Oceans Yet to Burn

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May 2017

This conversation has negative value to me now.  It went back up for a while because examining morality at the subindividual level was an interesting and novel idea sparked by it, something to be integrated into a later body of theory, but I see there’s nothing more to be mined from the conversation.  Anarcho-Capitalism remains an unworthy ideology every time I revisit it.

I’ll keep going for a while longer if you’re willing to apologize for your “let it go” bullshit, but otherwise we’re done.  There’s more profit to be made elsewhere, and what do AnCaps love if not markets?

May 13, 2017 96 notes
#uncharitable

Which doesn’t change it being the self, still? Yes, external factors can influence internal factors.

But “being the self” doesn’t establish the moral liability you so desperately want.

Except you’re making this either or, that conciousness OR subconciousness is ‘central.’ The point is that you are a complete whole, both concious and unconciousness are part of you, and are relevant.

I can alter my hand, it doesn’t make my hand not part of my body.

Except that altering your hand doesn’t make you not you, because the central element that defines you is the mind, and within that mind the consciousness.  If you don’t make it the consciousness, then you could end up with a situation where taking a drug technically makes you a different person, which would then mess up property and contract rules.

No, I’m saying they’re entirely part of the whole, they’re as much a part of the moral liability as everything else.

Except they aren’t sufficiently distinct, you’ve not established why they are, when they are indeed all parts of a single whole entity, that. The subcomponents aren’t pilots.

They’re not entirely, in the sense that matters, part of the whole, which is why they can conflict and dominate each other.  They ARE sufficiently distinct, whether you like it or not, whether or not that makes you feel like you don’t have control, whether or not that offends your sensibilities about so-called “free will”, whether or not that has implications that you don’t like for properties or contracts or taxation or the state or your own personal safety.

Ordinary people, who you asserted can recognize evil and have to be lead into it, can recognize this, which is why ordinary law looks very little like the dogma that is Anarcho-Capitalism.

You have asserted, over and over again, while questioning the faith of my arguments with groundless speculation about my motives and bullshit about “loss of control”, that this boundary matters before all others.  

You have failed to prove it, and you will never prove it, because it doesn’t matter before all others, it matters as part of a system, part of something more flexible and, dare I say it, innovative than what you have in mind.

You’re just asserting it at me over and over again, not establishing it. You’ve hit a loop, and I know how you’ll respond to this, and it won’t prove a thing.

May 13, 2017 96 notes

We cannot go inward any further than the whole self entity because all of them are linked as part of one entity, and we cannot go outward because there is a discernible difference between one self and another self.

No dude, we actually can go further because it’s still causally relevant.  We can also use physical interventions such as drugs or magnets or surgery or injury to act on the subindividual level.

The subcomponents are relevant in the self level, that’s the point, they are as much a part of the self level as your conscious, controlled thinking. I’ve said as much several times over.

So it isn’t consciousness that’s central to moral liability anymore.  Either demonstrate that it’s still necessary for your system, or that starfish over there violated my NAP.

I have not asserted all internal layers should be dismissed, I’ve actually stated they are merely part of the self.

By saying your position such that they don’t have an impact on the moral liability, you have effectively stated that they should be dismissed.

You have not argued why they should be considered distinct, when we’re discussing the morality of actors.

They are causally relevant and in that sense sufficiently distinct.  You are discussing the morality of aircraft, I’m saying it’s fair game to talk about the morality of the pilots.

They exist as distinct entities, but the sublayers are not distinct, they’re part of a whole, that’s why we call them sublayers, or subcomponents, or so on.

They are actually sufficiently distinct, that’s why they can be altered.

Your subconcious mind is still you.

Again, not making consciousness the central element means that non-conscious animals are now part of the moral consideration.

May 13, 2017 96 notes

remedialaction:

mitigatedchaos:

What makes that boundary so special that further recursion is unjustified even though further recursion is causally relevant?

You need to articulate what you mean by recursion as I’m not seeing it.

Assigning moral liability in layers heading inwards, or examining the roots for moral liability gradually inwards. You have to establish that, even though the differences in subcomponents are relevant on a causal level to determining behavior, that this is completely irrelevant at the self level and all internal consideration is totally off the board in terms of mitigating moral liability.

So far, you have asserted the self layer is superior so all internal considerations should be dismissed, but you haven’t actually properly established why. Relative causal unity wasn’t enough for you for nations, or presumably warships, so you have to establish why it’s so special here. Otherwise, it might make logical sense to split on the conscious and subconscious elements, since the concscious is along for the ride but has only limited control of subconscious elements, but the conscious is being used as the anchor here unless you want to argue non-conscious entities can be counted as persons under AnCap.

