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Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.
It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex:General Carter, after the UNATCO plot is exposed, decides to stay within the organization, because institutions are only as good as the people that comprise them. Later in the game, you see him in the Vandenburg compound. He has given up on his idea of reform and joined the resistance.
I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever. I have been living under a censorious regime in a country that supposedly enshrines freedom of speech as one of its highest virtues for My. Entire. Life. The only place where I can even come close to honestly speaking about how I view the world is in anonymous and pseudoanonymous forums like this one, and even then I take pains not to get too real with y'all because it's really not that difficult to dox someone with a long post history and it just takes one obsessive.
Why are there no rightists in the academy? Could it be because they were systematically deplatformed and depersoned and dethroned on a generational, decades long project to completely seize control of elite production forever? No, it's because righties are dumdums, we're all dumdums.
And now you have the audacity to complain when the institutions you hollowed out are being kicked over, all the support columns contributed from the right having been forcibly removed? Boo hoo.
If you may allow me a moment of cathartic ranting emerging from decades of repression; razing these institutions is a moral imperative. I want them to do it more. I voted for it. I hope it gets worse for you. I hope your degrees not only become worthless, but millstones to drown you. I hope you have to hide your former affiliations on your social media and resumes, like I have had to do with my views for my entire life. I hope you know every ounce of the fear and anxiety your regime has smothered on me like an inescapable burial shroud, for, again, my entire fucking life. I hope they are so thorough with their dismantling of your institutions that in 50 years your cathedrals that are on the tips of every tongue now are only vaguely recalled in retrospect. A quaint historical artifact, like Standard Oil. Only then can something somewhat resembling what was lost be built from the ashes.
You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.
Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get. If you read between the lines, you should have seen this seething rage boiling over years ago. I am quite certain that many, many people feel the same - they just don't say it, yet; the habit of censoring one's own emotions, thoughts, and opinions for safety being deeply ingrained. The tighter you seal it, the more dangerous the pressure cooker becomes.
A rant about how much you hate your enemies and can't wait to see them get the rope is always going to be hard keep within the rules of discourse here, but all your "you" statements put this well over the line. The first part of your post was okay, but when you tell another poster that you want to see them, personally, suffer, that is too much heat.
My apologies, the you is rhetorical and broad. "You (the left)." I'm not wishing personal, specific harm on Skibboleth.
One of the divergences of right and left, however, is their belief in retribution, punishment, and suffering as morally justified and necessary in and of themselves. It has been my general observation that the left has completely abandoned the idea that retribution and punishment can be just and morally necessary for their own sake, not merely as incentives or correctives.
If there was a magic pill that would ensure a criminal never again committed crime - indeed, became an upstanding moral citizen - but induced no particular suffering, I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers, and that any further retribution upon them would be barbaric and primitive. I do not believe this, nor do most on the right.
Suffering punishment when you do wrong is correct, morally. You SHOULD feel guilt when you do bad things. The push towards a shameless society is very, very bad. Shame is good, actually. Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop. A father disciplining his child does so out of love, and for their own good. So understand that even when if I say things like, "I think X should be punished" - this too is not necessarily a statement born out of hate. I can and do think that being punished can be good for someone. I think this is frequently the case, in fact.
And again, not merely for its utility to modify behavior. I think this a view that many postmodern leftists simply can't square - "I want you to be hurt because it will be good for you on a spiritual and moral level to be punished for your sins. I want you to suffer because I love you and suffering can, in fact, be good." The purely utilitarian view where all suffering is bad simply can't deal with this. Their instinct is to try and invert it somehow, "Oh, the suffering actually is good because it brings positive utility later-" NO. The suffering is good because it is suffering. If it is just it is just completely independent of the future. If the universe were to blip out of existence the next nanoinstant, it would still be just.
I want to also comment briefly on hate. Hate, in almost all modern popular media, is simply bad in and of itself. Epitomized by Star Wars philosophy schlock about the dark side. "Hate is the worst. Humans would be better off without hate. If only we could learn not to hate?" - These things sum up a LOT of the left's worldview. I think it's dead wrong. Hate is the most human and divine of emotions. God is merciful, yes, but he is also wrathful - when it is justified. A rat can feel fear, or even joy - can it feel hate?
And what of the utility of hate? The left seems to have completely forgotten why hate exists. Whether you think it a quirk of evopsych or a divine part of the grand design, hate has a strong, real, and practical purpose. It motivates you to completely destroy long-term threats permanently, even at considerable short term cost. A herd of gazelles might stomp out a lion that eats their young if they can catch it in the act. A tribe of humans tracks the lioness 30 miles to their den, kills her, kills her mate, kills all her cubs - and repeats the process every time they even see a lion in their territory from now until eternity until their distant descendants can't even imagine what it is like to fear being prey, to fear their child being snatched up in the red jaws. That is the value of hatred.
