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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30895 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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There is now a USA Election Day 2022 Megathread for all your deliberatively democratic posting desires.

It is ridiculous to call this a racist incident. She was mad Tyrone cheated on her with Kylah. She only started saying the N-word after spending time with Tyrone. She was too drunk to remember that for white people the N-word card doesn't apply to all situations.

Source: It came to me in a dream.

Not sure if you're trolling or trying to be funny or what, but this is low effort and contributes nothing to the discussion.

If the races were reversed, as they probably usually are*, this probably wouldn't have made the local paper.

*assuming outburst of this kind are directly correlated with rates of violent, impulsive behavior

If the races were reversed, some of the arguments elsewhere in the thread about how the desk clerk really shouldn't have tried to stop the drunk girl would have been seriously espoused in the mainstream. We might here about "BBQ Becky" or something similar.

I know this is kind of victim blaming, but while I think Spring handled herself really well during the altercation (based on the video) I do think her reaction was partly a factor. She's friendly and gentle and clearly frustrated but not upset. In later statements she is clearly very upset, but how long would the altercation have continued if she had been that upset during it? If Rosing had slurred at her and she had gone all "frist of all how dare you", would Rosing have kept going? Maybe, some drunk people get energised by outrage, but a lot of the time you just need to pierce the haze of alcohol with a forceful display to get them in line.

This doesn't excuse the behaviour of course, but I do think it tilts the scenario towards 'media outrage bait' rather than 'extreme racism flourishing in younger generations'.

Wow I tried to follow a link in that article and it went back to… the same article! It’s a bit off topic, but things like this make me literally think half of these stories could be made up. The modern media is awful.

Any chance it was going to a tag which included this story? Some sites will do tags as a feed where you can keep scrolling. As the most recent it could be at the top.

Web 2/3.0 was a mistake, but not for the reasons you’re thinking!

What do you mean by a tag?

Most news sites will post their articles with tags by topic. So “United States”, “race”, “university”. If the link you clicked went not to a particular story but to a feed of all posts tagged “race,” perhaps this one was at the top.

Oh nope it was just the exact same article that I was reading. I double checked out of shock.

If a drunk girl saying a mean word but not actually causing any real harm is the worst example of racism you can find in a country of 340 million people I think it's safe to say racism is a solved problem.

There are 340 million people in the USA - why is this incident particularly noteworthy in your eyes?

The video begins (0:45 seconds long, is there a longer one?) with the black woman grabbing the white woman by the wrists, and at 0:03 reaching toward her face, which begins the brawl. I see below mentioned that the white woman was “too inebriated” upon entering the dorm, but anyone who has lived on a dorm in a public university knows that there is no level of inebriation that prevents a student from dorm entry short of violently vomiting in the fetal position. I doubt that the university terms allows the black woman to forcefully kidnap students who she believes are “too inebriated” to return back to their home. As such, calling her a slur is entirely within the realm of a normal response, although it’s totally rude and you shouldn’t do it.

If my understanding is right this would be the second misleading racism video to involve kidnapping. Remember the white woman walking a dog whose life was destroyed? The black man actually aggressively harassed her and (by his own confession on his Facebook page) said he would “do something you don’t want me to do to your dog” if it didn’t get leashed.

You didn't read the article. The statement in the article is that Spring was working the security desk at the tower, and was not supposed to let anyone in without ID, which the drunk chick lacked (probably lost).

She explained that Rosing walked into Boyd Hall, on Martin Luther King Blvd, after Spring had refused her entry because she did not have an ID card on her.

Rosing then managed to get into the building somehow, probably by tagging along with someone else.

When blonde Rosing managed to get into the lobby she stumbled as she approached the elevators, which concerned Spring who was behind the front desk {Lol @ the article slipping in "blonde" there as a little racial tidbit, just to whet the appetite}

Given that she was barely upright, it's pretty obvious why they'd have a policy that (50/50 a dude) bringing her in might require a call to an RA on duty.

This wasn't "Oh she was super drunk she can't go in" it was "She doesn't have ID, I'm not supposed to let her in; also she's super drunk so it's policy I should call someone to make sure she's safe." Rather than sit down for a minute and take her slap on the wrist from the RA, drunkard chooses to erupt.

No "kidnapping" here, but cute reach. Just using the most nightmare trash white people you can find to tar and feather 200 million odd Americans.

I’m not interested in the statement of the RA (you link the article like it’s authoritative, when it never is), who is seen physically apprehending an inebriated student, unless her actions are already defensible from the security cam. When I lived in a public university accommodation, RA’s would never physically restrain an inebriated student because they forgot their ID. If they were going to escalate the issue they would call security. If this were some gang member or a 45 year old man entering a woman’s dorm that would be extenuating circumstances.

you link the article like it’s authoritative, when it never is

So let's speculate wildly instead! She's being kidnapped!

When I lived in a public university accommodation, RA’s would never physically restrain an inebriated student because they forgot their ID.

She wasn't an RA, she was working security at the desk. The specific job of those people at my school was to prevent you from getting in without an ID. Typically via controlling the lock on the door.

I get that it's a goofy story we shouldn't even be talking about, and that your political enemies are trying to make hay out of it, but I don't see why we have to make up facts and ignore context.

You don’t seem to have an understanding of how the university employs students.

She was working at desk check in. It’s the same occupation as RA. If she described it as working security that’s fine, I see no indication that she is a security guard or otherwise empowered to detain residents for not having a card.

“It is a part of our job (as desk clerk) that if we see a student that’s, like, very drunk, we are to call an RA to … write up a report,” Spring said.

She’s not even an RA. She’s a desk clerk, and Rosing can plausibly sue her for kidnapping or something else, because it is illegal to forcefully prevent a person and grabbing their wrists for such non-felonies

https://kykernel.com/89062/news/videos-show-uk-student-using-racial-slurs-attacking-desk-clerk/

If you lived in an apartment complex, I assure you that a random clerk assigned to the building does not have the right forcefully prevent you from attending to your accommodation. They can escalate with the police, at maximum.

extreme racism

Good times. I remember when "extreme racism" was a phrase reserved for mass murder, genocide, etc. Now it's a drunk kid shouting the worst word she knows, to the injury of exactly no one.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is the tip of a hidden iceberg. Perhaps the whites of UoK will rise as one to this banner and slay all black students, faculty and townspeople before unleashing ethnic cleansing on the midwest. When, in six months time, we gaze out at a new Holocaust, we won't be able to say that GW2 didn't warn us. If I'm right, we can expect the condemnation of the girl to be extensive and damaging to her personal and professional future, far out of scope with any harm she might have caused, no matter how awful her behavior (and it is definitely that).

I guess time will tell!

I don’t know if I’d call this “extreme”, because she was drunk. People get into drunken altercations with this amount of heat all the time, and I don’t expect humans to remember to not say that one special word while their inhibitions against violence melt away. It’s not as if this event led to the discovery of a secret KKK membership that she had been holding while sober.

I don’t think these even deserves news coverage honestly.

If such incidents were common, it would not be newsworthy enough to be noticed even by newspapers at the other side of the world.

When you town paper prints as breaking news: "Elephant seen wandering in the streets" would objective observers conclude that elephants are common in the town? No, they would conclude that elephants are pretty rare over there.

You have never read the daily mail before have you? Half of their articles are about fights on the internet, they are all heat and no light. Can you find articles about this from any major American publications published before the daily mail article? Preferably not from Kentucky?

This sounds like one of the incidents for which the "boo outgroup" rule actually was invented.

Other commenters here have already pointed out the angle that epithets can be what you say to someone when you just want to hurt them, and that shouldn't be considered racism proper.

There seems to be some slight disagreement over that. It appears some won't settle for stamping out prejudice, and want a world where racial epithets are a line that can't be crossed.

The differing perspectives over this point lend evidence to an idea I've expressed before, which is a fundamental disagreement over the sacredness of race and racism. This also explains other social rules, like why certain off-color jokes about racism are wrong, even if the joke itself is not prejudicial and actually mocks racists. Racism is Not a Laughing Matter.

Boring anti-toxoplasma registering that this is bad and people should not call other people the N-word 200 times.

But 199 times is ok, right? ;)

very slightly less bad.

One time I was in Hoboken NJ (most liquor licenses per capita in the country!) and around 1AM this fat lady in a revealing dress spent 45 minutes alternating between crying, criticizing the masturbatory habits ("you wankers!") of everyone who attends the particular bar she got kicked out of and vomiting.

This is a stark reminder that shaming of people who masturbate still happens.

I doubt anyone at the time and place felt shame.

You can be shamed by someone you recognize as authority. When your mother , even old and frail, yells at you, you will feel ashamed. When wild animal howls at you, you might feel afraid, but not ashamed.

“Wankers”? This happened in America?

Hoboken is in New Jersey, USA. I don't spend much time trying to understand such things beyond "drunk chicks from NJ".

Hoboken is right across the river from NYC; plenty of Brits around despite being in America.

This is basically a rehash of the "It's [current year], why is [thing I don't like] still happening" meme, without using these exact words.

Apart from the specific criticisms of the incident others have already offered, I'd note that this "society is still racist" idea bubbling right under the surface of your comment basically implies that for society to be sufficiently non-racist the incidence of bad actors would need to be literally zero, which is ridiculous and impossible.

I'll also note that it's very easy for media to create the appearance of omnipresent racism. They can do this because if the population is large enough even incidents with a 1 in 1000 chance of occurring will occur sufficiently regularly, which means the frequency of news reporting on racist incidents is high enough to give everyone the illusion that racism is everywhere regardless of actual probability.

(Except anti-white racism, that can be swept under the rug or alternatively, if it is legalised, portrayed as noble diversity initiatives aimed at helping PoC.)

Do we have any idea what preceded the sloppy-drunk white girl incompetently struggling to punch the black girl? I'm not about to go out of my way to defend a drunk throwing racial slurs while struggling with someone, but I am curious what happened.

Overall, if this is the stark reminder of extreme racism in 2022, I will continue to believe that demand for racism greatly exceeds supply.

The article relates Spring's account:

In an Instagram post following the altercation, Spring explained why she had intervened in the first place.

She explained that Rosing walked into Boyd Hall, on Martin Luther King Blvd, after Spring had refused her entry because she did not have an ID card on her.

When blonde Rosing managed to get into the lobby she stumbled as she approached the elevators, which concerned Spring who was behind the front desk.

Spring said: 'I worked a shift tonight where was assaulted and called a n*****, and someone said other racial slurs towards me.

'It is a part of our job that if we see a student that's like very drunk, we are to call an RA to... write a report.

'So I reach my head out of the desk area, and I ask the girl 'Are you OK?'' Spring recounted, 'and she stared at me and started to call me a n*****.'

There is also reportedly video of Spring preventing Rosing from getting into an elevator, and forcing (?) her to sit down, but I didn't watch. Seems plausible that the desk clerk was just trying to do her job, but Rosing was far, far too drunk for that to be a simple proposition. This basic scene plays out in some college every single weekend all over the world, I'd wager, but this particular event has enough of a race angle that the rage-baiters picked it up.

This basic scene plays out in some college every single weekend all over the world

I’m not so sure about that. I had no idea college dormitories in the US had a desk clerk, and I’m still not sure why they’re stopping drunk students from going to sleep in their own room.

It's SOP at every college I've ever visited that was located in a city to require Id to get in. Most of the time, if you live there you just swipe in, or if you don't you surrender your id to the desk and collect it when you leave. No ID at all meant getting an RA to vouch for you before you could get in.

In the US, I guess. In Israel there’s no such thing for the dorms. It’s actually pretty bizarre, from where I stand, to have someone like that.

For entering the building we had keys or key cards. If you lost them, you could call campus security I guess, or more likely your roommate. Same as any normal building.

For entering the campus on foot or by public transportation, you just go in. Cars need to have a sticker or be pre-approved to go in, though.

Yeah, safetyism is a constant problem at us colleges. I envy countries with sane university systems, and without the mix of woke helicopter mommy and rumspringa that underlies us colleges.

Spring is the desk clerk, Rosing is the drunk chick.

Fixed, thanks.

Big oof. Yeah, that basic story sounds entirely plausible and drunkenness really doesn't absolve someone of that level of behavior. I'm going to continue to be irritated by the common framing of racism as just about the worst sin someone can commit, but Rosing seems pretty all-around awful in this story. Whatever, she's a drunk kid, but it's still a bad look.

Funny enough, there is a genre of racism stories in which the "victim" is questioned by security or police are called while minding their own business. If the case were race reversed, CNN may have been interested in pursuing that angle here as well (victim and offender reversed, of course).

It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:

extreme racism can happen among the younger generations

Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.

Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.

Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times.

In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.

I'm skeptical of widespread American anti-Black racism narratives, and I don't think this case supports them (except weakly at the margin). I think it's possible (although unlikely) that the White girl doesn't harbor meaningful animus towards Black people, and that she was just grasping clumsily for an epithet that carried a powerful valence. I also assume the White girl has some fairly serious emotional problems (as do many people, such as myself) which were exacerbated by alcohol use.

Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.

Exactly. The fact that you reach for a racial epithet when you're trying to inflict pain says something. Racism by the classic definition is thinking that someone is inferior or hating them because of their race.

