While there is a lot of talk of free will in various circles, I always wonder if this has any impact on political libertarianism. Is the question of free will relevant to politics? Or is it more just academic?
Quoth the Wikipedia: Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism, which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position, argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe and that agents have free will, and that, therefore, determinism is false. Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are in fact compatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers.
The first recorded use of the term “libertarianism” was in 1789 by William Belsham in a discussion of free will and in opposition to “necessitarian” (or determinist) views.â
I will not really answer the question of life, free will, and everything. The great free will debate has been, is, and will be raging in the foreseeable future, most likely dragging neuroscientists, physicists, philosophers, and everyone else for the ride. I am neither of those things, but a humble guy in possession of internet access, and as such I have my 0.02 fraction of bitcoin/gold ounce/fiat currency of choice to contribute to the proceedings. And so I shall.
I decided to write … well did I really decide? Maybe from the first moment of the Big Bang it was determined that I will. Oh well, the grandfather of all knowledge must know… AnywayâŚ
I fairly unambiguously believe in free will â because, otherwise, what is the point of it all? My definition of free will may be tailored to confirm my belief, but without it, if everything is predetermined, is there a use for debate or philosophy â besides being predetermined to debate, obviously? I perceive things as if I have at least some amount of free will, so having it or not, by some scientific criteria or other, is not that relevant to me. I couldnât tell the difference, either way.
Obviously I am but a man, and as such, bound by human nature and environment. These things affect everyone. Person X and Y would not make the exact same choices in similar circumstances â there is no such thing as identical circumstances – because each human is different from every point of view. But people being who they are, the existence of some inherent constraints to decisions, does not change the simple reality that humans can and do make decisions.
Free will in my view is that one is put in the position of choosing, and one can use whatever reason and life experience one possesses to do so. All the things that make me me â being either nature or nurture – are part of what constitutes my free will. At least the way I see it.
Decide, get feedback, analyse, change. There are always constraints in nature – gravity, the need for food and air, laws of thermodynamics, and many more. Being bound to human and individual nature does not negate free will, like being short preventing you from playing basketball does not negate free will.
Now some may say at this point you are your brain chemistry, or some such. Be that as it may, there are unique chemical and electrical processes inside each individual human brain. Whether there is or isnât something more than that to conscience or soul is not essential. Free will can be simply a faculty of the uniqueness of the brain â which leads to each brain making its own decisions, processing data in its own way.
Some will add stories about people who had an accident and could no longer control themselves. Some people are sometimes, harsh as it may sound, broken. But most normal people are not. The existence of the blind does not negate that humans in general have sight.
That is not to say you should judge people harshly on their decisions or that you should completely ignore their life and environment. But you can neither eliminate capacity to decide. We all make a bad choice here and there, but 100 bad choices without learning anything, that is something else entirely. And some choices cannot be excused. Taken to extreme, it is not a rapist’s fault he raped someone because he was born one or society made him one.
Agency and responsibility are part of what makes us human, differentiates us from the simpler creatures â aka food. Humans can go beyond instinct. If you remove agency from people and go to predestination you, in a way, dehumanize, or at the very least infantilize them.
In pure mechanical views, humans may be seen as a neural network of sorts: get an input, process it in a way, gen an output. Compare the output to the desired one, and if it is lacking go through a learning algorithm to improve processing. Free will is in the uniqueness of all these factors and the ability to consciously realize how these things work, to change the way you process things, to adapt your learning algorithm. The fact that you are aware of what you are, that you are aware how your choice works, that you are not led by blind instinct.
If you look at free will as something outside physical reality, like God or Soul and whatnot, then the question of is there free will, like the question of the soul, cannot be answered. If you look at it as the existence of reason and self-awareness, like I do, well, there it is.
So is the question of free will relevant to libertarian politics? Not really, I would say. Everyone is a unique, separate entity, with their own preferences and their own choices. Whether these are purely chemistry or something else is not a factor. You perceive what you perceive, wherever it comes from. As such this has nothing to do with political questions.
Even if each human being is “predetermined,” he is predetermined in a unique way which gives a unique preference. Even assuming subjective preference is predetermined, it does not change how this manifests in the market and does not change that humans still want to fulfill that preference to achieve subjective satisfaction. There is no valid argument over the predetermined preference of some being imposed by force over the predetermined preference of others.
Some would say than some people are programmed to make bad choices and can do nothing about it, others are programmed to make better choices. Despite the previously mentioned dehumanising qualities of this view, there is absolutely no way of telling who these people are or getting them into position of power. There is not a clear argument for substituting someoneâs preferred outcome to anotherâs. And no way to decide if âbad choicersâ will be better off with others making their decisions.
Off course it is very possible that we are all predetermined not to live in libertarianism, but under a bunch of incompetent sociopaths. Could go either way, really.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
NOT GIVING IS TAKING
Forced sharing at the point of a gun is caring; that’s how this whole thing works.
P.S. I apologize if I upset you in any way following my leafly.com link last Thursday. My immediate response was probably poorly thought out and I deservedly took a small amount of crap for it.
+1 insensitive asshole.
I had to look up what you were talking about, so definitely no offense taken. Lol. I took it in the nature I assume it was given–light heartedly. đ
Also, that witch’s brew looked interesting. Probably something I’ll have to wait to try–when scarcity isn’t so much a concern.
I was reffering to my *smacks on the nose* comment I used as a reply to your first response.
