domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
Goodguy
9m ago
Socrates was a smart guy by all accounts, but I don't think that his kinds of methods were the basis of all intelligent thought. It is telling that in many of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates' opponents are essentially straw-men, written by Plato to serve as a foil for Socrates. Surely Socrates' actual real-life debates were not like this. How much do we know about how Socrates actually spoke and debated?
The Greeks also gave us several other methods for intelligent thought that are very different from Socrates'.
One such is the mathematical method of proof.
Another is the Aristotelian essay. Aristotle used a very different kind of rhetorical approach than the Socrates of Plato's works.
So did Thucydides, whose arguments in the History of the Peloponnesian War are very different from Socrates' style.
Rov_Scam
11m ago
I think that Trump's involvement is the more peripheral "lot of smoke, no fire" kind of thing. The Democrats wouldn't release it because it would have just been brushed off as such and made it look like they were grasping at straws, just like the various prosecutions. If there was nothing they could prosecute, it would just be another smear that everyone forgot about in a week.
I don't know if they planned it this way, but it was good ammunition to have in the event that Trump won the election. Now that the pressure to release it is coming from his base, and he at least alluded to releasing it, but he has cold feet for some reason, it makes matters worse. It's like with his tax returns; it's unlikely that they would reveal any criminal activity, but there's something personally embarrassing that he doesn't want revealed. Now that he's been intransigent despite the pressure, anything that is in there that's unfavorable is going to have a much bigger impact.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
11m ago
No actually we've managed to avoid fixating on quote tallies 'til now despite having votes viewable after 24 hours since back on reddit iirc. We just don't fixate on vote tallies.
the_Culture_is_great
13m ago
I'm not going to disagree that black people as a group share common adaptations for warm climates, that's obviosly true, and not the morally wrong part of the metaphor.
the fact that there are some nice invasive species doesn't change the fact that the typical attitude towards them in general is still very, very negative.
And finally any implication that subgroups of people are different species i.e. not human is also morally wrong, especially just dropped into an unrelated conversation (the original comment made no mention of race).
Listening
15m ago
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15m ago
they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience
But we literally are doing that.
Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought
It is the basis of all intelligent thought:
"- Is Socratic irony an expression of revolt? of plebeian ressentiment? As the member of an oppressed group, did Socrates take pleasure in the ferocity with which he could thrust his syllogistic knife? Did he avenge himself on the nobles he fascinated? - As a dialectician, you have a merciless tool in your hands; dialectics lets you act like a tyrant; you humiliate the people you defeat. The dialectician puts the onus on his opponent to show that he is not an idiot: the dialectician infuriates people and makes them feel helpless at the same time. The dialectician undermines his opponent's intellect. - What? Is dialectics just a form of revenge for Socrates?"
"I have shown how Socrates could be repulsive: which makes it even more important to explain the fact that he fascinated. - That he discovered a new type of agon, that he was its first fencing master in the noble circles of Athens - this is one thing. He fascinated by appealing to the agonistic drive of the Greeks, - he introduced a variation into the wrestling matches between young men and youths. Socrates was a great erotic too."
the_Culture_is_great
23m ago
Black people are not a seperate species.
Sure make an argument about "we should stop subsidizing black people" (I especially agree with "don't subsidize people based on race specifically"). But don't do it in a dehumanizing way by calling them a seperate species.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25m ago
Add the following code to your custom CSS: button.m-0{display:none;}
Goodguy
25m ago
Not sure if you would consider this anti-MAGA, but it's certainly anti-Trump: https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345537?context=8#context
This one is me criticizing Trump's tariffs: https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/315024?context=8#context
Me being concerned about Trump's authoritarian impulses: https://www.themotte.org/post/1681/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/298689?context=8#context
Me criticizing Trump's desire to increase the military budget: https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316103?context=8#context
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
26m ago
As always, the historically aware people have better perspective. Cotton gin is an interesting example. Deeply ironic: making the labor much easier for processing cotton increased the demand for labor for the cotton itself. It still took 30 years for the US slave population to double, and 40 years to double again, and the entrenchment of slavery took 70, all spurred by the technological invention, but the social and economic changes took decades to come to a head with actual war. Most every other important invention in history, even when adopted rapidly, usually takes decades to percolate and fully influence the economy and social fabric of a country.