Analogy, a man can't get it up, he's impotent after an accident. His wife says to him, over and over, "Honey it's fine I love you, not your dick, I don't think any less of you at all! You're still just as much a man as you were the day I married you!" Maybe he even believes her. Then she gets drunk one night, and they get into a fight, and she screams at him "You're not even a man, you can't even fuck me, you're a pathetic eunuch, half a man at best!"

Which is the truth? The polite bromides mouths when she's sober, or the hurtful epithets she reaches for when she is drunk? If someone brings it up when they want to hurt you, whatever they say sober you know they think it but they're too polite to say it sober. It's pretty obvious she does think less of him, and that she thinks he ought to think less of himself.

That said, this kind of incident is beneath notice.

I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?

Taggin @PutAHelmetOn as well, because this relates to his point about the "sacredness of race."

In Vino Veritas.

Alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex first. This part of the brain is responsible for judgment, reasoning, and suppressing impulsive behavior. That’s why after a few drinks you lose some of your inhibitions and feel more confident venturing out of your usual comfort zone.

For a bigger exploration see several chapters of Slingerland's Drunk or listen to him on Rogan, but at core alcohol weakens your ability to suppress impulses you had already. It does not create whole-ass new impulses.

An analogy:

I might get drunk at a party with my wife and hit on one of her female friends (or worse, one of her female enemies!). I might do 8 shots and tell her friend Brittany that she has great tits and we should hang out some time. Afterward, when my wife and/or Brittany's boyfriend confront me, I might say "I'm sorry, I was really drunk, I never would have done that sober." And everyone will understand that what I'm saying is that I wouldn't tell Brittany that I wanted to fuck her if I were sober; it's understood that my urge/impulse/desire to fuck Brittany exists when I'm sober (I'm a straight man after all!) but that absent alcohol I am capable of suppressing that urge in polite society. No one would think that meant that when I'm sober I don't think Brittany has great tits, that would be stupid.

On the other hand, if I get drunk at a party with my wife and I hit on one of her male friends, if I did 12 shots and walked up to Craig and said that I wanted to take him home and bend him over my Eames lounge chair, no amount of pleading about the top shelf tequila would convince them that I'm heterosexual. I might once again plead that I wouldn't have tried to hit on Craig if I were sober because I would suppress the urge to fuck Craig with my full-powered prefrontal cortex, but I couldn't argue that the bourbon created the urge to fuck Craig and I wouldn't have any homosexual impulses if I were sober. That homosexual urge necessarily already existed, before I started drinking, the drinking merely brought it out, suppressed my ability to suppress my urges.

Alcohol causes you to pursue your desires, it does not create those desires.

Same with any other urge I might or might not have. Alcohol doesn't produce new thoughts, just reveals old ones.

but at core alcohol weakens your ability to suppress impulses you had already

Even takin this literally - if discrete impulses exist then they are complex, interact, and make up larger impulses. If you're very drunk and stumbling around, then alcohol 'weakens your ability to suppress' your impulse to, say, sway to the right and left as you walk instead of walking correctly. There certainly is an impulse to sway to the right and left, because you do it while walking, but suppressing that 'impulse' is a critical part of normal walking - you subtlely shift to the right and left at various moments to maintain balance. But - is it even really suppression, or is it just a decision not to sway that way? If you have one neuron that tends to activate an output neuron, and another neuron that tends to suppress that - you could say "the neuron suppresses the impulse encoded by the first neuron", or you could just say - it's just a logic gate that's part of a much more complex system.

And alcohol is messing with every 'impulse' that exists, there's no reason it has to emerge from 'racism being unsuppressed'. What if the alcohol suppresses the authentic anti-racism, and all that's left is 'randomly picking bad sounding words'? Maybe when drunk they just decide to insult people. A very gay person can totally call another gay person a fag as an insult, a black person call another black person a nigg-r, when they're very pissed.

A simpler approach, assigning no 'internal motives', is just - alcohol makes you dumber and causes you do to dumb things more or less randomly. If you get blackout drunk and start hitting on women - does that really say anything about your non-drunk behavior, or just that you're really dumb and 'hitting on women' is a fairly simple instinct?

if I did 12 shots and walked up to Craig and said that I wanted to take him home and bend him over my Eames lounge chair

I could see someone doing this because they thought it was incredibly funny in the moment!

If you're very drunk and stumbling around, then alcohol 'weakens your ability to suppress' your impulse to, say, sway to the right and left as you walk instead of walking correctly.

Or you could try reading the sources I linked instead of making up goofy ideas I didn't bring up. Same source, next few sentences:

As alcohol affects different parts of the brain, different symptoms of drunkenness emerge. That’s because different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions.

Alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex first. This part of the brain is responsible for judgment, reasoning, and suppressing impulsive behavior. That’s why after a few drinks you lose some of your inhibitions and feel more confident venturing out of your usual comfort zone.

Alcohol then affects the frontal lobe and parietal lobe, slowing your reaction time to sensory information.

The cerebellum controls your balance and coordination. When alcohol affects this part of the brain you may find it hard to walk in a straight line or speak without slurring your words.

Different effects of alcohol, and of other drugs.

I could see someone doing this because they thought it was incredibly funny in the moment!

I'll concede that point. I once loved a game of gay chicken, and found it hilarious for a while in college to slap my friend's asses in clubs just to make them uncomfortable. I guess my hypo is presupposing that it was clearly serious which is tough to demonstrate, I'll concede you could fight the hypo.

I guess I'm saying that the suppression of that desire is as real as it's unleashing. So the prioritizing of the bad behavior/utterance as Real You is just pessimism in disguise. You can just as well focus on the part of you displayed when you're not drunk and say that's the authentic you and the authentic opinion.

Getting sober can reveal old thoughts as well, unmasking the desire, hidden all along deep down, to be a better person.

I see what you mean, it depends on what we mean by describing a person as being x.

When I describe someone as heterosexual or homosexual, I'm referring to their sexual desires, not necessarily to their behavior. If you're a man who wants to fuck men you're a homosexual (or bi but we're going to ignore that for simplicity). It doesn't matter if you successfully suppress that or never get the opportunity, the identity is in the desire not the act.

Ditto racism. I'd define being a racist as having a belief or theory of racial Animus. I don't follow Kendi, I don't think actions are racist by impact alone, only by intention.

If you, on the other hand, define identities by their impact, then it would make sense to say sobriety is the "real" state.

I'm reminded of a quote from Shogun that I've got an effortpost around in the hopper:

Every man has three hearts, A false heart in their mouths, which they show to the whole world; another heart in their chests, which only relatives and friends know; and finally, a real heart, which no one knows, hidden. Only god knows where.

But this is the whole anti-racist vs not racist thing. If we live in a free society (I know, big if, but that's the claim) you do not get to police the insides of people's heads. You do not get to demand everyone signs up to your ideology, the most you can demand is that anyone who doesn't agree with you shut up about it (because your ideology currently reigns in 'polite society').

This girl straight up said the word that can't be said, so I understand 'polite society' is going to throw the book at her. But if we are throwing the book at her because slurring a word over and over again to upset someone is proof she is racist in her heart - if we are going to start policing people's hearts - then there is no hope for society and its time to get out the grey hoodie and sunglasses.

I'm not really arguing punishment here, I agree wholeheartedly that hate crime and hate speech laws are total violations of basic enlightenment principles. We should punish actions not motivations.

I just found the arguments in favor of the girl to be very narcissist's prayer: the same people arguing she wasn't racist were also arguing that she shouldn't be expelled if she was.

Sorry, I didn't mean to direct my post at you, I meant the royal you but I should have realised how it would look. This whole thing is just so frustrating. There is an element of the narcissist's prayer there, but I do think it's because racial politics has become totalitarian in its true sense - nothing outside of racial politics. They're two separate positions, but if one is on the anti racist side one can't accept either of them, leaving the not racist side full of people who believe in both, or people willing to align them.

That's a nice analogy but should it also apply to people who think there are demons living in their walls after they smoke crack or any other psychoactive drug. Very compulsive and out of character behavior isn't even that uncommon among drunks. I doubt it has that much to do with one's "true character".

It's in vino veritas, not in coca veritas or in LSD veritas. Trying to apply it to other drugs, or to mental illnesses, makes it iffy. Alcohol has a specific known effect by a specific mechanism. Positing a similarity to other substances will work in some ways but not others, I lack the experiences to speak to it.

If you told me she was tweaking on meth or tripping on acid, the whole tenor of the event changes doesn't it?

"In LSD veritas" was the CIA's motto in the 60s. They tried with alcohol, but determined that alcohol wasn't good enough to be used to determine anyone's true sentiments. (neither was LSD)

People react very differently to drunkeness. Some get sad, violent, horny, lethargic, delusional or paranoid. Not all drunk behavior can be interpreted as uninhibited desire.

More comments

So you don't think the prefrontal cortex contributes meaningfully to who you are as a person, and that judgment and reasoning aren't part of your personality? I think this is a strange way to understand the human mind.

I mean, isn't what anti-racists want is for people to use their moral judgment and reasoning abilities to suppress impulses to act racistly? Or is the goal to eliminate every racist urge in all human brains, no matter how deep it's buried?

I wouldn't label myself an "anti-racist" I'd label myself a "non-racist" if forced to. But I don't think

eliminate every racist urge in all human brains, no matter how deep it's buried?

Is as crazy as you think it is. You could get me as drunk as you want, I'll never hit my mother or my wife, or really any woman. That is ingrained in me at a deeper level. One might achieve a similar degree of non-racism with proper cultural upbringing.

So you don't think the prefrontal cortex contributes meaningfully to who you are as a person, and that judgment and reasoning aren't part of your personality? I think this is a strange way to understand the human mind.

Maybe I'm phrasing my argument poorly. Let's use the old Freudian division: in my view the drunk you is your id, your deep and base desires; the sober you is id managed by superego, societal training and politeness, producing the ego. Which we call "you" or your personality is a secondary question, "then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes;" if you yell slurs at black people when drunk your id is racist. It's possible for a person to have a non-racist id, to genuinely not see race as a valid category for insult and negative judgment.

If you believe something inside, but your judgment tells you not to say it out loud, we call that political correctness. If one thinks Black people are inferior, but doesn't say it out loud sober because of political correctness, I'd call that a belief in racism. I think fat people are ugly and inferior, I don't say that out loud because of political correctness, it's a belief I hold, if you get me drunk and in an argument with a fat person I'll probably call him a whale.

What if you don't think Black people are inferior, but the particular person in front of you, who happens to be black, is inferior?

More comments

Firstly, thanks for the tag! I was debating whether to post my comment top(per) level or here, and because I'm a karma whore, I chose the latter.

I appreciate the link and learning something new! It reminds me of people who argue that Kanye's mental illness can't create whole-ass antisemitism, only exacerbate existing prejudice. I'm inclined to agree with everything you say here, but I'm not sure it addresses the cognitive algorithm nara and me are independently describing.

The drunkenness reveals the urge to be mean to someone (maybe it's because they're black or maybe because they punched me). If I was sober, I wouldn't be mean to them. But because I'm gonna be mean, I'm gonna execute a meanness strategy. Noticing they are black, I choose the Gamer Word because it lets me inflict violence (so I've heard) without even bruising my knuckles! I imagine I can execute this meanness strategy sober, too.

This sort of argument originally occurred to me because of the times I've been hurt by what people say to me, and every time I can recall, it was because they were set off by something (not alcohol, in any of the cases). Rather than say, "gee I guess all these people secretly hate people like me," I just decided it was because they were heated and angry.

I'm not sure what kind of evidence could distinguish either of our theories. In both cases, there is a need to distinguish why some drunk people yell epithets and some don't (equivalently: why some schizos post about Jews and some don't), and each of us go towards un-factual conclusions to support our moral intuitions.

That's fair. "One can shout bigger at a Black woman repeatedly but that doesn't mean one is racist!" Just strikes me as epistemicly similar to people in an earlier thread saying "One can post castration fetish material to a castration fetish site, and then totally separately one can publish medical guidelines on voluntary castration, they aren't necessarily connected!"

Trying to shrug it off on society by saying well she said it because she knows it hurts because other people think that, even if she doesn't; that strikes me as more like Kendi, a racism without racists.

Alcohol reduces your inhibitions. Your inhibitions might prevent you from saying an unpleasant truth out loud. Of course, they might also prevent you from saying an unpleasant UNtruth that you know will be devastating, because drunk you is an asshole that will say anything to win an argument.

I would say that the unfiltered (or at least, less filtered) side of you comes out when you're inebriated. This is the "real you" if you consider those filters to be an artificial construct constraining your true self, but I would not agree. Behavioral filters, like habits, generally are constructed, but they are constructed by a long series of choices that are morally attributable to yourself.

Similarly, however, the choice to become inebriated is a choice to relax those filters (involuntary intoxication is another matter), and that is also a decision with moral weight. In short, if you don't like what you tend to do while drunk...don't get drunk.

The fact that you reach for a racial epithet when you're trying to inflict pain says something.

Mostly that you think it will inflict pain. It may mean you're a racist, but it might just mean you know you've got a magic word to harm people. I don't think it really matters in this case; going on a drunken tirade is reasonably punishable without determining if the drunks heart was pure or not.

In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.

No. In my hypothetical and in the real-life event, a drunk person chooses the word that seems most likely to offend the person they are confronting. "Characterizing X as detestable" is just far, far too much cognition to attribute to someone this drunk.

Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.

As I've said, I'm confident that expulsion solves nothing in this case. But I could probably be persuaded that this girl should be expelled for her behavior (including both heavy drinking and resisting arrest), conditional on other students routinely being expelled for similar behaviors. What bothers me is the idea of expelling students because they said a naughty word (yes, even if they said it 200 times). If the line between expulsion and not-expulsion is "did you say a racial slur," that violates my intuitions regarding the importance of freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry in institutions of higher education.

"Characterizing X as detestable" is just far, far too much cognition to attribute to someone this drunk.

If I say that Martin Shkreli is an asshole, I'm probably not exercising too much cognition. I'm certainly not consciously/explicitly characterizing anuses as bad. Indeed, there's a reasonable case that assholes (anuses) are good - after all, what's the alternative? Still, in context, there's some clear background knowledge: assholes are detestable.

What bothers me is the idea of expelling students because they said a naughty word (yes, even if they said it 200 times). If the line between expulsion and not-expulsion is "did you say a racial slur," that violates my intuitions regarding the importance of freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry in institutions of higher education.

So you're suggesting that broad principles of free speech require public colleges to treat student speech in a content-neutral way, with no special treatment for the communication of ideas we find abhorrent, including racial slurs? That seems fine, although it's not the position most public American colleges seem to take (certainly not in practice). It's hard to imagine how this would even function if implemented literally. How could student work possibly be evaluated in this context?

So you're suggesting that broad principles of free speech require public colleges to treat student speech in a content-neutral way, with no special treatment for the communication of ideas we find abhorrent, including racial slurs?

I'm suggesting that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. The University of Kentucky is a public institution, and thus bound (through the incorporation doctrine) by the First Amendment.

That seems fine, although it's not the position most public American colleges seem to take (certainly not in practice).

Are you sure about that? I haven't taken a recent poll or anything, but in my experience it is the private universities where this tends to be more of a challenge. Public universities are aware that they are bound by law to permit offensive speech, and failure to do so can result in substantial judgments against them.

In this particular case, the (many!) physical altercations likely give adequate cover to the university if it decides to expel the drunk girl for assault, but only if nobody involved in the process accidentally writes an email or makes a speech about the epithet. If the university says "we're expelling this student for racism," they might very well lose the resulting viewpoint discrimination lawsuit.

No. In my hypothetical and in the real-life event, a drunk person chooses the word that seems most likely to offend the person they are confronting.

In the same way that kids telling their little brother that he's adopted don't hate orphans, they just like teasing their little brother.

No. In my hypothetical and in the real-life event, a drunk person chooses the word that seems most likely to offend the person they are confronting.

In the same way that kids telling their little brother that he's adopted don't hate orphans, they just like teasing their little brother.

I think this example supports my position. Yes, the older brother is trying to rile the younger brother. But there's also common knowledge across the participants that the older brother holds that it's undesirable to be adopted.

It's undesirable to be adopted because it means you aren't as much a part of the family as he is, it means your parents don't love you as much as the children they gave birth too. It wouldn't matter if adopted children were considered heroes by society, it would still be hurtful, because inside your family your status is diminished. When we were little, my parents were very strict about cursing, so we invented our own insults. My little sister (5 or 6 years old) wanted to be a princess, so we called her a puncess. It upset the absolute shit out of her, she cried so much about it that my parents added puncess to the list of curses we had better not say if we valued our hides. Because it didn't matter what the word was, our intention was to hurt her and we put all the venom we could into it.

Words can not hurt you. It is the way words are used, the intentions behind their use which hurts, and then only as much as you let them. And we have set up a system which rewards people for being hurt. Would you be ok with her being expelled for shouting asshole 200 times?

If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst."

I expect that if you got drunk and repeatedly called a woman a "cunt" it would be considered a "sexist outburst" however.

Depends on some context, "cunt" has some moderately accepted uses for both genders in some social contexts. There are some situations I could call someone a cunt in front of female friends and have it not be interpreted as sexist at all. "nigger" really doesn't have a non-racist case for use beyond the describe/use distinction.

"cunt" does not mean, "you are womanly and thus bad because women are bad" the way "nigger" implies.

I'm not sure how this relates to my comment, which was just pointing out that calling a woman a "cunt" is more likely to be seen as sexist than calling a man a "dick".

COVID: released on purpose?

This is the most disruptive (and deadly, according to the government) of our lifetimes and I haven't seen any leaders talk about COVID as a tragedy or natural disaster. The lack of any blood, or even any question of blame in response an event of this magnitude is very weird. A large fraction of people believe COVID was a lab leak from some combination of China and the US, but there is no discussion about it. It would have been easy enough to throw Fauci and Daszak or some Chinese guys under the bus without any other damage, but we don't even get a sacrificial lamb. Furthermore, the policies they did in response are policies they wanted to do anyway and are happy about.

Governments either believe they owe their people nothing (believable!), or this was such an enormous crime that pulling the thread is too dangerous to attempt.

  • -11

and I haven't seen any leaders talk about COVID as a tragedy or natural disaster

Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy. "Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss.

blurb of the third DDG result for 'biden covid tragedy'

A large fraction of people believe COVID was a lab leak from some combination of China and the US, but there is no discussion about

covid lab leak discussion has solidly entered the mainstream over the past year. There's still a lot of people saying its not ok to say it and racist, but 'centrists' have openly discussed it for a while.

It’s discussed, but the tone seems to be more apathy than anything else, which is what OP is arguing against I think. I tend to feel the same way, I truly do not understand how someone could concede Covid being a lab leak and having just a completely apathetic response.

Goes to show how nihilistic and conflict avoidant our current generation is.

China has another reason to play up the lab leak theory: the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is their fault. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.

My tinpot theory is that the Chinese think they were targeted by an American bioattack and are playing it cool before they hit back harder.

China got targeted by Japanese biowarfare in WW2 - this is well documented. The US swooped in and took all the Japanese biowarfare technology and freed assorted war criminals on condition they work for the US. Now the CCP maintains that the US used that same biowarfare against them in the Korean war, evidence is mixed on whether it's true. The US obviously denies this.

Now given that the US NGO Ecohealth is at the core of the Wuhan fiasco, they'd be reasonably suspicious that they're getting bioattacked again. The Party would naturally be biased to suspecting foreign conspiracies from their primary rival. The other option is domestic incompetence.

But why would they announce their suspicions to the world? Announcing a bioattack means saying you were attacked with weapons of mass destruction. That's a good justification for full-scale war. China's nuclear forces aren't quite ready for war with America, there are a bunch of issues with their ability to deter. Conventional forces are similar. It would be humiliating to say 'we were attacked and aren't doing anything'. The other option is losing a war that they're not quite ready to win.

I think China is maintaining its zero-Covid strategy to shield its deployment of a powerful bioweapon. They just discovered that they have the best lockdown capacity on the planet. Nobody else squelched COVID as well as they did, nobody else has the state capacity and ruthlessness to lock people up as proficiently as they do. Unlike Japan or New Zealand, China had no warning time, they were the first hit by COVID. It's to their comparative advantage to wage biowarfare, they're the best at defending against it. They're even managing to stall Omicron.

So at some point some dangerous disease will be deployed, likely in America. Maybe it'll be next to a US biolab, it'll definitely be near a major transport hub. The West is tired of COVID and we don't mask like the Asians do. We get hit hard. China already has its defences in place, they're fully activated. All the bureaucracy is already set up, they can instantly cut off travel in response to this new disease. It'll look like a fortuitous coincidence.

In conclusion, the Chinese aren't playing up the lableak angle because they're preparing a crushing counterattack. Secrecy is vital. The Americans are either unsure about what really happened or they don't want blame cast their way (which it inevitably would given US involvement). Fauci and Daszak haven't been executed lest it spoil the plans of the superpowers.

This is a terrifying thought, and I suppose somewhat plausible. I’d hope that China wouldn’t stoop so low but I don’t know enough about their leadership to comment.

I tend to agree that Covid and mask fatigue would put us in a truly bad place if a deadly pandemic were around the corner.

Ultimately, I don't think the origin of the virus really matters.

There are two popular scenarios for the introduction of COVID into the world.

  1. The commonly accepted scenario, where the virus emerged in bats consumed at a wet market in Wuhan.

  2. The commonly disparaged scenario, where the virus was the product of activity occuring in lab near to the wet market in Wuhan.

If scenario 1 is true, China deliberately withheld information about the virus from the WHO in the first month of the pandemic. This was information that might have been of benefit to other world leaders in planning health strategies.

However, those world leaders spent the first few months encouraging behaviour that would directly contribute to the spread of the virus, before u-turning and banning not only intimate contact with strangers but also contact with those close to you for months at a time. If China had co-operated and released full information, would they have acted upon it?

If scenario 2 is true, then as you say a handful of the world's elite aided and abetted an extremely dangerous practise that produced a pandemic, then tried to mitigate it by one-upping each other in terms of damaging hygiene theatre. With the introduction of the vaccine (which I would like to point out that governments were doubly lucky in that it came out incredibly quickly and did not have terrible repurcussions when they decided to inject into literally everyone), WEIRD nations were offered an out and everything that was done to you should be forgotten.

I note with interest that only the US media has produced articles to the effect of requesting an amnesty for actions taken during the pandemic. This is mostly a product of the US having a significant anti-lockdown political movement in the form of the republicans. In most European nations measures had bi-partisan support questioning the measures is an extremely fast way to make yourself a pariah.

In both scenarios, the public demonstrated that they could be mostly cowed into submission with threats of mass death several orders of magnitude greater than observed reality and readily available bread and circuses, which very happily dived into. Some have taken to being a Nietzschean Last Man with incredible devotion. If I was someone like Biden or Johnson or Xi or whoever I would not be remotely afraid of the man in the street, or at the very least I would re-evaluate just what exactly would drive him to rise up and overthrow me, because everything I've done to him so far barely got a peep out of him. I might even release COVID-like viruses all the time for fun.

Christians and the Killing of abortion doctors:

I'm well aware that a strong case can be made for absolute Christian pacifism or more moderately for employing violence only with the consent of the ruling authority. Yet these positions are clearly not majority ones. Imagine if I posed to the average Christian the following hypothetical:

Tomorrow, the government passes a law declaring that blacks, being subhuman, are no longer entitled to any protection under the law. While the law allows you to kill a person who threatens the life of a regular person, killing a person who threatens a black is now murder. Mark 1.0 disagrees. While he is not black himself and has no special relationship with blacks, he consider them to be regular humans entitled to defense. As such, he goes to a black extermination center and kills a few of its exterminators. Are Mark 1.0's actions morally justified?

I think the vast majority of Christians would say that Mark was not only acting justifiably but commendably. If he started a revolution that overthrew the government, they would celebrate him as an example of Christian courage and dedication. If, however I replace Black with fetus, and exterminationist with abortion doctors, fundamentalists suddenly discover the value of 'giving unto Caesar', talk about how their belief in the sanctity of life is incoherent with killing abortion doctors and condemn Mark 2.0.

Once again, my claim is that there is no deontological theological justification that allows for Mark 1.0's actions, but not Mark 2.0's. Thus, when Christians claim to disown anti-abortion violence on religious grounds they are almost always either making a best methods utilitarian calculation (which given 60 Million abortions since Roe v. Wade seems rather specious) or demonstrating that their worship of the flag, trumps their commitment to God.

FWIW, I am a Christian, and this line of reasoning was a major factor in my becoming a pacifist and leaving the navy as a conscientious objector. Killing abortion doctors seemed obviously un-Christlike, and I couldn't find a moral difference between killing abortion doctors and killing enemy soldiers. So I decided I should stop killing enemy soldiers.

I tend to agree that I used to worship the flag more than I worshiped Jesus, and that I see a lot of other Christians doing the same.

It's pretty funny you chose black people for your first example, because taking your version of Christian logic in the other direction, people who are fine with abortion should also be fine with the systematic murder of black people. Which is exactly what some pro lifers believe.

I mean sure, some members of [x] believe [y] for virtually any X and Y. It's just an uncharitable potshot when used the way you used it. I'm sure some pro choicers also believe that... The founder of planned parenthood being a good example.

Sanger was part of what I was referring to, as hlynka joked - particularly among black pro lifers, many suspect abortion is designed to eradicate undesirables, with a special emphasis on black undesirables. Rather than Sanger though, usually they cite marketing as the proof - abortions are advertised more heavily in black communities and black pro lifers often feel ignored in the national debate.

I think it's an uncharitable pot shot either way, but I thought it was either an ironic coincidence or making a point I didn't understand, so I wanted to bring it up.

Man I totally misunderstood your comment. I thought your "which is exactly what pro lifers believe" was saying that some pro lifers are fine with the systematic murder of black people.

particularly among black pro lifers, many suspect abortion is designed to eradicate undesirables, with a special emphasis on black undesirables.

I've definitely also heard these arguments among (non-Black) pro-lifers, especially Catholics.

Are these people believing that pro-choice is good because it means more black babies are murdered/unborn or do they literally also believe that black people are subhuman too?

I am not The Shadow friend, so I don't know what lies in the hearts of men. Would it make much difference?

Margaret Sanger and Woodrow Wilson could not be reached for comment.