Apparently you’ve dealt with domestic violence in the past and I was ignorant of that fact…While I generally find people who take it upon themselves to ‘white knight’ on somebody else’s behalf annoying(you seem more than capable of defending yourself) the mild criticism I took for that post made me feel a touch shitty.
No offense intended, hopefully none taken.
Look, that was two marriages ago for me and I only punched her when she got out of line.
I mean, I really had it coming that one time. đ
But seriously, don’t feel shitty, Trigger Hippie. No man has ever laid a hand on me like that–and if one had, I wouldn’t be here having fun on the internet with you all because I’d be in jail for straight murdering him and/or cutting it off in the night. Hyperbolic-ally speaking, of course.
So, no offense taken at all. Don’t even worry about it. đ
A giant Mariska Hargitay on a billboard near work says I’m supposed to say “NO MORE” to that statement.
Just following orders, ma’am.
Good. Thank you. đ
::scratched Mike Schmidt’s name off the list for re-education camp::
Congrats on passing the test!
Don’t speak unless spoken to.
**Shuts right the hell up**
Don’t make me hit you again. You know it hurts me more than it hurts you. In certain ways, anyway.
Look, I learned my lesson twice already! Any more and I’m going to have to spend a day at Sephora!
RAPE IS SEX.
STEVE SMITH IS CASANOVA.
He’s just an undocumented boyfriend.
Deep down you know it to be true. SO easy for others to take care of everything. Don’t worry. Just give them the power. And you can be blissfully ignorant while things just work out.
libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position, argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe and that agents have free will, and that, therefore, determinism is false. Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are in fact compatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers.
Aaand this is why I refuse to engage in “philosophical” debate about libertarianism or anything else.
Ah but was that really a choice? Sometimes philosophical debate is fun. Especially with red wine or brandy.
I can’t take philosophers seriously. Especially after some of the stuf they’ve conned themselves into believing.
Like in all things you have to look for the good in the bad No such thing as philosophers as a group. Let’s not go collectivizing people.
He has no choice, he must.
The main problem is that rebuttals to philosopher A will often be in the form of reference to the work of philosopher B or C, and you go down a rabbit hole of madness.
So I wrote off the whole lot and accepted the losses of the few good apples.
You should read some Stoic philosophers. They’re more practical and grounded in helping one lead a better life.
Don’t read Hume. He’s the beginning of the nonsense that corrupts our era of relativism.
Donât read Hume.
The limits of human knowledge exist. It’s the attempt to fill the void beyond them that causes problems.
Say what you want but
David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel,
wait what? Hume is awesome. He quite rightly points out the limits of empiricism and builds epistemology more than damn near anyone else ever.
You are correct UnCivil but the basics do need to be aired out. Most people operate with basic assumptions that they are not aware of. Sometimes when going over the foundation they become aware of the cracks in the structure.
I have had this happen a few times when talking about self-ownership. The light comes on when they realize what the alternative to self-ownership is.
I agree with you about the philosophers smelling their own farts. The truth is that most of those guys aren’t any smarter then we are and we are perfectly capable of hammering it out ourselves.
On an unrelated note, I have a really crappy hangover.
Free swill?
Well, you get what you pay for…
But there is a weekly Philosopher web comic out there.
http://existentialcomics.com/
Some very “insider baseball” humor, but it has a button if you don’t understand the joke.
I think the author is the sjw postmondern type of philosopher. Definatly a lefty. not that it matters the comic can be amusing
I like this one.
So science is out for you? That’s just natural philosophy.
If you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can chose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I can choose a path that’s clear.
I think I’m going bald.
Do you have a head that’s oddly shaped? Or will you do okay without hair?
I thought the next line was “I will choose free will”.
No need to rush it.
We’d totally have the people who are predetermine to make good choices in power if the people who make bad choices weren’t allowed to vote.
Unfortunately we are predetermined to allow them to vote.
The conundrum of the progressive democrat. How to square the belief that the people have the right to vote with the belief that government should be run by Top Men?
+1 Choice Structure
My kids have the right to vote for dinner tonight. I take it as a nonbinding advisory vote, and then make something else if I don’t like they way they voted.
People have the right to vote for the correct people, see USSR / China / every other totalitarian shithole ever.
That’s exactly what the left believes, as evidenced by their continuing tantrum over Trump’s victory.
I think Rousseau dealt with this (paraphrasing from memory): everyone is required to submit to the Social Contract because it is the General Will of the people. GW was not necessarily majority vote but rather what everyone WOULD agree to if they had full information. But, most people lacked full information because they were not educated. Therefore, the educated needed to help/tell the others what was right.
“Forced to be free” IIRC
That’s just a convoluted way of saying “because I said so”.
Yeah the education think is still big.on lefties, new man and all that. Education meaning the right opinion, which is what they say it is. Blank slate social constructionism whateber you call it, not gonna work
What if two educated people disagree?
One gets shunned and has their status as “educated” revoked.
See that Duke story from earlier today.
The left’s contempt for and desire to dominate the ‘ignorant’ (i.e. people who don’t believe as they do) goes back at least as far as Plato. It’s inherent to that worldview. Hence leftism’s inevitable incompatibility with liberty.
Look, I don’t know what he did, but i think this Will guy has probably served his sentence, and deserves to be freed.
Then why do people keep firing at him?
He’s trying to escape. Duh.
A bunch of religious nuts want him “done”, apparently.