May 13, 2017 96 notes

What makes that boundary so special that further recursion is unjustified even though further recursion is causally relevant?

May 13, 2017 96 notes

remedialaction:

mitigatedchaos:

This is really about your desire to justify an unjustifiable concept - infinite moral liability for finite beings - despite your guesses about me “being upset over a loss of control”.

Except you’ve failed to establish that such a concept is unjustifiable. Even your term ‘infinite moral liability’ is essentially begging the question; you’ve not justified how it is ‘infinite’ really, and this all hinged upon your idea that somehow the fact that the thinking mind has various components not always in perfect unity somehow means that moral liability for the self cannot be established.

When you invent a genetic cure that lets me fix my executive functioning properly, since I can’t just forcibly override it (I have tried), then maybe the idea of a unified self of perfect liability will make sense. Until then, because I can’t just forcibly override it, then it isn’t justified to hold all of me fully liable for it. I don’t actually have a choice in the matter.

As for infinity, under AnCap it’s permitted to sell yourself into permanent slavery forever (if the tech exists for it), rather than capping liability and prohibiting that.

Also, it’s up to you to establish that kind of total moral liability for the self which ignores all subsurface concerns. Why does the causal chain stop there? Why does it ignore both what is outside and what is within? Why can it not be recursive?

May 13, 2017 96 notes

ancap: you can claim what you can meaningfully isolate and control with your work, for example water which you have collected, but not all the clouds in the sky

me, a supervillain: * builds massive sphere around the whole Earth *

May 12, 2017 2 notes
#shtpost

collapsedsquid:

Two people, each one demanding to be the one to get the last word in, making no progress but arguing in a never-ending cycle until judgement day.

squid honey kun is this because I’m filling your dash with arguments with that one AnCap

i promise this will be resolved prior to the robot apocalypse that occurs on June 2, 2204, okay

well, probably

May 12, 2017 4 notes
#shtpost
May 12, 2017 242 notes

shieldfoss:

blackblocberniebros:

proletarianprogramme:

proletarianprogramme:

kvltmvtherfvcker1349mvrdermvsic:

proletarianprogramme:

kvltmvtherfvcker1349mvrdermvsic:

proletarianprogramme:

kvltmvtherfvcker1349mvrdermvsic:

proletarianprogramme:

insurrectionarycompassion:

gayasscommie:

afloweroutofstone:

planetsedge:

kvltmvtherfvcker1349mvrdermvsic:

Leftists know “globalist” means “evil Jewish overlord” right? It has no coherent political meaning and “globalism” isn’t an ideology or a set of ideologies, it’s meant as an insult

People with PhDs in the interdisciplinary studies -mostly critical theory, international relations, and comparative political economies might say “ha”.

No one in any of those fields uses the term “globalist”

Globalist hasn’t been a term in use in any social science fields since the 90s it’s str8 up a Jewish dogwhistle

Globalization is a word used in those fields but that refers to an economic and social phenomenon. Globalist is just a fucking antisemitic word tbh.

(((globalism))) is anti-semitic? IDK sounds far-fetched

@proletarianprogramme

is back at it folks

your inability to read irony worries me comrade

Oh, you’re being ironically anti Semitic my bad dumbass

how are you both so absurdly edgy and embarrassing, but yet so ridiculously thin-skinned?

Yeah what’s with all these Triggered SJWs, am I right?

What’s with the kind of moron who would be lambasted for listening to black metal at all by the shrill dumbass liberal politics of today, turning around and using the exact same measure on other people? Hypocrite and a moron? Are you really 23 because I’m kinda sad now

If I have to spell it out for your dumbfuck ass, the joke here was that people who say ‘globalist’ will often literally put it in triple parentheses, an established anti-semitic trope, so it becomes kinda blatantly obvious that its a dogwhistle and that that has to be explained to people is kinda funny. Sorry if that was somehow unclear because your ML prejudices makes it fucking impossible for you to read people in good faith. Idiot.

“your ML prejudices makes it fucking impossible for you to read people in good faith.”

Oh man, that’s my feeling exactly!

Him, a young unemployed man angry because all the manufacturing jobs have moved to China, mainly on the back of international trade deals that make it easier for companies with a a world-wide presence, a global presence you might say, to exploit differences in labor costs: 

Man I hate these globalists.