Sorry, I'm not buying the notion that modern progressives are in anyway as based as their ancestors.

I'm not buying the notion that they are any different.

Whether it's men in white hoods setting fire to minority neighborhoods in 1920 or men in black hoodies setting fire to minority neighborhoods in 2020 the democratic party is and always has been the party of the lynch mob.

Whether it's "Jim Crow" or "Safe Spaces" the democrat party is and always has been the party of segregation.

The democratic party is and always has been the party of abortion.

The packaging may have changed but the contents remain the same.

No, the first one was under the auspices of the other party, though they were rather closer then.

I have not forgotten, i was just sticking to the simplest and least controversial examples for brevity's sake.

Oh come on:

'Let's sterilize degenerates, criminals and idiots to improve our human capital' is a very different position from 'let's promote childlesness among the educated and talented because children remind us of those icky rednecks'.

'Let's lynch accused rapists, murderers and looters in defense of society' is a very different position from 'let's burn down society in a sacred ritual to commemorate a degenerate criminal (who was unfairly killed)'.

No, no it is not.

Mark 1.0 is not justified if you include enough assumptions to make this properly analogous to anti-abortion assassinations, namely the inability to advance such an effort (given general apathy towards abortion laws at best and antipathy towards peacetime political violence) to a general prohibition, or even prevent choice abortions from completing through other means (it's not very evident that assassinating an abortion doctor deterred women from seeking abortions, while assassinating the exterminators presumably gives their victims a chance to escape).

And while someone can start to contrive more scenarios where this might seem preferable, it's worth remembering that Christianity demands Christians do take the "upfront cost" of assassinating very seriously (even if they don't quite commit to pacifism), and the uncertainty of even the most convincing 300 IQ plan makes the certain cost very doubtfully acceptable.

These are all very very obvious points so I don't have cause to think OP is acting in good faith.

The average well-adjusted person doesn't even take the written precepts of their religion literally and to their full conclusion, let alone those principles (like "abortion = murder" in many variants of Christianity) that are not written in any holy book but belief in which is only mediated by social context and gets its colour of religious law in part through understanding that tribal customs and explicit religion derive legitimacy from one another and to question one is to threaten both. (I reckon that's how in the US many appear to wind up with the vague or explicit feeling that taxation and socialism is unchristian, too.)

I think that "If you really think about it, wouldn't it be morally imperative to kill all the abortionists?" is an idea that is only likely to occur to the minority of people who believe that thinking about moral precepts and coming to unexpected conclusions is a valid and worthwhile way to guide your actions (as opposed to acting in the way that will invite approval from your social group and only invoking precepts phatically to reinforce group identity). Probably, if you post here, you are more likely to fall into that class of people; compare the folklore notion that engineers were overrepresented in ISIS.

This again?

Yes, from a pure util or purely Kantian perspective you'd be right. Christianity has, however, a well developed theology on use of force that isn't either of those things. Christian ethics exist and are not interchangeable with whatever secular system of ethics you happen to favor. Yes, Christian ethics include bits and pieces of utilitarianism and deontology and virtue ethics. No, secular examples of any of those things are not interchangeable; Christianity does not require its members to engage in futile attempts to stop another person's evil, and does not look kindly on causing damage in those futile attempts.

There are two millennia of theology explaining what Christians should do and why they should do it when the state passes a law contradicting Christian ethics. If you think you've discovered a contradiction in Christian ethics, I'd suggest that two millennia of theology might have the answer.

Now, as for the specific situation, Christianity has a concept of just war/just rebellion which requires, among other things, that the use of force have a reasonable chance of succeeding in accomplishing the goal(either "protect black people from extermination centers" or "protect babies from abortion"). That seems like an operative difference here.

And to address your "render unto Caesar" point, pro-life Christians violate laws on eg clinic zones of exclusion pretty regularly, because that's allowed in Christian theology on resisting unjust laws. Just like how Christians in Poland in 1944 didn't raid Auschwitz but did hide Jews in the attic(which was illegal).

Well, yes, but actually no?

I don't think I have anything useful to say about what is or is not obligatory in Christianity, but I don't think Christianity is really at the center of your imaginings here. The very, very broad framing of this question is, essentially, "when is it permissible to deliberately end a human life?"

One answer a lot of people buy is "at some point before that life becomes self-sustaining" (i.e., abortion). Another answer a lot of people buy is "in defense of other (e.g. innocent) life." People who disagree with the former and agree with the latter have a moral framework in which it would appear permissible to end the lives of people who deliberately abort babies.

But we also live in a society where we have agreed that only certain people are allowed to end lives. No matter how much we might believe that someone's life should be ended, we aren't generally allowed to do that ourselves. Mostly this is government does it (police and military) but medical practitioners are also often licensed to do it (abortion, euthanasia).

Some people decide that their beliefs about proper killing make it impossible for them to, in good conscience, remain citizens of their nation. So they immigrate, or go "off the grid," or whatever. People do this with regard to war, to overpolicing, I assume some people do it with regard to abortion as well. But most people instead participate in the political process of trying to make sure that authorized dealers of death in their community are not dealing death in unethical or immoral ways. We don't always get what we want from our government, but taking killing into one's own hands constitutes a rejection of government altogether, and is very likely to end badly for those who do it.

I regard abortion as utterly horrific. I would not in principle oppose the death penalty for abortion providers, though my actual preference is rather more libertarian than this, partly because I think the standard list of rape, incest, and to save the mother's life are all persuasive exceptions to the general rule (similarly, I support the death penalty for other kinds of murder, too, in principle but not usually in practice). But in practice criminalizing abortion would be an absolute disaster, at least if attempted in America. Culturally, most people do not have a strong moral or religious commitment to the protection of nascent human life. Most people are simply unwilling to weigh the interests of the unborn that heavily. This might make some of them hypocrites, I suppose, depending on what other things they believe. But this is a real "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" conundrum. Probably none of us is completely happy with our government's current "who it's okay to kill" list. But most of us are also not okay with bearing the cost of changing that list. We are all of us always balancing a plurality of interests in our own lives, and what emerges from all these collective balancings may not be completely to your liking, but that doesn't mean your only option is violent reprisal against your enemies.

After all, Christianity also says, "the meek shall inherit the earth."

I think it's possible that this post is the answer, or at least part of the answer, to a question that's been kicking around in my brain for a while, which can be poorly summarized as "if Christians are opposed to abortion because they believe it is a sin, and therefore are motivated to exercise their voting rights to vote for politicians who promise to make it illegal (or appoint SC judges who would overturn Roe, clearing the way for making it illegal), surely they should also be voting for politicians who promise to make other things that they believe are sins illegal, including not being Christian."

I kind of assume that the reason (American) Christians aren't lobbying to make not being a Christian illegal is because it's just so completely outside of the (American) Overton window. But maybe there's another reason.

I might, perhaps, be incorrect in the assumption that the primary reason many/most Christians are anti-abortion is "because it makes God mad". After all, I've read plenty of well-written posts on this site and its predecessors putting forth philosophical arguments for why abortion is wrong that don't have any reference to theology or the supernatural. I've spent the past approximately five years arguing fairly passionately with anybody I think will listen that pro-lifers don't hate women, or want to make America a theocracy, they just believe a fetus is a living human with the same right to state protection from murder as any other living human, etc., on the basis of these posts.

However, more recently I've noticed that everybody making these well-written philosophical arguments also just so happens to be either a Christian, or somebody super concerned about falling Western birth rates, or somebody who just thinks that kids are the best and everybody should have more than they currently do...or some combination of all three. (If I'm wrong, please correct me, any anti-Western child-hating atheist pro-lifers out there.) So I'm no longer trying to convince anybody in my circle that they should listen more to what pro-life people are saying, any more than I would try to convince hardcore 2nd-amendment believers to listen to what the people lobbying for universal background checks and high-capacity magazine bans are saying, because I know that they (gun enthusiasts) know that they (anti-gun activists) ultimately want private firearms ownership either completely banned or made incredibly rare and highly socially stigmatized.

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This logic is never applied to any other circumstance.

If someone is attempting to murder a regular child the regular american celebrates the person who violently stops them. If a mass shooter strikes the ordinary non-governmental person who runs in to shoot them is celebrated as a hero. We have an entire culture based around celebrating the idea of resistors to nazi occupation, or the british, and who actively imagines violence against a hypothetical tyrannical government ALL THE TIME.

And yet the question of guerilla violence against abortion doctors "Child murders" in this logic... is not only not done, it is not even discussed as a question except by pro-lifers saying "Look obviously you don't believe this... you aren't even willing to discuss violence"

I can even count the number of nations that have been bombed in my lifetime, and certainly can't count the number where bombings have been openly discussed by the common laymen... the number of people who have suggest the death penalty for drug dealers, or going and vigilante turning back illegal immigrants, or punching facist, or standing up to communists...or defending the enviroment... or defending your property from enviromentalists.

Talk of escalating to lethal violence is the NORM of political discussion. People regularly praise fathers who kill pedos, or mothers who go vigilante on killers of family members... or hell women who cut the dicks off of boring dates they often never even subsequently accuse of sexual assault (people will praise just literal crazy people for maiming others)

hell VIOLENCE is the logical end of all politics... that what we're discussing when we discuss politics, who we'll organize to employ violence against... do you think taxes are backed up with only letters?

.

And yet the only issue where there is no talk that violence could be justified, where there is zero tough talk of escalating to lethal solutions... just so happens to be the one where its claimed millions of children are being murdered.

I've literally heard more earnest talk in my life of escalating to violence over drag queen story hour, or Milo giving a speech on campus, than I've ever heard over abortion.

Do you not find that weird!?

And then you get even to the legal state backed solutions... and there are no teeth. No one proposes charging women who get abortions with homicide (meanwhile you hear howls for blood when it comes to mother of born children who kill their kids), there's very little discussion of even charging abortion doctors... You'd think talks of the death penalty for abortion doctors would be really common given they're supposedly SERIAL MURDERERS OF CHILDREN.

.

Somehow this one issue, the holocaust of millions of children, is the one issue in politics people just seem to never get overly worked up about. contrast how much violence there was over a few hundred police shootings a year... or a single "'stolen election'"... or merely being forced to use a coivd passport, and be restricted from engaging in civic life.

Did any anti-lockdown pro-lifers look at lockdowns and the the covid authoritarianism... and when a comrade compared it to Nazi Germany say to them:

"What the hell are you talking about? Medical passports? Restricted economic activity? Maybe making Quarantine camps? That's low level 1930s stuff! Regime "Doctors" murdered almost one million CHILDREN last year alone. And they did the same the year before that. AND THE YEAR BEFORE THAT! We've been at 1945 sheer moral horror EVERY YEAR OF OUR FUCKING LIVES. And you're talking about them starting to maybe make camps!? We've been living in one of the top 5 worst regimes in human history, at a perpetual midnight of horror, for 50 years!"

.

No pro-lifer thinks like that. None sit around cursing the day Washington was born, that had any moment in US history changed, maybe if the British or French had held control, none of this would have happened. None sit around wondering maybe if the south, or the Kaiser, or Hitler, or Caececescu had won... maybe 1 million children wouldn't be murdered every year...almost none sit around praying for biblical judgement to destroy DC like Gomorrah or Jericho. But its exactly what their own axioms would suggest.

Pro-lifers don't do that. They don't openly suggest the day of the rope is coming for abortion doctors, they don't openly speculate about getting their hands on the medical files and tracking down every murderous woman who dared be party to killing their own child. They don't discuss this. They don't fantasize about it. They don't hint at it.

What would be the advantage to doing so, from the perspective of actual Christians? We don't believe that a better world is possible. We don't believe that we can build heaven on earth, or perfect humanity. If we did those things, the world would be more or less equally sinful after we did them, and possibly moderately worse for a while. What would we be accomplishing?

What Christian end, specifically, is advanced by engaging in mass lawless violence to suppress abortion?

No pro-lifer thinks like that.

No pro-lifer thinking like that is presented to you through the dozens of filters designed explicitly to suppress such ideas.

almost none sit around praying for biblical judgement to destroy DC like Gomorrah or Jericho. But its exactly what their own axioms would suggest.

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

Why would you expect us to?

You don't, again, appear to have the slightest conception of what Christians are, what they aim for and value. You worship violence, purportedly in service of ideals, but violence is easy and largely pointless. Life, stable, purposeful, fruitful life, that's hard. Building durable relationships, durable communities, that's hard, and valuable, and no amount of motorcycle warlords can or will replace it. The future belongs to those who show up. Christians are pretty good at showing up. Are anarchists? Fifty years from now, when my children are taking over for me, will your children be taking over for you? And even this line of argumentation is, at best, an attempt to frame the relevant issues into a secular frame, but that is not our frame and never will be.

At the end of the day, we don't care about the things you care about the way you care about them. And so you and others will continue to be mystified, and resort to absurdities to try to grok behavior that seems, to you, completely irrational.

Don’t forget the other murderers in this murder conspiracy: the mothers-to-not-be. Murderers who in most cases don’t consider themselves such. Women told by their society that ridding themselves of this clump of cells and ending the nine-month insane transformation early is their science-given right and is a good and noble thing they do. Do they deserve a bullet in their heads too? Oh wait, that would kill the baby. Keep her locked up and force-fed vitamins, then seize her child as soon as it’s born and execute her? What a nightmare! (But she deserves it, she was going to slaughter her child in cold blood…)

And what of the police? A hail of gunfire for the would-be rescuer would only be the beginning. Politicians anywhere to the right of Hillary Clinton will be subject to immediate, intense demands that they publicly denounce such vile, vicious acts of terrorism. Anyone who didn’t would be subject to more intense media demonization than even Donald Trump was.

