Like many young people with delusions of intellectualism, I once determined to devise a complete system of morality from first principles. The two rules I started with aren’t important, but when playing out scenarios to see if these standards gave results that aligned with my intuition I found that there wasn’t a way of acting in a purely good manner when responding to someone who meant to do harm. This lead to my first moral corollary: “there is no moral solution to an immoral situation.” And indeed, there were very few actions which could be taken in any circumstances that under my rules would be purely moral.1 Sex with a willing partner was one, so my moral system had that going for it at least.
Obviously, I’m not the first person to notice that moral perfection is impossible in life. Quite a few religions have this as dogma, though they may differ as to whether moral perfectibility is a possibility. They do tend to agree that you should at least make the attempt. I’m not so sure.
Here’s the thing – humans are impure. In our very essence. For our very existence. Purity in the physical world is literally death. For life to exist, for anything at all in the universe to happen, there needs to be asymmetry. “Pure” air isn’t. “Pure” water can’t exist for times that humans can perceive or under conditions that humans can survive. When the Heat Death of the universe occurs, all will be in perfect balance, perfectly in equilibrium, and perfectly dead. Nothing will ever happen again.
And yet, for a species that physically abhors perfection, we certainly do mentally or spiritually strive for it. A philosophy that isn’t self-consistent is rejected. We revere logic. We celebrate lives lived according to a “code.” We spend vast amounts of effort in discovering the rules under which the universe works, and more importantly, how these all must be rewrites of a single very simple set of rules. The quest for a Grand Unified Theory is one of faith that the universe is perfect. And so far, that faith seems justified. Math… works.2 A completely abstract coding system from inside the human mind seems to map exactly to the physical universe, to the extent that “the universe is made of math” is a cliché or truism among the young, hip, and self-consciously nerdy. General Relativity made successful predictions that couldn’t be confirmed for a hundred years until technology caught up. The De Broglie wavelength was a silly mathematical game that turned out to be physically real. e and pi pop up while investigating phenomena that have nothing to do with circles or growth.
So we are impure beings on an impure world in an out-of-balance universe. Why should we try to live according to logically perfect ideas? Maybe because the underlying quintessence of the universe is perfect? Except, no. It’s not, or at least there is evidence it’s not. There’s those nasty Goedel Incompleteness Theorems lurking about indicating that math itself isn’t perfect, and the success of quantum mechanics indicating that the universe has an indeterministic nature – that there is a certain irreducible unknowability to existence. So… the universe is also imperfect, or at least indistinguishable from one which is? Why then do we imperfect creatures want perfection?
I don’t know why, but I know that humans do. And we’re good at it. So good, that people are complacent in our ability to reason abstractly and follow logical chains. We are so used to having these chains work that we forget to check our work. So much begins with “if A, then B” but without bothering to check on the validity of A. And this problem begins to surface when people try to live their necessarily imperfect lives interacting with other necessarily imperfect people according to logically pure ideals3. It can’t work. And the more that a person tries to make it work, the more they add epicycles and strictures to support their effort in pure living, the more likely they are to come to the conclusions that (other) people are the problem. It was fashionable for quite a while to claim that religion was the greatest source of and most common cause for all of the horrors that humans inflict on each other. But to the extent that was ever true, it was just one special case of the general problem of valuing the perfect over the human, as the history of atheistic utopianism demonstrates.
My libertarianism (to the extent that label has any applicability) has strong overtones of harm reduction and “inactivism.” It seems to me that an angry person or a madman can hurt people, but to have industrial-scale carnage, you have to be striving for something more than personal satisfaction. When a cause is worth killing for, you can motivate people to kill for it. Ideals based on the concrete, a rejection of abstract utilitarianism, these things are self-limiting. Unless of course, you decide that the only right way of living is to live by such beliefs and the world could be made perfect if only everyone else would also live by these precepts…
So, if you find that you can’t live life exactly according to the precepts of a code/philosophy/religion that doesn’t make you a bad person (there are surely other reasons for that last bit to be true). It means you’ve found the place where the map doesn’t match the terrain. I have neither the wisdom nor the authority to advise you on how much time to spend revising the map. Just know that I have chosen to say “meh, whatever”4 and continue on whenever anyone accuses me of intellectual inconsistency.
1Because of my noticing that almost every action had moral and immoral components, I coined another snappy witticism: “People who claim the world isn’t black and white aren’t looking closely enough.” Actions which are morally ambiguous aren’t because of an absence of moral value, it’s because they have a multiplicity of same. However, instead of taking both the blame and the credit for one’s actions, it is now very popular to pretend that these somehow offset each other and we get things like “civil disobedience” that involves no repercussions, only a staged arrest played for the camera.
2Sort of. I mean, it works really really well, and for a surprising number of applications where intuition says it shouldn’t. However, it also can suggest things that simply can’t have a physical existence and that then get taken very seriously by very smart people. Stephen Hawking once solved the problems with the Big Bang by multiplying time by i. For another youtube video on how “the equations say this is possible, as long as you assume a few impossible things are true” check out this one on time travel
3This problem is at the heart of theodicy in general and the 3-omni “disproof” of God in particular. It only works by treating omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence as terms that are both definable and correspond to something that exists in the universe. Not to get into detail why omniscience is the only term that might fit those two categories, I’ll just say any definition of omnipotent that includes “…and yet must be constrained by logic” is self-negating.
4 This footnote intentionally left blank
5Bonus youtube link on the limits on human effort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs&list=PLFs4vir_WsTwEd-nJgVJCZPNL3HALHHpF
I sacrifice my First First for your sins, Glibertariat. For those who except me as their Lord and Savior, no other philosophy is needed.
Who are you?
The savior of the Brochetittes. The true Chosen People.
…and on topic too. Well done.
You are, indeed, excepted as Lord and Savior.
You and Four Score are accepted as Brochetittes. There are no refunds.
Brioche Titties.
I think you are confused about the difference between “accepted” and “excepted”.
That’s an accepted exception. Except for its acceptance, of course.
Well played.
Here’s the thing – humans are impure. In our very essence. For our very existence. – I don’t get it. impure compared to what? Humans are what they are. Any philosophy should start with this foundation
And yet, for a species that physically abhors perfection, we certainly do mentally or spiritually strive for it. – I don’t
We revere logic – who is this we, cause last I heard logic is a tool of white supremacist cishet patriarchy
We celebrate lives lived according to a “code.” We spend vast amounts of effort in discovering the rules under which the universe works, and more importantly, how these all must be rewrites of a single very simple set of rules. – most humans don’t do any of these things
Level one: Humans are physically a mixture of mixtures all jumbled together heterogenously.
Level two: All biological processes — including thought — require that some collection of atoms be broken down somewhere. And this transformation produces waste. People must create shit.
Level three: For any of this to have happened, the universe must be in a constant state of decay. The seond law of thermodynamics and such.
Three different definitions of impurity.
I honestly don’t get it. Humans are not impure unless compared to some strange purity that has nothing to do with reality.
Any philosophy should be based based on what humans are. not on an ideal construct of what humans should be. You start from that and work your way.
I honestly don’t get what you’re saying. By any normal English definition of the word “pure,” humans are impure. If you’re saying “humans can’t be impure because humans have to be compared to humans” that seems really circular.
The central part of this was about the contrast of the ideal and the real. And why is it that the former should be seen as desirable.
What I am saying is I see no point in ideals not based in reality. You can imagine anything. And that works for fiction. I don’t see the point of pure and impure when it comes to humans. In real life you need to start with reality not with random imaginings.
Ah, well, if that is so, why does math work so friggin well?
