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I will push back on this and suggest that if you give him a gun, access to a high-value political opponent, and approximately zero chance of being caught and punished for it, he is somewhat likely to pull the trigger.
That's closer to how I measure the virtue of a person. What they will do when given an opportunity to inflict harm under the belief they will not suffer consequences themselves. That is, how strong are your personal principles, and can you hold yourself accountable for following them.
I think we end up arguing over how much the person has the personal capacity to inflict violence vs. whether they find violence actually reprehensible. The former is a bit of a misdirect from the latter. That is, just because someone lacks the fortitude to pull the trigger themselves doesn't mean they don't want to see that trigger pulled.
Now the scenario I proposed up there is far from realistic, and will not come to pass, so I accept all the various objections and caveats to my argument. My position is best articulated as "in my experience only people who have a stated commitment to avoiding violence are serious about not wanting it. In contrast, people who can excuse violent acts easily are usually just in want of an opportunity commit it themselves."
So I don't think this guys 'private' texts reflect well on him at all.
Oh, no objection that it reflects poorly on him and I'm very against this kind of violent rhetoric generally. We agree completely that low-level background support of violence is a bad thing and should be actively discouraged, regardless of the side.
I think you're well aware of this but just to state it for the record: impossible for any of us to know the heart of another. But I will gently rotate out of your pushback and note that you had to change the scenario significantly to even get to "somewhat likely" to pull the trigger. Assassinating a high-value political opponent is nowhere near the same thing as shooting a child.
I'm comfortable saying that if someone IS comfortable shooting a child, I would rather they be launched into a volcano by trebuchet than continue co-existing with them. Much less they have political power over me.
Sure I can think of justifications for possibly shooting a kid, but a person who does should be pretty repentant and broken up about it, probably to the point of having PTSD. Incidentally the apparent callous disregard for children as casualties is why I'm not really rooting for a "side" in the Israel Palestine conflict.
So I do NOT want to accuse this guy of being okay with kids getting shot, lest I also have to suggest he get launched into a volcano.
But the casual ability to joke about a specific person's children that way is definitely irksome. Its fair to demand much, much better of public servants.
I don't think it's a good idea to chuck people into volcanoes because they didn't have PTSD when you thought it appropriate.
Certainly, a serial killer who targets children, he gets loaded into the trebuchet. But there are multiple ways to the same outcome of "not an unjustified killer of children", and "can do correct ethical reasoning when it matters" works as well as "has an innate aversion".
(I get nervous about this kind of thinking, because I've seen people call for me to get loaded into the metaphorical trebuchet over certain psychological blocks I don't have.)
Not quite what I mean.
More that if someone doesn't have the requisite cognitive wiring to consider children a particularly 'special' class in terms of moral weight (that is, they are genuinely 'innocent' and have a heightened need for protection) it ups the odds, in my eyes, that they have other sociopathic traits that make them an overall undesirable neighbor, whatever their other values. Wouldn't want them around my kids, for sure.
What other types of vulnerable individuals would they feel comfortable exploiting? What moral code, if any, DO they follow, if 'killing kids' is easily permissible?
But as we've established, one can't really know another's heart or their true feelings so I accept that we have to make do with the circumstances we're given.
To make my position 100% clear, I do have a very particularized wariness of abortion doctors and the docs who push gender transition surgeries and puberty blockers on kids.
Okay, I'll elaborate.
Like 10 years ago, I was living rurally, and as sometimes happens rurally, a wild mouse snuck into the house and started eating our food (in particular, my Weet-Bix). My aunt put out poison for it, as she'd done many times before. However, I didn't much relish the idea of having to find the corpse by the horrible stench of putrefying mouse. So, when I spotted it one night, I got a pair of tongs, grabbed it (I think it was slowing down from the poison), crushed it to death, and then chucked it in our wood heater to be incinerated. Perfectly logical and justifiable action.
But lots of the urban West has grown up... shall we say, sheltered. They're not up to the job of killing an animal in that kind of personal fashion, even when there's good reason to do it. I grew up sheltered too, but for whatever reason that psychological block didn't take root. Probably something to do with me being high-functioning autistic and/or borderline.