The women in the clinic would be treated as the victims of something worse than rape: right-wing extremism. They would be flown at taxpayer expense to another abortion clinic in the lap of luxury, where their children would die anyway.

So it would take an intense nation-wide effort, organized by militias and timed to occur on a specific day and time. One whiff of such an operation, and the FBI would come down on them harder than Hunter S. Thompson going cold turkey. And if it was pulled off, the screaming and anguish of feminists would be unbearable.

And all of that might, might be worth it to save children being slaughtered at the rate of one 9/11 every two days. But the souls of the women and doctors and moderates would forever be lost, because by their modern liberal standards and the mutated hearsay cultural ideas of Christian doctrine, only a false religion kills in the name of its god, only a false religion has to kill. And the irony is they’d actually be right this time.

Ephesians 6:12 - For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Murdering the flesh and spilling the blood of the babykillers would only feed the rulers of the darkness of the world, and tighten their grip. That’s not Effective Heroism.

Instead, pregnancy crisis centers which don’t pull dirty tricks offer life to children and salvation to their mothers, according to their consciences and free wills. You can tell they’re effective because “Jane’s Revenge” is targeting them specifically for destruction, and the left’s best weapons for community change, the media, are castigating them for their existence.

I can't tell whether you are cherry-picking or whether you're just missing empirical data, here.

This logic is never applied to any other circumstance.

It applies all the time. I did not specifically discuss the phenomenon of "defense of self or others" exceptions because they are exceptions, and they don't always stick. You might have to prove to a court of law that your justification or excuse is actually legitimate (see e.g. Rittenhouse). Even the military and police must sometimes do this! I did not specifically discuss the phenomenon of revolutionaries (failed or succeeded) because those are historical points where people have decided to pay the price of changing the list, so to speak. All your counterexamples are explained by the logic I presented. They are just examples where either the law still has the final say, or the law itself is being cast down in pursuit of something better.

VIOLENCE is the logical end of all politics

No, violence is the failure mode of all politics. Violence is what happens when the polity fails, either internally or diplomatically. I agree that taxes depend on the government's monopoly on force. I agree that the threat of legal repercussion is a violent threat! But that is not the end, it is not the telos. The end of all politics is cooperation and coordination.

And yet the only issue where there is no talk that violence could be justified, where there is zero tough talk of escalating to lethal solutions... just so happens to be the one where its claimed millions of children are being murdered.

Are you sure about that?

I don't want to give the wrong impression. A fair number of acts of violence have been committed in defense of abortion, too. But it's like maybe you've never heard about clinic bombings? The idea that there is "no talk" about violence in these cases is laughable. We're talking about it right here. But it's certainly outside the Overton window, and there are many voices against abortion keeping their efforts deliberately inside the Overton window.

You'd think talks of the death penalty for abortion doctors would be really common given they're supposedly SERIAL MURDERERS OF CHILDREN.

The fact that there is any talk at all of such things is pretty remarkable, I think! Because this particular issue is one where high-pressure psychological warfare has been waged against generations of Americans. I don't know what your bar for "really common" is, but I would certainly not call this kind of talk uncommon. I do have an unusually religious extended family, though, so maybe I just hear it more than you do?

No pro-lifer thinks like that.

I mean... you're just wrong about that. Especially here:

None sit around wondering maybe if the south

Visit the South, man.

But its exactly what their own axioms would suggest.

Most people don't live life on their own axioms. Most people can't imagine even trying. First of all, most people's axioms are sweepingly incoherent. I suspect many people haven't got much in the way of "axioms" at all, and I am sure that most people have absolutely terrible reasoning capabilities. Those who are smart enough to think carefully about the idea that a holocaust-level extermination event has been condoned by our government are also smart enough to recognize that there is approximately fuck-all they can do about it unless they want to get into the "murder and terrorism political revolution business." And life is otherwise good enough that the balance scales don't--usually--tip that way for them. Bread and circuses go a long way toward calming a troubled conscience.

And you can be disdainful of that, if you like; damning people for lacking the courage of their convictions is certainly a hobby of mine. But I think it is a bridge too far to simply tell people that they don't believe what they claim to believe. I don't know you, but given the tenor of many of your posts, I have a sneaking suspicion that you genuinely hold some beliefs on which you do not act to the utmost. I suspect almost everyone can be described in this way. Aristotle observed that man is not merely, as Plato asserted, the rational animal, but the political animal. We are interdependent, and often willing to bear heavy burdens to preserve the polity. I think a lot of pro-life Christians are not being hypocrites, but being deeply tolerant, despite weeping rivers over it, in a way that might only be described as quintessentially Christian.

There is a profound difference between being ready to act on your axioms immediately, and being willing to merely say it.

The communists were willing to talk about reigns of terror and liquidating the borgesoise decades before they ever got close to a revolution, ditto facists, likewise neocons, likewise libertarians.

Its really normal for people with political commitments to say "Yes ideally we'd pursue this violently. No we're not doing it now, we don't think we'd win"

Pro-lifers don't do that. They don't openly suggest the day of the rope is coming for abortion doctors, they don't openly speculate about getting their hands on the medical files and tracking down every murderous woman who dared be party to killing their own child. They don't discuss this. They don't fantasize about it. They don;t hint at it.

That makes them damn fucking unique amongst political movements.

Hell My fucking mother was big into the anti-lockdown stuff and her, her friends, and the commentators they follow commonly discuss the Nurremburg precedent and the possibility of hanging everyone involved in passing or enforcing lockdowns...

Many of these same people are Pro-lifers... Damn if that's what they dream of doing over restricted movemnent, what do you think they talk about doing to people who've systematically murdered millions of children every year?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Its really normal for people with political commitments to say "Yes ideally we'd pursue this violently. No we're not doing it now, we don't think we'd win"

You and I have very different ideas of what's normal. I've never heard anyone say that, not even online. I'm sure there are some people but it's quite rare.

On the flip side, I do have some pro-life friends who have talked about violence against abortionists.

So uh, you're just wrong. At best you can say that there seems to be less advocacy for violence among pro-lifers than among most political groups, but that's hardly surprising when you're selecting for some of the most religious people out there.

But in practice criminalizing abortion would be an absolute disaster, at least if attempted in America.

Re-criminalising, because it used to be a criminal offence pretty much everywhere. But yes, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You have a generation of people who demanded abortion or accepted it once it was legal, and a generation of their kids who grew up with abortion being normal. And now the next new generation being told that abortion is a human right, it is healthcare.

Telling them that it should be a criminal offence sounds to them like trying to make having your tonsils removed a criminal offence.

Telling them that it should be a criminal offence sounds to them like trying to make having your tonsils removed a criminal offence.

Or banning explosives or light bulbs or plastic bags or gas-powered generators or raising the age of marriage or...

Just because something has long been legal doesn't mean it can't be made illegal at the stroke of a pen.

I feel like this topic, why don't Christians act more like utilitarians, seems to come up every couple months (usually in regards to abortion) and the fundamental mistake that guys like you always seem to make is trying to model Christians as utilitarians who are bad really bad at utilitarianism, or deontologists who are too stupid to grasp deontology, rather than as people sincerely trying to implement Christian principles.

Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.

If you ask the average Christian for the fundamental principal underlying all questions of morality you're likely to get one of two answers A) Mark 12-30: Love God with all your heart and love your Neighbor as you would yourself. or B) the recurring theme from Deuteronomy, Jerimiah, Luke, Et Al of "Choose Life". The strict pacifists will cite A but there are many others who will point out that loving your neighbor doesn't preclude putting a bullet in their head. See Old Yeller. At the same time there are also a lot of Christians out there who subscribe to B and the Augustinian principle of "just war", the TLDR version of which being that the set of things worth killing for is a subset of the set things worth dying for.

Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.

Christianity has a pretty strong tradition of requiring the "consent of the ruling authority" in just war theory. For example, Thomas Aquinas describes three criteria for a "just war", the first of which is that it must be waged by a proper authority. (The second is that the war must have a just cause and the third is that the soldiers must have a just intent.)

"ruling authority" and "proper authority" are not necessarily the same thing though, in fact one could argue that the explicit delineation between these two in Christian doctrine is arguably one of it's more unique cultural features.

As @DuplexFields observes above if the government's legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed, a government that does not submit to the will of the people is not a "proper authority".

I think you are giving too much credit to the content of their beliefs. History has shown that Christianity can be compatible with and used as justification for any number of completely contradictory actions. I think @4bpp has the right idea, the average person simply doesn't believe things with 100% confidence and logically follow them through to conclusions that are not openly endorsed by their social group and peers. They just sort of pick up their morality from social cues, while texts are used on an as-needed basis to post-hoc justify conclusions they had arrived at by other means in a sort of parallel construction.

Christianity can be compatible with and used as justification for any number of completely contradictory actions

Christianity is not [the set of beliefs held by people who call themselves Christians]. For any reasonable definition of Christianity you'll run into the issue that when people make certain decisions they are not being good Christians. Christians can justify anything; Christianity cannot.

Christianity is not [the set of beliefs held by people who call themselves Christians].

There is no such thing as "Christianity", there is about 40,000 current Christian denominations and much more historical ones, every one claiming to be "one true church".

Anything you like, you can find church that praises it as the most Christian thing ever, anything you do not like, you can find church that damns it as the most unchristian thing ever.

For any reasonable definition of Christianity

What looks reasonable to you is not reasonable to another person and vice versa.

Was it reasonable thing to torture people to death to save their immortal souls?

Christians in third century would say no. Christians in thirteenth century would say yes.

Let me rephrase:

People are allowed to call themselves whatever they want. If your definition of Christianity is just [people who call themselves Christians] then you are by necessity making more of a point about general human nature than about Christianity, because of course there's at least one [person who calls himself a Christian] who believes literally anything.

If you instead narrow your definition to be more sensible, however you define Christianity, then your point starts to target the ideology rather than just normal human nature.

And my reply to this is basically "what @Jiro said". Christianity has some fairly well established doctrines over when and where violence is justified, and while individual Christians might disagree on whether a given set of circumstances meets the required threshold, the overall shape of the debate-space is widely agreed-upon. Accusing them of being contradictory or insincere (not really holding their beliefs) for failing to follow through on what you believe the utilitarian implications of their beliefs are only makes sense if you assume they are a utilitarian. Most people are not utilitarian. As such I see you as having made the same mistake as the OP; "trying to model Christians as utilitarians who are bad really bad at utilitarianism, rather than as people sincerely trying to abide by Christian principles."

The average person isn't a utilitarian in the first place; this doesn't justify treating Christians like utilitarians and then claiming that they're inconsistent because they won't murder as utilitarianism demands.

Jiro, it's the old old argument I've seen too damn many times by now. The people who put it forward don't give a damn about underlying moral principles or coherent philosophies. Any stick will do to beat the dog, and their main problem is religion, especially Christianity. Maybe they're atheists, maybe they were never any particular faith tradition to begin with, maybe they're from fundamentalist families and are now very very ex-Christian. What they do have in common is, Christianity Bad.

So Christianity Bad, Christians Bad, Christians say love but commit atrocities and wars, yadda yadda yadda. Abortion is just one of the fields they like to play on. If it wasn't "pro-lifers Christians, Christians bad, pro-lifers bad" it'd be something else.

That's why I say this is a trap. "If Christians believe abortion bad, why not stop abortion by force?/Christians use force/Aha we told you Christians murderous hypocrites!"

Speaking as someone who does hold a weaker form of the opinion expressed in the OP ("If you really, truly believe abortion is mass-murdering babies, why don't you respond the way most people would to the mass-murder of babies?"), no, it's not an unprincipled stick to beat Christians with. (Christians aren't the only pro-lifers, you know.) It's gauging how serious someone is about their stated beliefs.

When a pro-lifer does actually blow up an abortion clinic, I don't say "Hah, I knew Christians were murderous hypocrites!" I say, "That guy actually believed his own rhetoric."

FWIW, I do not think Christianity is particularly "bad," and I strongly suspect the OP of being a troll.

Yeah, well, you hang around here, you're an exception.

Take Trump (yes, unhappily, I have to go there). A lot of comment was about "if the Republicans truuuuuuly believed what they say about abortion (fill in the rest yourself)". Many times it was "then they'd make abortion a crime and prosecute doctors who perform them".

Trump comes along and does an interview where he goes "yeah, criminalise it". Cue all the shocked, shocked! faces. Here's a brief story from the BBC:

Donald Trump on abortion - from pro-choice to pro-prison

Some other Republican politician or other, I can't remember the guy's name and I can't be bothered Googling, went much stronger. Again, shocked pikachu from the "if they really believed what they say..." crowd.

Nobody went "They believe their own rhetoric", they went "We told you they were cruel misogynists who hate women and want to control them".

So I'm burned out on the "if pro-lifers/Christians really believe abortion is so wrong, why don't they..." type of questions.