The "population bomb" people being so obviously wrong is also a great example why the new "population stagnation" people are also probably going to be obviously wrong. "Doom" happens slowly.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
27m ago
I am routinely rang up at my local Chinese restaurant by middle-schoolers, who a few years ago were visible hanging out in the back while their dad worked.
Perhaps they just don't work on the books?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
28m ago
Is there a way I can use that somehow? I'm a professional programmer, but I don't do a bunch of stuff in CSS...
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29m ago
For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience.
This is a pretty good analogy.
I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted.
Care to share an example or two of this? My experience has been stuff like this conversation, where I said I doubted that Biden was pocketing bribes.
I've had contra-MAGA posts that go slightly positive if they're very high effort, but the difference between me posting that and say, posting an antifeminist piece is that the contra-MAGA post will be like +50 | -45, while the antifeminist piece will be +50 | -2 or something.
Quantumfreakonomics
29m ago
If there's one thing we learned about the Democratic establishment in 2024, its that they love themselves more than they hate Trump. Very possible that those in charge decided that the hit to Trump wasn't worth the risk to themselves or their friends from bringing additional scrutiny upon the Epstein story.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
32m ago
There is a problem here, and the problem is you.
The problem, specifically, is that you post a lot of these kinds of sneering borderline kinda-making-a-point-but-mostly-just-sneering comments, and increasingly people are getting frustrated and angry and snapping at you, and then we have to mod those people (because you are not allowed to attack someone) and it's starting to look very much like this is your game.
Sometimes we ban someone not because any one post was terrible but because their overall effect on the community is so negative that there seems little value in allowing them to keep throwing shit. We don't like to do it; it's very subjective. We can't read your mind. Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy. But we've warned you enough, and you keep doing exactly the same thing, that I suspect you know what you're doing and you're doing it on purpose.
So I'm telling you now: stop it. Or I will propose to the rest of the mods that you should be banned under our catch-all egregiously obnoxious category.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
33m ago
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
The metaphor is specifically telling you not to put yourself in a position where you would have to take extreme measures to remove the invasive species. Have you ever read an account of an adoption gone wrong? In the worst cases, it sounds like the stuff that makes family annihilations seem understandable. And just to get ahead of the obvious criticism, the worst such story I've ever come across involved adopting a pair of Eastern European girls, who proved to be violently uncontrollable wrecking balls on the lives of their adoptive parents.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
36m ago
Some are evidently hardwired to care more than others.
Sure. I would have been right there with you thinking it was silly to care about downvotes if they didn't soft-censor your post like they do on Reddit. But then at least a portion of my views started diverging from the dominant thought paradigm on this forum, and the downvotes for well-researched posts started feeling pretty obnoxious.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
36m ago
Honestly I don't think domestic life is going to be too awful. The real shock for the US is going to be the precipitous decline in US foreign policy influence. At some point this century, Americans are going to wake up to some kind of rude and jarring awakening to how (relative to the past) impotent the influence has become.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
38m ago
I find it impossible to believe that if there were some hint of damning evidence about Trump in Epstein's files that it wouldn't have gotten leaked during either of the last two elections. There is just no conceivable value that the Dem establishment would have held high enough to cause them to refrain.
Much more believable that the juicy parts of the relevant hard drives and data were "accidentally" thrown into an incinerator in 2019.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
38m ago
they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience
B A S E D
Karma, even temporary, is for parasocial dweebs
I'm struggling to wrap my head around this. Not the fact that this is the thing that seemingly broke his base, but that so many people, including liberals, are shocked that this broke his base.
"He lies all the time, why should this be the thing that makes them change their minds?"