So the instant half the Blue Tribe hears this story, of course, they start doing the Body Snatchers scream. I don't think like them, so I'm not one of them, so I'm dangerous, so I'm to be destroyed or at least contained. Xenophobia. It doesn't matter that there's nothing ethically wrong with what I did (unless you're Ziz, I suppose); the thought process wasn't the same, so the hardware's not the same, so I'm pattern-matched to a serial killer.
I really, really don't want to legitimise the Body Snatchers scream. I know my face looks exceptionally tasty, so I'm not going to vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party.
(Admittedly, I'm willing to make the "no, being sapient doesn't mean having anything remotely like human morality" argument with regard to AI. Combination of being essential to understanding the danger and the bright line of "not human".)
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I think a lot of people fail that standard, even if they have a “stated commitment.” Talk is cheap.
Yes, but at least you can be held to account for failing your commitments.
If you never commit at all, then best we can do is punish what we view as misbehavior and hope it changes your behavior.
Justice lets us align virtue with self-interest. That’s good because the latter is much easier to measure. I think most positions of trust work this way, and I find it unfair to apply a different standard just to this one.
I say this despite thinking the guy should lose his election. He should lose because his competition is more agreeable, less impulsive, less hateful. But not because he failed a hypothetical test.
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Well I mean, given that he's running for AG, he gets to decide by a large degree who gets caught and faces punishment for what. And we've seen AG's use a lot of "discretion" in this regard. And so the question is, after statements like these, is there even a fig leaf of equal protection under the law?
Oh yeah.
Lets leave aside how he's in a central 'position of trust' for the State.
I feel vaguely hypocritical on this point because I generally support the idea of using political power to make your ideological opponents uncomfortable enough to leave (I mean implement policies they don't like and would want to get away from, rather than policies specifically targeting them for their political associations) but having your state's executive branch have an unstated policy of leniency on violence against political opponents is a genuinely terrifying thought to me. Doubly so if your state's self defense laws are weak. Virginia is Stand Your Ground, at least.
Thankfully one that IS pretty handily solved by moving away and/or organizing a campaign to oust the problem candidates. But it does harken back to my Skin in the Game rant. If you want to support the idea of political violence against opponents, in the abstract, I would prefer if you, personally, or people you care a lot about, are at risk of getting targeted by it. Instead, what always happens is the political class circles the wagons and ups their levels of security and leaves everyone else to fend for themselves.
Would it be wrong to suggest that a Gentlemanly duel between the parties in question here might be a way to resolve the grievances?
Who would challenge whom to a duel and why?
Mr. Todd Gilbert is the subject of the "Two in the Head" comment, isn't he?
Maybe he challenges Mr. Jones to pistols at dawn. Two bullets each. Or Mr. Jones can drop out.
No I don't think our elected officials have the fortitude for this these days. But its more to the point there should be actual consequences on the line for making such comments.
I'm old fashioned in many ways, but this reasoning seems so weird to me.
A: Threatens to kill B and his family.
B: Right. Tomorrow, at dawn, I'm going to give you the opportunity to kill me.
Very manly, yes, but not very helpful unless you're sure A is an abject coward. Hire somebody who knows how to use a telescopic sight or put a horse's head in his bed or something.
I am DEAD CERTAIN that A is a coward in this case.
If they don't want to kill or die over words then they can simply recant. Most people do not want to kill or die over words.
Of course, we can make the duel less than lethal if needed.
In this case I suspect you're right. But there is no law that bad people have to be cowards, or poor shots. Hamilton for example was killed by a belligerent nutbar, and I believe there were many such cases throughout history.
Belligerent nutbars can more easily be thinned out if we're allowed to shoot them under the right circumstances.
I think we're in an arguably worse equilibrium where public harassment and 'fighting words' can be thrown around willy-nilly, degrading the general discourse because there is no legal means of reprisal that doesn't also expose you to possible legal liability.
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Corvos is in the right here. We’ve managed to re-derive the desirability of one legitimate bearer of force in society at a time in just a couple posts - excellent work speedrunning the rise of civilization team.
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Circle of equals! All the legislators form a circle, and the two have to fight it out bare handed until one submits.
This was actually my suggested solution for solving faculty disputes in my old university. It would be so, so much simpler and more friendly than the backstabbing and politicking that goes on, and everyone's too scrawny to do any real damage.
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