OP may be a troll, but he/she/they/it/xe may be the type of troll that usually poses this kind of question everywhere online. "I ask this so if you say 'no' I can call you a hypocrite who only wants to control women's sexuality, and if you say 'yes' I can call you a monster who only wants to control women's sexuality".

"but he/she/they/it/xe" - I rarely feel insulted by an internet comment but this kind of hurts my feelings.

" Donald Trump on abortion - from pro-choice to pro-prison": This was one of Trump's finest moments. Notice how the willingness to say the obvious seems anti-correlated with personal Christianity. It's not Fundies leading the fight against woke depravity, but de-facto pagans who'd have been libertarians (or communists) in a different world.

If you don't want to get lumped in with the stereotype you shouldn't trying so hard to live up to it.

More comments

I forget, are we allowed to swear on here or not? Because if we can, then "Oh for fuck's sake, here we go again".

Oh yes, one more go-round of the old "If you pro-lifers/religious bigots really believed abortion was murder, you'd be out there firebombing clinics and shooting abortionists!" trap.

Somebody does firebomb a clinic or shoots a doctor

Shocked pikachu face "Those bigots! We knew they were violent monsters all along who only object to abortion because they hate women and want to control them!"

Why yes, as a pro-lifer I haven't stopped beating my (non-existent) wife, how kind of you to enquire!

Well you know the saying, 'you only know you are a good christian when the world is giving you good feedback'.

Well you know the saying, 'you only know you are a good christian when the world is giving you good feedback'.

What? If anything its the opposite. Between this and the bit about "consent of the ruling authority" I have to ask, have you ever actually sat down and talked to a Christian before?

Have you ever read your bible?

On obeying the ruling authority:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. - Romans 13: 1 - 2.

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme;Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. - 1 Peter 2:13 - 14

Now I'm sure most Christians (who bother with theology) have some explanations for why this rule isn't absolute, but I included the exception for the many who might, and who have the explicit wording of the bible to back them up. Since you don't, I think my general argument still applies to you.

On being loved by the world

"its the opposite": So why are you invoking the world's pikachu face when I ask you about your duties as a Christian?

You have to understand, it's more of a vibes based religion these days.

Speak for yourself

In America, the people are the sovereign, and the government are that subset of the people who are hirelings and servants of the people. Any American government, whether village, county, city, state, or federal, which does not submit to the people are subject to God’s wrath.

As for civil disobedience, I’d cite both Daniel’s prayers in defiance of the idol prayer ordinance (thou shalt have no gods before Me) and Jesus’ scourging of the moneychangers (thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain).

Have you ever read your bible?

I have, and having actually read the full KJV rather than just the cliff-notes that the LGBTQ-Aitheism+ crowd pass between themselves for dunking purposes I'm familiar with a number of themes that recur through both testaments. Most relevant in this case being that the devil can and will quote scripture to serve his ends, and the tension between the worldly and the moral/spiritual. Specifically the idea that one can not seek the power and rewards of former without debasing or giving up those of the latter. To quote the son of man himself...

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Or to put it more bluntly, if you're looking for feed back from the world, you're doing it wrong.

If anything, the historical and scriptural reward for being a good Christian has been to been to find oneself set apart and persecuted. So where are you getting all this nonsense?

I forget, are we allowed to swear on here or not?

When has there ever been a prohibition against swearing, here or at the old place?

I'm not entirely sure of the rules in the new place yet, and some places do let it, some places are very prim and proper. It might be that the mods don't care if we spit on the floor and call the cat a bastard, but the hosting service does.

Yeah well fuck the hosting service, because I'm saying it - the cat is a bastard. Also spoiler alert: Amadan is one of the mods

Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?

For numbers, let's say:

  • the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)

  • the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user

  • the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight

  • the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user

  • the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.

  • the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.

This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.

Factors I can think of offhand:

  • This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined

  • This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator

  • This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user

  • The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed

  • Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?

  • Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?

The biggest issue is noise. A multirotor drone buzzes like a swarm of giant hornets, you won't be able to sneak up on more than one car. And a drone flying at knee height is a very vulnerable target.

Hmm. Some of these asks are a bit contradictory.

Okay, I was about ready to dive into engineering options, culture war be damned, when I realized you were asking about the ethics. Setting aside the plausibility of a weapon which can slash 4 tires but not a human eyeball, this is a pretty unwholesome device.

The cost of 4 tires, or even 40, is not actually all that high. This device isn't a game-changer for wholesale destruction compared to something like gasoline. Instead, it's quite targeted, and It's also strictly less useful for legitimate purposes, meaning I'd expect it to be regulated pretty heavily.

Outside of niche law-enforcement usage, it is best suited for vandalism and vigilantism, AKA enforcing one's will on others or their property. I count no-car anarchist compounds in that category, though I really doubt they're a large contingent.

From an engineering perspective, this isn't viable without a gun or gun surrogate mounted on the drone. Piercing a car tire is difficult; it requires a lot of force. A multi-rotor drone simply isn't able to generate enough horizontal force to do it with just the use of it's propellers.

you can see the recoil of a drone when a gun attached to it is fired here. I'd agree that the drone wouldn't have enough force to stab the tire. But what about something like an electric spinning saw attached to the drone. That might be able to cut the tire.

Pretty much. I was thinking captive bolt pistol.

That was my thought, yeah. Some style of Derringer-style action with a captive spring-loaded blade or piston, which is what drove the small handful of pierced tires between visiting a human.

That will just propel the drone backwards.

Same as a gun of equivalent energy, no?

I think the idea is to avoid consistent pressure like you’d need to cut. Though I’m not sure round, clean holes are a good way to cause irreparable damage.

Captive bolt guns have much less energy than projectile-throwers. In particular, a much lower velocity.

I’d think that a captive bolt driven by, say, a .22LR blank would have similar energy in the short run, assuming the same “barrel” length. So a revolver, not a rifle. Giving the bolt 100x the mass would lead to 1/10th the velocity for the same KE.

I honestly don't think drones can mount any weaponry that would generate any significant recoil impulse. Maybe dangerous laser pointers or small rockets, but at that point, you are likely to risk getting the full fury of the law dropped on you (or the wrath of the FAA, but that's probably the same thing).

I think the mechanics of doing it without enabling a lot of much more dangerous things are a lot harder than you'd expect, in ways that you don't expect (that 10k minimum price is actually pretty high!). The good news is that true autonomy is very hard, right now: the minimum power and payload for live YOLO processing starts around 500 USD, 15 watts, and the better part of a pound, which is actually kinda rough for a small drone you want to have moderate range, and probably isn't enough for what you want. But these may not stay hard for long, and close-enough autonomy might be closer.

But I'm pro-Defense Distributed and pro-Cathode_g, so I'm not opposed to it just because of that. Outside of the general "driven by the beauty of our weapons" problems:

  • Tools aren't limited to the scenarios you'd design them for. Expect to see them used not just around an existing permanent zone, but also just as short-term punishments for areas where opposed groups are (or are believed) to congregate. At 10k USD against 350-500 USD per set of tires, an area with 30 cars becomes a target, and that includes even moderately sized political meetings, nevermind something broader like a convention center.

  • Expect to see them used as parts of broader scenarios: eg, blocking a road with protesters and then causing many cars stuck in the traffic to get stuck with four popped tires, or (more morbidly) to block evacuations from more direct attacks.

  • Tools aren't limited to their use by the people you want to use them. That is, expect everyone from tire salesman to anti-public-transport activists to wackos trying to take over a wildlife refuge to use them, on everything that holds a fluid or gas in a thin and less-than-steel-hard shell. And some of the addon threats are things that could not be done with a rifle: there are some things in this category that are 'virtue of silence' materials because they could result in hundreds of indirect deaths per event, without the knowing intent of the 'activist'.

  • Mental frameworks for a threat are sometimes as important as the physical capabilities, for better and for ill: 'school shootings' are the most overt example of using old technology for awful ends and having a massive uptick because the concept entered the realm of the possible, but I think this is also part of why post-DC sniper attacks aren't discussed prominently anymore. But the nature of your proposal will provide a mental framework that can be readily adapted.

There seems to be intra-jewish elite culture war - the same way wokeness is intra white elite civil war. What I notice is that American Jews that are not ultraorthodox are sacrosanct. Any cultural attack against them is done with swiftly. Israel, the ultraorthodox and the Zionists - not so much. I am fairly sure that if Kanye was lashing against them he could have gotten with way way more relatively. Right now in the polite spaces you can trash Israel as much as you like and get pat on the head.

I do have to wonder where guys like Neil Druckmann stand in the culture war though, this guy is Israeli and reviled in the GamerGate tribe for pushing feminism in gaming, and bringing in Sarkeesian... who's also made pro-Palestine tweets. But apparently, TLOU2's supposed Israeli politics stand below feminist and trans politics in the oppression hierarchy, I don't see much woke pushback against this as there is the anti-woke pushback against the aforementioned. So basically, brownie points against the anti-wokes > rebuking the Israeli politics.

Oh I definitely believe so too, my point was more about the perception of Israeli patriotism since I don't recall him being outwardly critical of the IDF's excesses either. His silence may mean something else to the hardcore pro-Palestine activists.

It seems the DR figure parrot is generalizing the outgroup. The parrot realizes that the same people who are Jewish apologists attack white overrepresentation, and sees it as hypocrisy. He says, "these people like Haz," so the parrot isn't responding to Haz in particular. There's a few problems with the parrot's argument:

  • Haz probably doesn't whine about white people (from my brief scroll, he seems far too sophisticated for such normie takes).

  • Whites owning slaves or not is only analogous if it was common non-whites owned slaves, too. In that world, the focus on white slaveowners would be unwarranted. Alternatively: it is analogous if all the powerful people in today were Jewish.

This is part of a general pattern where, "Not all Jews are like that bro its just a few that are in power" is shot down as special pleading because absolutely nobody buys that when applied to white overrepresentation. There are other arguments why You Can't Compare Jews And Whites, like the argument from historical oppression, but everyone seems to start with the argument from "don't generalize." Eventually, Jewish apologists will learn this and the conversation can move forward.

I know nothing about the "FTX collapse" so I googled it and started looking up the Early Life section of all the names I could find, and Fried was in fact the only Jew I found. My guess is Jackson was surprised that Fried is Jewish and was banking on everyone else being so surprised that they would just agree, "Jew Powerful" without noticing anyone else.

I know nothing about the "FTX collapse" so I googled it and started looking up the Early Life section of all the names I could find, and Fried was in fact the only Jew I found.

Did you read about their Chief Regulatory Officer?

Whites owning slaves or not is only analogous if it was common non-whites owned slaves, too.

It was common for non-whites to own slaves though. Definitely globally but also in the US before the Civil War.

Even among top exchanges, it's not like they are all run by Jews. Binance ( Changpeng Zhao), Coinbase (Brian Armstrong ), Bitstamp, etc. Based on my research on crime and stuff of that nature, I don't see Jewish overrepresentation at all among criminals. It's usually poor whites and blacks that commit small crimes, and gentiles that commit the really big financial frauds (along with the occasional Jew, such as Madoff). Plenty of gentiles commit huge frauds too, such as Elizabeth Holmes, Allen Stanford, Bernie Ebbers, and the entire c-suite at Enron. It's possible it seems like Jews commit fraud at a higher rate because there are not that many of them relative to gentiles, but in the financial services sector, it does not seem like Jews are less honest than other groups. If you look at a list of some of the biggest fraudsters, it's not like it's all Jews or all 'x', but a surprisingly diverse mix. But the fact his contract was terminated without any hesitation shows that crypto is not 'safe' from the sort of cancelation seen elsewhere.

Have you been asleep the last week or what?

Have you not heard of the saga of Effective Altruist Crypto Goblins, headed by someone with the very apt name of Samuel Bankman-Fried who are now suspected of creating a fraud of positively Madoffian proportions, a big sucking hole worth billions? Great nice details, such as secret tools to evade audits, crypto accounts transferring stuff after it whole blow, millions per minute ?

SBF called himself an 'ethical maximalist'.

Madoff, wasn't he a Jew ? He looked like one, and that name. Hmm.

That SBF was second biggest single donor to Biden's campaign is just the cherry on top of an especially delicious cake.

As someone aptly summed it up on twitter, the FTX case's optics are so bad that Julius Streicher would have been unable to make them even a bit worse.

Based on my research on crime and stuff of that nature, I don't see Jewish overrepresentation at all among criminals

Siri, tell me which country had an entire sector of economy based on online fraud?. (though sector might be a bit generous, just a couple of thousand employees. Enough to keep lobbying parliament though! ). Supposedly been shut down now.

One could certainly make the case Jews are not underrepresented among finance crooks.

Madoff, wasn't he a Jew ?

I literally mentioned that in my post

I still don't see how you can go with the line of 'Jews don't do much fraud' in the same week as a person who could not look or seem anymore like an antisemitic stereotype unless he were exclusively photographed pawing helpless women is running away after committing epic amounts of financial frauds.

I'm not sure whether they're overrepresented, and would not money on them being so.

Maybe possibly mildly (20-30%), because again, their high verbal intelligence allows them better abilities at rationalizing away misdeeds than other people have.

Yes. This ☝️. Lifelong grifter, former Nikola CEO, and now-convicted felon Trevor Milton is a Utah Mormon. But what does that really tell anyone about fraud without it being placed in a broader context?

