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MathWizard
Good things are good
13hr ago
I would broadly agree that glory as a motivation is easier to follow, as it's more inherently rewarding. While love for others is less inherently rewarding and thus a larger sacrifice. Which in turn is why it is MORE good. It is... easy is not the right word... easier to follow glory, to do good things which will give you glory, than it is to do good things which will merely help others but not yourself. Someone who is filled with a desire for glory but not a love for their neighbors might do all kinds of things, and only by sheer coincidence will those things be truly good, while someone who is filled with a love for their neighbors and no desire for glory will live a humble and self sacrificing life doing small amounts of good. Although someone with both will do large acts of good that help many many people, and thus is even better.
A motivation for glory is a smaller, easier stepping stone to reach. A motivation of love for humanity is a greater goal which is much much harder to attain but of greater value if attained.
If Christ’s motivation was glory, both for his Father and for his divine family and for himself, then we would likewise imitate this, and this would lead to glorious moral acts. But if Christ’s motivation was pure and uncorrupted “love for humanity”, then we will only feel a gnawing discomfort at the impossibility of our ever replicating this motivation in any legitimate sense.
It's axiomatic that no human can possibly reach the true goodness of Jesus. We are imperfect sinful humans. So you have to figure out how to not despair at never reaching the goal, and do your best anyway. Again, I think that on a fundamental level there isn't truly a distinction between actions which glorify ourselves, actions which glorify God, and actions which show love to humanity. They're the same actions. There are things which people might define as "glory" which harm people like being a murderous conqueror, but don't give true glory because they are evil and sinful. Ultimately true glory comes from doing the most good. So you don't really have to choose, just do all the good things for all the good reasons. But I think love for humanity, although harder to attain, is harder to corrupt once present. Still possible, but harder. There are fewer examples of actions which superficially seem loving but are actually evil than there are actions which superficially seem glorious but are actually evil. But in the end I think Jesus was motivated by all of them, so imitating him by yourself following all of the motivations seems like a more robust way to do good than following one of them to the exclusion of the others. You're more likely to notice when you're being led astray when the motivations appear to diverge instead of converge like they're supposed to.
Rov_Scam
14hr ago
I'm not sure what refusals they're referring to, since he answered Epstein questions during his confirmation hearings and again during a House Oversight Committee hearing after it became big news, though I'm not sure if the latter worked the intelligence angle (the former was only five minutes and was unremarkable). He did explicitly tell OPR that he had no information about Epstein being an intelligence asset, though I'm not sure if this interview was under oath. He isn't scheduled to testify in front of the current House committee, but I can't see any information indicating any refusal or reluctance, only that he isn't on the witness list.
faceh
14hr ago
Yep. I can think of possible ways around it, but when the failure mode/Schelling point is "They destroy us immediately and completely" I'd guess most Civs will end up being defectors.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
Optics matter, sometimes. I vaguely recall reading on WP over some Eastern European government which fell because they pardoned someone who had been convicted in some orphanage child sex scandal.
2rafa
14hr ago
Not really. Assuming the maximalist realistic interpretations of both events are true, there is:
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Epstein was part of an Israeli kompromat operation targeting powerful people that was covered up by the US government / CIA etc.
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A senior Israeli official was caught in a sting operation and avoided a lengthy jail sentence because the US government let him go home under pressure from Israel.
It is doubtful that the sting op targeting some (other than this guy) randoms in Nevada involved targeting part of the same kind of operation as that alleged to be run by Epstein, although I suppose more will be revealed.
The second is a diplomatic incident where a senior foreign official is caught and then allowed to leave (like the Harry Dunn killing case), the first is an allegation about a blackmail scheme run by someone supposedly working for the government that employed the official in the second allegation. That they both involve sex crimes doesn’t really link them together.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
Tge sleeper has awakened.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
I mean it depends. If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic. A real-deal alien civilization sending a real spaceship to earth is likely to cause more panic. That helps no one. As far as who meets tge aliens, I’d look for a level headed diplomat if anything.
faceh
14hr ago
Still doesn't create a 'moral' argument for not going out there, and instead staying on the one planet we currently have.
Note I'm not targetting anybody who doesn't want to fund space exploits. If you personally want to stay on earth, and don't care to put money into the space exploration fund, that's fine with me.
And as I intimated in my post from a few days ago that I linked to up there, I don't think we can obtain an answer to The Last Question without hitting Kardashev II status, at least.
Of course, if you, yourself, decide "Entropy can never be reversed, and that alone shows that we won't solve anything by leaving this planet, why bother?" I don't blame you either.