OP, trying to prevent him from becoming a neonazi:

I THINK YOU MEAN JEWS. BECAUSE JEWS ARE THE ELITES. ALL ELITES AND GLOBALISTS ARE JEWS. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT THE ELITE, IT’S DEFINITELY JEWS YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT. IF YOU FEEL SCREWED BY WALL STREET, THEN THE PEOPLE WHO SCREWED YOU WERE THE JEWS. IT’S THE JEWS WHO ARE DOING ALL THIS, MAKE SURE TO REMEMBER THAT. DEFINITELY TRANSLATE YOUR HATRED TOWARDS A VAGUE ESTABLISHMENT INTO HATRED OF JEWS, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOTALLY THE ONES YOU’RE THINKING OF.

May 12, 2017 1,108 notes

This is really about your desire to justify an unjustifiable concept - infinite moral liability for finite beings - despite your guesses about me “being upset over a loss of control”.


Alright, I’ve had my tea, so I’m feeling a bit more charitable.

Your grounding is based on the idea that the root causality is encompassed in the self, and that therefore the self ‘owns’ the results.  But the causality passes from outside, through the subcomponents, and then back out again, with the self riding on top in a sense.  The subcomponents can radically alter the total outcome, while the self remains riding on top.  

You haven’t established why this ownership should not be subsurface.  After all, you said it was about causality.  You say “but the self is also a whole”, but causally, so is an aircraft, so that doesn’t really help.  There are of course many practical reasons, but for your purposes that doesn’t really help, either.

Since I’m weighting on experience, rather than control, I don’t need to establish a perfect sovereign will that re-roots causality locally from the universal level to the individual.

May 12, 2017 96 notes
#the yellow black snake #philo

argumate:

Things that are true but you probably shouldn’t say: “he’s a little ugly”.

What about things that are false that you should say?

“What? No of course I don’t like [kink].”

The others are more depressing.

May 12, 2017 113 notes
“The unfortunate reality is that some of the MRA’s claims are undoubtedly true and deserve serious consideration, yet the overall picture presented to the audience is erroneous at best and outright disingenuous at worst. While men’s issues require genuine advocacy, the heroes of this pathetic diatribe tend to be rather unsavory characters.”—

http://thelinfieldreview.com/20367/archive/opinion/choking-on-the-red-pill/

(via the-grey-tribe)
If only there were some organization for gender equality that could have addressed these problems before a new group like “MRAs” formed… maybe a movement that said very many times that it is about gender equality…
May 12, 2017 3 notes
#gender politics #uncharitable

altrightbot:

here’s how marine can still win

A towering inferno rose up behind the column as the tanks rolled through Paris.  Normandy had already fallen, Orleans, the Ardenne… all now under occupation as the last holdouts had fled to the city.  But they were surrounded.  The armed militia members waited nervously behind a makeshift blockade, clinging to their AKs.

- A History of the New France, 2034

May 12, 2017 29 notes
#mitigated fiction #shtpost #mitigated future

It is the year 2201.  Prison has been abolished.  Empowered by new technology, the state only punishes the part of one’s brain considered to be truly responsible for a crime - this is considered the most humane solution.  You (or a character) wake up in a recovery clinic for the only crime worthy of lobotomy followed by replacement - murder.

May 12, 2017
#mitigated fiction #writing prompt
I think the most glaringly naive and myopic part of ancaps ideal worldview is the fact they think collusion amongst organizations wouldn't take place to the point where states would emerge. Hell, there are modern corporations right now that are more powerful than many smaller nation states and if it was just a matter of sheer resources and manpower they'd absolutely get their own military companies like coca cola have even conspired with paramilitary organizations

I think any serious anti-state ideology acknowledges that it requires constant vigilance to prevent the emergence of another state, which requires viewing any sufficiently large organisation with extreme suspicion, as well as the constant propagation of memes warning against the perils of statehood (statedom?)

This fucks up freedom of association to an absurd degree, but you can get out of it by being okay with a state being established “without coercion”, eg. you’re born into a world where you have to explicitly sign the social contract or starve, unlike our current world where you implicitly sign the social contract or starve.

May 12, 2017 17 notes
#日本語 #politics #shtpost

Yet it clearly does, and given you already recognized the premise of “I think, therefor I am,” you clearly recognize there is a unity here. You seem to want to have unity when it matters to recognize self and attempt to derive value, and then reject it now. You can’t have it both ways. Either there is an entity, a self, or there is not.

Actually, both can be true simultaneously, in the sense of both self and subself existing and being relevant at once.

Like, causal bundling again - people talk about nations being “just lines on a map”, but they’re actually a very complex wave-like phenomena involving institutions, land, resources, people, culture, and so on that form a clear causal bundle and natural category.

