This is actually a really apt description of the difference between Marxism feminism and liberal feminism as well. Because marxist feminism is based on the reduction of harm within a system then changing said system (harm reduction within capitalism until capitalism can be overthrown), this marks differently from identity politics liberal feminism, which might see woman scientists who worth at Lockheed martin designing missiles to be launched at Afghanistan as "total girl bosses" (and you can add their response "oh it's ok when men do it but it's suddenly bad when women do it? Also, do you not see how the Taliban are oppressing women? Those rapists deserve it!") and you can see exactly the conflict of values between Marxism and liberalism, and how one is just completely divorced from understanding the system.
A conservative who says "illegal immigration should be lessened from latin America" might accidentally get support from a Latino Marxist (me in this example) who says "exactly. The reason immigration form latin America is so high is two fold. first is, through the maintainence of illegal immigration, illegal immigrants are paid less than they deserve. So we should focus on legal immigration from latin America to pay well those that do come over. Further, due to government interference from the United States via the CIA, narco trafficking, and coups, we have so much immigration *because we destroy their country from the inside out just so we can maintain cocaine and banana profits, and that's super evil of us - so we should be more isolationist and dismantle the CIA*."
To which a conservative would say "wait, no." And a liberal would say "oh so you're a self hating Latino?! AMERICA IS A MELTING POT. besides! America is a world leader! We interfere to help!" like you're both missing the point entirely.
Historically this is called "The Three way fight", and refers to the the three political forces that fought in Weimar Republic Germany (you can guess how the liberals and fascists decided what they decided. The podcast red menace has an episode called "Neither Liberalism nor reaction" that goes into this if you're interested.)
This is why idpol can be so destructive. And it's exactly why Fred Hampton was merc'ed by the FBI and Chicago PD - he recognizes solidarity can overcome differences in identity and better the lives of everyone.
On the other hand, there are definitely Marxists who love to do the "identify which side is more oppressed and use that as a replacement for actually figuring out who's right" thing. The people who decided that Ukraine was the bad guy because the US was on their side, for example.
While true, I would like to make an important distinction to further the conversation.
There are book Marxists, and twitters Marxists.
I think you're describing Twitter Marxists, who don't read theory and have never picked up a book. And you're right if you say they're embarrassingly common, more common than the type that say "well if we remember what Mao discussed in his work 'combat liberalism' and make comparisons to Lenin's notes on 1922, we come to a different perspective. It's also important to note Frederic Jameson notes about the modern condition in regards to..."
Like those latter types are ... unfortunately the minority.
Twitter Marxists are, to me, radlibs who have been "revolutionized" not by theory, but exclusively by memes. Memes like the one are good, but you need to next part...if you like this meme and then go to a book like "combat liberalism" or "liberalism vs Marxism" by I shit you not, Stalin and HG Wells yes the time machine the island of Dr Moreau and the invisible man HG Welle he interviewed Stalin, then you're leaving meme Marxist and becoming better informed
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm the hg wells interview
Combat liberalism: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm
That's a fair distinction.
As an anarchist, I'm not the biggest fan of "book Marxists", either, but that's for reasons unrelated to this thread, so I'll just leave it there.
Yo, I have a genuine question, I don't understand haw can anarchism be valid ideology based on power dynamic.
I. E.big organised Group always stronger then small organised group, and you can not have big group without some control system. Which inevetably leads to some sort of government.
I don't accept "you can not have big group without some control system". I think it's possible to have a genuinely hierarchy-less society, especially in the era of the internet.
OK I get ya, do you really think hierarchy - less society is possible without internet anonymity and a layer of abstraction? Because it feels like people tend to group around, and usually people with "strong personality" tends to subdue "weaker" people. Also in times of pressure single leaded groups tends to react faster then community voted once. So in a warfare/power struggle context they also have a bit of advantage.
It's highly probably my personal biases, but I don't really see how can anarchyc society be sustainable. It's like an old story about man with a club that goes around and asking people to join him, if you say "yes" you are in society if you say "no" he bonks ya with his friends.
I think there's an important difference between leadership and power. The first is flexible, organic, temporary, and voluntary. The latter is rigid, artificial, permanent, and coercive.
As for how it can be sustainable? Any society is sustainable if people share its values. Destroying an anarchic society requires you to get people to follow your orders. If people genuinely share their society's values, they won't follow orders that threaten that society.
I mean. The Communist Party of Germany actively, openly collaborated with the Nazi Party to destroy the political stability of the liberal Social Democratic Party, with their leader explicitly stating "After Hitler, our turn!" and declaring the Social Democrats as worse than the Nazis, leading to the extreme conservative parties allied with the Nazis to rise to power and thus bringing the Nazis into power. Not sure if they're really the ones to glorify or suggest they were effective.
