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From the pen of Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
Scott offers several examples of why TPOASINWID results in absurd analysis. His examples are selected for maximal absurdity, so it's amusing that three out of four directly undermine his case, and the fourth is still a pretty good argument against his position.
This is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure cancer", because numerous considerations mitigate against curing cancer, things like economic considerations, bureaucratic constraints, and the work/life balance of the staff. And even when all these align such that curing this specific cancer is the system's goal, "curing cancer" might not mean what you think. I was especially amused by this exchange in the comments:
...written in the comment section of the author of Who By Very Slow Decay. Yes, very much like Chemo. This example, by itself, is probably the one I'd like Scott to address specifically.
It seems to me that this is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to defend Ukraine from hostile military action." America and NATO are very specifically and very openly throttling aide to keep Ukraine from being defeated outright, but also from being able to hit back too hard. Stalemate appears to be the deliberate objective, and certainly has been the openly-stated objective of many Ukraine supporters in this very forum.
One could make a similar statement about the Russian military as well. Any description of the Russian military that doesn't account for the realities of coup-proofing and endemic corruption is not going to make accurate predictions about the real world.
His intention here is to achieve absurdity by narrowing the scope to one specific result, rather than the sum of results, and in fairness, he provides examples of X randos arguing in this fashion. "The purpose of the British Government is to keep a lid on the British People while pursuing goals orthogonal to their interests" seems a more parsimonious description, but even Scott's version seems more accurate than something like "the purpose of the British Government is to execute the will of the British people as expressed through democratic elections".
Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope. But even with a framing as uncharitable as this, it's worth noting that all systems have costs, and that description of a system that ignores the costs and how those costs are managed is a worse description than one that centers those costs. This is true even for descriptions that only consists of one significant cost, because the benefits of systems are generally far more obvious than the costs and thus the missing information is easier to find.
This is a bad article, and Scott should feel bad.
Yep, Scott's at his worst when he's complaining about his outgroup. Not that most of the twitterati who employ POSIWID are particularly shrewd analysts, but the concept has plenty of explanatory value.
For another recent example of Scott getting sloppy, see his article on how the BAPist "based post-Christian vitalists" were hypocritical for caring about the victims of the Rotherham grooming gangs when they normally sneer at caring about poor people an ocean away as cucked slave morality. Of course, the obvious counterargument is that the Rotherham victims were white Westerners like themselves, aggressed upon by a far more alien outgroup.
I think he was actually closer to the mark there. You can see the hypocrisy when someone like KulakRevolt, for example, is calling for all of England to be burned down over the Rotherham gangs, as if he doesn't hold promiscuous fatherless girls from the lower classes in utter contempt himself. When all your grievances are formulated around tribal affiliations, you can argue that it's okay when we do it and bad when they do it, but you can't argue that you genuinely care about young girls being mistreated, and that sort of gives the game away when you're trying to convince people they should be outraged at rape and grooming when your actual objective is to stir hatred against your alien outgroup.
If Kulak hated European maidens he wouldn't have constructed his entire identity on the worship thereof. I don't think this is a good example at all.
The idea that you can't really care about your ingroup if you wouldn't care about them if they weren't part of it is a dangerous nonsense.
I ask you, would you love your Mother if she wasn't your mother. And if you wouldn't, how dare you say you love her? It's absurd. Who we are and what relationships we have is important and meaningful. It is not and never has been morally neutral.
I hate this gnostic reduction of our essence to some abstract individual will with every fiber of my body.
The Rotherham girls are not his ingroup just because they're white. He constantly talks about what he thinks should happen to white people who are also not in his ingroup.
His feigned outrage over "European maidens" being besmirched by Muslims is because Muslims are doing the besmirching, not because he actually cares about victimized white girls. If it were Irish grooming gangs responsible, he might contrive some anti-Irish reason to wash the streets in blood (he's certainly flexible like that), but more likely he'd just find something despicable brown people are doing elsewhere.
I'll note that, by reputation at least, (often drug enabled)abuse and grooming of lower-on-the-totem-pole teenaged girls is a 'the purpose of the system is what it does' for Kulak's claimed ingroup of reconstructionist pagans.
I don't really intend to go experience reconstructionist paganism. It may well be a false stereotype- and frankly doesn't much affect my (extremely negative) opinion of either reconstructionist paganism or idiot teenagers who experiment with it. But Kulak doesn't seem very upset about it either way. Nor does he seem to care very much about war rapes by the Russian Army, for another example of white people doing this.
Yeah, that's my point. If anyone else was drugging and raping teenage girls (including teenage white girls), Kulak wouldn't care. He just wants to see bloodshed. Also, his recent Braveheart Viking Hells Angel Paganism schtick and telling all his right-wing r3tvrn Christian followers that their religion is fake, gay and Jewish, is almost as hilarious to me as the people who still think he's an OF girl.
Isn't he/they an MTF?
No lol, he just picked an anime avatar and now some of his twitter audience unbelievably think he’s a woman. I don’t think he’s even claimed to be, so it’s not even a grift, it’s just weird or very stupid people.
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No.
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This like complaining that a Muslim cares about the Umma even though he cares about his sect or tribe more.
How dare people have Ordo Amoris? Their care must reduce to one bit!
Obviously people have circles of concern. And obviously just because someone doesn't extend their total moral community to all of humanity or all of creation doesn't make them abnormal. On the contrary.
Multi level tribalism is a perfectly acceptable and eugenic human behavior, albeit with some much talked about drawbacks. It is not however reducible to nihilism or egoism.
I think you give too much credit. I don't believe people like that feel ordo amoris for anyone at all. It's not about concentric circles of affinity, it's about identifying an enemy and manufacturing a grievance. I might believe some people feel some faint amount of "ordo amoris" for distant white girls because they happen to be white, even if they otherwise hold them in contempt, but not when every other message is about how they're dirt. Oh, now you care because a Muslim touched them? No heat graph meme argument is going to make that convincing.
Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical are bad models of people's behavior and therefore functionally useless except as the very sort of grievance they denounce.
The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning in some way is, I believe, one of the great sins of Western civilization. And I don't feel difficulty defending anybody who feels such feelings, wicked as they may be, far from me as they may be.
Indeed, insofar as humanism has any degree of visceral grounding, it springs from this feeling and cannot denounce it without sapping itself.
Fair. People who hype genocidal warfare are indeed part of my outgroup.
I do not think you understand what my standards of what people are "allowed" to care about are.
This not what I believe.
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