domain:parrhesia.substack.com
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.
44m 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.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
It’s entirely plausible that the talent these people actually need isn’t available in the US due to the skilled labor shortage. Particularly the U.S. no longer bothers to produce skilled factory labor.
aeqno
1hr ago
Who would you rather live next to, a randomly chosen elite college faculty member, or a randomly chosen MAGA?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
With violent crime it really is the same very small number of people doing it(yes, I’ve seen whatever Twitter thread you want to reference trying to prove mathematically that 13/52 means some notable percentage of the black male population will commit murder over the course of their lives- it’s all bupkiss because they don’t account for repeat offenders). With school performance and demands for a bailout because of it it is not.
TheBailey
soapy mop
1hr ago
I want to give the same "quiz" to close friends and see their response/reaction.
Be sure to be clear, not handwavey, about whether you're posing the question in terms of still-mainly-fictional "gene editing", or here-and-now "embryo selection".
- "Improving your bloodline" (in the abstract) is one thing.
- Improving your bloodline by siring a bunch of children and killing the "unfit" ones is another thing.
- Some would say improving your bloodline by producing a bunch of embryos and gestating only the "best" ones is a third thing still.
The "shiri's scissors" around prenatal infanticide could distort your inquiry on eugenics unless you take measures to address those distortions.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Also shiner bock beer, German influence in barbecue, etc.
CommittedToTheG
1hr ago
This is not a good argument, because Jesus is clear that we are all born again from God, that we all become a son of God with the same oneness as Jesus is the son of God (John 17:22-23). Of course we are not turned into sons of God in the sense that we are suddenly turned into a divine being. Neither are we the preeminent Son of God, the firstfruits. But it’s totally anachronistic to make this into an argument for his being God, and it just reads as someone trying to trick those unfamiliar with how words were actually used at the time period.
It is basically the same argument Gregory of Nyssa uses. I am far from an expert in ancient or Koine Greek, though, so it is hard for me to independently evaluate what is or is not anachronistic. I agree that we are all called to be sons of God, and also that there is one (Only Begotten) Son of God; we are to attain by grace what He is by nature. And I think that Christ's (eternal) divinity is necessary for salvation. Irenaeus, who stated that man was created in the image and to attain the likeness of God, says:
Jesus Christ was not a mere man, begotten from Joseph in the ordinary course of nature, but was very God, begotten of the Father most high, and very man, born of the Virgin.
- But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. (John 8:36) But, being ignorant of Him who from the Virgin is Emmanuel, they are deprived of His gift, which is eternal life; (Romans 6:23) and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life. To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gift of grace: I said, You are all the sons of the Highest, and gods; but you shall die like men. He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption, but who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God, who became flesh for them. For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?
Ultimately, the importance of adoptionism and “low Christology” is not because it’s the oldest and original, but because it’s essential for the religion to actually have an effect.
Makes sense, I can see how an overemphasis on Christ's divinity causes problems. But I also think that part of the magic of the faith is its ability to hold certain opposites in tension.
hydroacetylene
1hr 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.
As far as politics getting less racially split- well I think that’s probably downstream of social dysfunction. The deal was always ‘blacks vote Democrat, democrats take care of the black community through their machines’, but when the community gets worse young men are going to be the first defectors(and old women thé last)- almost exactly the pattern we see with black Trump supporters. At the end of the day thé black tribe is its own thing, much more ethnic than thé basically-assimilatory red and blue tribes. It’s urban, poor, southern, and honor driven. ‘Blue’ whites might really like black tribe music, and ‘red’ whites might do so much more quietly, but they’re still separate- and both tribes of whites only offer assimilation over the long term. Now this isn’t particularly realistic for blues because there is no place in the blue tribe for 85 IQ types, so the process is a lot slower and less insistent(the red tribe answer would be that there are many eg truck drivers who make a good living while not being good at school, disproportionately black), hence really identitarian blacks are stuck in a coalition agreement with the blues. But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.
07mk
1hr ago
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially. Which may be the case, but not really argued for. I do think there's a strong argument for it, in that consequentialist calculations are irredeemably fraught with bias in such a way as to be meaningless, since people will always, in good faith, calculate the consequences in a way that is biased in their favor.
But the case for taking principles consequentially isn't weak, either. If naively following some principle in a deontological way provably/reliably/logically/etc. reduces [Good Thing], then how do we justify calling the principle "Good?" Well, we don't need to follow it in some naive deontological way, but rather by following consequences.
Let's say a doctor has a personal principle that he will endeavor to make his patients no worse than the counterfactual of if they never saw him. Counterfactuals are intrinsically hard to predict and fraught with bias. So he might decide to avoid his personal bias and just take the deontological position that any action that harms the patient's health is out of bounds for him. Puncturing someone's skin certainly harms the patient's health, even if it's nearly trivial, and so he never draws blood for tests or gives his patients IV (or allows his staff to). This doctor would be less effective than a doctor who follows the exact same principle, but thinks in longer time horizons and figures that the harm of a syringe prick on a patient is outweighed by the benefits of what it enables, in terms of leaving his patient no worse off than otherwise. And in society at large, people who believe in the same principle would commonly prefer the latter consequentialist doctor as fulfilling their principles better than the former deontologist one.
So we could follow the principle of free speech by just never punishing anyone for saying anything (with rare exceptions, etc.) and let the chips fall where they may. I would prefer this, personally. We could also follow it by checking how certain behaviors affect people's ability to exercise free speech in society and then take the action that seems most likely to increase it (or not reduce it or maximize some metric or etc.). I would prefer not this, personally, because, again, this sort of prediction is so fraught with bias that I don't know that there's a way to do it credibly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with me on that.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
You could just go to a tanning booth.
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.
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