But the final, nigh-insurmountable argument is... wouldn't it just be more fun? Can't we imagine how much better life would be if we were consuming almost all of the sun's energy, and using all the excess to do things that we enjoy? And not having to fight each other over it? We can build homes where anybody who wants to live 'a certain way' can do that! If somebody dislikes people altogether, they can launch themselves into deep space on a whim.
I'm not saying we go full Culture, a la Iain Banks, but if you already agree that its better to say in the 'real' world rather than plug into a 'world sim' VR program forever, (not saying you do) then shouldn't it be almost self-evident that we will need to acquire more energy and resources so as to give ourselves more and more interesting things to do, games to play, (real) experiences to have?
Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.
Of course, with Da Jooos, there's always some genius like Shaun King to get things started.
I think it would be more fair to say, despite any conspiracy and maximally antagonistic JIDF posting, that the guy who started this is the guy who got himself arrested in America on account of luring a child to have sex with him and the fact that the same man is now free as a bird in Israel and not trapped in a small concrete box in Nevada.
It certainly does not help the JIDF case in this matter that the person ultimately responsible for his release, whether they were actually involved or not, is an Israeli born Jew and alleged zionist. Along the with the District attorney allegedly being jewish as well. Though that may all be besides the point.
The 'conspiracy angle' between this and Epstein is not known to me, and I don't see it being false as a relevant point to anything Joo related in totality, as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice. This just seems like another example of that ugly reality which is allowed to persist for reasons the JIDF posters are sure to be able to rationalize away as perfectly coincidentally natural.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
14hr ago
Oh my god, you're right. I was raised with "Hell is other people".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever.
No, it hasn't. Taking slaves has generally been a method of offsetting the costs and risks of war, not a primary war aim at the civilization scale. Babylon conquered Israel because Israel refused to submit to imperial power and/or violated suzerainty. The Romans were not sacking Syracuse to capture Archimedes, but to subdue the polity. The British Empire was not in India to gain Indian soldiers, they were there to secure value and resources for the homeland. Indian soldiers made that cheaper from the perspective of the homeland.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
To be fair, if you’re the minority party, you need every vote and supporter you can get. That’s how elections work— get the numbers, or take a seat while the other side does whatever they want. If MAGA wasn’t in power, they would not worry about Fuentes unless he was driving away potential red voters.
faceh
14hr ago
Enjoy it while you can. Remember we were doing "Iran is about to kick off WWIII" posting just two months ago.
Last month a bunch of people got killed by flooding (including kids) and there was fighting over whether Trump was somehow responsible for it due to NOAA cuts that hadn't taken effect yet.
Comparatively lighthearted fare is welcome, I say.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
14hr ago
Good god it’s a slow news cycle.
APnews has had a week of breathless reporting about Ukraine ceasefire negotiations. Pretty, pretty slow.
faceh
14hr ago
For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.
Technically it was a handful of carefully selected schmucks.
And it was kinda justified given that they lived in a surveillance state where aliens could intercept ANY communications but couldn't read into human minds.
That doesn't follow. There are colossal differences between:
- Suspecting that there are many large companies with massive amounts of fake email job deadweight
- Being able to reliably identify companies with more (or less) fake email job deadweight
- Being able to reliably generate above market returns using the information gleaned from 2)
Where 2) would be quite difficult for professional investors, much less regular individual investors. And even conditional on if one somehow were able to pull off 2), modern financial theory would suggest 3) is still highly unlikely. Since if you could pull off 2), so could others, and thus there leaves no opportunity for arbitrage.
Note that it’s unclear what the directionality of such an investment thesis should be. With or without arbitrage, one could argue that high-bullshit-email-job companies should have higher expected returns, since the market would perceive them as riskier in being more vulnerable to disruption.
Corvos
14hr ago
More likely to be the other way round, don't you think? People who feel a compulsive need to travel are going to be drawn to occupations that let them do so. Combine that with the tendency of children to do the same job as their parents et voila.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14hr ago
How is this CW?
I guess I should be glad that the final frontier isn’t also, somehow, a referendum on Donald Trump. That impulse is at war with the one that tells me this is dumber than a sack of primitive, ferrous construction equipment.
In unrelated news, have you read The Dark Forest? Not for the apocalyptica. For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14hr ago
I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.
Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would be beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14hr ago
Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).
Gaashk
14hr ago
Sure. That's in the drunk college student, but way way faster realm. Nice to have, provides consumer surplus at free tier or $20/month, but probably not $200/month.
Shrike
14hr ago
Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."
Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.
(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)
Quantumfreakonomics
14hr ago
Good god it’s a slow news cycle. We’re actually speculating on whether or not a nearby comet is aliens.
Apparently never happened.
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