Why can you take equations derived from some particular observation of reality, apply it in relation to a (apparently) unrelated phenomenon and find that it describes it? Go back to the De Broglie wavelength. We’ve all been educated that wave/particle duality is a thing, but back when that was discovered, there was no empirical evidence to suggest it was true. But the math said it was, and it was.
why does math work so friggin well? – because math has nothing to do with human nature. Laws of maths and physics are in the end rooted in reality.
So you’re creating a disjunction between “reality” and “humans” or “human nature.” I’m not disagreeing with you… necessarily, though it does seem like humans, being part of reality and all, should have some connection thereto.
But here’s the thing: “Math” is just something that humans thought up. There is absolutely no physical aspect to math. Even if humans aren’t anything more than the end result of physical processes, Math isn’t. It’s as “pure” a human creation as the color magenta.
So you’re creating a disjunction between “reality” and “humans” – no I am saying that human nature is rooted in reality. whether you can or cannot describe it by equations at this point in time is not really relevant. Human nature if it is a set of equations, it is that set of equations. I see no point in assigning it terms like pure and impure. I see no point in idealism e.g using other equations which one my find preferable to the actual ones. If the universe decays, it decays. It is not impure. It just is.
Now I’m wondering if we’re hitting some sort of semantic/connotative distinction I’m not grasping.
When would you use the term “pure?”
When would you use the term “pure” – I don’t know. I rarely do… when it comes to some substance that is as pure as possible I suppose. Certainly not in philosophy, unless about something I oppose.
Great Article Adahn. The Strugle between Ideals and Reality is something i’ve been tussling around with for a few months. I strongly consider myself an Idealist, even though i know that is counter to the way many libertarians would consider themselves. For example, i recognize that the world is imperfect but that it could be better. At the same time I don’t believe perfection is possible to achieve in this life/universe etc.
It’s given me some more angles to look at this as i chew on it some more. Thanks!
Yeah. I personally don’t believe in perfectibility as regards human beings. Evidence? Just look at history. Are we capable of improvement (in the sense of becoming better people)? Hell, yes. Just don’t try to improve (or perfect) your neighbor.
I once determined to devise a complete system of morality from first principles.
I haven’t read past this yet, and I already have a short response: Gödel.
Okay, now to read more.
A philosophy that isn’t self-consistent is rejected.
See above.
Thing with Go(umlat)del is that (IIRC) he didn’t prove math to be inconsistent, just incomplete. And that any system of logic will be incomplete.
Incomplete OR inconsistent. You can take your choice. If it is complete, it will be inconsistent.
Or it can be consistent and incomplete.
Unless you are taking a metaphyiscal perspective that MATH and LOGIC are universal ideals from a higher realm of consciousness (omni or not), you shouldn’t treat them as theologic objects.
They are constructs of the human mind, tools to understand our world/existence. They are extraordinarily useful, even having survival value (if you gleam the purely evolutionary cube), but they are not things which exist outside of humanity.
Plato condemned the West to the search for the perfect.
Hmmm. Im split….
Like i said i am quite the idealist. But a lot of Plato i do end up rejecting. I need to understand that space of philosophy better.
*koff*
I saw it, You got to it a few paragraphs too late. You should always lead with Gödel.
Its not that math isn’t perfect, its that math is either inconsistent or incomplete.
It is still perfect.
Perfect means complete. That’s why the verb tenses are “past perfect” etc.
You can have complete, it will just be inconsistent!
Philosophy is Futile – I am unconvinced.
Also you seem to make to many assumptions about what the average human does and thinks. Many would read this call you a fag and move on with their lives without any pause.
meh, whatever
right. well that settles it I suppose
Yeah, I wouldn’t say philosophy is futile. More, a complete/consistent/”perfect” philosophy is impossible.
Oh, B, I do ” For those who except me as their Lord and Savior,” .
I do except you but I don’t accept you. Now get bent !
Words have meaning? Or did we change that?
Only if you’re Humpty Dumpty.
I do believe that HM schooled us that meanings have words.
Our confusion that words have meanings arises, I believe, from the way we encounter new words, don’t know the meaning they are for, and then discover that meaning. Because we typically start with a word and discover the meaning, it looks like word first, meaning second, or “words have meanings”.
hehe
give that man some Joker applause!
Morality isn’t a philosophical idea, it’s the feels. Leave morality out of any debate you want to have a logical conclusion.
While that’s true, you shouldn’t _always_ want to have a logical discussion. Pure total logic leaves you lying in bed all day waiting to die. The key is to tell yourself just enough “lies” to derive purpose. Emotions are useful, or else Darwin would have disposed of them a long time ago.
I’m all about morality, I just don’t think it belongs in politics or other philosophy.
Whatever basis you think you have for that preference is itself moral. Otherwise you could not decide that it doesn’t belong.
Morality=it makes me feel like I done bad.
Logic= This leads to desired outcome, where desired outcome still might make feel like I done bad.
Logic does not contain anything which allows judgments. The normative component is moral. It does not have to be fleshed out to the level of “touching your peepee is naughty.” It starts out at the level of is pleasure a good? Is survival? No course of action is desirable absent some standard that determines what is desirable. A person bent on suicide finds the placing of an airbag under the building they jumped off undesirable. A person who falls off the same building accidentally does not. When people object to morality they are generally objecting to some particular level of detail. “The survival of our Constitutional Republic is a desirable outcome” is a moral stance.
Again, value judgments are not morality. Morality is THE FEELS. Morally, to me, drugs are bad, premarital sex is bad, so on and so forth. Those are not the things that should decide laws.
yeah
and I don’t think there are any limits to what a moral person might do once intercepting others is suitably rationalized (kill baby Hitler, Col Kurtz), so I avoid moral questions
to put liberty first is to tolerate a world with billions of bad, refutable ideas and horrible but preventable decisions; I only hope that human nature is typically tolerant enough that my own lifestyle will avoid detection, scrutiny, judgment, and penalty
Sorry, CPRM but I think you have that wrong. Morality is a set of value judgements, not a set of feels. What is moral and what feels good or bad often don’t line up.
Morality, as a discipline, is the normative branch of philosophy. it is definitionally identical to value judgments. Your counter examples are specific moral beliefs you hold that you do not think should be imposed because of yet another moral belief you hold which is that freedom is more important than forced compliance with those other strictures. You want the higher order moral precept in the law, and are willing to leave the lower order ones out because including them violates the higher order precept. In other words. Morality even in your example is involved in the law.
Not a feature of politics
Not true. Not at all true. Without the normative element there is no guide to what is a desirable (and no concept even of desirable) conclusion. You cannot choose paths logically unless you have a basis for preferring outcomes.
A value judgement is not the same as morality. To make the judgement that freedom is better than oppression is not a moral judgement. Morality is what one feels to be wrong, not what I reasons to be wrong.
value judgments = morality. It is tautological. Freedom is better than oppression is absolutely a moral judgment. Feels certainly are involved, but are unreliable indicators because while value judgments may be derived from feelings they also can cause feelings.
No.
You are oversimplifying, to the point of error, by ignoring aesthetics, which is both a matter for philosophy and disjunct from morality.
The general question of value is broader than ethics/morality.
I would argue that to the extent that aesthetics is an intellectual discipline it belongs under ethics and disagree with your premise that Beauty is somehow distinct from the other ‘goods’ that are considered in Ethics.
I think Kant would disagree with you.
Kant was a bit of an asshole though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMfCTBkMgKY&
Morality is what lends to the interesting debates. Without it you are just arguing facts, and not affecting what people actually care about.
This is going to be the subject of my next sermon.
