Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Misc SF Moral Ideas

Here, did you want some background ideas for you science fiction?  In-universe, violating some of these could be considered morally unthinkable.

• Abortion is banned, but everyone is born naturally sterile unless they get a procedure to allow them to have children.
• Meat-eating from animals is banned except for a few “traditional” cultures.  This actually includes the Amish and a few "historical,” pasture-based farms.  Everyone just eats engineered meat grown in tubes instead. 
• Similarly, aside from a handful of traditional farms, the vast majority of milk products are created using tissue engineering and modified bacteria due to perceived animal consent issues.
• Predator-prey relationships still exist in nature, but prey animals have been genetically modified to lose awareness after sustaining a sufficient level of injury.
• Prison is considered cruel and inhumane.  Instead, convicted criminals are fitted with internal cybernetic restraints that are monitored by AIs and physically prevent them from engaging in certain actions.  (Alternatively, it weakens, dampens, and delays their motor actions.)
• Alternatively, prison is considered cruel and inhumane, instead, convicted criminals are subjected to a regime of corporal punishment, but otherwise are allowed to roam a small, isolated town. 
• It is unthinkable that someone would choose for their child to be monosexual instead of bi- or pansexual.  It has not yet been classified as child abuse.
• People are almost immortal.  It turns out population explosion isn’t a risk because wanting to have lots of kids is not genetic, but primarily social.  Thus, it’s only considered a weird thing some women do.  To meet population replacement goals, most children are grown in vats and raised by the state.

Moral progress, you guys.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

hey, i've got an argument against being "prolife." you should listen. here it is. wait for it... IT'S 2017

traveling-spartan answered:

The passage of time magically made unborn children not human beings anymore and killing them not murder?

Morality is an objective constant whether you like it or not. Try again.

[thathopeyetlives]

What does this even mean? Does anon think that they own the future somehow, or what? Do they think that we are supposed to just vanish away over time? We are the ones who are not killing our next generation. 

In the year 2044 shall we see a revitalized Church? In the year 2068 shall we see ongoing negotiations to restore the Papal States? In the year 2102 shall we see a United Nations Convention On The Rights Of The Unborn? We can only labor to create such a world. 

[mitigatedchaos]

Only through means that the Church would disapprove of, on the count of its apparent position against contraception - far more fully unlinking sex and reproduction.

And I know the answer in response is “but just don’t have sex then,” but that is not, and never has been, how that works in the real world.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

learn-tilde-ath asked:

if on the cube you put "undecentralized" instead of "centralized", then each of the axis names would have an initial of either U or D, and that could be kinda neat

The formal specifications for the Ideocube™ Ideology Partition System™ call for the “C” symbol to be rotated 90° degrees counter-clockwise, with its side components straightened vertically, and written with the new unicode codepoint “rotated straightened latin capital C”, rendered as “U”.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One Thousand Footballmen, Standing for the Flag

[mitigatedchaos]

I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.

The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?”  And so on.

However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.

It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity.  For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die.  In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.

Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.

America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small.  However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.

And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.  

Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.

Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts.  It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.

[rendakuenthusiast]

Is this an argument that one should openly advocate in favor of the performative flag-wavers and against the antiracist protesters because performative flag-waving is itself useful? Is it an argument that you should begin performative flag-waving, even if you were not doing so before? 

[mitigatedchaos]

It’s an argument that the performative flag-wavers are not as dumb as they seem to the outsiders.  Normie intuitions are okay about a lot of things a lot of the time.

Performative flag-waving is tier 0, unreconstructed Nationalism, with many of the problems that brings.  It’s, hm, a bit unenlightened, I would say.

One level of contrarianism up, it starts getting deconstructed, but that isn’t actually complete or good, either.  You start doing this “lol, no nations” thing, and then problems that you can’t address within your conceptual framework begins cropping up.

A more enlightened form of Nationalism is higher up the contrarianism hierarchy.  It is necessary to reconstruct Nationalism and synthesize in new information for better and more accurate performance.

To put it another way, you can use performative flag-waving Nationalism to fight Nazi Germany, but you can also use it to launch the Iraq War.  Anti-nationalism messes with your ability to do either.  Higher forms of Nationalism which enable fighting Nazi Germany but not launching the Iraq War, but which can pull from the same powerful emotions and intuitions, should be designed and deployed.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Of course, my personal opinion is that I don’t care if they kneel for the national anthem - but then, I don’t watch football, so what does that matter?

Besides, there’s no way that agreeing to this will save the next Googlebro.  As a coordination problem, you can’t pact for it.

[mitigatedchaos]

@silver-and-ivory

it’s not about saving google bros

it’s about freedom of speech

It actually is about saving the Googlebros, and it’s about freedom of speech.  It’s just that it’s about the spirit rather than the letter of free speech.

The NFL is their job, this is something they are doing on their time at their job.  The NFL would be within their letter-of-free-speech to fire them.  

Either both factions get to not be fired, or neither does.  If they hate having this sort of thing enforced on them, then they shouldn’t be so excited to force it on others.

A lot of the dumbest rationalizations, both in the bad forms of Nationalism, and in bad forms of Social Justice, are all about “but it’s different when we do it” which can be true sometimes but often isn’t.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Man, imagine if I had to cram all this information into Twitter.  

I mean, you think I’m esoteric now… lol

Also, the ensuing accusations of “manthreading.”

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Of course, my personal opinion is that I don’t care if they kneel for the national anthem - but then, I don’t watch football, so what does that matter?

Besides, there’s no way that agreeing to this will save the next Googlebro.  As a coordination problem, you can’t pact for it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Whig History implies that right-wingers should never, ever concede or give up ground, since they will not be able to reclaim it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

One Thousand Footballmen, Standing for the Flag

I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.

The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?”  And so on.

However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.

It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity.  For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die.  In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.

Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.

America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small.  However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.

And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.  

Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.

Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts.  It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

While this may not be the Perfect Policy That Would End All Badness Forever, a large part of my… not ideal world, but at least “world where things are mostly okay from a system one perspective” is just “competition and violence exist, but everyone is honorable and plays by the rules.” Like, where CEOs do their thing and make as much profit as possible, but are honest negotiators, don’t collaborate to raise prices, etc, and where war exists, but everyone follows the Geneva Conventions.

It’s weird to me that this isn’t a more popular position. In particular, it seems like “bring back honorable warfare, real men don’t torture children or use chemical weapons” should be prime neoreactionary territory, and yet somehow it isn’t.

[mitigatedchaos]

I think the Neoreactionaries would welcome it - if they thought it were remotely possible.

I certainly find something… hmn, I’m not sure what the right word is for it, but I appreciate that CEOs in Japan still experience shame as an emotion.

And I probably shouldn’t.  I probably shouldn’t be satisfied that someone embezzling ten million dollars would throw themselves into the sea, never to return, out of such a deep sense of shame.

Maybe it’s because one of our weapons against embezzlement is the stripping of social status - and if someone has no shame, it’s a sign that their social status hasn’t been stripped and can’t be used against them.  And then what is there to stop them embezzling?  White collar jail?  House arrest?  Not very effective.