Will done? Switzy!
i was thinking “Thy Will be done”, assuming that clergy all speak with some terrible cockney grammar
Furitive movements, feared for our safety, totality of the circs take your pick
FREE WILLY!!
*Raises fist in air; gets crushed by orca that can’t jump nearly that far.
Orca? I thought you were encouraging indecent exposure
I was. I had no idea that whale was gonna be there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMtoGj0dcSo
Obligatory? Sure, why not?
My comment is on the phrase “ban marriage equality” in the cartoon.
What happened was, we went from a system where the government recognized opposite-sex couples only as married, while allowing a large freedom of those in the private sector to define marriage differently….
to a system where the government recognizes same-sex couples as being on an equal footing with same-sex couples, without allowing people the freedom of those in the private sector to have a different defnition.
So under the old, “evil” system you could act on a definition different from the government’s…and under the new system of “love and tolerance and equality” the government will go after you for holding to a different definition.
Libertarians who support this transition, or contextualize it, or promote it because “it’s not our fault if it happens differently than I want,” are going to buy only a few minutes of acceptance from the progs, after which it will be back to demonizing libertarians as nazi oppressors of LGBLTs.
Agreed.
In the contractual sense, the inclusion of gay marriage into those unions recognized by the State did nothing more than cement the fact that the State is the arbitrator of deciding which contracts are valid and which are not. Instead of religions determining marriages and the State recognizing these unions, it has become where the State determines marriages and religions must recognize these unions or be punished (or soon it will be).
“religions determining marriages”
One might think that even in a country of full-on atheists, the people would realize that man/woman couplings tend to produce children, and that men and women tend to get together to jointly raise their children…simply as a general rule with all sorts of exceptions (war, plague, hippie communes, government payments to single mothers, etc).
Is there anything intrinsic to atheism which requires ignoring these realities? If so, that would be an excellent anti-atheist argument. But I don’t think atheists qua atheists are necessarily so dumb. It’s the foolishness of proggies who want to use the state to reshape the family which is to blame – not atheism *as such.*
At the same time, it seems that organized atheism hasn’t been very effective in resisting the proggy assault on the family, and traditional religions have stepped up to the plate.
Organized atheism is politically progressive. Most atheists aren’t organized, though. There’s a term for idea of any institution not being explicitly conservative getting captured by leftists but I can’t remember it at the moment.
That was one of Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics:
1)Any organization that isn’t explicitly right wing will, over time, become left wing.
2)Everyone is conservative about what they know best.
3)The simplest explanation for the behavior of any bureaucracy is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
I remembered that the name was fitting, but kept thinking of “capture” instead of “conquest”. Thanks!
No one could take a look at my desk or my shed and call me an organized atheist.
You collect gods?
Organized atheism. *snicker*
Atheism proper is the lack of a certain belief. If I dont believe in Bhuddism that doesnt make me an anything except ‘not a bhuddist’.
Once people begin organizing atheism and becoming activists they just look to me like they are forming their own church.
“like they are forming their own church.”
Which wouldn’t contradict atheist principles unless they start believing in God.
Atheism is a specific belief – or nonbelief – about God. Anything more is True Scotsmanism.
Everybody seems to have their own idiosyncratic definition of atheism. I’ve had more than a few arguments about this on the other site. Nailing down a consistent definition of atheist/atheism that is both consistently applied and has descriptive power is almost impossible. Then again, the same is true of defining Christian or Muslim or any other religion. Every individual who self-identifies as X has a definition of X that, in practice, excludes at least some other individuals who also self-identity as X.
One of my favorite examples of this sort of thing was a Biblical literalist who asserted that only those who believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible were Christians. That was fine with me, as far as discussions with him were concerned, but then he would use the statistic that Christians formed the most numerous group of religious adherents on the planet. That’s true, as far as anyone has measured, but only for a totally different definition of Christian than he uses. In fact, most Christians so defined are not Biblical literalists, although the degree to which they revere the Bible sometimes includes accepting parts of it literally.
Anyone who can be a literalist after having read Numbers….
“that only those who believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible were Christians.”
a) No one believes in the literal interpretation of the whole bible.
b) many people who believe in the literal interpretation of the bible still disagree violently about what the literal interpretation is.
I know that, you know that, but this guy… he claimed otherwise. He seemed to sincerely believe the ridiculous things he said, but his on-paper intelligence far outstripped his demonstrable intellectual curiosity.
Yeah; I should have been clearer: I was disagreeing with him, not with you.
And I write that as a Christian who believes the bible is the word of God. But the literalists usually don’t understand their own argument. And much of literalism was a reaction to 19th century Higher Criticism – it was specific to a cultural time & place but has become a new canon.
Reminds me of the KJV absolutist loons I used to work with years ago. The KJV is the only real Bible, and anyone who doesn’t use the KJV is a heretic and not a real Christian. Yes, they included any Christian who doesn’t know English and who therefore reads a Bible in his own language.
I take issue with people who argue that the letter of the text is more important than the spirit of the teachings.
“yes, they included any Christian who doesnât know English and who therefore reads a Bible in his own language.”
Exactly. By their logic, you should translate the KJV into the local language. Dumb. Not to mention that many of the KJV adherents sing praises for the Erasmus translation – which undermines their argument against worldly influences.
And, of course, there were no political or social forces at work in the KJV translation process.
Was his Name Mark? Does he live in Richmond? Cause it seems like you know my Brother
They DO form their own church. It’s called Progressivism.