Morality is what has lead to all the wrongs in every political system. It FEELS icky that some people have more than others, it FEELS wrong to do x, thus it must be outlawed.
I’m pretty sure the Communists were being scientific. Had nothing to do with morals. They just were scientifically deducing that workers rights had been infringed by the captialist class.
Or, they were co-opting ‘#SCIENCE!’ to try to spread their new morality. Fine, go found New Moralstan. Just leave me alone (even though by being left alone I’ll continue to live my life by a morality I would not force on anyone).
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing that Certain morals shouldn’t be enforced on others, but that itself is a moral question (it uses should, rather than is).
Is vs Ought is the main thing. I can say the sky is blue, and say that is not a moral question, because i can say it. I can say the Sky ought to be blue, but that is a moral question because i’m saying that regardless of weather it is or isn’t blue, the sky should be blue.
Maybe I’m too old for the mental masturbation. Because this sounds like a Marxist bitching about capitalism without even knowing what capital is – and “capital” is much more easily defined than “moral”.
We still don’t know what we don’t know yet, nor the right questions to ask,
silly Humans………
Nice post Adahn,
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
– Bertrand Russel
He paraphrased Yeats.
Are you sure?
e and pi pop up while investigating phenomena that have nothing to do with circles or growth.
i pops up all over the place too. It seems like a silly comcept, but it is real.
Hell, e^iπ = -1 makes no sense at first glance.
Stoicism has seen a significant resurgence on the internet the last few years and despite the significant problems I have with it as a guiding philosophy (eg, research has ably shown that no you are not always in “control” of your own actions), that there’s substantial benefits one can gain from it, particularly for the rudderless. I tended toward nihilism for a very long time and a part of me still thinks that it’s ultimately “right.” But I’ve found there’s more important things than being “right” (or as you put it, “perfect”). A lot of irrationality leads to misery, but so does complete and total rationality. A few bits of irrationality scattered here and there within your life can help at least give it the appearance of “meaning, and the “appearance of meaning” and “true meaning” are probably so similar as to be indistinguishable.
Humans need to believe in the little lies to be able to believe in the big lies.
Terry Pratchett. The one true prophet.
You can’t completely control your feelings. But you can choose how to express them, and most importantly you can largely control your environment and circumstances which affect your feelings. You will never sit completely apart from the world, but you do not have to wallow in all of the world’s problems either.
For some reason, I am reminded of the Larry Niven short story “Limits”.
Is that the demon with the pentagram drawn on his chest story. I liked that one.
No. That is “Infinite Series”. Limits is a Draco Tavern story where 2 aliens are discussing humans always finding limits, including some that had never been found by other races…and they wanted to make sure humans would continue to search for limits.
Why and why?
What is the 2nd why? I get the why as to why would they want humans to continue to search for limits?
But what was the other one?
The first why is why are humans finding these limits that others did not.
The second is why the aliens want the search to go on.
1. Humans are different. We actively search for limits. It seems that most other races bumped into them, like say, light speed, but didn’t actively search them out. I can’t remember, but I think the Incompleteness Theorems were ones the aliens were totally unaware of.
2. They learned a lot from humans, but were afraid if humans became too involved with the galactic community, we would stop searching for limits.
Its been a long time since I read it, I may have parts of it wrong.
Humans didn’t live for a very long time thus they searched for limits in nature, so the aliens decided to keep immortality away from humans because of this.
Yeah, what Timeloose said was the actual answer to #2.
There is no limit to derp and melanin manipulation.
Teen Vogue writes of Fannie Sosa and Navild Acosta, who created Black Power Naps, that they “were tired, but it wasn’t just any old fatigue. Yes, they experienced a lack of sleep, but they were specifically experiencing a generational fatigue familiar to Black people and people of color.”
Teen Vogue says Black Power Naps is “also a recognition of the hundreds of years of sleep deprivation that Black people and people of color have experienced as a result of systemic racism, a way to pushback against the false stereotype that Black people are lazy, and an investigation of the inequitable distribution of rest.”
Acosta posited, ““We’re dealing with an inheritance of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation was a … deliberate tactic of slave owners to basically make the mind feeble. That same tactic has only evolved.” …
Sosa said, “We are having to go out in the streets during a pandemic, expending our energy in really huge amounts in order to ask for reparations and rest and energy. It is a … double edged sword to navigate as an activist or organizer. You are putting your body on the line to reclaim it. That creates a lot of burnout. We have people who are 20, 21, they are burnt out. They need time off. They need not only to sleep, but to know their people are going to be ok, to know they’re going to be ok, to know they can take a break.”
If I am even 1/1024 black I am going on CPT.
The Mexicans of Europe were already doing this without all the racial bullshit to go along with it.
You can’t just make shit up and then expect people to go along with it.
Or i guess you can
Even the Bee wouldn’t have put something that unbelievably stupid in one of their parodies.
Having to?
I don’t think epigenetics covers lack of sleep
My thoughts on the subject.
Another thing about perfection that i’m thinking about after reading this is, if we are imperfect creatures, the idea that we can perfectly know what perfection is seems unfounded.
I think about sketching. When i sketch, i don’t know what i’m starting to work on, i may have an idea, but i don’t have a perfect image of it. As i work it out it starts to form. Sometimes i make a mistake, and it has to be incorporated into the sketch. Some are easier to do than others.
When it’s complete, does that make the sketch imperfect because there were mistakes along the way, or is it perfect, because i have completed it and deemed it satisfactory?
Art is Subjective, so Yes to both….
:<( I was trying to be profound.
For some people I’m antifound – I want them to get lost.
The Thought was fine, I am a defender of the Arts,
so Yes,
I have a similar experience. I have an image in my mind. Beautiful and profound.
Then I put charcoal to paper. The image forms over time, changing and adapting to unseen forces. In the end, I’m left with a dirty piece of parchment destined for the dustbin.
if we are imperfect creatures, the idea that we can perfectly know what perfection is seems unfounded.
This is why I’m libertarian.
I’m fairly confident that I know the direction of Good from the direction of Evil (yes, I’m a moral absolutist, fuck off), but I’m not confident enough to pretend that I know enough of the contours of such things to impose my views on my neighbors by force.
the direction of Good
apologies for second HeeHaw reference in as many days
I think you can go further than that. God, who in theory at least does know those moral contours, made the decision that the existence of free will was so important to his creation that it justified allowing evil into the world. It always seemed to me (and was one of the reasons I stopped being a Christian many many moons ago) that Christianity lost the thread of what was meant by witnessing and turned to attempts at imposition instead.
Thou shalt get that pussy
One of those “lies” that gives life purpose, yes.
I do except you but I don’t accept you. Now get bent !
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who caught that.
I use the ignore feature now, there is nothing there with B, just rambling,
You had me at crackpot’s corner.
As I plummet through this bizarre epoch of our nation, I am finding that I’m well and truly entrenched in the crackpot corner. Espousing what should be bog-standard views is now “hate speech”. Noticing that the last two democrat presidents immediately received tens of millions of dollars from corporate American as they left office is conspiracy-theory territory. Questioning the wisdom of a lame-duck president using the power of his office to undermine his successor is crazytown. Heck, even something as simple as noting that some young person who wishes to be referred to as “they” is not plural is hateful.
I am predisposed to believe that it is the world that has gone mad and I remain a sane rock, swept by impermanent currents of an insane cultural flood. But I suspect that this is what all old crackpots believe.
*climbs on cyto’s Rock o’ Sanity
It’s a Trap.
cyto is a wannabe unicorn?
Would you act in a different way if you knew you had no free will?
