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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Even so, Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, did it. And in a sense, so did World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan

Talk is cheap. Hitler is dead so there are no stakes to saying “I forgive him.” You put Eva Kor in a room with living Hitler and the power to kill him and we would see if he was really forgiven. Outside of that this is just virtue signaling

Can you not kill someone and forgive them at the same time? I guess if you take a more Catholic view could you not feel ok seeing Hitler in heaven after say 500 million years in purgatory.

I rarely believe in executions but a few cases I do - treason at a high level and murderers in prison. For prison true solitary seems to mean to me but you can’t keep a person alive who you know will kill again even in a secure environment. Leaving only execution as an option. For Hitler you can believe in murdering him because alive he’s still a threat to society. Same reason Rome would still do things like planning to execute Cleopatra in a public triumph if she hadn’t committed suicide. You can still forgive and kill at the same time because the killing serves another purpose.

How does that even mean anything? If you stop 'hating' someone, but still carry out the entire process of judgements and actions that anger refers to, you haven't actually done anything. "I hate black people, yet I support affirmative action and equal rights, and have many black friends - but I still hate them"?

When I kill a cow do I hate it or do I just want to eat a hamburger and have no judgement on the cow? Forgiveness is a mental state. Violence can be from a mental state of hate/revenge or it can be logical and for your benefit.

'A mental state of hate/revenge' is just an evolved set of ideas intended to serve your interest, though? So if I kill someone 'out of revenge', or kill someone 'because I logically want to maintain incentives against intentionally doing harm to society', they're both doing the same thing.

Is that because 'revenge' is the same as logically 'wanting to maintain incentives against intentionally doing harm to society' or are you just discounting motivation and looking at the act itself?

If it's the first I disagree with equating the two as revenge can be justified irrationally without concern for the harm to society. I might fully agree with the idea that the legal punishment for an offender is sufficient to disincentivise him and deter others from doing the harm he did again, yet still chafe against the fact that the law is holding me back from doing worse to him than prison can.

I don't think there's that much difference between 'revenge, irrationally, with bad outcomes' and 'attempting to do harm to someone in a rational way, but you mess up the reasoning, with bad outcomes'. So that revenge can be 'irrational' doesn't separate the two. Even if they are different, if you're not 'hating' someone but you're still game-theoretically punishing them, that's not 'forgiveness' in a meaningful sense.

Yeah it's a tough thing to distinguish and you may be right. What about game theoretically punishing someone out of a sense of duty without the personal aspect of revenge? Like 'there but for the grace of God go I', I'm a soldier and you're a soldier on the opposing side who I hold no personal animus towards but who I'm going to try and kill for what your country did to mine.

That's definitely not personal revenge, it's just war - i guess maybe it's revenge in the national sense - it makes sense to say "Azerbaijan's revenge against Armenia". But that's just a matter of 'what you think revenge means', either way I don't think that soldier's 'forgiving' the enemy soldiers he's calling artillery on in any important sense.

Perhaps anger driven by a desire for justice provides psychological padding against the shock of doing deliberate harm to another? Depictions of people who approach war and criminal justice coldly and unemotionally are not generally positive; one may describe them as "detached," and that phrasing suggests an "attachment" that is broken or missing.

Well regardless even in your model one is still evolved which is different. It still seems different to do something out of an emotional state versus doing something for tactical reasons.

For the cow example example a butcher kills a cow out of greed, he wants to sell the cows meat, not out of hate that the cow is a cow.

Can you not kill someone and forgive them at the same time?

Heinrich Heine — 'We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged'

I don't see how it's any more implausible than white people who want to see 'whiteness' go away, such people do exist.

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