Now, obviously that’s not all atheists. I myself have dabbled in atheism from time to time, and even now as a practicing Christian I would be lying if I don’t have many bouts of doubt as to what the capital T Truth really is. I never begrudged anyone their beliefs, though, and on the whole have found religion to be a net positive in the lives of most people.
But… the Crusades!!!
The number of people who actually understand what the Crusades were about is a lot smaller than the number of people who mention the Crusades in arguments.
Even if the Crusades were as one-sided a bloodthirsty conquest as its critics like to contend…
…it’s been several centuries, so maybe it’s a bit of a reach when attempting to relativize recent and ongoing massacres perpetrated by Muslims.
To be fair, Crusades apologists (“BUT MUH DEFENSIVE WAR”) aren’t exactly historically accurate either. But as kbolino mentions, actually understanding the nuance of them would significantly negate their utility in stupid modern political arguments.
Either way, it’s weaponized stupid to try to apply modern norms borne of material and political conveniences barely imaginable a century ago, let alone centuries ago, to the goings-on among middle ages Europeans. And I mean weaponized. Nobody is that stupid on accident.
I mean, Europe is still 100% Catholic, absolutely monarchical, and shares a fanatical devotion to the Pope, right? Also, the entire Western hemisphere is indistinguishable from Medieval Europe. It is known.
If we had the sort of people there that were around in earlier times, there’s be a fence of impaled migrants instead of chain link along the balkins road.
But also failing to recognize the huge advances made in political accommodations, science, prosperity, liberty… with, yes, some major growing pains… but undeniably maturing as a civilization. But because of this badly misrepresented caricature of thirteenth-century Europeans, we’re meant to feel chastened, and to withhold judgment of other cultures.
I think I’m a little more concerned by Europe’s attempted self-immolation less than a century ago.
I think Iâm a little more concerned by Europeâs attempted self-immolation less than a century ago.
And look at the number that’s done on the Germans culturally (or at least as a result of de-Nazification afterwards). They’re basically willing to commit national suicide, idiot references to the Crusades pale in comparison.
Even framing it this way takes for granted a paradigm that is completely inaccurate.
I struggled against this all through grad school – the Eurocentric assumption that Europe has always been Supreme – either Supremely Good or Supremely Evil.
In the scale of the world of the eleventh century, there were no considerable powers in Europe. In a straight fight between essentially any of the Turkish powers ruling the ME at that time any European army would have been crushed. There happened to be a lot going on at the time beside the Crusades, and in the ME view of history, the Crusades are little more than a footnote in a period marked by general chaos and conflict (the Mongols figure MUCH more largely in ME history than the Crusaders).
What the Crusaders had in their favor was the element of surprise. In no way did anyone in the ME expect a bunch of random barbarians to show up from the far west and attack them. The Turks simply don’t seem to have taken the Europeans seriously as a threat.
There is no scenario in which the Crusades can be seen as “evil European bullies pushing around the poor innocent Turks.” If anything the Turks were the bullies and the medieval Europeans were post-colonials trying to assert themselves on a world stage on which they were very much minor players.
re: square circle
That’s a good point. I’ve read fairly little about the crusades (*one of my favorite summaries were the 2 chapters in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds“) and that was the impression i got = hardly that of a dominating Europe over a victimized ME … more like an expected tide of dirty-European rabble showing up on the doorstep of a region which ranked the Europeans fairly low on the list of things to worry about.
and that the motivation of the crusade organizers (popes and royalty) was really simply to expel a lot of those dirty rabble and consolidate their lands, not expect them to actually accomplish any regional geopolitical goals.
Terry Jones made an awesome documentary series on the Crusades that’s well worth seeing.
He tends to overstate his points – like his argument that Chaucer’s Knight is a fraud and a mercenary who’s supposed to be completely unsympathetic, he dresses the Crusades up as a comedy of errors, but he’s got some interesting angles on it.
When the Papal Legate died, said rabble basically dropped their entire campaign’s initial military objectives and just made up their own, mostly consisting of “guys with the most spears and swords carve out their own kingdoms”. At the time the Seljuk Turks were also at war with the Fatimids in the Levant, so the Crusaders were basically a wild card that showed up in a pre-existing battlefield and pounced on their weakness.
At the time the Levant was a regularly war torn and minor part of the greater Islamic world, the entire obsession with the Crusades has largely come from both later European revisionism in the wake of Turkish expansion and later Islamic revisionism as Europe began to push way ahead of it.
Indeed – up to and including the sack of Constantinople, which was somewhat contrary to the original mission statement.
I should have also mentioned that i also own that. Most of the things i’ve digested re: the Crusades are either docos like that, or higher-level historical summaries
(and the occasionally tedious novel like Foucaults Pendulum)
*i’d meant “unexpected tide”. But i guess that was easy to figure out.
I have no belief whatsoever in the supernatural. I was aiming at progressives with that comment. People who have read my posts over the years may have noticed that I also have a somewhat anti-progressive bent. Somewhat.
Yes, my point is that there’s nothing in atheism which either requires or precludes a particular political stance.
With this exception: That an atheist cannot say that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
There’s that motte and bailey move again.
Ultimately, the public at large has supplanted liberal social order with bureaucratic-democratic government. Instead of seeing social order as emergent and reflective of the actions of free people, and government as only the steward of that order, they see government as the vanguard for establishing social order, with democracy and good intentions washing away any negative side-effects. It is a perversion of the ideas of the Enlightenment; at its heart is a tacit acceptance of one of the core ideas of fascism, which they all swear up and down to abhor, namely that the state must shape society for the benefit of the right people.