I mean, that line of argument makes sense to me. I strongly disagree with it on pretty much every level, but I do think there's an internal consistency to it. If you're going to have an identitarian worldview based around critical concepts of power distribution...that's going to strongly push towards anti-Semitism. Now, I think a lot of people make exceptions and keep things separate in their minds. This isn't a blanket accusation of bigotry. But at the same time, I do think there are consequences to ideas. I do think they have logical outcomes for people who take the ideas seriously and apply them to the world around them. Again, I'm not saying those outcomes are automatically good or correct, or even universal or automatic. Like I said, I think there's a lot of people who don't take these ideas seriously and don't apply them to the world. Just to make that clear.

I don't understand this line of argument.

When you don't understand some argument and want help with that, you should try to explain what in particular you don't understand, which parts you're able to follow and where it loses you, paraphrase confusing parts in your own words to see if you understand it correctly and explain why it sounds unconvincing to you. Just stating that you don't understand without any elaboration sounds like bait.

On a related note, here's a funny tweet from a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1590722899702591489

If you look at the religious affiliation of any powerful group in the U.S., you're bound to do some noticing.

I think the explanation is pretty simple. If Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ about 1 standard deviation above the normal, that means they are 20 times more likely to produce a person with a +3 standard deviation IQ. So in the +3 group, the percentage of people that are Jewish is going to be very noticeable. Then, combine that with network effects. People who are Jewish are much more likely to be connected or even related to these +3 people. Nothing nefarious needs to happen. Just natural talent and connections, both of which Sam Bankman-Fried had in spades.

Why does it seems to be mostly black people who are doing the noticing lately? There's also a simple explanation for that. Post-2020, there has been a huge societal push to give black people extra privileges. Things that would easily get a white person canceled are fine and even encouraged from the black community. So black people feel they have the ability to freely express themselves in a way that white people do not. They are now learning the limits of that ability.

The only thing that feels weird or objectionable about this whole thing is that it's okay to attack non-Jewish white people, but Jewish people are given special protections despite on average being much wealthier and more powerful.

I think the explanation is pretty simple. If Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ about 1 standard deviation above the normal, that means they are 20 times more likely to produce a person with a +3 standard deviation IQ. So in the +3 group, the percentage of people that are Jewish is going to be very noticeable.

These are two arguments that are often repeated but don't stand up to scrutiny. The IQ of Jews in the US is not a standard deviation above American whites of European descent. Lynn calculated the verbal IQ score of American jews to be 107.5. Considering 'verbal' subtests are the ones jews tend to score the highest on, a safer estimate for jewish IQ in the US would be 104-109.

Moreover, you are assuming that the people occupying any alleged positions of overrepresentation are extremely intelligent when there is no reason to assume that they are so. It would be a first for me to learn that the correlation between IQ and status within, for example, media and academia would be 1:1. Not to say that many of these people aren't intelligent, but not to the factor of 3+ standard deviations.

On top of that, as you mention, the context of explanation isn't what would fly in the HBD sphere. The public at large has already been taught that these sorts of explanations don't hold any water and are in fact just manifestations of supremacist tendencies and fragility. If these sorts of explanations weren't valid for white people, why would they be valid for jews?

The only thing that feels weird or objectionable about this whole thing is that it's okay to attack non-Jewish white people, but Jewish people are given special protections despite on average being much wealthier and more powerful.

Why is that weird? Of course you can't criticize the King, that is the normal order of things.

Kings normally acknowledge their own reign. This is more like some bizarre farcical custom where it's exile-worthy rudeness to openly acknowledge the position of the Grand Vizier.

The only thing that feels weird or objectionable about this whole thing is that it's okay to attack non-Jewish white people, but Jewish people are given special protections despite on average being much wealthier and more powerful.

This is my main gripe about this whole thing. As a white gentile I don't even care so much about jewish people disproportionately in positions of power. Its just the special pleading that prevents gentile whites from their own self advocacy in the age of identity politics. Just let all groups undergo in-group nepotism and advocacy or let no groups do so. I don't care which, just not having rules applied fairly is really aggravating.

just not having rules applied fairly is really aggravating.

The story of the 21st Century, perhaps.

This reminds me of the argument that what leftists call "privilege" should be called "things that everyone is entitled to". Jews aren't getting special protections here, just protections that not everyone has and maybe should.

I don't understand this line of argument.

A big part of black culture and identity is the idea that the black community has been/is being kept down by "the powers that be". The mainstream woke interpretation of "the powers that be," is that they are white people, specifically white supremacists, who keep black people down by creating systemically racist institutions. The point being made by Kanye and others is that it is not white people as a whole who are "the powers that be", but rather a much smaller subset consisting largely of Jews. The prospect of this becoming a mainstream opinion among the black community is, understandably, terrifying for Jewish people. Thus you see the massive backlash against Kanye, Kyrie, and anyone else who notices the religious heritage of finance and media executives.

none of the major actors besides Fried seem to be Jewish

If Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda Research) doesn't turn out to be Jewish I'll donate to the ADL personally. She met SBF at a Wall Street trading firm, her dad is the department head of economics at MIT, and she looks like this.

She is like pulled of out of Big Bang Theory parody how geeky girls should look like ...

Nah, she basic as hell.

I think it’s important to note here that the black working class(statistically the vast majority) are for obvious reasons close to the white working class, and it’s hard to hate your neighbors.

Most working class blacks only see Jews on the Christmas episode of their kid’s tv shows.

Obvious reasons are obvious- if you’re kept down by a shadowy cabal defined along ethnic lines, it’s probably not the one full of your friends and coworkers who are largely ignorant of these efforts.

I think it’s important to note here that the black working class(statistically the vast majority) are for obvious reasons close to the white working class, and it’s hard to hate your neighbors.

I believe history refutes that last assertion. Neighbors hating neighbors goes WAY back.

There was also a Twitter scuffle last week between Candace Owens and her employer Ben Shapiro.

Candace Owens responded favorably to a Tweet by Max Blumenthal condemning the ADL and calling it out as an instrument of Zionism. Candace said:

You are about to get into a lot of trouble for stating this.

Reminds me of when I said something similar about the NAACP and BLM way back when.

When you disrupt the trauma economy and call out the not-for-profits that benefit from it, you become their next target.

Ben Shapiro did not like Candace's Tweet and called her out publicly. I think Ben Shapiro has basically given up on publicly showing any sort of tact to cover up the contradictions in his disavowal of identity politics for everyone else while very aggressively playing the identity politics game on behalf of his own Jewish identity.

There are was also another message from DR figure parrot arguing against Haz... I don't understand this line of argument.

The line of argument is perfectly demonstrated in the debate between Haz and Richard Spencer which took place earlier this year. The Podcast hosts read a question from an audience donation: "To Haz: How is the West run by Anglo-Saxon elites when even identifying as Anglo-Saxon will get a politician attacked by the entire media?". Haz gives a coherent answer. He talks about the particularities of Anglo-Saxons and how that enables this apparent contradiction. He also talks about how American institutions inherited the power and legacy of the British Empire. He doesn't say anything that Richard or the DR disagrees with. It's the parts he leaves out which are the problem.

Watch what happens when Richard gives his response. Richard starts by essentially granting Haz his argument. But then Haz mutes him when Richard starts talking about Jewish elites in the British and American empire. When Richard is done talking while muted, Haz says "I disagree but I'm on Twitch so I can't talk about or I'll get banned."

You have to see why the DR regards this as so hilariously revealing. Haz shows he is perfectly capable of having a frank discussion on the Anglo-Elites, and their ethnic particularities and historical context, and their use of power as it's waxed and waned and changed form over history. But when it comes to Jewish power Haz throws his hands in the air and just says "you're a schizo if you think that matters", without even trying to explain why it doesn't matter. "It doesn't matter. Also I'll get banned if I talk about it. So I'll just stick with my monologue on how the Anglo Elites are running Western civilization." Come on, it's too much.

Saying "Anglo Elites run Western civilization but you're a schizo if you think Jewish power matters" is just so transparently absurd. The DR are the only ones willing to engage in a frank analysis of both Anglo and Jewish ethnic particularities and power. Nobody says "you can't call slavery a White institution because not many Whites owned slaves and a lot of Whites opposed it!" But if you try to talk about Jewish power you will get a bunch of rhetorical nonsense explaining why you are mentally ill if you acknowledge it and criticize it, or that you are merely perpetuating "one of the oldest prejudices in the world".

"We aren’t ‘denying’ there’s a lot of powerful Jews and that many Jewish groups wield great influence. We just don’t give a fuck because that tells you next to nothing about anything important." - Haz

Next to nothing is still something. Contrary to HBD-informed opinions popular in rationalist circles, Jews are a people, not just a sample with higher IQs, like Ph.D holders. Accordingly, they have such as thing as Jewish culture. Some assert it's the culture of hard work, curiosity and striving for justice, or whatever. This is not borne out by research. However, this culture does have a lot of exclusive content. For example, it has the notion of chuzpah, a peculiar moral failing and occasionally strength:

Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, which renders others speechless and incredulous ... one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight. The implication is at least some degree of psychopathy in the subject, as well as the awestruck amazement of the observer at the display. …"that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."

Disregard for consequences befalling others aside, chutzpah has many faces as a general cognitive-strategic attitude. Chutzpah is the hope that you might be a miracle worker and the belief that «there is a crack in everything», as the Messiah wannabe Leo Cohen sang. Chutzpah is extreme rules-lawyering, the denial that laws of Nature and Nature's God are ontologically different from laws and customs of men. Chutzpah is first-order utilitarianism when you're really sure that you have noticed the skulls and divined the golden road betwixt their piles. Chutzpah is having your cake and eating it too. Chutzpah is paying for something with nothing squared, tokenized collateral of your own futures, crypto farts sniffed by friendly SEC regulators, in the name of giving well. Chutzpah is Harry Yud-Potter gaming every challenge via Time Turner, and Unsong's Karma Houdini of a moral lesson: Comet King overdosing on selfish sinfulness to go to Hell to recarve the Universe without the facet of Evil. Chutzpah is whatever the fuck Yevno Azef was doing and what had caused Lavon affair and guided Soros and Berezovsky and Sacklers and keeps Netanyahu in power, and so on and so forth, permeating the book of history. Chutzpah is hacker's mindset, «one weird trick» praxis, cheerful «high decoupler» insanity of the Ratsphere that begets Sneerclub, and the antithesis of the entire edifice of traditional Christlich, Hajnal line, Western civilization – that is built on predictable cooperation and law of equivalent exchange, viscerally felt as truth.

Arguably it was necessary to kickstart modern finance and enable centuries of sustained economic growth. Maybe it's a mental trait needed to transcend this local optimum and pull humanity kicking and screaming into the era of post-scarcity. But in practice it's more about callous exploitation, «X affair» and «Y-gate», broken lives and burned trust and destroyed roads to better future.

Yes, it is «condemned». Except by Alan M. Dershowitz (who just got settlement with regards to that Epstein sex trafficking stuff):

“Chutzpah” is rich with what Dershowitz characterizes as the essential quality of Jewishness-- rachmones , which Dershowitz defines as “the Hebrew-Yiddish word for compassion .”

Dershowitz, for instance, is currently championing the cause of Jonathan and Anne Pollard, a pair of American Jews who confessed to espionage on behalf of Israel, and he noisily condemns the fretfulness and timidity that some Jewish leaders have displayed toward the Pollard case, the “ sh’a shtill (keep quiet) mentality” of an earlier immigrant generation.

“The time has come for us to shed our self-imposed second-class status . . . and rid ourselves of our pathological fear of offending our ‘hosts,’ ”…

“The byword of past generations of Jewish Americans has been shanda --fear of embarrassment in front of our hosts. The byword of the next generation should be chutzpah --assertive insistence on first-class status among our peers.”

And he had enough pull to cancel one condemner, at least.

As one lives, one starts to notice this peculiarity, even without familiarizing oneself with Jewish self-reflection. It's just as glaring as high IQs if not more so. But it's more costly to point out – although of course even the IQ stuff can get you slammed hard if you don't spin it just right, that is, with enough chutzpah.

Fortunately Coindesk can cancel a black guy for a Hot Take about Jews in the FTX case. Unfortunately, Coindesk (apparently Jewish-owned) isn't above casually taking shots at other broad demographics who allegedly dominate the industry. This kind of particularism is a major factor behind one of the oldest prejudices in the world – one could say, one of the oldest stereotypes. That's what, three special features already? And you can take issue with zero of them.

But, really, all those righteous noises are beside the point for a common man. The point is: on the level of personal decisionmaking, do your beliefs pay rent?

Like they ask you in the Russian prison: there are two chairs. Say, you're a normal rationalist, it's mid-2022, and you want to use an exchange to park some of your crypto in a token. So, there are two major exchanges.

  • One is a shady operation that started in China and is ran from Singapore; it has «no headquarters» because «decentralized ethos», can't officially operate in the US and is investigated by DoJ on allegations of money laundering and tax evasion. The owner's parents were lowly teachers and he used to work in McDonald's. The company shared data with the warmongering Russian government. Their token chain is a centralized mockery of Ethereum. Really i's a run-of-the-mill scammy crypto gig that grew a bit bigger than others.