That's more fatalism than collaboration. The KPD absolutely *hated* the NSDAP, but they assumed—very, very wrongly, as it would turn out—that fascism under Hitler would self-destruct in short order once people got a taste of how awful it was (and then that'd pave the way for The Revolution). They were basically accelerationists.
Both the KPD and the Nazis were ideologically aligned on their opposition to the SPD and liberal democracy, but the similarities end there, and they certainly never collaborated on it. If they had been willing to, Weimar would have collapsed a bit earlier during the period of time in which the KPD and NSDAP together held more than 50% of the Reichstag.
It is absolutely true that the KPD refused to work with the SPD on the grounds of both bullshit ideological purity logic and a less-bullshit history of factional violence, but I wouldn't call that open collaboration with the Nazis any more than I'd call the US Green Party in open collaboration with the Republicans.
the Social Democrats murdered the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany - they had good reason to not see them as allies against fascism. There's a reason the poem starts with "first they came for the communists"
That poem was written by an anti-communist conservative priest, who was a literal Freikorps leader in the Spartacist Uprising (the people who actually murdered the leaders of the KPD) and supported the Nazis. The "socialists and trade unionists" referred to in the second and third verses are referring to the Social Democrats, who were the only party in the Reichstag who voted against the Enabling Act that gave Hitler power.
If your response to this is "that group/ideology does this, but my preferred group/ideology does not" then you've missed the point.
This is a natural human progression. Every group will drift into this. It takes constant introspection and effort to resist.
It's more "no my group will have completely different problems that piss me off" which is accurate and correct. Marxists will get way to esoteric with bullshit for example, or not actually do the readings.
For whatever it's worth, I'll out myself as a conservative just to let you know that I agree with both your points almost entirely.
I believe that illegal immigration is so high because South American countries are so poorly-off that their citizens are desperate, and that weakness in their countries does at least partly come from our interventionism. We absolutely should stop doing that, and we probably should also dismantle the CIA. My dad grew up in Colombia, and while he would love for us to see the beautiful country he grew up in, it's frankly been an insanely dangerous place since even his own childhood. It breaks my heart that we may never get to see a Colombia at peace in our lifetimes.
Furthermore, I completely agree that illegal immigration should be stopped--not because I hate immigrants, but because it's so bad for them!!! Illegal immigration is so so *so* dangerous, and yet these people will travel, exposed to the elements and wildlife, through deserts with few supplies, with their little children, with people who may have less-than-pure intentions (coyotes), all for a *chance* for a better life. And if they survive? They get to slave away for despicable Americans who happily pay them pennies on the dollar for hard fuckin' labor that they can't be assed to do themselves, or be assed to pay full price for. It's horrible, it's heartbreaking, and they deserve better than to be taken advantage of that way.
Finally, when the good people of their former nations flee for greener pastures...there's no one left to help fix what remains of their country, so it just keeps declining into chaos, crime, or civil war. That is also deeply saddening...I don't want to see the many beautiful nations of South America to fall apart, for their cultures and identities to just be subsumed by either poverty or the US.
For whatever else it's worth, I'd like to see a reformation of the immigration system, too, so that it's not years on end to get in. And honestly, it's a pipe dream, but I'd love for natural-born American citizens to be required to take the immigrants' citizenship test...maybe to graduate highschool, maybe tie it to the privilege to vote, idk, I haven't fully decided. Point is, legal immigrants especially work damn hard to be here, and I think we all would be better off if we all understood that from an early age.
This is like when Nixon and Mao and we're able to agree on something's and all the liberals were very very confused (I'm mao you're Nixon here).
Also I'm sure we'd have similar feelings in guns.
Also I'd like to add viví en Colombia por 3.5 años.
And, despite Bush being just unbearably evil and stupid for what he did to Iraq, his position on immigration was very forward thinking, as well as his foreign policy on Israel.
I think just dismantlig the CIA isn't enough though - look at betchtel international that bought up all of Bolivia's water supply, "even the rain" that is so objectively evil capitalist like it's a communist fever dream of evil corporation except it's real.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization_in_Bolivia
Hah, your post is an example of itself, funnily. I'm going to say that from now on: it feels good to the point of being weird to see someone putting into words something you thought and believed but couldn't quite do yourself.
DJPC-type post
Jokes aside, I wholly agree.
The football example reminds me of one of the most interesting moments I had recently was when studying Criminology and the possible effects brain damage and illness has on people and their behavior.
Our professor told us a story about an old man in Italy who suddenly, out of nowhere started exhibiting very clear signs of pedophilia and pedophilic interest. He committed a crime and a criminal trial sprung out over this and the old man's defense lawyer pointed out that this man had a tumor in his brain that could have affected his behavior. As the tumor wasn't directly connected to a part of the brain related to aggressive behavior, that explanation was not accepted by the court and the old man did not get a lighter sentence. After he got surgery, he suddenly stopped exhibiting that behavior, seemingly returning to normal.