The state should have nothing to say about marriage. Marriage is a religious concept. Government should enforce civil contacts between any two (or more) adults.
Churches should decide what their teachings say about marriage, and marry people according to those teachings.
No, they used the word equality, that’s a magic word. Kind of like how repealing the ACA is ending healthcare equality.
Eddie confirmed for John.
(I don’t disagree.)
I’m not John you half…oops, almost let that one slip.
Now tell him what he REALLY thinks
A lot of people call themselves libertarian. That doesnt make them one. I can think of another website that is chock full of those types.
Hitler. com?
GILLESPIE
Well, then we keep at it until we the progs are never unhappy with us!
RACIST SHITLORD
Won’t…won’t that make us exactly like progressives then?
GILLESPIE
No, because…(long pause) look, studies show that people are abandoning party affiliation in droves! Legal weed! Immigration! GET OUT OF MY COMMENT SECTION!
libertarianism has done triumphed!
Gillespie will be up against a wall facing a communist firing squad and he’ll claim that it’s proof of the libertarian moment because the left wing are taking gun rights seriously. Man needs to retire and let new blood take over (unfortunately Reason hasn’t really hired any red blooded young libertarians), he’s basically an embarrassment now.
The younger generation at Reason is people like Robby and ENB, who are just angling for a job at The Atlantic or Vox.
But fortunately the young firebrand libertarians don’t need to work for Reason. Pre-internet or even in the early 2000s Reason may have been a predominant and recognized publication that spread libertarianism, but that isn’t the case anymore. The Millennial and Generation Z libertarians are being raised by the likes of Lauren Southern, Julie Borowski and Paul Joseph Watson, not Gillespie, and they tend to be on more flexible and independent platforms.
Can’t believe no one has called you on this yet…
–“Libertarians who support this transition, or contextualize it, or promote it because âitâs not our fault if it happens differently than I want,â are going to buy only a few minutes of acceptance from the progs, after which it will be back to demonizing libertarians as nazi oppressors of LGBLTs.”–
You are presuming that anyone of a libertarian persuasion who supported government recognized gay marriage did so to curry favor with progressives and not because they believed it was the morally correct thing to do. While such people probably exist (and most of them are probably writing for certain libertarianish websites/magazines) the overwhelming majority of those who believe in freedom supported gay marriage because they recognized that there was no legitimate reason for the government to not recognize it. what progressives thought of the issue was irrelevant to their thought process
I canât take philosophers seriously. Especially after some of the stuf theyâve conned themselves into believing.
Precisely.
Modern “philosophy” has pretty much descended into shrieks and hoots, as far as I can tell. It’s enough to make a gibbon (not that one) weep.
* gibbon
Not this one?
You can eat cattails?
*re-evaluates life*
http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/if-this-is-feminism-its-been-hijacked-by-the-thought-police/
Related
and the very notion of violence has lost its meaning?
She’s so close to getting it. So close.
still not there. her argument ends up being so much special pleading about how her and Tuvel “We’re the Good Ones!! WE’RE FEMINISTS!!”….
…as though the ridiculous claim that “words cause harm” is never supposed to be used against RightThinking people.
once you grant that claim, you don’t really deserve any sympathy.
She also grants that ‘deadnaming’ trans people IS a crime! its just… well, Jenner doesn’t object! so its OK in this case.
Interesting is how the author comes close to a ‘Robby-esque’ pivot, but avoids it =
The Robby-type would feel the need to vociferously denounce rather than merely confess that they ‘do not endorse something’ merely by defending its right to be stated.
“deadnaming” sounds like something a conservative Orwell imitator would have come up with to parody SJWS.
If this is an actual word being used to shut off discussion, then the SJWs are really into Newspeak.
The whole psychostructure around discussion of “Trans-issues” requires pretending that people can have absolute and total control over their “identity”.
basically, when people (say, a man) decide they’re someone new (now a woman), it is now incumbent on the rest of society to act as though the former never existed in the first place.
Why? Because doing so could prove embarrassing (or in fact sometimes actually dangerous) for the new-person.
Its true that transitioning has social consequences which can be very negative. and maybe its simply ‘polite’ to offer those people the courtesy of never speaking about their prior identities
but its still nothing more than a social-courtesy. Pretending to apply these rules to public-figures like Bruce Jenner or Bradley Manning is absurd. Even more absurd is claiming that violation of those courtesies in the context of an academic paper is some sort of crime that should bar that work from publication.
And when they say “hate speech is not free speech,” this is what they mean – describing certain people who were born with dangly bits as “men” and using their birth name is literally as bad as preaching from Mein Kampf in front of a synagogue.
They have an entire vocabulary that can be translated to “Shut your mouth”.
I usually respond with “Go blow it out of your ass.”
I will repeat. Once you get off of the path and wander around in the weeds pretty soon you are neck deep in a swamp. These people found the deepest part of the swamp in record time. When your philosophy is just a word salad with no relationship to reality that you have learned to parrot back and forth with the likeminded this is what happens.
It is also why they are going to lose…why they are losing. I am really enjoying watching.
The funny thing is, all she did was try to apply simple logic to social justice principles, but learned the hard way that when it runs against the prevailing feelz of the moment, your are excommunicated from the cult.
It’s also a good case study of groupthink.
Agency and responsibility are part of what makes us human, differentiates us from the simpler creatures â aka food.