  • The other is ran by an «ultra genius and Musk-like doer builder», math wizard of finance, born into the family of Stanford Law School professors, endowed with the citizenship of the freest nation in the world, praised by mainstream media, tradfi players and public intellectuals. He cut his teeth in Jane Street. He testified and lobbied for crypto before Congress, promising to actively cooperate with regulation. He's proudly inspired by Peter Singer (Unsong: «The kabbalistic meaning of “singer” is “someone who tries to be good.” This reading we derive from Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who explored the depths of moral obligation. Singer called the movement that grew up around him “effective altruism”». His chief advisor is the author of the book «What We Owe The Future» that extols precautionary principle against catastrophic risks on the astronomic scale and timespan. He finances EAs. He's a vegan. He Has A Savior Complex – And Maybe You Should Too.

The first guy's name is «Changpeng Zhao» (赵长鹏).

The latter's is «Samuel Bankman-Fried» (סם בנקמן פרייד).

You're a rationalist, that is, supposed to win. So you shut up and calculate expected value using available priors, and known red flags.

Using only knowledge provided here, whom would you rather entrust with your money? And what would an Antisemite do?

Or rather: what would a crypto-rich Antisemite do upon learning that the champion and savior of crypto is now called Samuel Bankman-Fried?

I rest my case.

…Every few years there's another shande far di goyim, another fractal garbage fire that leaves one speechless in its boldness, instigated by some highly educated, well-connected, too greedy, too horny, too crazy or otherwise too-clever-by-half rich Ashkenazi Jew, a chunk of humanity's wealth wiped out by supreme chutzpah. Another cohort gets singed by the flames and starts noticing patterns, and wondering if there are things which do not leak but are equally beyond the pale. Another round of purges and suppression unfolds, «network contagion» and «spread of hate» are again «checked» by well-funded orgs of extremely concerned people. That cohort learns their lesson, and learns to keep it private too: they now have a prior to trust hyped-up Jews somewhat less, and they know that the only socially acceptable comment on this topic is along the lines of Haz – lest you be branded a bigot and destroyed.

But they'll obstinately overlook credentials, connections, persona and reputation and prefer shady Zhaos and Semenovs and Muchgians to Bankman-Frieds, baffling and disgusting newcomers who pay attention.

So it goes, round and round. It's one of the world's oldest, ugliest prejudices, and we'll sooner figure out all laws of Nature and secrets of Nature's God than learn how to extinguish it for good.

Well, maybe Effective Altruists will build a Singleton with SBF's loot, and it'll find some clever one-and-done solution, but I hope not.

Well, maybe Effective Altruists will build a Singleton with SBF's loot, and it'll find some clever one-and-done solution, but I hope not.

Excellent post as always, and like some of your others it ties back to this theme. Is TheMotte a safe space for further exploring it, or where do we read more about it? Should I just read Revelation and call it a night?

Excellent post as always, and like some of your others it ties back to this theme. Is TheMotte a safe space for further exploring it, or where do we read more about it? Should I just read Revelation and call it a night?

If you mean, can we talk about Noticing(tm) and write long-winded diatribes barely concealing the core message ("It's Da Joos!") under lots of words, as @DaseindustriesLtd and a couple of others make a hobby of doing, yes, we do not censor any topic or viewpoint per se, so long as you are not advocating violence or just booing an outgroup. However, if by "exploring" you mean "I want to turn this into a white nationalist space to talk about the JQ," no.

Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility…

Are you quoting something? The link above this line says nothing of the sort. Are you just marking the important bits with italics?

It's quoted verbatim from the Etymology section of that page, though.

Huh, true. Guess I glossed over it. Maybe it's because you changed the order of the sentences (Why?).

I wouldn't agree with the characterization. "Citation needed" seems well placed, at least.

In any case, I pity the people who think חצפה is a negative trait.

Why?

It makes sense for the definition to precede the concrete example, both on the scale of the paragraph and the whole post.

Sam Bankman-Fried. Scam Bankman-Fraud.

Three letters away! I can't believe this is a real thing that happened. A man who was basically named Scam Bankman-Fraud ran a fraudulent, scammy bank. Simulators are getting lazy.

Posted by someone one letter away from Random Danger.

Yeah. My post is built around the theme of EA philosophy, and those four lines are, more than a quote from Cohen, the epigraph to the ו Interlude of Unsong, «There’s A Hole In My Bucket» (p. 131). The interlude ends with:

...My friend Ana informs me of a way around the paradox: some texts say the Messiah will come either in the most righteous generation or in the most wicked. Granting that we’ve kind of dropped the ball on the “most righteous” possibility, I think the wickedness option really plays to our strengths.

Still other texts say the Messiah will come in a generation that is both the most righteous and the most wicked. I don’t even know what to think of that one.

I think I have an idea.

(Damn, the book mentions a butt-load of cracks). Oh right, so here's what I meant to show, p. 548:

[Are things okay over there?] asked Ana.

[Not really] I answered. [Did Acher ever figure out a way to get the consequences of repenting without doing it for the consequences?]

[You’re really upset by this Acher thing.]

[I think... yeah. It’s the idea of something you can’t think your way out of. Something so slippery that just trying to think your way out of it ensures you’ll fail. It just feels... wrong.]

[I don’t know,] Ana answered. [To me it feels, I guess kind of perfect. Does that make sense?]

[Yeah. I think perfect things feel wrong to me. Remember, I used to do cryptography. The whole point was that every code can be broken. Thought is the universal solvent. My advisor at Stanford, he had a saying on his wall. Leonard Cohen verse. “There is a crack in everything.” That’s my philosophy too. Things shouldn’t be perfect.]

[God is perfect.]

[No He isn’t! That’s the whole point of Luria. There is a crack in everything. That’s what I mean. There ought to be a crack in God’s denial of salvation to Acher.]

So it's a bit of a metastable idea, in Scott's mind at least. You might as well give up on getting the maximum value – nothing's ever perfect. But if you really really want and try hard enough, you just might get something better than maximum: you might get something for nothing, cheat math itself and get the Creator to reconsider.

This ties in to my response regarding the nuanced connotation of chutzpah in American English.

And now I beg your forgiveness for a crass but legendary Soviet anecdote.

Petka approaches Vasily Ivanovich and asks:

– Vasily Ivanovich, can you explain what "nuance" means?

– Well, all right, Petka. Now take off your pants...

Petka takes off his pants, and Chapayev begins to fuck him. Petya says:

– Okay, but, Vasily Ivanovich, what is "nuance"?

– Petka, consider the following: you've got a dick in the ass and I've got a dick in the ass. But there's one nuance...

The interlude's best passage is, IMO, the following:

«In theory, we ought to be able to swim around the bottom of the fountain, hunt for the debris, and build it back into functional God-deflectors. Then we need to take the sparks of divine light and use them as an energy source to power the deflectors, and finally arrange the whole system in exactly such a way as to correctly channel the power of God at a human-bearable level. In practice we are sex-obsessed murder-monkeys and all of this is way above our pay grade».

Just so. I hope there are at least no murders to come to light.

a chunk of humanity's wealth wiped out by supreme chutzpah

Not that much wealth was wiped out because there wasn't much there to begin with.

There was a bunch of imaginary internet dollars, people assigned them high valuations based on various hedges and pegs to other imaginary internet dollars. That value was untethered (hah) to anything meaningful as they were neither a medium of exchange nor a store of value, but they were easy to collateralize and so the shit show went on until it couldn't anymore.

That's not to say that no one lost real money, but it's nowhere near the notional value of the deposits held by FTX (or others). If a Nigerian Prince says he'll wire me $7M once I pay his attorney friend $2000 good faith money, I'm only out two grand.

Next to nothing is still something. Contrary to HBD-informed opinions popular in rationalist circles, Jews are a people, not just a sample with higher IQs, like Ph.D holders. Accordingly, they have such as thing as Jewish culture. Some assert it's the culture of hard work, curiosity and striving for justice, or whatever. This is not borne out by research. However, this culture does have a lot of exclusive content. For example, it has the notion of chuzpah, a peculiar moral failing and occasionally strength:

There's a Jewish culture (or cultures), but there's a lot of Jews, at least in the US, who just aren't a part of it. As for chuztpah, except for being a cool Yiddish word, there's nothing exclusive about it; it basically means audacity, or in one sense, "balls". Elon Musk isn't Jewish, but he definitely has chutzpah.

One is reminded that The Odyssey is the story of a travelling swindler

The trickster is an archetype in all cultures

Wait… so The Odyssey is basically the Loki miniseries but focusing on the trickster who invented the Trojan Horse?

Yes, there are many different Jews, and in fact a Jew doesn't have to lose relations with the Tribe to be less given to its peculiar shortcomings. After all, it's internal Jewish analysis that I'm citing, we're all reading our Matt Levine to understand the SBF catastrophe better, Yudkowsky is here to deliver a sermon against naive utilitarian reasoning, and Finkelstein's the one who castigates Dersh in his «Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History». But that's just normal, every group has to be aware of its own failings, if perhaps one-sidedly.

As for the rest, I disagree. Elon Musk's distinguishing character trait is daring, not chutzpah. Sure, to the extent that he's leading us by the nose with Full Self-Driving and indulging in irresponsible stunts on Twitter, there is a chutzpah-like quality too. But his rockets go up and come down, his robot walks and his cars charge and he didn't steal anyone's money to get there. Essentially, he is doing honest work, boldly. Oh, and he doesn't hire poker frauds as his «Chief Regulatory Officers» managing this kind of monstrosity.

Now, had you said «Richard Branson», I'd have agreed wholeheartedly. Elizabeth Holmes – even better. And Martin Shkreli... well, there's a reason JewOrNotJew.Com readers were nervously praying he'll turn out to be a Gentile. It was just too stereotypical. And Mavrodi was Russian-Greek but, again, people had trouble believing it.

I am aware that Gentile Americans have appropriated that word. It doesn't mean what they think it means, just like «one baaaad motherfucker» and «sick bastard» and «this nigga is a stone cold killer» aren't really positive descriptors. The problem is, some people use such descriptors as positive despite having their literal meaning in mind; a bit like Russians who embrace the label of «Orcs». Alan Dershowitz, for instance, uses «chutzpah» in the original sense when he calls for assuming the role of bona fide «first-class Americans» while defending spies of the Jewish ethnostate; a beyond-audacious attitude his Gentile admirers may fail to appreciate even as they read a whole book on it.

It's a somewhat common problem.

Elon "FSD in 2018" Musk didn't steal anyone's money to get there?

Yes, I maintain that it's a peculiar element of Jewish culture, although definitely not some exclusive behavioral pattern.

You're missing the nuance, it seems. Most of the fraud I've seen in my life has been perpetrated by Eastern Slavs, whether in cooperation with other peoples or not. Spanish picaresca is an indisputably Gentile genre. Recently, I've enjoyed watching one Lupin the 3rd movie (sans the leftie moral lesson of «let's punch Nazis and, crucially, break overpowered alien artifacts promising infinite clean energy, yay*), a Japanese take on a French trickster archetype. The Chinese are stereotyped as untrustworthy, which I guess makes CZ only more remarkable. And so it goes.

But fraudsters, tricksters, scammers and chutzpahmancers are qualitatively different. Maybe it's a matter of Bell curves or indeed, verbal tilt. The thing is, chutzpah, at least the kind I talk about here, the hugely consequential kind, looks like this. It's not mere trickery but an unmistakable flavor of in-your-face narcissism and layers upon layers of galaxy brain plotting, the flashy but ultimately degenerate mixture of high and low traits, especially in positions of authority, responsibility and power where people don't expect to see it these days. Or indeed, like TheDag reminds us, consider Adam Neumann. What does one call this nonsense if not chutzpah?

And as for relative trustworthiness of Russians and Chinese: on average, we might not be better. And if I see a Gentile who gets hyped like «SBF», I'll be suspicious. But this very hyping – all this «ultra genius» and «savior» – is not normal and not something Russians and Chinese do. Vitalik is, far as I can tell, a bona fide visionary who didn't simply want to cash in on the crypto craze, and he's rather humble for how grandiose his vision is. CZ is a rogue with low time preference and mild libertarian politics, and he offers a contract I can believe and get behind.

Not so with FTX and Alameda. Accordingly, I have never touched their shit and am very happy for it, although they've still managed to hurt my capital by setting the market in general on fire.

Ehh I don’t think libertarianism is especially Jewish. Hayek wasn’t Jewish. Locke wasn’t Jewish. Smith wasn’t Jewish.

Obviously libertarians have been influenced by Jews (eg Milton and David, Rothbard, Rand).

I rest my case

Do you have any evidence more compelling than a few anecdotes about Jewish fraudsters? Fraud statistics that control for likelihood of being in an appropriate industry and/or being in a position with opportunity, that sort of thing? Because if you're going by individual anecdotes then you're just at the mercy of whichever anecdotes you pay attention to.

By comparison if you were trying to avoid getting mugged you might sometimes get some benefit from crime statistics or (in their absence) at least a sufficiently large and unbiased set of anecdotes. You wouldn't get any benefit from listening to a few media anecdotes and deciding the main criminal threat in the U.S. is white men committing mass-shootings and hate-crimes. Sometimes stereotypes are based on fact but sometimes they aren't. Jewish over-representation in the financial industry is already sufficient to explain an anecdotal over-representation in financial fraud, to show it's more than would be expected based on that you would need a more precise method of analysis.


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