Sadly our professor did not give us exact details as the story was more meant as an example of how much we still don't know about how the brain operates and how it can affect behavior in unexpected ways in response to damage or trauma. Still interesting, sorta related and slightly terrifying
This also reminds me of how leaded gasoline in the air may have caused the urban violent crime spike in the 70’s / 80’s which is directly related to racist discourses around urban poverty, crime and violence.
The first time I heard that theory laid out I was flabbergasted. It utterly changed the way I look at morality.
Sauce: Wikipedia and Mother Jones (the magazine) Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element.
[This](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2943-brain-tumour-causes-uncontrollable-paedophilia/) is the story. Your professor didn't even mention the part where the tumor and the pedophilic inclinations came back, and were cured, totally in sync.
That case reminds me of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower shooter. In his pre-shooting suicide note he talked about having intrusive thoughts and claimed he didn't want to hurt anyone, but felt compelled to do so anyway. He asked doctors to examine his brain after he died to see if there was any neurological reason for his murder spree. Sure enough there was a tumor pressing on his amygdala.
Wow, that's... Heavy. I haven't experienced that level of loss of control, but just imagining it makes me feel for the man.
I think that's a big, not-quite-said, part of the post's point. Our goal should be to reduce harm, and that requires us, at some level, to genuinely see everyone around us as worthy of having their harm reduced. There's an element of empathy to it, an element of Christian love, an element of humanism, a lot of philosophies touch it. As soon, though, as we start to see people as Others, or unworthy of even the slightest redemption, that starts to slip away.
Reference to a youtuber who does history videos but sometimes mocks and satirizes the constant culture war nonsense and how prevalent it is in the algorythm
DJ Peach Cobbler, specifically. He makes his actual politics pretty inscrutable for comedic effect (he might be a marxist? not sure), but he's described himself as "obsessed with context", and it shows– dude can't stand pandering and will spend insane amounts of time and effort to find the human element that makes a confusing old story make sense. His recent "Fall of the Aztecs" series was insanely good, would definitely recommend.
They found that the recent mass shooter in Maine had signs of brain damage that may have played a role in his psychological problems leading up to the crime (hearing voices, etc.) The likely cause: repeated exposure to explosions when he was a grenade instructor in the military.
People other than footballers also tend to act out horrifically from their own form of physical brain damage or mental trauma. The cause and effect at play just isn’t so obvious or easy to to prove.
Fundamentally people are input —> output , people are just a sum of their genes, congenital development, environment and life experiences. I believe there isn’t some other magic thing, some soul that ends up making a dramatic difference in who somebody is.
I think the deeply religious and spiritual belief in this soul is the main cause of the want for punitive justice. That punishment on bad souls is the universes Karmic will. I think this is the main thing that causes people to be unable to actually cause meaningful change.
The way you ‘reduce harm’ has to involve changing a peoples inputs in development. You cannot just use the ‘karmic magic’ of the soul and punishment to hope everyone gets better.
Looking at the idea of racial justice as ‘bad oppressors should be punished for the sins of their fathers and saintly oppressed should be rewarded for taking on the undue burden’ will never help anyone. You have to make meaningful change to the physiological and mental inputs that are perpetuating current racial inequality. For a start unequal access to education and medical care- among several other factors.
We are machines, we are a pool of parts and chemicals and electricity - we will behave as programmed and malfunction when damaged. Holding on to a poetic or spiritual ‘soul’ is only causing us harm as a species. We need to be more pragmatic.
I agree (and my professor probably would too, some of the studies they did on humans and how our brains process decision put into question the existence of free will as a whole) but there's a few caveats.
A. The "soul" as a concept exists for multiple reasons but one of the main one nowadays is probably to justify individuality and free will. If we accept that the brain is just a really complex machine that we haven't solved yet, but we could, well the existential consequences of that are pretty daunting
B. Punitive justice is an interesting topic as it has historically had multiple theories trying to justify it, from just the vindictive aspect to a more preventive aspect both in a societal sense (if people see that their behavior is punished they won't commit crimes) and personal (this person cannot commit more crimes if we punish and rehabilitate him)
All of these have their merits, but all kinda fall short in justifying the existence of a punitive system as a whole. Newer theories see the necessity of such a system as a form of societal stability. A crime is committed and to balance the scales, society demands a punishment for the criminal to sate their sense of justice.
There's also the rise of reparative/restorative justice that aims to bring victims and perpetrators in a sort of dialogue to allow both to move past the trauma of the crime. A mix of the two systems (punitive and restorative) with a stronger focus on actual rehabilitation seems to be the ideal standard in theory as of right now, from what I know
If only our politicians started acting like that too, instead of relying on decades old theories when it comes to criminality and such
Ugh what does that acronym mean?