Wow, way to other the cannibal community.
Good thing we can structure society into providing the right incentives that will make humans act according to their best interests as determined by our betters as if we were nothing more than chess pieces. Soon it will be brain implants that will change our behavior. /prog.
Basically leftists in general don’t believe in free will as they keep trying to order society as if they themselves are above it.
Ever watch little kids playing with dolls?
I got in trouble for playing with dolls. I’d try to dress Barbie up in Ken’s work clothes and make her do Empowering Stuff, but dad knocked some sense into me. Since then I’ve learned to love the patriarchy.
I always decapitated my sister’s Barbies.
My He-Man figures would just carry them off to keep Castle Grayskull tidy.
Yes, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.
I am saying that progressives are like little kids playing with dolls. Stand here. Do this. Say that. For them other people are not individuals with agency, they are like dolls to be micromanaged.
Gotcha.
If I recall The Chocolate Jesus specifically make jokes about the notion of individualism on more than one occasion.
But you didn’t build those with your hard earned tax money. Or something like that.
Basically leftists in general donât believe in free will
I think they see it as something which exists, but should not. They expend an awful lot of energy trying to eradicate it.
I went into college with the idea of getting a philosophy major. A few classes of that and I switched to electrical engineering (and then, lazy bum that I am, computer science). I still got enough credits to get a philosophy minor – woo hoo.
My current view of Philosophy: it’s like arguing over how many angels can dance on the end of the pin. And yes I agree, it can be useful for providing structure to thought, emotions, and politics, but it can also lead one to drive into the metaphorical weeds.
Yeah, then there are all the semantic arguments not to mention ethics which is hourseshit. It’s fun to study for a while and satisfying to leave it behind.
It offered the world science and computers!
But even arguing about the utility of it seems off – why does the inquiry have to produce something concrete? Thinking is enjoyable for some people.
The interesting question for me is that if libertarianism is the morally preferable choice, then why are humans wired for something else?
The “Moral” choice is not always the optimal choice from a genetic propigation scheme. So those not predisposed to actions that ensure continuation will get selected out over time.
Right, just look at ants.
relevant
Morality is not innate to human existence?
Probably this. Morality, like knowledge, is aspirational, not inherent.
Right. We’re cavemen.
I bought spam for probably the first time in my adult life. I think I’ve had vienna sausages more recently than spam. Tastes like my childhood. I wish I had white bread.
You and UnCivil should get along famously.
We already had this grilled spam and cheese sandwich discussion.
Why do you torment me at work?!
When I was 5 or 6 we went to my grandparents lake house for some boating and swimming. I ate a can of vienna sausage and drank a strawberry soda. I got overly hot in the sun and puked it all back up, half out of my nose.
I have not consumed a single vienna sausage since that day. Just the smell of them makes me retch.
It’s an anti-poison defense. The brain tucked away the association of that smell with the fact that something caused your body to purge. The fact that it was not toxic food was lost, as the ‘better safe than sorry’ rule holds sway.
“The fact that it was not toxic food”
We disagree on that.
Don’t make me sit here and defend vienna sausages. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve eaten any.
My story like that involves blackberry brandy. And it’s not quite as innocent as your story.
Vodka here.
Anyway, there’s a technical term.
Conditioned taste aversion
It’s funny how emotionally imprinted foods can be. Vienna sausages meant camping or backpacking, so novelty plus high spirits and rambunctiousness and wading around in lakes.
Spam usually meant mom was feeling flip about parenting for the afternoon, which usually meant she was in a good mood and not yelling at one or the other or both of us. It meant paper plates and reading at the table.
Never mind the fact that these are both garbage food for peasants, they’re still damned tasty.
See, we never had spam, but for me it (or things like Chef Boy-ar-dee) meant that Mom wasn’t in the mood to parent and was in a bad mood.
And once we got our first microwave she used that incessantly and turned meat into leather. đ
when I was about eleven and headed for sleepaway camp, my mom packed a can of vienna sausages in my case. During the trip the can popped open and spilled that juice all over my clothes. When I opened the case later, the stench of it was overwhelmingly vile, and I’ve never eaten one since.
For some reason people used to send us Spam (and Treet, the knockoff Spam) all the time in Iraq. Because we worked in rotating 24 hour shifts and would be at the radar site for 24 hours straight, we used to hoard bagels and cream cheese from the DFAC and make Spam and cream cheese sandwiches in the toaster over in our maintenance van. I don’t think I’ve eaten it once since February 2006.
I may have to give that a shot.
I’m still trying to compose a quip about it’s anti-kosher qualities (meat mixed with dairy, pig remnants in a can, etc)
)))SPAM(((
^Homerun!
It’s shockingly good, although that may have been partially due to a lack of alternatives. Once we rifled through all the good MREs (jambalaya!), that left the stuff we could buy at the PX – Dinty Moore, instant noodle bowls, etc. Spam sandwiches look pretty damned good then.
I do like cream cheese and anchovies.
You like it slimy, salty, and creamy?
But mostly cheap, hence pickled anchovies and not, say, smoked salmon.
Pretty solid breakfast recipe using spam.
Eh, I’ll just have spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and, spam.
I don’t care about determinism because I consider it unfalsifiable.
OK. Let’s say free will is real. What should we expect? Going around, making decisions, and believing we actually have a choice.
OK. Let’s say free will is an illusion. What should we expect? Going around, making decisions, and believing we actually have a choice.
