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Jiro
7hr ago
A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc.
By that reasoning, if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.
God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.
The word "accountable" here is tricky. Clearly nobody can punish God if he doesn't act appropriately. So in that sense, God isn't accountable. But surely people can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts live up to his principles, and if they don't, conclude that God is acting badly.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
7hr ago
I expected something about racial integration.
Jiro
7hr ago
I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition? This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women. Nobody would believe them if they claim it has nothing to do with women because that would be a really weird coincidence. And most conservatives (and most people) would look askance at someone surgically reducing the function of their body for no articulable reason whatsoever, which this would be.
WhiningCoil
7hr ago
This is preposterous. Libby posted an athlete's record. Their literal public performance. Not their phone number, address, social media accounts, criminal record, or any other information that might be publicly available but threatening in the wrong context. Conflating that with doxing is just rank bad faith.
What's next, is a Ellen Page's IMDB page doxing? Is Bruce Jenner's Olympic record doxing?
Mantergeistmann
7hr ago
That info being publicly available if I went to courthouse, dug through a pile of books in the basement for hours; versus that information being publicly available via app on my phone.
Or, as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put it,
"But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard."
I think theres something to be said for a concept of a "Friction Threshold", where everything above a certain level of difficulty/cost isn't considered "publically available" for certain purposes. Now, what exactly that threshold is depends very much on the information and medium, I'll grant. But it is very much one thing to be able to access the information, vs sharing/making it easier to find, vs publically broadcasting it. Or, to put it light-heartedly, my mother's age may have been easily findable/public record, but that doesn't mean she was happy when her nieces plastered the telephone poles up and down the block with "Happy 40th birthday!" messages.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
Good point, it does matter a lot about who is having children to each side.
WhiningCoil
7hr ago
When I watched Nvidia's CES(?) presentation it was kind of wild to see all their AI products and/or aspirations. Their concept of having robots tokenize movements to complete tasks the same way LLMs tokenize words to respond to questions was an interesting concept. The part where current laborers have to train the robots was dystopian as hell. But I will derive a sense of deep schadenfreude when some "undocumented worker" or H1B that was trained by his white male predecessor (under duress) then has to train his AI replacement. Hard to imagine AI doing a worse job than 3rd world "elite human capital". And as a share holder of NVDA I'm rooting for it. Even as a nationalist I hope it takes off and is cheaper and has few externalities than the open borders policy our ruling class continually pushes in the interest of cheap labor. It represents a possible means to solving the labor issue that continually undercuts the polity of nations. It at least represents a ray of possible hope over the current status quo where the only solution to the dysfunction of our current society is to feed 6B third worlders through it at the fastest rate possible because "muh gdp".
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8hr ago
I'm not sure which theological/philosophical tradition uses the word "omnibenevolent" when describing God, but it's not mine. It kind of implies that a theist believes that he is "well-behaved," which is a category error. God is good, in that he is "actual" - to say that X is good is to say that it has succeeded in being in some way. A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc. God is good in that sense. God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.
Jazzhands
8hr ago
"The Population Bomb" was published in 1968, and was very much a leftist phenomenon. At no point did the failure of its predictions hurt his prospects with Stanford where he continued to teach. Anti-natalism has always been pretty closely tied to the Environmental movement, and this is in turn a big part of why the Right has ceased to trust environmentalists. It was a probably a big influence behind India's sterilization campaign, under its socialist government. The One-Child Policy was implemented by literal Communists.
Basically, anti-natalism has been a left-wing thing longer then most of us have been alive, and implemented by the left in some of the largest countries in the world.
What's the right-wing equivalent? I think you're over-indexing on a few outliers and twitter edgelords.
wlxd
8hr ago
Taleb is the most overrated intellectual alive. Tried one of his book, it was literally non stop half-coherent self-aggrandizing rambling. I guess this is a good strategy to sound intelligent to mid-wits: if you don’t fully understand what’s being said, and you’re not smart enough to see that there is nothing there, it might indeed sound like something above your head, rather than drivel.
It's hard for me to address your claims when you keep the intentionally vague.
As an example, you say that my descriptions of Caplan don't ring true. You don't say which ones, but one of them was obviously true: That the environment Caplan inhabits purposefully prohibits certain things from being discussed.
My problem here is that earlier in this comment chain you rested one of your claims on the fact that Caplan has done a lot of work within this gestapo environment to be a point in his favor. This irks me a bit, since instead of arguing against an actual argument I made relating to the fact that a person purposefully inhabiting such a stifling environment and that the work produced within is not 'serious', you ignore it.
Related to that, you assert I am not familiar with Caplan and his work. Insinuating that my lack of familiarity is a point against me. But by the same token, you assert that Caplan could probably not address these points publicly, given the environment mentioned above. So how could my alleged unfamiliarity with Caplan be of any relevance?
My description of Caplan was that he has not engaged with population group differences within the US and the lackluster result of immigration into the EU when it comes to his assertions. I, as a consequence, said he is not a serious person. I am, given all of this, at a loss as to how my descriptions are not true.