I don’t know that I have a sufficiently developed theory of the mind which includes no free will to answer that.
how could you?
FYI if you are ever looking for an example of what Begging the Questions really is, i think that statement above approaches it.
Which one?
Mine. A more clear example would be, Free will must exist because if you didn’t everyone would act like criminals.
But without free will, people wouldn’t choose to act a certain way, so they would behave exactly as they behave.
I see you have had undergraduate philosophy!
The final answer to this line of inquiry is:
“I’m pink, therefore I’m spam.”
At least that’s what I remember from my short stint as a philosophy major.
I took exactly one philosophy class: Symbolic Logic
Exactly. I think.
I’m getting turned around. My statement is begging the question. It assumes that Free Will exists now to prove that Free Will exists.
I think Kant decided that it was not possible to determine whether free will existed or not. Instead, we should just act as if it did.
For what it’s worth, i do believe in free will, but i agree that it probably can’t be proven to exist.
The corollary is the one to be avoided.
To wit: Assume you do not have free will. Examine your motive forces, internal and external from that point of view. This construct will inevitably lead to the conclusion that free will does not exist and you will wink out of existence with a small pop and tiny flash of light.
Turns out, the illusion of free will is necessary to maintain the illusion of existence.
If it exists the question has meaning. If it does not nothing has meaning. Better to assume it exists and not worry about it.
But without free will, people wouldn’t choose to act a certain way, so they would behave exactly as they behave.
Only if the belief in free will or its absence doesn’t affect your behavior.
Except that you would – free will or not. It is an additional input to the system. Of course it would affect the system.
Having a woman in the house has made me question the nature of free will. Pregnancy induces a number of psychological changes that are entirely involuntary and result in specific behaviors that are objectively irrational and would have been anathema to the person inhabiting that body only months prior. And not just mood swings. Prioritization of different things like house decor and sanitation changes radically.
Spiders spin their web entirely on instinct, without even having a plan for the end result. Experiments have demonstrated this as a fact of their nature. We have many complex behaviors that fall into this realm as well. They don’t feel instinctive or involuntary from the inside though. They feel very much a product of internal motivation and free will. Do I want to motorboat those titties because they are so perfectly formed and I have formed a rational intention due to the facts presented? Or am I driven with an urge to motorboat those titties because of some innate monkey-brain instinct built in to the wetware, free from any rational consideration?
These are the imponderable questions.
Some aspect of the changes may be involuntary, or perhaps more precisely prompted by involuntary changes, but I don’t think the specific outcomes are involuntary as such. People aren’t complete separate from their emotions but emotions don’t tell you exactly what to think, either.
Which is exactly what an automaton who is programmed to believe he is not an automaton would believe.
I think it also varies highly by person and by situation. Some people are much more drone-like than others. Some of that is situational, some is generic.
It was fashionable for quite a while to claim that religion was the greatest source of and most common cause for all of the horrors that humans inflict on each other.
And it is still fashionable. Now the “new” idea is that since the religious (especially Christians) believe in an afterlife, they don’t care about the lives of the people living today. That is, in general, a gross misrepresentation, though as with anything you can find somebody somewhere who believes an idea no matter how crazy it is.
And it remains fashionable despite a glaring Islam-shaped hole in the thinking of most of the people who espouse it, and despite the fact that the two most destructive wars in human history had no discernible religious component to the fighting (at least, not by the narrow definition of religion that applies here).
One of the underlying problems, I think, is the elevation of moral narcissism to an unspoken virtue. Some young middle-class kid has never enslaved anybody, nor fought in any wars, nor raped anyone. They are morally pure according to a moral code they didn’t invent and don’t fully understand. But this sense of purity is used, both by themselves and others, to elevate them as the most moral to have ever lived. Yet they never actually made a choice. They think they are Jesus telling the Devil no, but the truth is they’ve never faced the Devil. They didn’t enslave anyone not because of a burning moral conviction against slavery but because the choice was outside the realm of possibility for them. They didn’t fight in a war because they’d never enlist in the military anyway, and we don’t have a draft anymore, and the wars fought today are for them distant and vague. And so on. Morality is a process not merely an outcome. And if they were to have grown up 100 or 1000 years before they did, or in a different place or social stratum, would they have been the same person? They say they would, but their own philosophy, blinkered though it is, says the answer is actually no.
How do we solve this problem? I don’t know. The fetishization of youth is hardly a new phenomenon. But it has gotten out of hand.
Well said.
Jordan Peterson got in “trouble” for the obvious and seemingly uncontroversial statement to his students that if you grew up in 1930s Germany, you’d probably have been a Nazi. That the people who were Nazis weren’t some inhuman mutation, that they were perfectly normal people who for a variety of reasons believed truly abhorrent things.
Pointing out the imperfect and imperfectible nature of human beings offends the believers in New Soviet Man.
It is worth pointing out that certain figures within various regimes who support atrocities were not “perfect normal people.” A good example would be Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. As best as we can tell, Castro was likely a perfectly normal person (and brutal dictator), Guevara was not.
Peterson does not deny that evil twisted people exist. He points out that being an ordinary ‘good’ person is not a magic talisman that prevents you from doing great evil, and that believing that you ‘would never do anything like that’ is step one on the path to doing exacty that because it takes effort and courage to stop it.
Worse, there are deep psychological forces at play. There seem to be built-in groupthink features in our brains that encourage us to believe the group narrative as a survival enhancement.
So being plopped down in a totalitarian society that oppressed people as an ordinary course of action would actually alter your brain directly, causing you to better fit the society you are inhabiting.
This is both a comfort and terrifying.
I vote wholly terrifying. I struggle enough tryingto fit into a culture that still gives some lip service to individual choices and liberty, I suspect I would be one of the millions who retreated into constant drunkenness or suicide in totalitarian regimes.
Not just that, but that a lot of people joined because it was the way to go on professionally. My wifes Grandmother was a German Nurse during the war, and IIRC had to be a member of the party in order to be a nurse.
This was a difficult revelation for me. I always believed they were different. The southerners who voted to acquit klansmen were knowingly letting guilty people off. They were not like you or me. They all had some different wiring that allowed them to behave in amoral ways without a single care in the world.
Then I watched the OJ Simpson trial. I watched friends begin to believe the unbelievable. Not cynically with a wink and a nod. Truly believe things that defied all reason.
Then I knew. Motivated reasoning is much, much more powerful than I ever believed. People will believe just about anything they want to. People actually believe in the flat earth movement. There are lots of people who really, sincerely believe that stuff. Not as a goof. Or a scam. I mean, really believe it.
Which used to scare me in an abstract way.
Then I watched the left narrative take hold the last few months and rip what had been an extremely well-functioning society apart. Insanity spread like wildfire as people began espousing nonsense that no rational person could support. And my formerly abstract fears became terrifyingly real.
If you think you are a good person then I know you have never been truly hungry.
That’s a great line, Suthen. I would argue thirst is even worse. I was talking to someone on the subject of dehydration and I told them that they would sell their own mother into slavery if they ever found out what real thirst was.
I’m so fucking sick of this world.
Emailed two people involved in a project asked which one I should call to close out the project. Both replied directly, left off the other, and said call me.
Different project. Emailed the supposed SME to clarify part numbers and rather than answering, says the part should have shipped as part of the package and asks why it’s it not in place. How the fuck should I know? It was 5+ years ago. Material wasn’t shipped, installer was lazy or their first day on the job, aliens took it..? I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s not there now, is this the correct part number?
