This is my blog right now.
I was reading about Ethereum.
Solidity is the JavaScript-like programming language designed for developing smart contracts that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“Nyarlothep? Wasn’t that some anime thing?”
Anonymous asked:
I think self-defense shortcuts a lot of the debate over shooting conscripts. As my sergeant put it, if someone's pointing a weapon at you, you can rightfully kill them, period. Maybe your rules of engagement should include more room to allow for surrender from conscripts, but when the bullets start flying, who is shooting at you is no longer relevant.
In practical terms, sure.
Or to put it another way, if you give voters the same level of responsibility for a war that you give a soldier volunteering to go over and fight it, then you are starting to weight very heavily on partial causal factors - which means that you can weight on the causal factors that contribute to the risk of a war. No snowflake thinks itself responsible for the avalanche.
Attempted murder is just as bad, in a more Deontological sense, as murder, right?
Thus being a Fascist and not starting a war is as bad as being a Fascist and starting a war, under that line of thinking.
However, Fascism is not the only ideology to start wars of imperialism. Communism and other ideologies have done this, too. Therefore, before a war even starts, and even if it’s hopeless that they could hope to start one, Communists are a potential valid target.
So this isn’t really seeming like a good plan to me, here.
In ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all governmental actions in one form or another. This is a unifying principle of what makes a liberal theory a liberal theory, at least for the contractarians. The conclusion then that citizens within liberal societies are not covered under the [Neutrality-innocence justification] follows in a fairly straight-forward fashion. If a government decides to go to war, that decision only comes about as a result of the citizens authorizing the government to do so. The citizenry’s role in the war is as the originator of the action towards war. This might happen electorally or it might happen by consenting to a societal structure that allows wars to be waged. Regardless of which one happens to be the case, the citizens are necessarily participating in the process of waging war. Thus, the citizens are not innocent of the decision to pursue war, for it is they who are authorizing the decision; and, the citizens are not neutral towards the war effort because it is their actions (consent) that causes the war to occur. Because the citizens are non-neutral and non-innocent, the [Neutrality-innocence justification] cannot apply.
You’re either a subject of your government with no say and therefore not a legitimate target, or a citizen with say and therefore a legitimate target.
An interesting argument.
A terrorist blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of anti-war demonstrators would be perfectly justified according to this theory, which is your first clue that it is not also a good argument.
If killin antiwar protesters is forbidden, what about killing civilian pro-war activists? What about conscripts?
Since when do such movements limit themselves to civilian pro-war activists?
As far as I can tell, “a terrorist movement which only selectively attacks political operatives that are against their national separatism” (or similar) is something that largely just doesn’t happen.
I think it would be a lot smarter and likely to succeed than what tends to actually happen. It provides a very clear Exit path, draws in far fewer in opposition (since those of opposed ideologies are at much less personal risk), spends scarce public resentment resources over targets that disproportionately help the opposition, etc.
From what little I know, that might fit the IRA?
Anyhow, whenever I see this argument, I never see it in a more nuanced form suggesting that the force of violence be directed over the actual movers of political power towards war.
Instead, it’s usually “and therefore 9/11 was justified.” The problem with this is that the same reason meddling over there created the conditions for bringing about 9/11, launching 9/11 creates the conditions for the Iraq War. That’s just how people are - and in many ways it makes sense for them to be that way. From a practical perspective, all this viewpoint does is increase, rather than decrease, war.
that’s a utilitarian case though
an entirely separate domain
Okay, how about this take - the power falloff is fairly significant as you go from politicians, to political operatives, to voters, and war is only one axis of any major political party.
As such, retribution/war justification falloff is also significant. Otherwise, you start losing the argument that says forced-/non-supporters of $FASCIST_REGIME should be killed because they didn’t do enough to resist it.
(Which is of course not the Utilitarian “we don’t want to kill them, killing them is not good in itself, but from a practical perspective we must destroy $FASCIST_REGIME and that takes priority.”)
How much control do soldiers have?
See, that’s part of why I think a more highly Deontological justification for war is unsuitable, generally. You get weird things like desperately trying not to shoot the enemy conscripts or something, instead of dealing with the practical matter that it is likely necessary to do so in order to win the war.
It might be relevant if you have extraordinarily more power than the enemy. The US military fighting Iraq the first time deliberately held back on anti-personnel tactics and let lots of them surrender.
But, let’s suppose you’re a state on the border of the Soviet Union, they’re throwing waves and waves of conscripts at you, and it’s taking everything you have not to become the next megafamine zone.
You just can’t afford that.
There are other issues. As one chips away at civilian protection for the powerful, developed nations, one is chipping away at the civilian protection for less powerful nations. Even the non-voting subjects contribute economically to the despot’s war effort, if unwillingly.
It risks summoning Total War if people actually start to accept this doctrine, rather than this weird, chewing-around-the-edges thing we have now.
But it goes deeper.
If you go after the civilian political factions that cause a war now, it makes sense to start going after ones that might cause a war in the future - like Communists.
And if ideology is a valid target, then so is religion.
In ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all governmental actions in one form or another. This is a unifying principle of what makes a liberal theory a liberal theory, at least for the contractarians. The conclusion then that citizens within liberal societies are not covered under the [Neutrality-innocence justification] follows in a fairly straight-forward fashion. If a government decides to go to war, that decision only comes about as a result of the citizens authorizing the government to do so. The citizenry’s role in the war is as the originator of the action towards war. This might happen electorally or it might happen by consenting to a societal structure that allows wars to be waged. Regardless of which one happens to be the case, the citizens are necessarily participating in the process of waging war. Thus, the citizens are not innocent of the decision to pursue war, for it is they who are authorizing the decision; and, the citizens are not neutral towards the war effort because it is their actions (consent) that causes the war to occur. Because the citizens are non-neutral and non-innocent, the [Neutrality-innocence justification] cannot apply.
You’re either a subject of your government with no say and therefore not a legitimate target, or a citizen with say and therefore a legitimate target.
An interesting argument.
A terrorist blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of anti-war demonstrators would be perfectly justified according to this theory, which is your first clue that it is not also a good argument.
If killin antiwar protesters is forbidden, what about killing civilian pro-war activists? What about conscripts?
Since when do such movements limit themselves to civilian pro-war activists?
As far as I can tell, “a terrorist movement which only selectively attacks political operatives that are against their national separatism” (or similar) is something that largely just doesn’t happen.
I think it would be a lot smarter and likely to succeed than what tends to actually happen. It provides a very clear Exit path, draws in far fewer in opposition (since those of opposed ideologies are at much less personal risk), spends scarce public resentment resources over targets that disproportionately help the opposition, etc.
From what little I know, that might fit the IRA?
Anyhow, whenever I see this argument, I never see it in a more nuanced form suggesting that the force of violence be directed over the actual movers of political power towards war.
Instead, it’s usually “and therefore 9/11 was justified.” The problem with this is that the same reason meddling over there created the conditions for bringing about 9/11, launching 9/11 creates the conditions for the Iraq War. That’s just how people are - and in many ways it makes sense for them to be that way. From a practical perspective, all this viewpoint does is increase, rather than decrease, war.
that’s a utilitarian case though
an entirely separate domain
Okay, how about this take - the power falloff is fairly significant as you go from politicians, to political operatives, to voters, and war is only one axis of any major political party.
As such, retribution/war justification falloff is also significant. Otherwise, you start losing the argument that says forced-/non-supporters of $FASCIST_REGIME should be killed because they didn’t do enough to resist it.
(Which is of course not the Utilitarian “we don’t want to kill them, killing them is not good in itself, but from a practical perspective we must destroy $FASCIST_REGIME and that takes priority.”)
In ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all governmental actions in one form or another. This is a unifying principle of what makes a liberal theory a liberal theory, at least for the contractarians. The conclusion then that citizens within liberal societies are not covered under the [Neutrality-innocence justification] follows in a fairly straight-forward fashion. If a government decides to go to war, that decision only comes about as a result of the citizens authorizing the government to do so. The citizenry’s role in the war is as the originator of the action towards war. This might happen electorally or it might happen by consenting to a societal structure that allows wars to be waged. Regardless of which one happens to be the case, the citizens are necessarily participating in the process of waging war. Thus, the citizens are not innocent of the decision to pursue war, for it is they who are authorizing the decision; and, the citizens are not neutral towards the war effort because it is their actions (consent) that causes the war to occur. Because the citizens are non-neutral and non-innocent, the [Neutrality-innocence justification] cannot apply.
You’re either a subject of your government with no say and therefore not a legitimate target, or a citizen with say and therefore a legitimate target.
An interesting argument.
A terrorist blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of anti-war demonstrators would be perfectly justified according to this theory, which is your first clue that it is not also a good argument.
If killin antiwar protesters is forbidden, what about killing civilian pro-war activists? What about conscripts?
Since when do such movements limit themselves to civilian pro-war activists?
As far as I can tell, “a terrorist movement which only selectively attacks political operatives that are against their national separatism” (or similar) is something that largely just doesn’t happen.
I think it would be a lot smarter and likely to succeed than what tends to actually happen. It provides a very clear Exit path, draws in far fewer in opposition (since those of opposed ideologies are at much less personal risk), spends scarce public resentment resources over targets that disproportionately help the opposition, etc.
From what little I know, that might fit the IRA?
Anyhow, whenever I see this argument, I never see it in a more nuanced form suggesting that the force of violence be directed over the actual movers of political power towards war.
Instead, it’s usually “and therefore 9/11 was justified.” The problem with this is that the same reason meddling over there created the conditions for bringing about 9/11, launching 9/11 creates the conditions for the Iraq War. That’s just how people are - and in many ways it makes sense for them to be that way. From a practical perspective, all this viewpoint does is increase, rather than decrease, war.
Anonymous asked:
I just want there to be some nefarious group working to exploit horny dudes on the internet to funnel power to whatever dark god (2D) they serve okay
uggggh why can’t you just settle for a metaphorical dark god like the neoreactionaries do
Anonymous asked:
You know, why /doesn't/ the internet have a native sex cult?
…what?
Alright look we’ll just redefine the meaning of ‘cult’ a little so that people who think Rule 34 must be made real are defined as a cult okay.