So, determinism predicts the same thing when it’s true and when it’s false.
This reminds me of the arguments that we all live inside the matrix: clearly, you can’t tell we’re experiencing a perfect illusion, so it satisfies the theory!
Yeah, in a non-falsifiable way.
Next.
Pretty much how I feel about it (though I wouldn’t say I don’t “care” about anything that’s unfalsifiable).
If from some higher-order perspective free will doesn’t exist, is that relevant to our perspective? Insofar that we think we can fairly claim to have free will, that’s all that should matter among humans. We should be able to assume it’s so and move on to debating the consequences (notably, political consequences).
Incidentally, the “outside of the human perspective, it shouldn’t matter (i.e. stifle action/debate)” notion is why environmentalism has always struck me as insane and anti-human. Treat the environment in such a way that humans can continue to thrive in it. Will our impact on climate change, for example, affect that maxim? Dubious. But implementing the progs’ anti-market ‘solutions’ to climate change will certainly have a negative effect on human ability to thrive.
One has deterministic influences, influences that can be overcome. Sometimes easily, sometimes not.
“But implementing the progsâ anti-market âsolutionsâ to climate change will certainly have a negative effect on human ability to thrive.”
That is the purpose of environmentalism; to destroy people’s ability to create wealth. Redistributionism destroys their ability to accumulate wealth. Gun control is about destroying people’s ability to defend themselves. LGBTXYZ rights are about destroying the family. Critical theory is about destroying people’s ability to think and communicate. It is a deliberate multi-pronged attack to make people helpless, a calculated attempt to enslave and destroy western civilization. That is the left today. They really are worse than nazis. At least the nazis weren’t trying to destroy civilization.
To what end, though? I usually chalk it up more to simple-mindedness (“it’s not fair! it should be faaiiir!”; “guns are bad because they make killing easier”; etc.) than masterful consciously anti-human machinations. It all does make people helpless and ultimately destroy one’s ‘soul’ (desire to live and seek contentment, improve one’s lot, and so forth), but I can’t see it as calculated, except maybe for a few misanthropes/sociopaths. They act like they’re so moral for it. Doesn’t really seem like the amoral adult-version of fun of kicking over sandcastles and burning ants with magnifying glasses. They really think they’re part of a grander narrative and acting out of greater duty.
I have a few Progressives in my family, and I would characterize it as a fundamental drive to be believe that there really are right answers and we really can have structures of authority that “know” those answers.
My brother, for example, starts from the assumption that we all have a duty to try to improve society, and we should all be working toward that all the time, and doing what we can to make sure we’re all on the same page about what the right things to do are.
If we may not be 100% correct right now about what all the right things to do are, we’re trying our best in good faith, and one day, after all the refining and revising is done, we’ll have a perfect set of policies. Until then, we behave as if the current set of preferred policies is the right one.
Disagreement with the policies is immaterial in-and-of itself. Expressing disagreement with the policies is identifying with the forces that oppose Progress, who will always be in the wrong.
That is a stupefying proposition even given recent history. DOMA used to be the law of the land (for all I know it still is, but superseded by Obergefell). Was DOMA the Best of All Possible Laws according to Pangloss there, at least until Kennedy differed? I’m all for incrementalism, but generally that means starting from an extraordinarily bad premise (“government effectively nationalizes healthcare”) and working back to something tenable (“government is merely hugely intrusive and incompetent at organizing healthcare”).
That’s interesting and rings true.
It’s just so bizarre how you can make the jump from this kind of egalitarianism/democratization to ‘We must have structures of authority to impose the answers on everyone else.’ It’s a leap from basic faith in humanity to complete faithlessness, even misanthropy, and with no coherent impetus that I can tell.
How the left continually does this is just bizarre to me. Communism ostensibly seeks to lift up the working classesâbut needs and precipitates a totalitarian ruling class / organizer. Rousseau’s social contract sounds initially like a consideration and bringing-together of all people, but implies and precipitates a ruling class to enforce it. Anarcho-syndicalismâwho is going to run the guilds to make sure there’s no strife?
From systems that ostensibly appreciate spontaneous order and ignore the necessity of top-down controlsâto necessitating centralization and top-down control, in one bizarre leap.
To the Marxist, totalitarianism is justified as being only temporary until the New Soviet Man eugenics program is complete. That’s how they can justify being against free speech, because counterrevolutionary speech will hinder the progress to utopia, but once we reach utopia we can have all the free speech we’d like, because everyone thinks the same anyway. Genocide is necessary only temporarily until all sense of self-interest is stamped out of the gene pool. The state will “wither away”, but I haven’t seen a mechanism for this ever explained. When your life is micromanaged by legions of bureaucracy as it was in the Soviet Union, it’s not just going to voluntarily relinquish its power. I’d still like to see how they plan to figure that out.
It is about power butt-head. The legions of useful idiots are the only ones that believe any of that drivel. The Goracle doesnt believe in global warming any more than the most solid denier. How many hundreds of millions has he made flying around burning jet fuel by the ton? These people are like the mafia. They feed off of society destroying it in the process. They are just actively making it easier for them to feed, thats all.
Gotcha.
I guess we tend mostly to interact with the True Believers, not the exploiters, so the two groups get muddled under a ‘Prog’ banner, when they’re really quite distinct.
I’m not wont to play exploitative misanthropic games to win people over, though, so if most libertarians are similar I’m not sure how they/we expect to play politics well, especially if people are approaching debate with libertarians how Ed Wuncler’s friend did (below, #16).