Reply this morning, order the one in the diagram. Look bitch, there is no part number in the diagram in the document you wrote. The same diagram I clipped into the email to make sure you knew which one I was talking about. It’s right there. Where’s the part number? That’s the whole point of me asking which of two part numbers is the correct one. And for the new style part number because I’m 98% that the part number you listed in the appendix without direct reference is the old style one.
Did you check your status on the totem pole of oppression before making the inquiry? Because failing to acknowledge your white privilege might be the reason for your frustration.
Fuck. I knew I was missing something.
Welcome to the world of support. Get reports of critical issues, get no responses, tell them you’re going to close the ticket, either get a response or after you close the ticket (get an angry message as to why you closed it without fixing the issue).
Oh, I know. I’ve been doing this for a quarter century. It’s just circling the drain faster as competent people retire out and the dregs are left in the industry. And that includes me.
“Dregs unite!”
/just got off a half hour call with someone regarding his department reports, since the person who normal provides them is out today.
“Great, what report was she running for you?”
“I don’t know, which would you use”
“If you want the data to be consistent, you need to use the same report.”
Amen.
*lifts empty glass*
My undergrad philosophy degree, for which I had just excellent profs, capped off with all three profs and all the majors in my year locked in an epic struggle with Godel Escher Bach, which makes the point that no system can be complete. They all have fundamental a priori assumptions
Confirmed. RC Dean is really Douglas Hofstadter.
So: where in the universe does math give the wrong answer?
At the singularity. Stupid infinity screws the whole thing up.
South Africa And the third planet of that one star on the left in the Andromeda Galaxy
“where in the universe does math give the wrong answer?”
At the level of statistics.
You can’t spell statistics without STATIST.
That is such a lovely illustration of why math is the modern language of theology.
The mathematics of the universe are horrifically wrong, right this very moment. Were that not so, there would be no theory of dark matter (or dark energy). These were necessary to balance the cosmic books.
I have this amazing theory! It explains everything in the universe, from the tiniest particle to the largest structures!!!
Uh… your gravity thingie here is off by about 90%
Oh… .dang… Ok……. hang on…. Dark matter! There, fixed!
Uh… your expansion thingie is off by an order of magnitude over here.
Dang! Uh… Ok……. Uhm….. Dark energy! There, fixed!
I can’t wait to see what anomaly awaits when we figure out the forces at work there. The anomalies keep growing by an order of magnitude each time, so the next one should be really shocking.
“Every model is wrong, but some are still useful” is a common saying. Newtonian physics is wrong, but is still used countless times everyday with excellent results. I sometimes think some people/physicists confuse the model with the reality. It’s ultimately minor, but I got into a debate once when someone said “Maxwell’s equations govern electromagnetic waves”, or something similar; no, Maxwell’s equations are an attempt to model the observed electromagnetic phenomena, they don’t govern or control anything.
Theoretical physics seems to be sliding more and more in my opinion, although I can’t claim to read/follow it closely
Back in the old days at TOS, there was a commentor with the handle Thoreau. He was a PhD Physics.
I got into an argument with him about Newtonian physics being wrong. He said that “it’s basically right for a certain set of problems”. I said it’s always wrong, but for many problems, the errors aren’t measurable.
If the error is too small to measure, does it matter?
At those scales, the observation alters the measurement itself,
If the error is too small to measure, does it matter?
Or, if the error is too small to detect, how do you know it exists?
I believe the answer is “Because this other theory says it must”.
How many significant digits? If it is right to that, then it is right.
Pi is exactly 3, to 1 significant digit.
Dang…. I didn’t think of that.
I should go back and redo all my math courses. Answer everything with “1”. I round to the nearest positive googleplex. All problems round to 1. Done and done!
How often would you even theoretically come across a number that didn’t round to 1? Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Are you an engineer? That sort of practicality seems a very engineer sort of mindset.
Actually, the entire discussion started that day with the statement that Pi equals 3.14.
It comes down to a philosophical point of view of how you view correctness and errors. Pi = 3.14 is good enough to solve some problems. Does that make it right? Or does it mean it’s wrong but you don’t care about the error.
In my world view, wrong but good enough, is just that wrong, but good enough.
Really? Because in no way, shape, or form, is pi equal to 3.14 – any argument otherwise is mathematically wrong – like you said, you can argue that rounding/truncating it is ‘accurate enough’ in some cases, but arguing for equality is nonsense.
Are you an engineer?
Yes.
And I have a funny story about Pi. Professor says “From now on in this course, all multiplicative constants will be treated as one.”
[time passes]
Student: What happened to Pi in that equation.
Prof: It is equal to 1.
Student:
Haha, yeah, it’d drive me nuts in some classes how a professor would accidently drop some constant in a blackboard computation, and the same few students would always ask about it – at that point, you shouldn’t need to ask, just fix it in your notes
I tend to subscribe to your viewpoint
My thoughts:
I’m not sure I understand the question – math is not some natural force, it only exists in our minds.
It’s can be so incredibly useful in applications because the assumed axioms often align with our understanding of the essence/abstraction of what we observe. An axiom in Euclidean geometry (and in spherical and hyperbolic geometry as well) states that between two points, there is exactly one line – based on what we think of lines/points, this axiom seems to capture part of that essence. Trying to draw a counterexample on a piece of paper is enough to convince most people that it’s a reasonable assumption.
But points and lines don’t exist in the physical world – a line has a width of 0 and a non-finite length, so certainly nothing anyone has ever drawn on a piece of paper is an actual mathematical line.
That is all true, and yet it makes predictions about the existence and behavior of undiscovered things that do exist in the physical world.
Unlike say, Fidelio
Mine too. I need to revisit that book.
True story:
We got our hands on some excellent mushrooms. I dosed and headed off to what I thought was that seminar. I get there, and it turns out its actually our final exam. I was ripped to the tits for my philosophy final, and got an A.
Which probably tells you something about philosophy.
Also, after majoring in philosophy, I found most of the conundrums and tricks my law profs presented to be, well, not that hard. I believe it is analytic philosophy is excellent training for your brain.
So you’re a postmodernits?
I keed, I keed
Are post modernits commie larvae?
I’m hvanig a herd time typngi tooday.
Oh, so am I (every day) but I thought the joke was funny.
Would you act in a different way if you knew you had no free will?
I refuse to believe in free will.
do you feel the urge to send me 10000 dollars by any chance?
I did, but then I read this article here about Romanian wines and now I have something else to spend it on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOyQhgM1FU
Did I choose to post that link, or was it predestined?
Maybe everyone of us has no freewill, but are actually just copies of each other given different parameters, and are each living the multitude of possible outcomes available. We are all one.
Like how me an you are the same person, but one of us is evil.
I think I have mentioned it before, but I believe in both free will and predestination. I think they are like the Wave/Particle duality of light.
I think they are like the Wave/Particle duality of light.
So fictions crafted to explain in terms of our frame of reference a thing that exists outside our frame of reference? I can buy that, but it seems to approach (as many things do) saying “unknowable mind of God”
My original statement, about 30 years ago, was that God created light in that way in order for me (and maybe others, or maybe He did it just for me) to understand the nature of free will and predestination.
I have been convinced that:
1. The realm of things mankind can understand is infinite
2. There are things that mankind is incapable of understanding
are both true for many years. I am agnostic, but I find myself sounding like a Thomist theologian a lot lol.
Both are definitely true.
Our understanding of the universe has reached the point where we have definitely learned that there are things that are absolutely, provably unknowable.
The best one will be when we figure out that all of this is a simplified digital simulation of a truly analog universe and we are all living in a universe that only exists in some analog universe version of a kid’s school science project.
I am becoming convinced that this life is the hell, a version of the burning lake of fire.
