1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
bambamramfan
mitigatedchaos

To add on:

The argument around homosexuality used rights (which don’t exist) vs sin (which also doesn’t exist at least in the sense they say it does).  There were also lots of complaints that it is “unnatural”, which was nonsensical.  That’s the level of debate by the normals.  I watched it happen.

A nuanced position based on the actual benefit to society did not occur.  

If the ideology of rights wins, then people have a right to cousin marriage and it is perceived as immoral for villainous consequentialist Nationalists (comme moi) to demand that the State should have an interest in not creating generations of new higher-genetic-risk children for very little gain, which it will then have to subsidize.

All of society must live with the consequences.

Source: discoursedrome gender politics
bambamramfan
discoursedrome

@rustingbridges wrote

to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that

(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights, whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do it well, y'kno)

and now for the hot read as: unnecessarily disagreeable take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs. If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors, guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?

There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.

But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.

bambamramfan

You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.

Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”

The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.

mitigatedchaos

This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.

If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.

If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.

An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.

Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.

bambamramfan

This is an argument that we can’t have nuanced or moderate norms, because people will only listen to extremes.

It’s also an argument that our concern is “someone being forever alone”, and not “having the freedom to choose whatever they want romantically so long as its consensual.”

I’m not particularly invested in defending the rights of cousin-daters, so much as I am utterly flabbergasted at how people would never use this sort of logic in a serious debate, let alone tolerate it from their ideological opponents, but bring it up in taboo situations to justify feelings of ickyness.

It’s the damn Electoral College argument all over again. Yes, you are clever. All of rattumb is very clever. You can come up with nominal arguments against anything. Are they good arguments? Should they be taken as the same weight as the default ethical principles like “the person with more votes wins” and “let people do what they want.”)

Like imagine you wanted to date someone of the same sex, and a conservative was using the arguments of the form presented in this thread, as reasons you can’t. How upset would you be.

mitigatedchaos

You haven’t noticed how opening the floodgates on gender many decades ago is already leading us in this direction? There is no stopping point - which might be okayish once we hit the Transhuman era and most of the negative consequences are removed, but before then there will be consequences and not all of us support atomistic individualism.

At issue is that rightists cannot tell what isn’t a risk and leftists cannot tell what is a risk.

Homosexuality is not contagious and isn’t particularly harmful. It also doesn’t make children. It doesn’t even really alter the dynamics of the straight dating market much. However, it would be a problem if it hit 20-40% of the population because as a species we depend on reproduction. (So if the situation were different then I would have a different opinion. But it isn’t, so gay marriage promotes membership in society, family, etc.)

But I will hold the line on polygamy, which is really the harmful polygyny when normalized, and we can see what happens in countries where it is common. I will hold the line on cousin marriage, which not only increases genetic risks but undermines nations. And of course, the taboo must be held on pedos.

These things have consequences far beyond the individual, and if your response on cousin marriage is “oh we’re going to make it legal but don’t worry, no one will use it anyway”, then why make it legal in the first place?

The ideological tools used to break down the barrier will prevent us from doing anything about it, like banning cousin marriages from producing children. On some level you must know that.

Source: discoursedrome
funereal-disease
funereal-disease

Sometimes I still think about that time that someone submitted to a confessions blog that they were scared of being called racist because of their faceblindness, and the mod responded “trying to opt out of being called racist is privileged and you should feel bad”

like

what must your mindscape look like if that seems like an appropriate response

lenyberry

…did the mod not know what “faceblind” means? 

funereal-disease

I think the logic was “you may not be racist because you’re faceblind, but you’re probably racist anyway, so fuck you”

mitigatedchaos

At some point the correct response is that you don’t care whether others will call you racist, and you reject their authority to apply the label. While not SJ ideal, one simply cannot trust randoms to apply the racism label correctly or even consistently, which has contributed to its erosion in recent years.

argumate

Anonymous asked:

how do marxists account for conflicts that are clearly fought along ethnic/national or religious lines? It feels like they make the almost trivial observation of "class conflict" ad-hoc with everything

argumate answered:

do they need to account for them? I mean “nationalism and religion are bad” would seem to be sufficient.

shieldfoss

You kind of do need to account for them if you have a central premise like “all conflict is class conflict.”

argumate

An easy out is to say that nationalism and religion are forces that enable you to mobilise people to engage in war against their class interests, eg. convince workers that they are German and that they should go and fight for German bosses against the French workers instead of uniting and deposing the bosses.

Maybe the next question is why people find nationalism and religious belief so much more appealing than class consciousness, and the answers to that are fairly obvious and explain why international socialism has been on the back foot since 1914.

mitigatedchaos

Communist: Workers of the world, unite!  Abandon your culture and possessions to pay into an enormous and anonymous group which will eventually be defined by the entirety of humanity! 

Nationalist: The nation is my extended(2) family, its culture is my culture, its glory is my glory, its benefit is my benefit.

I’m going to be a bit uncharitable here - Communism appears to be rather hollow and unsatisfying to humans compared to religion and nationalism, and I’m not even religious.  It leaves substantial corruption in its wake, and I can’t help but wonder how China would be functioning now if they didn’t try to get rid of the old culture.

politics

Time Criminal Ask Meme

Red: Who is the most exciting person you’ve met in an alternate timeline?

Orange: What is your stance on time paradox duplicates?

Yellow: What is your opinion on the North American Union vs the Union of American States?

Green: Which China is the best China?

Blue: Least favorite alternate-timeline country?

Indigo: Most favorite alternate-timeline country?

Violet: What is the strangest fashion in <year>?

Ultraviolet: <write own question - para-symmetric questions only>

counterfactual ask meme mitigated future mitigated fiction

“Nationalism?  How can you take pride in something you didn’t produce?”  They asked.

You didn’t produce your nation when you came to it, but your nation produced you.  And then, once you become a part of your nation, you do.

Nations are continually produced by their citizens, great projects of many hands, like civilizations.

nationalism
argumate

Anonymous asked:

AI as an existential threat i.e. some robot going on a killing spree is blown way out of proportion, but the social, political, and economic upheaval that will be caused by types of software getting more and more advanced and efficient i think is definitely downplayed and i think with enough concentration of resources and power in a small group of corporations or military organizations i think the goal of a conscious godlike ai or whatever could become essentially superfluous

argumate answered:

yes.

this latter scenario gets less nerd attention because it’s politics and can’t be solved by programmers.

mitigatedchaos

Politics is exhaustingly difficult, and I lack the magical powers to meme entire ideologies into existence, like some kind of National Technocracy.  My only political follower, in an inspired rather than Tumblr sense, is some youth in China.

However if in 30 years China has formally abandoned Communist trappings and is ruled by a network of computers implementing whatever it is that comes after prediction markets, I may be partially responsible.

politics
Top Photos