So one can, actually, coherently both talk about a nation doing something and the factions and individuals within a nation doing something.

The self can exist in a way that derives value without totally ignoring that it is composed of subcomponents that aren’t wholly unified.  Much like the self can exist despite the influence of drugs on the mind, but without ignoring the influence of those drugs.

The primary reason to say that we cannot recognize the influence of the subcomponents on a moral level is a desire for applying infinite moral liability.  Thus, effectively, pretending that there is no tension between the internal components and therefore, for example, when a person says they “want” to be of a healthy weight, but then eat too much junk food anyway and find it distressing, that this is their “true, revealed preference” that applies to their whole self, even if they hate it.

There is, of course, the practical matter of lack of access to sub-delineations - or at least, there is now at the current technology level.  But that’s a practical matter, and often modern courts of law will change sentences according to psychological state.

As for the ability of nations to think, that depends on how one defines the term.  I don’t think they feel.  Not yet.  The concept of what is to states as Transhumanism is to humans is not yet more than a grain of sand.

May 12, 2017 96 notes
...I see the division of Batman predates the comic book character... well played, Australia... well played...

Melbourne was in fact founded by Batman, which explains the art deco buildings and the dark brooding winter.

May 12, 2017 14 notes
#shtpost #not actually true

The point of my objecting to your granulation is not that you can’t subdivide parts, but that those subdivided parts remain part of a whole. The claim about natural boundaries within people is irrelevant here in the subject of moral responsibility because the very concept hinges upon distinguishing that which is inside and that which is outside. Those inner boundaries all share one aspect, and that is the very fact that they are, even in your argument, inner, and therefor distinct from outer boundaries. 

Inner/outer is being used for convenience, not revealing something.  

I like this metaphor as well, as it accurately fits the concept of every person a nation unto themselves. :P

It’s not such a bad metaphor, since it exposes the problem with your way of thinking.

People treat subnational units as relevant in international politics quite frequently, which is part of why, while destroying much of the German army during WWII, the result following the war did not involve putting all the Germans to death.  The national responsibility for the war was actually split up according what the individual people and factions within the country did.  In fact, they didn’t even execute the entire German army itself.

Attempting to subjugate a country and knock out its entire army is typically done not because the nation as a whole is sufficiently unified in order to justify total moral liability to all of its subcomponents, but because trying to individually negotiate with all the soldiers and so on while the state apparatus is in the control of a dictator is extremely difficult and unlikely to succeed.

While people may recognize that, say, Texas does not get to speak independently on the international stage, they recognize that it still has an influence on the government which is different from that of, say, Ohio.  This is actually a big part of the large, televised anti-Trump protests, establishing non-total-liability to outside observers.

I could also discuss the nation as a whole as having an inner and outer, and claim that morality exists at the level of the nation and not at the level of the individual.  What makes that boundary more special to the point that we can’t care about the subcomponents?

May 12, 2017 96 notes

collapsedsquid:

@argumate gotta admit I seen a lot of “down with Islamophobia” posters from local socialists and very few “down with religion” posters

Yeah, there’s this problem where if you say stuff like that, people mostly use it as a reason to take that religious group that has all that money or oil or is just inconvenient and just kill them all.

Yeah, well there’s also this problem where different cultures are actually different on more than just what kind of food they eat, and if you heavily push “anyone who heavily questions this foreign religion or culture is an evil racist bigot and should be fired”, you end up covering up massive child sexual abuse scandals.

I find it very frustrating that a religion that is actually worse than Christianity in many ways, and is oppressive in itself, and is so far difficult to secularize people out of and water down, with elevated rates of fundamentalism among second-generation immigrants, is getting this free pass from the people who were supposed to be all anti-oppressive and logical.

May 12, 2017 5 notes

@collapsedsquid

What fucking Breitbart shit are you reading?  Is it the fucking leftists who are supporting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?

No dude, they’re just supporting mass Islamic migration and denouncing all criticisms of Islamic as racist and “Islamophobic”.

Also the Liberals, but I’ve seen actual Socialists talking about the needs for diversity and tolerance of Islam and whatnot.  

May 12, 2017 6,278 notes

thathopeyetlives:

rendakuenthusiast:

thathopeyetlives:

thathopeyetlives:

I have a vague like (well below the level of actual political preference) for a monarchy.

And, well, I really, really, really don’t like British Monarchy Apologism. It’s simultaneously obscene and cowardly.

If we see a restoration it will, and will have to be, different. Above all things the historical aristocratic contempt for all things useful and practical and especially for labor must pass away.

I’m not sure it’s possible to have a monarchy without some level of aristocratic contempt for useful and practical things. What would a non-aristocratic monarchy look like? 

I didn’t necessarily say “a non-aristocratic monarchy”.

What I was specifically thinking of is, like, people who form entire cultures around considering Working For A Living to be basically illegitimate, and who then don’t have the saving grace to live in austere and ascetic poverty when their rent fails them.

In my ideal nation, the royal family would have the role of safeguarding the nation’s culture (and a few other things) rather than being a tourist attraction or having full political power better reserved for the civilian government.

Their membership would be drawn from national heroes, waning over several generations and requiring new heroes to marry in for the line to remain royal.  So, great artists, great scientists, great warriors, those who have made amazing sacrifices - people who just knowing they’re from your country and embody its ideals, make your heart swell with pride.

This keeps the genetic lines fresh, rewards those who benefit society, helps keep the nation united, and so on.  In many countries the monarchy is reduced to a national mascot and cultural institution - so if we’re going to do that, let’s do it right.

May 12, 2017 8 notes
#policy #the black forest country #the iron hand #the golden crown
tfw no money to enroll in trap school

I am seriously thinking what the dynamic would be like if there was such a thing and comprised of all of us on here.

May 12, 2017 5 notes
#shtpost

drethelin:

isaacsapphire:

cailleachan:

guys but like…not every vocal atheist is an m.r.a dudebro with a goatee and a fedora and a hard-on for richard dawkins. plenty of people have a legitimate reason for mistrusting and criticising religion and religious practices (i.e. abuse survivors, lgbt people, people from former or current colonies, many women all over the world) and atheism might actually be important to some people as a space for resistance.  which is not to say i advocate black and white thinking and i think all criticism of religion should be sensitive and placed within careful consideration of context (i.e. people not using “atheism” as an excuse to be islamophobic, anti-semitic etc.) but religions are social institutions that still exert a lot of power and we should let oppressed people have safe spaces in which to criticise them

I’m still trying to understand how the Left started hating atheists, associating Atheism with being anti women’s rights, and consider religious people as a morally superior group?

Like, what the fuck? What happened to the god-hating liberals my (abusive) Christian parents despised?

The complement of Divide and Conquer: Unite and Conquer. Make alliances of convenience to gain power. Leftists aligned with Islam because they’re both opponents (especially in America) of neoliberal globalism, as well as Conservativism. Islam has money and power behind it, Atheism has none. Islam also fits into the antiracist agenda, especially in the west where Muslims are a minority that’s also correlated very much with ethnicity. Racism is a tough rap to beat and it means people who want to spread Islam and Islamic power are naturally aligned with the left, who want to hurt the same people and take their power too.

Before Islam was a noticeable group in Western politics, atheism was fine/good. But if you want to ally with an increasingly powerful Islam, you HAVE to shit on atheists. Because atheists are willing to actually attack Islam, whereas feminism and LGBT issues can, via doublethink, sidestep it, they get thrown under the bus. 

They’re very much playing with fire.

May 12, 2017 6,278 notes

nostalgebraist:

My brain, out of nowhere: “Gosh, hippies!  What a bunch of goofs!”

I mean,

it’s true, is it not?

May 12, 2017 17 notes
Yeah, but you could take measures to ameliorate the long commute for employees--for example, running a high-speed train line there for their particular use. (If the commute is long even then, you could make that commute time paid--have people punch in/out as they get on/off the train, or just add a set amount per day.) Of course, that's expensive.

Airports and sewage treatment plants have other constraints on their locations (flat land, downstream) and it’s not just the employees who have to travel to reach them but every construction vehicle, delivery truck, etc.

But eh infrastructure is hard, Melbourne doesn’t even have a regular train line to the airport yet.

May 12, 2017 6 notes
#politics #policy

You can’t subdivide out entities that way, though, even if we distinguish them due to the complex interactions involved. The lack of a unified, detached ‘will’ animating our meat puppets doesn’t change the fact that at the core, it remains a single entity, a single actor. You are attempting to granulate things that don’t have any business being so granulated.

Actually, the effects of Ritalin prove that it IS so granulated.  And I, myself, have taken it and am familiar with its effects.  So yeah, actually I can subdivide entities out that way.

That is a thing, even if it’s one you don’t like.  

You have created a false boundary that ignores causal distinctions and elevated it to full status, but reality is not so cleanly delineated, which is something I’ve tried to get at with you for a long time but which hasn’t gotten through to you.  

Some kind of nihilistic type might object that a boat is just a collection of atoms that we have arbitrarily labeled as a boat, and that reality doesn’t care.  (They’d likely also take your “but you just don’t like it” shtick, too.)