Moje, I recall a story from years ago that posited that this world is actually heaven even though nobody realizes it, and that mundane reality is much, much worse.
To be fair, the mind of God is/would be unknowable.
So like, Spock Beards and shit? Cause that would be weird,
Yes. I think facial hair and cat ownership has proven leon to be the evil one.
It only gets weird when you grab a lyre and start singing.
Groovy man!
I know FedEx and UPS have GPS on their trucks. I wonder why I don’t see realtime position mapping as an option.
Unless they’re convinced that means they’ll have more truck hyjackings.
That’s pretty much a guarantee.
you work for the government. get your buddies at the NSA to tell you
He works for New York. The New York State Government’s Security Agency hired gender studies majors not math majors so they can explain that the driver is a fairy otherkin heterobi ocotpusgenderqueer, but couldn’t tell you where the driver was if the driver was in their bed mounting them in a hockey mask.
I’m pretty sure FedGov hates NYS. NSA would probably just ransomware the State databases.
Like we’d pay that. We’d finally be able to pass the security scans.
UPS lets me follow my delivery. It seems to be pretty accurate.
My box is already three hours late.
And this is why they won’t enable real time access.
Dunno about Fedex, but UPS has their on time guarantees suspended for several months now. Best effort.
it got on the truck at 9:10 am.
That’s plenty of time to have arrived before the original time guarantee of 10:30 am.
It’s not a taxi service. Even the early am express deliveries, separate from the regular route delivery, has a list of stops.
I once had to move offices for work, from one building to another. The buildings are across the street from each other. I’m not even sure why a truck was involved, other than some of the pieces were large and unwieldy. Anyhow, the movers came and loaded everything onto the truck. Then they disappeared with the truck for four hours. I didn’t bother to ask.
“Union rules require a break after so many hours of work.
Trucks cannot be taken on breaks, so it must be returned to the depot.”
If I hijack a UPS truck it will be to haul some of the mountains of junk I have piled up around here away.
My box just now arrived.
did you really need one more dildo?
No.
That’s why he ordered the multi-pack….
*grumble*
A few extra hours in a hot truck and my crawfish pies have started to thaw out.
Regarding human “purity” if humans were “perfect” there would be n o need for philosophy. Even socialism would work. The point is to take humans as they are and find something that works. And that will be messy. Sure. And in a billion years Andromeda and the Milky Way will merge and everything we do don’t matter. Also 36 sucks. 35 was better. mas vino as the Germans say. Is it morally wrong to finish the bottle I opened 3 hours ago tonight? Should I save half for tomorrow?
Perfection is….what? Finishing the bottle today and having another for tomorrow?
i actually left the half bottle and grabbed a beer. It says red ale on it. ep: 12 plato which I still dont know what means
water barley malt, wheat malt, oat, hops, yeast
THIS IS NOT PURE. why is there wheat and oats in my beer? this is what you get for not reading the label.
also the label is racist
https://untappd.com/b/plan-beer-bred/3703626
Brix: Percent solids (sugar) by weight
SG: Specific gravity; OG: Original gravity; FG: final gravity — ABV is calculated from OG and FG.
Plato/Baume: potential alcohol — how much alcohol will be produced if all available sugar is converted to alcohol during fermenation.
Plato = 12 means a high gravity beer.
Don’t eat marmot.
Too bad. And that carpet really brought the room together.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.
— Mark Twain
The inspiration for this came about when watching David Lynch’s Dune, and Kyle McLaughlin has the line: “pure, unrefined Spice.” Which set me off, because “unrefined” is an antonym of “pure.”
It is. The line should have been pristine unrefined spice.
I always translated it to “uncut”.
watching David Lynch’s Dune – on drugs I hope.
“…watching David Lynch’s Dune,…”
I missed that line because I fell asleep.
Sleep is the mind-killer…
Fear?
Did he miss the line because he was afraid of it?
No.
He was asleep.
Sleep is the mind killer.
Next thing you are gonna try and tell me that they should do 6 minute abs. No! 7! 7 minute abs!
I also believe there 5 lights…………….
Well played!
Inception level movie-reference hopping leading you to judgements about the sanity of others?
the seven minute abs clip should clear that up.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”
NA, just wanted to say that I really appreciate the thought that went into this – and the honesty. I, too, have spent 50 years in the quest for a ‘complete’ philosophy. Let me offer a bit of a semantic argument, but one that helps me (slightly) in these arguments about morals and philosophy.
I think of morals as the value judgments of a particular society or culture at a particular time. They may rise to the level of being principles and therefore have applicability across time and culture, but we can’t really know that for certain because of our time-limited nature. We’re just not here long enough to know – hence why the study of history is so important. Ethics, for me, is the method of choosing(?) between competing morals. Sophocles’ Antigone is a prime example of an early attempt to distinguish between morals and principles, to articulate how one arrives at a decision as between competing (and seemingly valid) moral claims. Is Creon correct that Antigone’s brother deserves no funeral rites as one of the members of the failed uprising? Or is Antigone correct that there are some principles that operate across time and culture and stand above even the King/Leader/etc.?
This debate is at the heart of Law, I believe, and unfortunately gets short shrift in our education system. Because it’s… (perhaps) unanswerable.
Is pedophilia “wrong”? If so, by what standard are you judging it? What is the measuring stick that says it is? It isn’t enough for those of us with “delusions of intellectualism” to just say “because I said so” or “because someone else or some book said so.” Could we use empiricism to arrive at the conclusion? For example, some folks I knew ran a home for sexually abused children. They said, straight-faced, that in all of the children they had sheltered and treated and adopted out, and in all of their experience, that anyone (male or female) who was sexually abused before the age of sexual maturity (they said about 12-13) were permanently, irrevocably harmed. They all went on to have terrible problems later in life. I believe the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit might have some corroborating data on serial killers as well. (Of course, then we would have to be able to articulate why THAT’s wrong… and around and around we go.)
I think the Golden Rule shows up again and again and again in culture after culture and I don’t think it’s an accident. Kant (to me) is nothing more than an intellectual reframing of it. And it derives from some very simple and fundamental observations: we are all separate individuals, unique and different, reacting to our environments and “do something” for ourselves. We come into this world in the same state and, therefore, none is “better” or “above” any other. We are also fundamentally ignorant of the universe, of our planet, and all just trying to “figure it out” during our brief stay. Therefore, no one can claim to have some “right” to control any another. Given those starting points, all objectively verifiable, I think, I see no other ethically defensible position than Freedom/Liberty to pursue our own passions without stomping on anyone else’s ability to do the same:
Voilà! Le NAP reigns supreme!
(The devil is, of course, in the details, but I’m at my comment word limit).
I knew a guy who had a complete philosophy once. Went by the name of Steve.
Steve’s philosophy was direct and quite linear in its thinking. “Everyone else is an idiot” was his philosophy. It was an all-encompassing philosophy, applicable in every scenario. It lead Steve to lead an angry life, suffering fools all around him as he forged onward, beset by idiots all around.
Steve was an asshole.
Nobody liked Steve.
I was thinking of a different Steve who has a complete philosophy and is fond of hikers. Nobody likes him either. ///freeCascadia
Now if Steve had abandoned the overly intellectual northern concept of “Philosophy”, and embraced the more visceral concept of “Dao” he would have been much more mellow.
Dao?
Tao (also dao)
It’s funnier my way.
But it loses the Steve joke, and it was a pretty ok movie.
I have tried, unsuccessfully, to articulate what you just said in two articles…..
In short, you know you are right if it works.
Thanks for the response.