Are they this bad at modeling the other side? I'm not on that side and I can model it.
The old chestnut about the American right vs left is that they hate each other because the left thinks the right is stupid. Team Red is used to taking those sneers from the overeducated professional class, and let's face it, certain ideas from the wonk class tend to disproportionately negatively affect Team Red anyway. Then along comes Trump, with his "poor man's idea of what a rich man should be", telling them literally everything they already believed - that they were getting fucked, that they were getting a raw deal, that the wonks sold them out and they're corrupt. Of course he got elected. They tried to kill him!
The excuses made around the Epstein mess are whoppers of such tremendous scale that they signal Trump, and by extension, his administration, think the population of America, including his base, are so dumb that they struggle with object permanence. What did you think his base was going to do? They're used to being called stupid by the people who hate them. What they didn't expect was being treated as stupid by the guy they helped put in office as an act of revenge against the people who hate them.
I'm gobsmacked at it myself. An even halfway competent liar would have made some excuses about it being useful as international blackmail (something the more realpolitik-minded would respect if the concessions were good enough). Alternatively, release doctored files that are not obviously doctored; if they could edit Epstein's jail camera footage in an act of blatant gamesmanship and have it not be revealed as obvious until recently it would be trivial to placate a majority of people who aren't so deep in the conspiracy hole they're halfway to Australia. Never in a million years would I have expected a response like "the evidence doesn't exist, Pam is doing a great job, why are we still talking about this?"
There's a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin tells his mother that aliens have landed and that she needs to go out to confront them while he guards the cookies in the kitchen. Her response is perfect: "Calvin, just how stupid do you think I am?" Hardcore salt-of-the-earth dirt and potatoes Red Tribers pride themselves on seeing the world as it is, unlike the idealistic Ivy Leaguers/Tech-utopian Tribe who see the world as they wish it to be. 'Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining' applies; the same thinking can be applied to the disaster over immigration and almost every other cultural flashpoint.
This reminds me a lot of the Korea Park Geun-hye scandal. What killed Moon in politics wasn't the fact that she was corrupt, or that she was giving political and pork barrel kickbacks to people she was in cahoots with. What killed Park was the reveal that she was in thrall to literal cultists and possibly of unsound mind. The Trump base doesn't care too much that he's corrupt, or lying. He could even have been named in the Epstein files repeatedly. He could even have released them and nobody would have cared as long as what was in there was sufficiently incendiary that it took down half of Capitol Hill! But to lie so comically badly that it reveals that Trump thinks you're stupid, just like all those Blue Tribe assholes... what the fuck did people think was going to happen, that this would become another case of Teflon Don?
Of course, I could be totally wrong and the last few credulous people in America that totally believe Trump when he says there's no evidence and take him at face value can only come to the even worse conclusion that the DOJ filled with people he handpicked is completely incompetent, and man hung himself/a woman is serving two decades of jailtime on charges that weren't real.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
40m ago
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
Gave me a nice chuckle. Honestly, one of the things I admire about Approval Voting is that - on an individual level - there's almost no such thing as regretting your vote. The simplicity is refreshing. Vote for two people, even if you prefer one? The non-preferred one wins, but you still voted for them, so your vote "worked" as intended. Don't like someone? Don't vote for them. Like someone so much that you wouldn't be happy with any other? That's fine too, vote for them only! "I am okay with X person elected or I am not" is admittedly a little reductive, but is that really worse than the current system? I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 as a protest vote, even though I infinitely preferred Clinton to Trump. Strategically, I felt a little bad about it, but it seemed like there was no other way to be seen. Even then it was a little out of character for me, an avowed moderate and work-within-the-system type, but I guess it does represent how bitter I was feeling about the way Clinton wrapped up the primary with a little bow (not even re: Bernie, I was more annoyed with how she preemptively pushed all other candidates out before the primary even started via a combination of threats and influence peddling. Plus, I guess, I hate her as a person, so that too)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
43m ago
This has not gone unnoticed. But you still can't just attack people.
Yes, and?
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