However, even though the natural categories are fuzzy (for instance, when is a skin cell a part of someone, and when isn’t it?), we can still define object boundaries - but we have to use causal bundling instead.

That is, the impact on the world.  A “boat” is defined as a cluster of possibilities based on its effects on the world compared to alternative configurations of matter at the same time and place.

There are natural boundaries around people, but it is necessary to also consider the natural boundaries within them, rather than arbitrarily declaring them off limits for moral consideration.  These are themselves real causal clusters with impacts on the state of the world.

I think you need to justify placing your causal cutoffs where you place them.  Why is placing them at the total mind level valid, but both the sub-agent and incoming-causes levels are invalid?

May 12, 2017 96 notes
#the yellow black snake
Airport Gothic

ms-demeanor:

davetheinverted:

argumate:

I started writing this, then realised that factual description of time spent in an airport was already sufficiently horrifying, and no further comment was required.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.” Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.   – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

That said, the S2 concourse (D gates) of Terminal 4 at Sky Harbor is not bad at all.

Airports are prime liminal space, which is why I love them. People sitting tailor style on the ground in business wear and charging their phones, a line of children with small faces lit by tablets, silent under headphones too large for little heads, chest-high counters often abandoned, side-scrolling orange led displays that make subtle changes to the lighting, the resonant thunk as a luggage carousel starts an empty rotation before bags tumble noisily down its chute, the omnipresent sports team made up of teen girls in matching uniforms with matching bags and matching ribbons in their hair.

I love that everything is in motion and everyone is going somewhere and sometimes it all goes to shit but mostly it works and sends people all over the world to meet family or start a job or take a break.

My local airport reminds me of a cross between a cathedral and a library; it’s all high glass ceilings casting beams of dusty light over broad expanses of silent travelers seated on evenly spaced benches. If you want something more to look at than that you can stand at a wall of windows liking at an endless field of blue and watch the planes fly into forever.

May 11, 2017 156 notes
#this
If you were a committed moral realist, how do you think your other beliefs would be different? What about opinions? Basically, what is committed_moral_realist!argumate like?

Wow that’s a tough one. At first I think that version of me would be completely unrecognisable, but then I’m not so sure. I already have very strong moral inclinations, even though I am aware they are not baked into the universe; perhaps if I believed that these moral principles were fundamentally real then there would be few observable differences in my behaviour, besides what I might say in discussions about moral realism!

To think otherwise is to fall into the Jack Chick fallacy, where an absence of the god of Abraham immediately gives one a license to kill, cheat, and steal.

May 11, 2017 14 notes
#shtpost #argumate

We’ve already had that talk? The short form is that we recognize ourselves as thinking entities, IE: I think, therefor I am as you’ve repeatedly stated. What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them. From this flows such necessary moral precepts such as the illegitimacy of initiating force against another thinking actor and the necessary fact that because are responsible for the results of our actions, we also own them, and that includes actions that mix with other material goods.

What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them.

This requires a kind of internal unity of agents/minds that I’ve already established does not exist.  You want absolute moral liability, but people do not have absolute control over their minds and never did, which is why brain injuries, drugs, and mental illness can alter behavior.

For your position to make sense, the effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin should be impossible.  It shouldn’t be feasible to change someone’s level of alignment between their will and its execution through biochemical means if their will is absolute and unified.  

And if will isn’t absolute, if it’s subject to all the limitations and complex complications of life in physical bodies in a physical world, then the result of binding liability (if we even accept that) is far, far lower.

Because of this lack of perfect unity, if we took your proposition seriously, then it should be possible to charge someone’s executive functioning capability with a crime (or just moral liability) independently of the other subcomponents of their mind.  

Some sort of unification of limited moral binding based on limitations of execution, limitations of information, the default will, targeting of subcomponents of mind, does not, I think, move towards AnCap, but some new class of moral theory that has yet to be born, which is the first thing new/valuable I think I’ve actually gotten out of these discussions with you.

…though not entirely without precedent, but rather not formalized into a total system.  See typical handling of limitations in many common courtrooms, and many laws.

May 11, 2017 96 notes
#the yellow black snake
May 11, 2017 11,122 notes
What do you even like about the west?

I live here, it’s a pretty nice place to live.

May 11, 2017 1 note

“the yellow black snake” seems like a reasonable tag for that cluster.

May 11, 2017
#just for clarification
Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level

That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.

Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).

In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.