This whole thing has basically been a set of steps backwards (retreats?) from:
I’ll figure out morality!
to
Is morality figure-outable?
to
Is it worth anything to discover whether or not any of these questions have meaning in the first place?
to
Why are these questions interesting?
And as to your shelter operators… as someone who has first-hand experience with being sexually “abused” at 5, they are full of shit.
I have been talking with friends having marital problems rather frequently over the last few years. I’ve given them all this bit of advice during moments of near-despair: Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do. Whether it works or not, do it because you want to be the kind of person who does the right thing. So even if everything does fail, at least you leave knowing you did the right thing.
This seems to be good advice that helps people who get divorced live with their choices as their spouse screws them over. It was supposed to be advice that helped them to be loving and supportive partners when they didn’t really want to, but that only seems to have worked out in 2 of 6 cases. The other 4 did have a sense of peace about things though, knowing that they indeed kept their word and did their part to try and provide a happy life together.
I’ve always had a belief that being a good person and doing the right thing was the path to happiness. Being moral and kind in every situation should inevitably lead to other people treating you the same way in turn. Sort of a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone chooses to never betray.
Turns out…. I’m an idiot.
No, you aren’t an idiot. You were right. The problem is that a lot of people have no sense of morality. You can’t really do anything about that. Mostly.
As Mrs. Suthenboy sometimes says “Some people just need killin’. “
I still live by my philosophy. But it does lend itself to being taken advantage of.
I wonder what it would have been like to live in a society where my early moral teachings were framed not by Christianity, but by the teachings of a Klingon society. A society where the morally correct response to being treated dishonorably would be to disembowel your enemy, providing them an honorable death.
It is hard to imagine all of the repercussions. But I do imagine that folks would be a lot more polite to one another.
We’ve seen that – it generates blood fueds.
Well sure…. but polite blood feuds.
You dont have to imagine it. There have been a lot of honor societies in history and some still today. It doesn’t work very well.
Well i never! I demand satisfaction sir!
It brings to mind that Afghan girl who’s family cut off her nose when she ran away from her arranged marriage. Good lord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi_Aisha
Duelling is fine as long as both parties are in agreement. It gets less fine when some asshole with higher status than you decides you have offended them in some way and horsewhips you, or sicks his bully boys on you, or god forbid you are female and get stoned or raped to death to assauage someone’s offended ‘honor.’ The problem with honor societies is that honor divorced from a solid moral code turns out to be nothing more or less than pride.
This is what I love about our band of misfits. A simple offhand joke about killin’ making people more polite turns into an actual discussion.
You weirdos are fun.
In a proper history class, this is how the discussions should go.
ISTR remember some Norse guy who was just exceedingly good at the holmgang so he would provoke other people into challenging him so he could kill them and take their stuff.
It gets less fine when some asshole with higher status than you decides you have offended them in some way and horsewhips you, or sicks his bully boys on you
Do we not have a similar or arguably worse scenario now? Replace bully boys with CPS or law enforcement and I think that’s a solid case. At least in a society with voluntary dueling you have a chance to defend yourself.
At least in a society with voluntary dueling you have a chance to defend yourself.
Only if you are of the same social status as the person coming after you. Higher status people could beat you in the street and your resistance was assault. See among many other examples Kiri-sute gomen. To kill and walk away.
Only if you are of the same social status as the person coming after you. Higher status people could beat you in the street and your resistance was assault.
We’re seeing this exact scenario play out right now in major cities across the country. Just replace “higher status people” with “useful idiots protected by higher status people”.
Yes. The left is turning us from a dignity culture into an honor culture
Maybe. I think it’s more about implementing Marxism using a Social Justice mask. Perhaps an honor society devoted to state worship.
I don’t see marxism as counter to an honor culture. My knee jerk reaction is that all marxist societies are honor cultures, but I would have to think about whether there are other categories on the honor/dignity spectrum before I commit to that. I am pretty sure you cannot have a marxist dignity culture.
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ” ― Epictetus
Admittedly, sometimes this site can inspire me to rage. I then have to take a step back and reevaluate what I can control, which isn’t much other than myself.
^^^ Sound advice. I know i probably come off as an ass when shit happens in another part of the country, but it is partly a mechanism to keep myself from getting worked up over injustices i have no power to fix.
That should “the power of our will”
I meant no offense NA, but as to that specific example, let’s suppose it is not an absolute, as there are very few “rules” that don’t admit of exceptions, and instead think of it as a heuristic that has some value and may help point to a larger “principle” (to use my terms). They’re also wonderful people who spend their time vluntarily helping abused kids. I think they probably deserve a better rep than I may have given them with my thumbnail reference. Bear with me if you will for a (seeming) diversion:
I have a very religious (and smart) Calvinist friend who uses the “is pedophilia wrong?” argument (for fun on the internet) regarding morality and the existence of God and God’s law/right and wrong with atheists. Because he knows no one wants to come out and say that the philosophical endpoint of atheism is that pedophilia is just a particular preference (hangup?) we current puritans have. It’s really uncomfortable. I’ve always watched from afar and though that the easy rejoinder to his argument is that pedophilia can be empirically derived to be “bad” in that it seems to cause developmental harm to (most) children.
I think of it as a special case of a broader phenomenon (and this is going to come across wrong on a sensitive subject, but hopefully Glibs will forgive me): I call it the “picking fruit too early” phenomenon. In Nature if you pick something before it is fully ripened, it doesn’t serve what looks like its Platonic purpose (I’ll call it). Pick an apple before its ripe to eat and you’ve (a) ruined the apple for its purpose, and (b) it is now detached from its source of nutrients and can’t ever ripen to full maturity. HOWEVER, the counter to my counter is that some things (even fruit) can be picked “too early” and used for OTHER purposes. But I still think that most of us who garden understand that organic things have a natural life cycle, including sexual maturity, and meddling in that before fruition will likely produce untoward results.
I hope that doesn’t offend because I say it with nothing but love in my heart for your situation. I got started very young sexually, but thankfully, it was all pretty innocent and I was a voluntary participant with other kids close (enough) to my age.
HOWEVER, the counter to my counter is that some things (even fruit) can be picked “too early” and used for OTHER purposes.
See Verjus.
In the things one should never discuss vein:
There are two categories of harms involved in sexual abuse of a child. One category comes from the sexual interaction and is what we are getting at when we talk about pedophilia being wrongin and of itself. The other category comes from the conception of the interaction as abuse and is much more difficult to talk about because it bumps up against very strong taboos and the blame for it is not as clearly attributible to the ‘abuser’. The second category is demonstrably real though, because many of the children who were never actually abused, but who were convinced that they were abused by charlatns in the great child abuse witchhunt of the 80s showed all the behabiors and issues shown by actual abused children.
The question the people honestly discussing this (as opposed to perverts discussing it to justify and enable their perversion) ask is how much of the damage suffered by children comes from the sexual interaction and how much comes from attitudes toward the interaction. To my mind that question is not really important in the area of preadolescent kids because it is clear that the sexual interaction is abusive in that context, but gains importance rapidly after puberty.
I worked a case of “imaginary”/implanted pedophilia when I was a prosecutor and it still makes me sad to this day. Mother convinced her 3 year old that he was abused by dad and dad’s girlfriend. I dismissed the charges because I had a decent bit of experience with prosecuting sexual abuse of minors and after one call with the mom I knew she was driving the whole thing. Did NOT make me popular, but I was leaving the military and had no fucks to give about my career. Next prosecutor resurrected the charges and at trial it all came unraveled that mom was the motive force. Judge acquitted the guy and apologized, but none of that could repair the harm that mom had done to the kid and the kid’s relationship with the father. Fucking horrible, but to your point, that child is ruined by what he believes happened, not what actually happened.