The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded.
If punishment is not merely an incentive or a corrective, then what else is there, particularly in the "good for you" scenario? Suppose I'm an incorrigible psychopath who already did wrong, you punish me in secret so that it is not a counterincentive for others and does not provide catharsis to anyone - how is it good for me? (I imagine it would still provide catharsis to you, the thought experimenter, but that can't be helped.)
If you're tempted to answer with something like "God" (paraphrased), first recall your rage when a trans person told you the definition of a woman is whoever wants to be a woman.
This would not be sufficient punishment because it does not deter potential criminals from first doing the crime and then being force-repented. If this was the sole punishment for murder, I believe the Luigis of the world would be many more in number. This example of yours demonstrates the importance of the deterrence part of punishment, not the esoteric goodness you're hinting at but haven't explained.
Yes, it's axiomatic. Being punished when you do wrong is good. The cosmic scales are balanced. It simply is good.
Why is pleasure good? Why is pain bad? Why is fulfilling preference good? As you well know, at a certain point we all must defer to some axiom of what is right and wrong, whether it come from god or preference or whatever.
I simply see punishment for wrongdoing as axiomatically good. Indeed, your hypothetical incorrigible psychopath deserves to be punished and suffer. If he does not learn, being incorrigible, he will do more wrong and deserve more punishment. It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.
That the psychopath does not recognize this no more changes this brute fact than does his opinion that killing people is fine, actually, makes that actually true. But, of course, it is superior if punishment also effects a moral change. And the most significant and greatest punishment is not that which is externally and bodily administered, but that of genuine guilt and shame for understanding one's own transgressions. But it is extraordinarily for the good when someone does, in fact, recognize their guilt and repents it, even if this causes them to suffer greatly.
It is far, far superior for a murderer to repent their ways out of genuine contrition than to be given a magic pill that, say, makes them forget their crimes while also causing extreme pain in addition to making them model citizens, even if that has the same deterring effect.
And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.
Also, I don't believe in true incorrigibility. Everyone has the potential for redemption. "Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven." - The Archdemon Screwtape
Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certail stimuli with seeking more of them.
Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.
It's not always good. For example, many people prefer to do hard drugs, but fail to predict and conceptualize that they will develop a tolerance, overdose and die an early death in a ditch, which they don't prefer now and wouldn't prefer later.
Punishment may result in net higher pleasure and/or net higher reproduction for the punished individual, but whether it does is quite far removed from whether the punishment was actually just. This leads us back to incentives.
The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.
The incentive societies face is to indoctrinate their constitutients with the idea that punishment has a cosmic axiomatic importance, along with their particular definitions of wickedness, of course. This is to persuade the members of society to act according to the rules even if they are sure they will not get caught.
Sometimes shame is good for the immediate survival of the individual. Sometimes it is good for the immediate survival of the society, which usually benefits individuals and their reproduction long-term. Other times, shame is an instrument that only serves a particular layer of society at the expense of others.
Examples are left as an exercise to the reader. Given the role shame plays in the toolbox of the left-dominated society you wished destruction upon, the exercise shouldn't be hard. Your compatriots who were shamed by leftists have felt the exact same shame that wicked people supposedly must feel for understanding their own transgressions. Shame does not have a hash code that decyphers to "good" if it was a wicked person feeling shame for wicked deeds and to "bad/fake/wrong" if it was a righteous person misled into feeling shame. It is the same mechanism.
Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.
Why is that good, as opposed to merely feeling good?
Why is that bad, as opposed to merely feeling bad? I think you don't recognize that such a difference could even exist, which seems to me very... empty and sad.
No, it would not matter whether or not it was observed or imagined by me, or you, or anyone. That it is obviously good is because we have a moral sense.
You can't seem to disentangle your own belief that everything must merely boil down to meat preferences in the end. It has nothing to do with feeling good or feeling bad. It has everything to do with being good or being bad. Feeling guilty doesn't feel good. It actually feels quite shitty. It would be much, much easier and more pleasurable to simply decide that the thing you are feeling guilty and shame about is actually not bad at all and it's just your irrational guilt/shame that's the problem, not your bad actions correctly causing them. Believing this would feel a whole lot better, it would feel good, but it would be bad.
You can make a just-so story about why such and such moral beliefs must have been adaptive (except when they weren't), but what I am trying to say is that most people don't believe this. They believe that they have a moral sense (perhaps imperfect) and that through the exercise of this moral sense they can discern right and wrong. Almost everyone believes this unless it is deliberately taught out of them.
Well I don't want to get into a whole discourse - but there is a whole discourse on sorts of wickedness that are inflicted on others vs. internal wickedness (which is nowadays called victimless - nonsense, as if you yourself can not be a victim of your own actions - and therefore not wickedness). Both are wicked, but the correct response to both is very different. I also do not believe in an afterlife where finite wrongs are met with infinite punishment.
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