domain:parrhesia.substack.com
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1m ago
But had he not signed the letter, would his funding not been cut? The stated justification by the trump administration has to do with UCLA failing to adequately police antisemitism on its campus, not wokeness.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15m ago
If resources are what you're after, "at the bottom of a decent gravity well" seems like one of the worst places to be. Maybe there are other reasons to like planets, but shipping lots of mass between them seems expensive.
IMO asteroids are a far more interesting near-term target.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
25m ago
Frankly, UCLA as an institution should not be in the business of having official political beliefs.
Correct, it should not. But it is.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-s-steps-to-support-black-life-on-campus
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
33m ago
Ha, I was thinking of the recent brouhaha in the UK with the Afghans, this one had already slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder.
link to the letter https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/scientists-condemn-racist-violence these cut have to do with UCLA's complicity in failing to denounce antisemitism, not the letter ? Had he not signed the letter, presumably his funding would have still been cut?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
41m ago
07mk
42m ago
Fair enough, crushedorange's comment indicates pretty clearly that in his specific case, he abandoned his principles. An excessively charitable reading would be that he learned that his naive implementation of free speech principles actually harmed free speech and, as such, abandoned those principles and replaced them with ones that would increase free speech. But there's no way to actually figure out if he's upset that following his previous principles meant that free speech as a principle was being failed, or he's partisanly upset that following those meant that his side was losing, and though the former would be charitable, the latter seems far more likely.
But on this:
My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
This seems like a straightforward way of restating what I said:
claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially
If a commitment to free speech doesn't count as a "moral principle" if you implement it by taking action that leads to more people being more free to express themselves instead of taking action that leads to any particular instance of someone you observe speaking being unpunished, then that's just straightforward supremacy of deontology over consequentialism as a way of doing morality.
What is currently keeping us from fusion torches? What’s the sticking point?
For power generation, I understand that we haven’t been able to get enough power out to pay for the containment fields. I’d naively expect that to be much easier if you don’t actually want to hold on to the reaction. Unless that just gives you an Orion drive instead of a torch…
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
45m ago
I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.
I don't think the right wing would consider black activists to be "the good ones". Or at least not the same black activists that the left wing would describe as "black activists working to improve their communities".
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
47m ago
Okay, this is much more clear on the distinction and I'm glad we stuck through the conversation to reach this point. Thank you.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
48m ago
Based on family history i've adjusted diet but still anticipate a high risk of plaque buildup, so this is good to know! Any particular brand you trust for nattokinase as a supplement? My tolerance for funk isn't what it used to be; I don't have it in me to eat natto regularly.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
50m ago
At risk of reductio ad fascism, there are quite a number of things which are useful but not good. We should not do those things.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
52m ago
Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?
WandererintheWilderness
54m ago
exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly
I think many people intellectually hold principles that strongly. Perhaps, under duress, they would break. But they would recognize themselves to be acting in an immoral manner. They would feel guilty. They would continue to believe that it would have been more ethical of them to stick to their guns, even if they made excuses for why it wasn't that bad of them to have fallen short of that ideal. All of which I find to be very different from openly saying "holding this belief became inconvenient for me, so I gave it up". The former is flawed human nature failing to live up to its genuinely-held moral principles; the latter is giving up on the idea of having moral principles at all.
I can imagine scenarios where I could be coerced into taking actions that clash against my moral principle that e.g. torture is wrong; but I cannot imagine any scenario where the pressure would result in me surrendering my belief that torture is wrong at the abstract level. I would still consider my actions to have been wrong, and someone who had resisted the pressure to be morally superior to me.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
59m ago
It’s still quietly dominant in Texas, the Midwest, and chunks of New England. But none of those are leading cultural centers like California.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially.
No, not really. As I saw it, the question was more like whether moral principles like "don't persecute people for their speech" are instrumental or axiomatic. My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech will lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
Indeed, you can approach that premise just as easily from a consequentialist framework (ie you may be willing to trade some censorship against a greater good) as a deontological one (ie you will hold yourself to a rule of never, under any circumstance, suppressing speech). I will recognize it as a moral principle you hold in either case.
It is not impossible to justify short-term right-wing censorship based on a consequentialist pursuit of freedom of speech. For example, we have "culture war acceleriationists" mounting arguments of that kind elsewhere in the thread, talking about the need to demonstrate MAD to return to a stable equilibrium later down the line. I'm perfectly willing to believe that they hold free speech as a moral principle, even as they advocate to suppress it in one particular context. But this is not what @crushedoranges was saying. crushedoranges was saying that he'd abandoned his (so-called) principles because holding them had "amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades" for his political tribe. That's not an argument that suppressing some speech now is the best way to maximize free speech later. That's an admission that guaranteeing intellectual freedom was never a goal he believed in for its own sake, just a means to secure unrelated goods for his "side", who naturally ditched it when it failed in that task.
He still has tenure. the funding can be terminated at will
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