People like Martha Coakley are profoundly wicked, and it says terrible things about our body politic that a person like this would get nominated for statewide elective office on multiple occasions.
Yeah. I internalized it not as something bad, or that I was bad for doing, but as something that was added to the very long list of “don’t tell adults about this or I’ll get in trouble.”
Which probably means something that even at five, I had “things that are bad” and “things that I will get in trouble for” as two separate categories.
No offense taken. I was scoffing at someone thinking that since all of the kids they fostered turned out bad, it must have been the sex whut dun it. As opposed to “we only got the really fucked up kids to foster” or “we are really bad at fostering kids.” That’s why I put the “abused” in quotes. AFAICT, the only harm it did to me was get me in trouble in school for being too precocious.
More generally, I don’t think it’s deniable that there are minority sexual orientations and some are decided to be good and some bad. Sometimes there is a logic of harm reduction, but other times it’s really just about ickiness.
Comorbidities abound.
The only project I ever took on that I wish I hadn’t was a very heartbreaking autobiography of a man who was in the foster care system in the 30s and 40s and the abuse and neglect he suffered at both older children’s hands and adults’ hands, and then perpetuated himself. He ended up getting married and having kids, and never touched any of them, which he found amazing.
I didn’t know, of course, what was in it and I believe it was part of his restitution in a 12-step group (alcohol? drugs? can’t remember). And I think his daughter wanted him to write it down to show himself how far he had come. But it was tragic and horrible.
Subject of your next book? ‘Cause Mojeaux would be a natch to help you publish that. ; )
Only if I can pretend to myself it’s fiction.
ROFL. (both of your comments)
One particular incident is likely to inspire a scene in the book I’m currently working on, but it’s just kids playing doctor kinda stuff. I still laugh about it when I think of it now… Interracial, too, which is likely to give it pornhub bonus points. (I’m going to hell for this comment, no doubt.)
If you’re going to Hell, I’ve definitely got a first class ticket.
Brought over from dead thread:
@ChipsnSalsa said:
@Ozymandias said:
I said:
Is that the book you have been editing?
No. That’s a book on education ChipsnSalsa rec’d, but can’t be obtained at Amazon, as discovered by Ozy. I went to a pirate site and found a link to it.
I’m working on Ozy’s anthrax book.
Cool on that.
But I was referring to the annoying client that was driving you crazy a while back. Unless that is Ozy, then nevermind, I didnt bring it up.
Oh goodness no. Ozy’s a dream to work with and he cuts me more slack than I deserve, that’s for certain.
No, the one driving me batshit insane is done now. I think. Probably not. She’s like that one hair caught between your back and your clothes that you can’t reach and can’t find, but is THERE and making itself known.
Did you try jumping in a fire to burn the hair off?
Or did i get to mixed up in the metaphor?
I don’t know if you got mixed up, but you certainly mixed ME up!
I wasn’t implying you should burn. But burn the hair. I don’t know. It came out all wrong.
It is her fault. Nobody does metaphors about hairs getting stuck down the back of your shirt. Who does that?
Hair metaphors usually involve getting caught in the back of the throat and are usually not suitable for PG-13 conversation.
Tuh. Tuh. (Sound of someone spitting out a hair).
Unicorns? Myths?
As after a haircut, I presumed. Men!
LOL. I wondered when she posted some of that stuff on here. I was like, “Damn… am I demanding and a time suck?!?” So far Mojo has been kind enough to pretend it’s not me.
Thank you, Moj! I am also guilty of being a thieving a-hole, but Amazon doesn’t leave me much choice.
And I’ll raise a glass to your point about black markets. If they’re going to start pulling “wrongthink” from the regular marketplace, well, then black market it is!
Same as the 3D printer gun instructions, as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, I have no moral (heh) qualms about the black market when something (legal or illegal) is unavailable for arbitrary reasons and/or because of immoral laws (hello guns and weed). That said, if the author has a website and/or a tipjar and/or an email address attached to a Paypal account or Venmo, it’s usually good to throw a little something his way directly. It’s not the author’s fault Amazon’s being an ass.
Fuck Mike Bloomberg.
I just read that 40% of recent gun purchases were by first time gun owners. Maybe I don’t understand the east coast very well, but I just don’t see how:
1. Tolerating rioting and looting
2. Defunding the police
3. Taking away your means of self defense
… is a winning platform.
NPR did SCIENCE! to prove that all these gun buyers are racists.
“But muh polls!”
They’re blind zealots.
Not even with your dick.
Didn’t he get a lot of CO pols fired with this shit before? Go ahead Mikey, throw your money away.
The more i think about it, the more i think that the Dems are pushing hard on Gun Control right now (see virginia, Blomberg, Biden) party because they think that they have lost a lot of ground throughout Corona and the Riots.
I cannot understand why anyone would vote for a democrat. It is a damned shame that more Americans dont travel overseas. They have no perspective. Most people in this country truly dont know what they have, how lucky they are to live here and. how easily it can be lost.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Remember O’bumbles ‘We have had a run of bad luck’ speech?
I suspect the moron had no idea what he was saying…..but it is not all that unlikely that he was just giving us the finger again. I cant decide.
I doubt he ever read Heinlein.
off subject, but stimulated by Heinlein . .
Is Agile development a form of communism?
Agile development?
Engineering nonsense
I’d say no.
Agile may seem like it in what a lot of people talk about it, (everyone putting their desires aside to acomplish the goal), but honestly, that’s just good teamwork, and you don’t need a whole agile philosophy to get it done if you have good team cohesiveness.
I don’t consider that communism.
Also Agile doesn’t work unless everyone is willingly on board.
Interesting question. There is a long part in one of W.E.B. Griffin’s The Corps books about the Marine Raiders’ roots in Mao’s Route Army, and how the Gung Ho concept made its way into the Marines via the Raiders. Gun ho meaning all pull together, which is at least similar to the Agile idea.
Earlier when I said most dont understand what they have here I was going to mention living in a country with only one paved road and no bridges. I said that to my wife and she asked ‘how did they get across the rivers?’
They had a ferry. It was woven of reeds and had half of a dozen little boys running around with buckets bailing like mad to keep the damned thing from sinking. Then I thought about digging out a photo I took of it…but the photo might give me away. Maybe I will get drunk sometime and post it for y’all.
I’ve been to DuBois, PA. You’re not getting those people’s guns. And when they want more, they’ll go get them.
I was thinking the same…I have known a few of Pennsylvanians and they were all gun nuts.
“Hair metaphors usually involve getting caught in the back of the throat…”
I may have told this story before….
One night, sitting around a restaurant table with half of a dozen friends….mostly women….I was in the middle of saying something to the group when I half coughed, half gagged and then plucked what was obviously a pubic hair out of my mouth. I held it up to the light and said….”Well, would you look at that!”
You can imagine the reaction that got.
as long as it wasn’t a different color than your lady’s…
All of my wife’s friends are divorced multiple times….and envy her. Of course less than a minute after meeting them you can plainly see why they are all divorced.
Hoo boy, the diversity lecture might be fun.
I was reading some of the questions that have been submitted. Most are anonymous bitching that make me very disappointed in my coworkers. But there was one (with a name attached!)…
So, the corporate structure is kind of complicated since we’re a Trusted Foundry eligible to take government contracts, but our ultimate owners are the UAE royal family through their private corporation.
This guy had the balls to ask “Will we be confronting the lack of women and minority representation at [UAE royal private corporation]?”
He had the balls. Now he works in the harem.
Nice!