domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
Sorry, I should've been clearer. My point about JWs was that they are now falling under state scrutiny even though they are small fish compared to Catholics. If the eye of the state can fall upon them to the point they are being used as a partial example for new legislation, then the same could easily happen to the Amish.
Are sexual offenders going to testify that they confessed their sins and then the priest didn't provide testimony to the state?
Based on lawsuits I've seen in other states, I think this is the route that victims' rights advocates have in mind:
- Abuse occurs and abuser confesses it to his pastor
- Pastor does not report
- Victim makes allegations, abuser is prosecuted, and during the investigation the state learns that the pastor knew (in a few cases I've read, the abuser specifically tells other people or law enforcement that he told his pastor first)
- Victim sues church for millions of dollars
Currently, #4 is being blocked due to pastors not being mandatory reporters. By removing the clergy-penitent privilege and making pastors into mandatory reporters, then it would open churches to liability if they fail to report.
Great, because if his argument is valid, then it wouldn't be talking about anyone who's part of the conversation, just people like them. So none of what you said applies.
I don't think you understood what I meant on this part. My point was that the person you're directly taking to always deserves more deference than a public figure you're referring to in the third person to guard the light:heat ratio of the conversation. If you and I were talking about US presidents, and I called Trump and Biden pieces of shit, that wouldn't be great but it'd be much less bad than if I called you specifically a piece of shit. There's just no way we could have a conversation worth much of anything if attacks like that are getting lobbed at the person you're discussing things with.
For the JK Rowling stuff, again, I come back to the hypothetical of a 2A advocate:
-"Biden wants to take all our guns!"
-"No he doesn't"
-"OK but he's the Democratic president, and there are Democratic factions that want to do that"
Stuff like this happens all the time. People rarely get all that fussed over it. The fact that people are trying to attack Darwin for this points me to believe that they just disagreed with him broadly, and then went fishing for anything that could be described as "manipulative".
Forgive me, but could you clarify a bit? Are you saying:
- You literally feel absolutely no repugnance / negative valence whatsoever at somebody buying lots of helpless creatures purely because they find it fun to kill them.
- You have some kind of negative emotional response to it, but for intellectual reasons you have decided not to indulge that response. E.g. you rationalise that no actual harm has taken place to anything with moral weight / man is master of the animals and therefore has the right to do such things even if you don’t find it tasteful.
- You feel a negative response that is weak enough that, to you, it can be rounded down to zero in mildly hyperbolic fashion on the internet.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I would think if I found out someone enjoyed killing bees, I would be concerned but only inasmuch as their behavior analogizes to things I care about. I wouldn't want my sister to date a guy who purchased bees for the purpose of killing them.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
2hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
A law removing long-standing rights isn't likely to stand. I'm unsure how it works with JWs, but the practice of Catholic confessions (behind a screen in a dark room, anonymous option) nullifies testimony. Are sexual offenders going to testify that they confessed their sins and then the priest didn't provide testimony to the state? Will the state be bugging confessionals?
Should Washington state consider revoking other privileged positions? Why should spouse, lawyer and doctor be exempt?
Edit: Reading the text of the law there is more leagalise to parse through in regards to the responsibilities of medical personnel if understand it correctly https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Passed%20Legislature/5375.PL.pdf#page=1
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Not with that attitude...
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
2hr ago
Could you link specific instances or mention the worst users who are regularly doing this?
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2hr ago
I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?
Not in the least. I've heard of worse hobbies.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2hr ago
Well, I think that's the chief complaint about public school already in these parts? We spend a fortune to try to bring up the low end and mostly leave the above average kids to suffer with boredom and turn into misanthropes.
How do we make them more efficient? Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains? What do you have in mind?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.
SnapDragon
2hr ago
Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.
You know, sometimes pools just accidentally lose their exit. Common engineering mishap. My sincere condolences to those affected.
I'm not convinced darwin2500 needed a permaban, but if you want a long-form discussion of why he was a bad poster, I wrote one here (and against some of his AAQCs here). And it's not like that was some all-encompassing list; many of his worst behaviors were well after that summary, and I didn't even include all the bad behaviors before that summary (open question: can Darwin2500 use CTRL+F?). _Viking's "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." kinda sums it up.
There's (unfortunately) a number of posters that you could pick out for each of darwin's individual ticks except from the right here (well, most of them), but there are very few, if any, that manage to combine all or even a sizable section of them all on their own.
Chi_Wara
2hr ago
I don't care how utopian your proposed society would supposedly be. I'm not going to let anyone take away my political rights under any circumstances. I won't be a subaltern or slave
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Probably indefinitely. Northern European Protestant cultures cannot function in modernity without a Refugia to provide labor that makes up for their own low fertility rates; in the past these were mostly Catholic cultures that provided immigrants(Ireland as the ur-example, but that’s what Mexico was recently. Obviously, neither of these places are going to be exporting masses of young laborers they way they could in 1850 or 1990.), but that’s not an option anymore so the choice is between tolerating weirdos in your midst- provided they have six well behaved and hard working kids- or importing Africans. Germany may rather the latter, now that there’s no youth surplus in its Slavic near abroad, but America will almost certainly rather give the Amish more of the same special carve outs they have now.
If I were thé Hasidim, however, I’d be worried. Antisemitism is slowly becoming normalized on the left and the future right is unlikely to have much patience for groups that won’t even pretend to work.
Corvos
2hr ago
I don’t think it’s the case that, under the near-100% global fluidity you seem to be arguing for, the west will continue to remain ahead. That is, I don’t necessarily see why economic growth should be sticky under conditions of high global fluidity.
At the moment, Britain (say) is in relative decline. Because we once had a very large market and because companies serving that have mostly been staffed by British people for various reasons, that decline has been slow. Say, Toyota sets up a car factory in Sunderland to build cars for the British market; that factory is mostly staffed by British people by virtue of being in Britain and because of various employment laws, meaning that a decent number of British people are earning a decent salary, meaning that the market for Toyota cars in Britain is still decently sized, etc. But the decline is still present because (among other things) Britain is expensive and therefore British workers require global-market-beating salaries to live well.
Under conditions of maximal global liquidity, I would expect to see accelerated growth and decline, with some countries entering into the India/Taiwan/China/Japan role of ‘cheap country where multinationals can get decent work for low prices’ and other countries declining to that point or past that point and waiting for their time to get back in the spotlight.
(Countries might decline past the ‘spotlight point’ because factories etc. benefit from synergy and investment tends to cluster, so even if several countries have favourable economic conditions only one of them might win the prize at any given time.)
In short, to my mind, the maximally fluid world looks like it would accelerate boom and bust for any given country (or its native population) rather than lead to ratchet growth spread globally. I think it would be hard to get public support for that - first world countries wouldn’t want to sign up for accelerated decline from their current position, and third world countries want to be able to protect their economic growth once they have it.
FtttG
2hr ago
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2hr ago
I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.
I'd say odds are high, and I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened yet. Look at the flurry of stories from the past few years involving Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a relatively small sect (but larger than the Amish). Washington's recent law removing clergy-penitent privilege specifically referenced them along with Catholics as the reason for needing to remove the privilege.
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't
Great, because if his argument is valid, then it wouldn't be talking about anyone who's part of the conversation, just people like them. So none of what you said applies.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
The issue isn't him putting words in JK Rowling's mouth, people do that all the time as part of completely normal acceptable conversations. If it went like:
- JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people
- No she doesn't
- Oh... Looks like I was wrong, sorry.
it would have been completely fine. He'd still be putting words in her mouth, but he'd be open to admitting he was wrong, and correcting. Instead we had him making a false claim, denying that he had made it, redirecting to another claim that he thought was more defensible, but was just as false as the first one, and then claiming that any false claims he made don't actually matter because he wanted to talk about something else, even though he's the one that brought each of these claims into the conversation.
It's textbook trolling - luring people into what appears a reasonable conversation, making insane claims to get people riled up, and ducking out after the damage is done.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong.
Again, him believing Rowling is a transphobe is irrelevant to the conversation, I'm completely fine with people holding that belief.
If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
If you don't think Darwin's behavior objectively crosses the line into dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative, I think it's pretty clear you are just biased in favor of people who go against the grain of this forum. It's fine, I get it, you catch a tonne of shit for disagreeing with the average poster here, so it feels nice to have company, but it's still bias.
Tree
2hr ago
I know guesswho claimed that. Still. You should have asked him if he was ever wrong on the smollett thing to determine his identity. If he said yes, it wasn't him.
07mk
3hr ago
GuessWho quite literally answered a direct question of whether he was the user darwin2500 on Reddit with "Yes, obviously."
It's possible that GuessWho is a lying liar. But I'd say at the very least, the preponderance of evidence points to them being the same person.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
3hr ago
Your first two links are both thoroughly articulated arguments in defense of specific positions. They broke no rules. Every one else is free to marshal arguments against them - as I see that you did, terribly, for the first. The second still got a mod warning. The third one is perhaps more openly insulting (if you fall into the exaggerated position it's attacking), but it has always been the case that statements prefaced with "I think" and the like get a lot more leeway. And oh, there you are downthread, completely missing the point of that comment.
Meanwhile, the routine criticism of Turok is that he never actually stakes a position in the first place, but just engages in borderline incoherent, miserable performance art.
Tenaz
3hr ago
We can basically break suffering into two components: the physical sensation, and the meaning / long-term effects. As bad as getting a leg amputed without anesthesia hurts, the long-term effects will hurt worse, and so the horror of losing a leg permanently may well outweigh the physical pain in the moment.
Conflating these two types of pain is counterproductive. If we turn off physical pain, we might get hurt more. If we turn off negative utility we fundamentally alter ourselves. I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible to turn it off--going from 100 utility to 50 probably feels exactly the same as going from 0 to -50.
I doubt being fed your own genitals is actually all that painful compared to any number of other ways to die. It's just more horrifying. Most elderly people in America probably go through much worse physical pain than anyone in that prison as their bodies linger in agony for months.
Rape might not be physically painful at all but most people would choose to break a bone above being raped. Even if you were guaranteed to never suffer trauma or anything from it, it's still highly undesirable because of fundamental human desires. If you want something (control over your own body, both legs, an ice cream cone, a million dollars, etc.), then not getting it will inherently feel like suffering no matter what it is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't. JK Rowling wasn't actively debating on this website, so things are different for her as a public figure than they'd be for a poster on the Motte responding directly to me.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong. This might seem utterly arbitrary, but I think Darwin's statement here is about on par with a Republican claiming "Biden wants to take all our guns away". In one sense, Biden was in favor of further gun control. In another sense, the literal statement of "Biden wants to take ALL our guns away" is clearly wrong since he never advocated for completely taking all guns away. If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
I'm inclined towards your skeptical take - I think we as humans always fantasize that there are powerful people/beings out there who want to spend resources hurting us, when the real truth is that they simply don't care about you. Sure, the denizens of the future with access to your brainscan could simulate your mind for a billion subjective years without your consent. But why would they?
The problem is that there's always a risk that you're wrong, that there is some reason or motive in post-singularity society for people to irreversibly propagate your brainscan without your consent. And then you're at the mercy of Deep Time - you'd better hope that no beings that ever will exist will enjoy, uh, "playing" with your mind. (From this perspective, you won't even have the benefit of anonymity - as one of the earliest existing minds, it's easy to imagine some beings would find you "interesting".)
Maybe the risk is low, because this is the real world we're dealing with and it's never as good or bad as our imaginations can conjure. But you're talking about taking a (small, you argue) gamble with an almost unlimited downside. Imagine you had a nice comfortable house that just happened to be 100m away from a hellmouth. It's inactive, and there are guard rails, so it's hard to imagine you'd ever fall in. But unlikely things sometimes happen, and if you ever did, you would infinitely regret it forever. I don't think I'd want to live in that house! I'd probably move...
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