To top it all off: You, despite having allegedly far greater knowledge of his work, don't point to where he addresses these contentions. Instead you just spend one too many a comment floating the possibility that he has. Well, you now say he has written about them, but you're just not telling. OK man.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
The whole legal concept of publicly available information needs to be radically reimagined.
I can get a copy of the deed to someone's house in minutes in most cases, for $2.50 online.
That info being publicly available if I went to courthouse, dug through a pile of books in the basement for hours; versus that information being publicly available via app on my phone. I'm not even sure those are the same concept.
WandererintheWilderness
8hr ago
and has only publicly available information
I don't find this compelling. A vast majority of behavior that falls under "doxxing" involves the collation and signal-boosting of information that is technically 'publicly available' to a motivated sleuth, but not widely distributed. The most familiar example round these parts would be Scott's real name, which was always trivial to find through the Internet Archive if you knew to look for it. That wasn't a good reason for the NYT to publicize it against his express wishes, and I think the same goes here.
(Of course, that only proves Libby's behavior was either knowingly dickish, or irresponsible. There's still a leap from that to arguing it's so beyond the pale that it's worth barring her from fulfilling her duties as an elected representative. But as a matter of common decency, all else being equal, Libby should apologize.)
anon_
8hr ago
Still, the 2/3 requirement for expulsion means the majority cannot use its power to determine rules to expel. That at least implies that it cannot do things that are tantamount to expulsion by a bare majority.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8hr ago
Funny, I was just looking at this a few minutes ago.
What do you think of this current crop of news?
Talking about AI, especially with regards to capabilities advancement, feels kind of pointless right now because the battle lines have clearly been entrenched. Any discussion of the shortcomings of current models or potential limitations of deep learning is met with "ahh, but just wait 1/5/10 years, then you'll be sorry!"
Very well then, let's wait 1/5/10 years. I'll check back in 2030.
The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part.
But see, I don't think it is, or rather it's not the only contentious part. It might be the sole sticking point for a few idiosyncratic philosophers on Internet forums, but it isn't the objection in the real world. I think the conservative position, and in particular the argument from telos, is very much "you shouldn't cut your breasts off, inject yourself with testosterone, and change your name to Jonathan", not just "by all means do all those things if you want, but in an important philosophical and semantic sense, they still won't make you a man, sorry". I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
The ontological impossibility of becoming truly indistinguishable from a biological member of the sex towards which you wish to transition cannot in itself be a compelling reason not to transition, any more than "you'll never be a bird" is a compelling reason not to build a plane. The telos framework which argues otherwise is smuggling in more assumptions than the physical impossibility of ignoring the universe. I'm not saying there's no philosophical background behind those additional assumptions, but I do think they're a lot less intuitively compelling than "you can't ignore the physical universe" and it's disingenuous to hide them behind the can't-ignore-reality thing. Hence the motte and bailey accusation.
Insights from Taleb and Mandelbrot about tail risks and black swans are another good example of something "obvious" that it took smart people a long time to come to terms with
Really? People have been quite risk averse since forever. The first thing and Eastern European kid learns in life is never to drink from Coca Cola bottle with a Fanta cap (there is something mild inside usually - no more than 120 proof, but kids and foreigners just can't drink) and from there on till the end of their life - first they smell then drink.
What Taleb peddles is mostly common sense. It is not great insights.
WandererintheWilderness
8hr ago
Your disagreement is too fundamental to be resolved on the level of ‘changing your gender can fit with your telos’. You don’t agree with the concept of a telos.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As I said here, my point is that appealing to phrases like "the dictatorship of the universe" and "look in the mirror" fail to make the concept of a telos in its full Christian sense compelling. They're rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The desirability of following one's telos in the theological sense doesn't follow from the blunt fact of the impossibility of ignoring one's material circumstances.
To put it another way, I think "biological males can't get pregnant" cannot get you to "therefore they shouldn't get genital surgery and change their names even if they want to" any more than "humans are not swans" can get you to "therefore they shouldn't become airplane pilots", no matter how loudly it is repeated.
(not falsified, however).
Is too. At least if by God we mean "an omnipotent omnibenevolent being" as opposed to an entity that's one but not the other. Still, let's not get into that.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
9hr ago
Appeal to the tautological impossibility hmm. Can you give me an example? I don’t see the point of appealing to something like that if you think it’s impossible anyway.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
9hr ago
There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.
With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.
Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.
Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?
striker
9hr ago
Gabor Mate in particular has a very broad definition of trauma. I.e. it’s a lot more than what is typically set down. I would recommend his books, yes.
WandererintheWilderness
9hr ago
When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics.
I'm not saying they do. I'm saying that, when arguing that the concept is intuitively correct, they appeal to the tautological inability to do impossible things - to actually rewrite physical reality - and then act like that should generalize to the full theological concept of telos. I think this is rhetorically disingenuous.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
10hr ago
Nice! I'm impressed seeing your Substack. You have really been grinding out the writing my man. I hope to join you soon :)
You just blew my mind.
Though in hindsight I now understand why "he offered to carry her books" was a big childhood romance story trope, in media not much older than I am...
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