May 11, 2017 25 notes

No, you did not explain why it ‘does not make sense,’ you posited some objections that I answered. You have no ‘violated its understanding of unified agents,’ given I answered your supposed objections each time. You have NOT pointed out how it does not logically follow, you’ve merely said it doesn’t. The fact that minds ‘precede’ ownership isn’t even relevant, and so on.

Well, let’s see your derivation for self-ownership, then.  Explain how it logically follows. 

Keep reading

May 11, 2017 96 notes
#the yellow black snake

rtrixie:

If anon’s explanation of that “Benedict option”as Catholics retreating into catholic-only communities is accurate, it operates under the serious fallacy that a hostile government won’t utilize forced integration and diversity against such a thing. 

Freedom of association doesn’t apply to cash cow and designated ‘oppressor’ groups. See also: the town of Oranje in South Africa.

Why Left/Libs can’t demobilize the new increase in White Nationalism, part 86.

May 11, 2017 14 notes
Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level

That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.

Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).

In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.

May 11, 2017 25 notes
#politics #the yellow black snake

I’ve already explained why your axiom does not make sense, I have violated its understanding of unified agents in several ways, I have repeatedly pointed out that “self-ownership” does not logically follow from its premises, I have pointed out that minds themselves precede ownership because ownership isn’t even meaningful in one-agent systems while the borders of minds still are, it’s just - 

- ach, I was going to just leave the post and not read it because I know this discussion is pointless, but I wanted to see how you’d respond to the Delegate Organization Republic so I read it anyway.  Or enough of it.

I’m never going to be convinced by your premises, because aside from the general worldview, intuition, and so on, for me, a morality system is about good things happening and bad things not happening, and any moral system that isn’t about that is, to me, pointless.  As far as I am concerned, there is no other possible root, and it is bizarre that people say “no, these rules being followed is more important than outcomes” because why would you even bother having rules if not to seek outcomes.  (So, logically, the ultimate system is the one that seeks the ultimate outcome.)

And as for your part, you seek a different kind of control that you don’t have.  You want a system in which morality is far more fixed and far less dynamic, incapable of being redefined in its broad details according to who actually exists within the system, at a much more concrete/intermediate level than under a Consequentialist system, which the fixed core is at a higher level of abstraction.

You want a system in which a consent violation is always wrong, no matter what.  That’s what makes you feel like you’re valued.  Not having it makes you feel like you’re not in control.  If a consent violation happens to you, it’s important that it be deemed wrong, no matter if it reduces consent violations elsewhere or prevents someone from involuntarily ceasing to exist.

But that dooms you into a framework in which terrible things can happen without even being considered regrettable/immoral by the system because it has no language to mark them as bad.

May 11, 2017 96 notes
#the yellow black snake
The perfect metaphor

millievfence:

K comments on a slate star codex post about the curious way people react to failing rebreathers.  Deep divers use a rebreather rather than just an oxygen tank, because it decouples length of dive from amount you have to carry.  Rebreathers can fail; that’s okay, you bring an emergency oxygen tank with you, enough to get back to the surface.  The problem is noticing; oxygen deprivation is hard to notice because noticing requires oxygen.  So they put a monitor in that beeps at you if the oxygen content of the air gets low and you need to switch to your emergency tank.

All your incentives are aligned here.  You want oxygen.  You have a source of oxygen.  You have a clear signal as to when you need to switch.  Switching is not hard, you just need to swap your mouth pieces.  And yet, people are horrible at this.  They panic and in their panic they can’t detach from the thing that has been your source of air, even if intellectually they know it is no longer a good source of air.

Some people do this even when they are on land in a room full of normal air when they knew they’s need to switch at some point.  It is just too hard.

This is a great metaphor for anxiety.  Even if you intellectually know the cause of your stress it can feel too dangerous to separate from it long enough to introduce a healthier replacement.  You have to get the rebreather working first, and then you can switch sources.  It is related to but not quite the same as a sick system, although I can’t quite articulate the difference.

So “clinging to the rebreather” is a thing now, please introduce it to your lexicon

May 10, 2017 111 notes

argumate:

Actually Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, not the book.

“Actually Argustein is the name of the psychiatrist, not the author.”