Not to indicate that it’s just some sense of moral superiority that accounts for failure of libertarian proselytization. It’s also that lots of internet libertarians don’t actual show any interest in persuading people, but rather argue smugly and sarcastically. Or we focus too much on abstract philosophy and abstruse jargon, as some people mentioned earlier.
My perspective when I leaned left was that all sorts of bad things had been perpetrated by society throughout history by instititutions and for reasons constructed by people. So when you look at societal institutions that have lasted through history they probably bear blame for why bad things happen. Then you’d just look at history and say people believed this, and now things are better so the approximate cause of progress was to continue to restructure society to something better.
You think “destroy civilization”, they think “implement Marxist worker’s paradise”. The only reason the former keeps happening is because the wrong people are in charge and they’re doing it wrong, of course.
And that’s pretty much the essence of the “compatibilist” position, and goes back, as far as I know, to Thomas Bradwardine’s de Causa Dei contra Pelagianos Modernos (OK, I’m plugging my thesis here a bit).
The whole course of nature may be completely deterministic, but the limitations of human perception and knowledge mean that we may as well be making contingent decisions. We probably don’t have a great deal of free will when you really get down to it (and what will we do have likely has its basis in ignorance), but no one has ever successfully argued that that should make any difference to anyone.
What I heard you say is “You’re a genius.”
That is it exactly square circle. I think I posted a essay length rant to that effect some years back at the other site but you said it more succinctly.
Maybe the only interesting thing about it is how it’s a belief that appears to be held by mainly educated people. Why should something unprovable be more persuasive to anyone?
Only caught part of the news story so I might not have all the details: A $500 million letter of credit has been issued to fix the Oroville Dam but all along the Dam folks have been saying it’s a $270 million fix.
So is this straight up, out in the open graft? They’re already over-charging by $230 million?
$270 mil of an individual’s money = $500 mil of other people’s money
I assume the estimates were 270M, the budget is 500M, and the actual cost will be 2.5B.
500M is just the monthly installments.
I mean I understand that point of public works projects aren’t the works themselves. The point is to go over budget and wet many, many beaks but this is so obvious. It’s like they don’t even care if anyone notices.
It does seem excessive – the low bid came in at $275M. $225M is a pretty damn big contingency on a $275M base contract.
The line of credit is not money spent, however, so it’s not de facto graft – it may just be over-caution (potential for massive $$$ in unforeseen conditions when you’re digging on that scale). It’s hard to distribute that money outside the umbrella of on-the-books contracts.
What to keep an eye is that the bids are going based on a elaborate scoring system, not to the low bidder. The two out-of-state contractors who gave the low bids are probably legit. The high bid is a local joint venture called “Oroville Dam Constructors.” My money says they’ll be found the lowest “responsive and responsible” bidder at $344M.
RAGE!
Justin Raimondo continues to bring the hate to just about everyone. It’s Raimondo against the world at this point (except he seems to like Glenn Greenwald, Pat Buchanan, and Ann Coulter).
https://twitter.com/JustinRaimondo/status/861704315731296256
^ Here he states: ‘fuck basic income’ and ‘oh, yeah, Gary Johnson can go to hell’. Rage Level: BITCHY
https://twitter.com/JustinRaimondo/status/861705241502269441
^ Here he mocks Charles Murray for being friends with Ed Crane. ‘Oh yeah, fuck Ed Crane. Team Rothbard, bitch’. Rage Level: CAN’T EVEN
I’ve never liked that guy. Mostly because of how he looks, but also because he’s from White Plains.
The Libertarian lifeguard meme makes me laugh a lot. It just shows how absolutely out of touch and stupid our critics are and why you must take everything they say including criticisms with a grain of salt.
An acquaintance of mine posted that meme up on his FaceDerp wall and I wrote that the premises and the assumptions in this meme were wrong. First off, if the Libertarian Lifeguard is being paid to watch the pool area, our philosophy dictates that we have an obligation to save whomever is drowning. Secondly, I doubt that most Libertarians would let people drown even if they aren’t getting paid if they have the power to save them. Just because I am not forced to do “good” doesn’t mean that I won’t do good. My moral system isn’t shaped by government force.
His response was that if we let Libertarians have their way, corporations could kill their customers and exploit their workers. He rebutted none of my points. That was when I realized that this guy is intellectually dishonest and far too gone to have any sort of discussion with him.
That’s why I don’t talk to those types anymore. It’s the same with gun control.
It’s one thing to disagree with my views but at the very least argue in good faith and actually know what you’re talking about. The guy from my has never met a strawman that he didn’t burn.
Well, I’d let someone drown, but that’s because I can’t swim worth a damn and one victim is better than two. Of course I’d never be hired as a lifeguard and I start away from water deeper than my bathtub so that point is moot.
Never be hired? Sounds on the contrary like the Lifeguard Corp. would hire you to exploit your ineptitude at swimming and thereby cause the deaths of their customers.
Customer acquisition cost? What’s that?
“Oh he’s not a life guard, he’s a life monitor.”
^Excellent.
Is there a version that has the lifeguard reading his union contract?
Or rather, 8 lifeguards standing around, all pointing to their contracts?
Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Shanghai Disneyland.
Justin Raimondo Rage Watch
https://twitter.com/JustinRaimondo/status/857432543288635392
^ Just insulting Nick Gillespie for some reason. Rage Level: AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT