the future.
In 2007, when the WGA went on strike for 3 months, it had a huge effect on television at the time. There was a shift to unscripted programming, like reality television, and some shows with completed scripts that had been on the back burner got fast tracked to production. Part of me doubts that generative AI is really at the point where this could happen, but it would be fascinating if the AMPTP companies didn't just use traditional scabs during this strike, but supplemented them with generative AI in some way. Maybe instead of a shift to reality television, we'll look back on this as the first time AI became a significant factor in the production of scripted television and movies. Imagine seeing a "prompt engineer" credit at the end of every show you watch in the future.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Holidays ebb and flow in popularity.
Easter is theoretically the most important Christian holiday, and there have been times when banning Christmas was a popular opinion among certain populations. (Especially some of the Founding Fathers.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
(If one political side is fundamentally thwarting democracy, then in my humble opinion the other side can do the same. They can do this by, for instance, accusing them of technical election fraud or vampirical adenochrome or whatever they want. They are morally justified to defend themselves using the same weapon as their attacker.)
This is just silly. If you're saying you wouldn't look down on the other side for getting down in the mud with their opponents that's one thing, but I think setting things up so that if Side A suppresses even a single voter-relevant news story, then that gives Side B full moral license to claim actual election fraud without evidence or to make up conspiracy theories, then I think you've set up an insane and unworkable game.
We've just experienced an episode of high inflation due to government stimulus. If anything, we've learned just how dangerous MMT can be.
I'm not sure the government stimulus is the best single explanation for the high inflation of the last few years. If you want to blame the government, then I think overreaction to COVID would be a better angle of attack, since a recent Indicator episode looked at why there is a disconnect between ordinary Americans, who claim to be miserable, and economists who say that despite what Americans say in polls they're spending more like they're happy (high spending on travel, etc.), and it concluded that a lot of indicators of Americans being happy with the economy are actually due to pent up COVID spending. Basically, people didn't get to go on vacations for a year or two and now that things have opened up they have a bunch of money saved up that they're still spending, in spite of inflation.
If this explanation is correct, it might mean the government stimulus is part of the saved up money that Americans are now spending, but I somehow doubt that one time payments of $600 per person in December of 2020, and $1000-$3000 in 2021 are the best explanation for a sustained increase of prices across the economy. That just doesn't seem like a parsimonious explanation of what we're observing.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Have to agree with /u/Testing123 here. Hbomberguy's evidence that Man In Cave was plagiarized from a single article was fairly convincing. For what it's worth, I also think Internet Historian and James D. Rolfe came out looking the best of all the plagiarists in that video. For Internet Historian, it seemed to only be a single case of blatant plagiarism, while for Rolfe it seems like he is mostly guilty of selling out (all of the actual plagiarism done without his knowledge by his scriptwriter.) Meanwhile, it looked like iilluminaughtii's entire career was built off of sloppily plagiarizing documentaries, and James Somerton just compiled and read essays from other thinkers in the space, including entire books.
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.
If you organically learned that the only media your coworker had consumed in the last year was hardcore mermaid hentai, then that might color your opinion of your coworker, even if you were totally okay with harcore mermaid hentai. Similarly, if you learned your female coworker only consumed reality television, trashy romance novels and fan fiction for series she had never read or watched, you might not look at her the same way afterwards.
If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The social convention of a large part of society is that gender identity is nonsense, and transition is impossible. They reject your approach, and you definitions, and by imposing it on them you are doing the "point deer make horse" thing.
I'm okay with people saying the "wrong" thing, or believing "wrongthink" - whatever that may entail from my own point of view, or from anyone's point of view, really. I think there are many domains where it is undesirable for the government to enforce uniform speech or metaphysical ideologies, and this is one of them. If that means that in the world I propose, trans people will be treated with respect and acceptance in some parts of some big cities, but be in an iffy situation elsewhere, then so be it.
Just as a racist hotel owner is free to call a black man the N-word as he hands the purchased hotel keys over, a gas station attendant will be free to use whatever slurs they want while they let a trans woman use the women's restroom. Or to simply "misgender" her. If we already have the government forcing public accommodations to work a certain way for the public, then I see no reason why it shouldn't do this for trans people.
Now, I'm open to general arguments that the government should never have been involved in non-discrimination laws in the first place, but I tend to think this is one of the weakest planks of hardcore libertarians. Yes, in theory capitalist greed alone could be enough to not want to discriminate. But I think once you have a world with racially segregated hospitals and race-based banking discrimination, no matter how you got there, it kind of doesn't matter if there were technically no violations of the Non-Aggression Principle at any step in the process, you've ended up in a space where some people are meaningfully less free than other people, since bodily health and finance are basic components of freedom in a free market capitalist system. The free market is already not doing its job.
Even from the perspective of merely fixing a "market failure" I think whatever minimal form of government must exist would have a compelling interest to step in and regulate a handful of high-impact domains to preserve the freedoms of citizens living under such a system. Now, I'm definitely open to arguments that bathrooms would not be a part of this if we were building a society based on rational principles from the ground up, but when the precedence is already there as it is in our society I see no reason not to expand it.
I'm not sure who you thinking is fighting for the right to scream at strangers in supermarkets.
Surely you can't believe that the ecosystem of videos of "obviously trans woman does embarrassing and socially unacceptable things in public" is the totality of what exists online? I'm sure there are plenty of "red neck yells at butch cis woman for trying to use women's restroom" type videos as well. Neither side has a monopoly on embarrassing loud mouths.
And regardless of any of that, I think it's a form of "Chinese robber" fallacy. Most people (cis or trans, trans activist or anti-trans) are probably keeping their head down, and trying to use their best judgement with how to deal with any social situation they find themselves in. The government probably isn't the right tool to deal with breaches of social etiquette.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I'm curious about where you draw the boundaries around "fascist." Are there any circumstances you would consider it acceptable to restrict freedom of movement of individuals or groups?
Would any of the following be acceptable circumstances to restrict freedoms, while qualifying as non-fascist:
- The government has credible intel that a terrorist attack is planned at a particular airport on a particular day.
- It is wartime, and the government is concerned about enemies entering the country, or traitors leaving the country to fight for the other side.
- The government of an island nation, like Australia, starts to hear reports about a new Black Death-like plague with a 40-60% mortality rate in Eurasia
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
There seems to be a desire to remove Rowling, but still somehow retain possession of the franchise itself, something that is frankly impossible.
This general situation is actually why I'm very consciously a fan of knock-offs. I'm a huge believer in libre/open culture, and I think modern copyright laws are a travesty across the board.
Give me the Evil Galactic Authority, where the noble but persecuted Star Paladins use laser-swords to fight off the evil Inquisitors. Give me a villain in a YA novel with an arc suspiciously similar to Zuko from AtLA. Give me Invincible's Omni-man and knock-off Justice League. Give me copy cats and follow the leaders, and fan fiction.
I hate that Disney and a few other companies own so much of our culture, and take a century to give us the scraps off their table. Human creativity is usually more like that of Shakespeare, who mostly retold well-known stories, or Sir Thomas Mallory, who codified an existing story tradition. Our cultures emphasis on pointless originality and innovation in storytelling is a disease, just as surely as the fact that only a small number of franchises dominate the box office is.
I don't really care much about the object-level question of Rowling's Wizarding World. But if people can find the non-copyrightable part of her work, and can retain the soul of Harry Potter in the derivative works, I wish them luck. More cultural elements should be like Romero zombies or Slender Man - not really belonging to anyone, and being used and reused to tell interesting stories, or just retelling old common places with a new twist.
Okay, but you didn't answer my question. Do you believe angels see? Or are angels blind in any meaningful sense of the word? (Perhaps they have other, completely non-analogous, ineffable senses of their own?)
I understand if you think my question is coming from an overly binary way of thinking, but I just think this is part of what unravels your entire project here. If angels have "senses" in the way we do, then those senses require an explanation of some kind. When a human being sees something, we can say it happens because light particles bounce off of objects and hit the human's eyes. You are asserting that angels can interact with the human sphere of experience, and are potentially the source of ESP. I'm open to the idea that both of those claims could be true.
However, when you remove angels and ESP from the realm of matter, I have difficulty understanding what exactly you are claiming. If angels are completely "immaterial" how do they interact with the world at all? How does a being that doesn't see, smell, hear, taste, or touch (since all of those rely on material processes as far as we know) interact with the material world at all? You say that angels might be the source of ESP, but how could an angel acquire information about, say, a squiggle on a card 50 miles away, if the card and the squiggle are all material objects that the angel should have no way of perceiving or interacting with?
If you're asserting that all material objects actually also exist and interact with the "spiritual" realm, and that there are spiritual analogues to all the traditional senses (spirit-sight, spirit-hearing, etc.) and that angels communicate with our astral bodies or whatever, then I would say that seems like an overly complicated theory. Why not just believe that angels are material beings made out of something like neutrinos or literal light that interact and communicate with us in the physical world?
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