May 10, 2017 22 notes
#shtpost
  • Libertarian: let me try an economic argument
  • Statist: Efficiency isn't everything!
  • Libertarian: ok let me try a moral argument
  • Statist: Yeah, but how would that work in the real world?
  • Libertarian: ok let me try an ec
  • ---
  • Libertarian: Voluntary action will solve environmental problems.
  • Statist: It's already failing to solve environmental problems in China.
  • Libertarian: But the Chinese government is authoritarian and corrupt and is failing to solve environmental problems.
  • Statist: But it doesn't prohibit solving environmental problems through voluntary action, they lie about the smog levels being low so they would hardly stop you actually clearing the smog, and other countries have environmental problems managed through government. If voluntary action is enough, why isn't it already there and working?
May 10, 2017 137 notes
#the yellow black snake #the iron hand

AnCaps acting as if we forgot about workers locked into burning factories, rivers so polluted they became fire hazards, meat packing plants so vile they contributed to more deaths of soldiers than enemy action, women licking radium paint, dumping PFOA in the water supply, and every other abuse by business. They would have us believe voluntary consumer action is sufficient to address all these and other problems, when it already isn’t sufficient now. They say that “well that isn’t worse than what states have done”, but that’s mostly because these companies do not have freely-operating military arms and are instead militarily subordinate to states. Even abolishing LLCs does not actually solve it, since it’s possible to set up alternate webs to escape liability, and it’s far easier and cheaper to cause damage than to fix it. People cheated at Commie rules. No reason they wouldn’t cheat at AnCap rules, too.

May 10, 2017 1 note
#the iron hand #the invisible fist #the yellow black snake

wirehead-wannabe:

Probably, digging up old discourse here, but I really really really do not trust any QALY measurement that doesn’t allow for negative values. If you’re rating a year of depression at 0.6 times the value of a non-depressed year, something in your model has probably gone off the rails. I mean seriously, even if a person spends an entire year in a nursing home in constant pain, barely able to sit up, and isolated from all the friends and family they used to see every day, the people claiming to be making rigorous utilitarian calculations will STILL insist on expressing that as a non-negative percentage value relative to a year of health, no matter how much the patient insists that they would rather be dead.

I wish this was just an isolated methodological error, but sadly this seems to be the norm for everything when we talk about happiness economics, life satisfaction, and healthcare.

They want to avoid going Full Hitler.

May 10, 2017 18 notes

@remedialaction​ Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough - 

I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack.  My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.

I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible.  I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs.   Revolution is, after all, overrated.

It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.  

It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.  

May 10, 2017 1 note
#politics #policy

@remedialaction That will be my last response to you for a while, because I noticed typing all that up was time-consuming, and these things tend to be distracting and leave me anxious wondering when a reply will drop.

May 10, 2017 1 note

I think those two things are intimately linked, though. 

Look man, if you want a cynical explanation, might I suggest that clearly from my expectations I expect to suffer and maybe die under Anarcho-Capitalism, and that at some point I might need state assistance.  Not guaranteed, but it’s been mentioned in various places that I don’t have perfect executive functioning.

Keep reading

May 10, 2017 96 notes
#wasteful longpost #the yellow black snake

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

kaptainkulak:

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

Uh oh Miti, you get to be “tamed or even physically defeated and must also be punished in proportion to the severity of their crime to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully to teach them a lesson for the future.”

I’m a wild and dangerous animal that can be exterminated like a pest though, so it could be worse!

You know the irony is that I would materially contribute to fighting against an armed Communist revolution, but since I believe involuntary taxation for things other than defense spending is justifiable and I’m to the Left of Augusto Pinochet…

Also the Communists would probably treat me as a Class Enemy or something.

Edgy Centrist problems, man.

May 10, 2017 93 notes
EXPLAIN WHO IS TOGEPI1125

TOGEPI1125 IS

well

he’s sort of an infamous (well, as far as anyone knows he’s an okay guy? maybe??? no one seems to have ever actually talked to him???) big name furry

who is notorious for one thing

he is, singlehandedly, the source of almost every single piece of Falco x Fox macro art out there (and we’re talking literally hundreds of pieces. maybe even a thousand.)

he’s reclusive, has extremely specific tastes in kink, and commissions so much art (and not just still pieces, we’re talking like several minute long animated porn shorts)

we’re talking like “this guy could buy several houses with the amount of money he spends on commissioned furry porn of his very specific kink”

theres one other thing we know about him- the reason he can afford all this? is because he’s apparently one of the top heart surgeons in the country

May 10, 2017 27,473 notes

kaptainkulak:

mitigatedchaos:

kaptainkulak:

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

If the alternative is to be implicitly owned by outside forces from the beginning, then yes, I’ll take the first option.

You always were. In practice, property is a product of the ability to exclude through force, not a metaphysical entity. With the purity of the world already broken, excluding infinite liability for finite mistakes is not actually shocking or ridiculous.

May 10, 2017 93 notes
#the yellow black snake

kaptainkulak:

anarchyinblack:

mitigatedchaos:

Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

May 10, 2017 93 notes
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