domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
GBRK
2m ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'?
That is why he wrote it that way. He's describing a character, a type of character even, not just a caricature.
Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
I'm all for building artificial worlds. I'm skeptical "better" plants and animals are possible; we've altered plants and animals before, and we can doubtless alter them far more radically in the future, but what makes those alterations "better"? "Living as long as one wants, regardless of age" used to be something I was very excited for, less so after contemplating the downsides. All the pathways to serious immortality I'm aware of involve making the sum of me fully legible, and the risks of that very likely outweigh any possible benefit, assuming it's even possible.
But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
The alternative is thinking that our mastery is not ever-increasing in the way you seem to mean. Technology can and has greatly increased, and maybe it will greatly increase even more, but technology is not the same thing as mastery. If you want a highly reductive example of the difference between the two, compare the original Snow White film to the remake. The people who made the remake had vastly more technology, vastly more resources, vastly more experience in filmmaking to draw on; more "mastery", right? So why was the original a masterpiece, and the remake a trash disaster? Again, that's a highly reductive example, it seems to me that the principle generalizes quite widely.
I don't think we are moving toward ever-increasing mastery. I don't think we have to stop tech advancement either. I think what will happen next is pretty similar to what has happened before: we'll build something wondrous, and then the contradictions will assert themselves and it will all fall apart.
Technology is the concentration of power. Concentrated power is individual power. There is almost certainly a level of individual power that society, as we understand the term, can't contain or channel, and once that level is achieved society will simply fail. Society maintains technology; when society fails, likely the technology will fail as well, and then it's back down the curve for the survivors.
Maybe this time will be different. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
ulyssessword
14m ago
Where are you finding that?
anti_dan
16m ago
His tone is annoying, but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.
The point of HBD discourse is to show the progressives are being done when they are campaigning for whatever in vogue racial justice program they are currently pursuing. The left is, instead, currently caught up in a fervor for Hamas and Iran, which while low IQ nations compared to their foe Israel, the left isn't really pursuing their fight along that line. So its not really relevant to parrying the set of attacks currently being deployed. If anything it could be used for dunking on Dems, in the "haha dummies thought a bunch of 90 IQ cousin-f*ckers could win a war with 110 IQ Jews" but that is probably not what the smart people (and that is who ever engages in HBD discourse) are interested in doing.
GBRK
17m ago
"States issue citizenship" is a good enough framing that I won't dispute it. But there a particular bullet I'm interested to see if you're willing to bite: "children could only inherit citizenship from their parents" does not imply "children should inherit citizenship from their parents." You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship. Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis, presumably to reward pro-social behavior, there are plenty of reasons why it should also exclude a particular citizen's baby from also having citizenship? That doesn't violate the citizen's rights-- nowhere in the constitution is it enumerated that citizens have a right to have citizen babies. All the relevant text is about the born or naturalized individual's rights.
GBRK
26m ago
tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???
Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.
The correlation is weak at best and even if it was strong, the same source in 2024 tells a different story.
In the meantime, being in a heterosexual marriage appears a more reliable predictor of voting preference than either racial or party affiliation.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
37m ago
How many examples with how many upvotes would i have to provide to convince you that it's not a fluke? How explict do they have to be? Will you accept plain language at its meaning, or should i expect you to play the old "defund the police doesn't literally mean defunding the police" card?
I felt what I consider an appropriate level of bad one particular time I found a rat in a traditional trap. It was gravely maimed, and as I went to put it out of its misery I saw, as it had lain incapacitated, its friends or children had taken the opportunity to feast on its guts. If I had chosen to not put it out of its misery, then I would have thought less of myself. The experience did not make me think more highly of rats, but it's not as if I am above considering the suffering of other animals.
Targeting an animal one already hopes to exterminate for pest control is not outlandishly cruel. To argue against that one needs to argue against effective rodent control more generally.
If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me. Except, in this case, instead of one weird kid you make sure your child stays away from, it's all of society that is going out of their way to torture rats. That what I imagine and have been told the emotional prism is like for dedicated vegans. As a personal choice it is common and well enough. The personal choice I don't have much objection to. The more foreign value impositions, especially done in a way that where they only logically hint at the most moral ends, are where I find objection.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
48m ago
Wash it? Pretty much never. It's a light color that doesn't show dirt much, the paint job is roasted, and there's a bit of body damage so washing it doesn't really make it look much better. I keep the interior reasonably clean, though, and my tools are organized in the trunk.
I find anything to do with cleaning cars to be a chore, but worth it when I have a car where the effort actually pays off.
YE_GUILTY
58m ago
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people.
Hm. Just today, I passed a swimming pool and noticed an insect struggling in the water. It was a bee. Did I have a Singerian obligation to hop the fence and rescue the 7-15% of a drowning child?
Suffering is essentially just the unlearning gradient in an ML model. Even a single neuron can suffer. Even a single atom can suffer.
(That being said, I don't care about the suffering of neurons and atoms-- or plants, or animals, or basically anything except humans, near-human animals like apes elephants, plus a few pets I irrationally love.)
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