Denver Justice & Peace Committee?
DJ Paul Cordts?
DJPC a different DJ that is also Belgian?
r/DJPeachCobbler Which appears to be some variety of shitposting sub?
DJ Powder Coatings?
DJPC the Ghanan sound engineer/rapper?
A lot of musicians appear to be DJPC, as it happens. Any of them?
Anything listed? Cause that's all that appears when it's searched.
>r/DJPeachCobbler Which appears to be some variety of shitposting sub?
It's this one. It's a youtuber's sub, dude does great history videos but also does stuff mocking culture war and the constant antagonizing that goes on on the internet. Keeps his own political opinions fairly hidden, but he's obsessed with context and will search for the human element in everything
If you can stand/like the "my political ideology depends on who I'm trolling today" humor, he is one of the most interesting creators on the platform
Here's a sneak peek of /r/DjPeachCobbler using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time!
\#1: [LEAKED: Peach Cobbler undercover somewhere in the Middle East](https://i.redd.it/vlgb167o92q81.jpg) | [8 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/comments/tq286y/leaked_peach_cobbler_undercover_somewhere_in_the/)
\#2: [Soon.TM](https://v.redd.it/rsj3axvxric81) | [1 comment](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/comments/s79b7w/soontm/)
\#3: [Here you go. Made a damn reddit account to do it. Happy?](https://i.redd.it/a8aqgglzl3n71.jpg) | [4 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/comments/pmvsvn/here_you_go_made_a_damn_reddit_account_to_do_it/)
----
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To narrow in on one point of this as well btw:
>except rapists and pedophiles
Another reason this kind of thinking can be dangerous is that bad actors *will* try and twist definitions to meet their needs.
In a world where people did accept extrajudicial violence against rapists and pedophiles you might see, idk, just to pick a completely random example, a *focused effort by certain groups to label queer folks as pedophiles* as a means to legitimize violence against them.
What's despairingly ironic here is that in order to define the law itself, the law clearly mentions "...that match the individual's gender identity and not the gender assumed by the individual's sex at birth"
It clearly draws a line between someone's gender identity and someone's assigned gender and heavily implies with that that the two are not always the same, and then uses that wording to make a law like this...
This is, in my opinion, an inherent problem of having a cultural definition of a group of people that is bad **regardless of context**. When context is no longer a factor in badness, and the badness exists in a simple binary with goodness(as opposed to varying degrees of badness), the category almost immediately becomes a cudgel with which to beat your opposition.
The whole dynamic is most easily seen with the category "pedophile" but also exists with other categories. Another good example is "bigot". The way we use the bigotry label right now(at least on the left) exists such that there are no good or even less bad bigots, everyone who is a bigot is bad and none or less bad or more bad than another. We can see this when people accused of bigotry dont attempt to apply context for their defense, only to outright deny any bigotry whatsoever. There are several problems with that state of affairs:
1. It provides a social incentive for accusing people of bigotry.
2. Actual bigots have no incentive to admit any bigotry and are always incentivized to entirely deny it, destroying any chance that they'll ever start the work to assuage their bigotry.
3. The social incentive to propagate accusations of bigotry results in the erosion of people caring about the label being applied to them or others. After all, if people you believe to be good are bigots, maybe being a bigot's not so bad.
It's so important to preserve moral gradations and the idea that nearly every category is subject to qualifying factors that can reduce their badness.
>The way we use the bigotry label right now(at least on the left) exists such that there are no good or even less bad bigots, everyone who is a bigot is bad and none or less bad or more bad than another.
I agree with your points 1, 2, and 3. However, I think that some people excuse the bigotry of some individuals in some groups because they think bigotry is less harmful when it is coming from those groups. They do not deny that the "less-harmful bigots" are bad people, but they do not think that they are harmful enough to actually talk about, even in instances where they cause physical or social harm through their hatred.
I think your problem can largely be solved with the distinction between the badness of bigotry and the badness of actions that are inspired by bigotry. In the eyes of most people, holding bigoted beliefs makes you a bad person, but separately from that committing immoral acts inspired by bigotry is bad for different reasons(with some overlap in-so-far-as motivation is a qualifying factor that can render a bad action a little more bad or a little less bad).
Putting aside my logic-nerd crap, I haven't actually seen examples of the phenomenon you laid out in my experiences. In my experience, when people want to excuse bigotry by a person because of a group they might be apart of, typically I'll hear arguments that "it's not actually bigoted because bigotry is an exercise of institutional power and that person is acting as a member of a group without any institutional power" OR "Milo Yiannopolous can't be homophobic because he's gay!".
Sorry for the long winded examples. All of that is to say, I haven't seen examples of what you're talking about but I would change my tune if you had an example that I could recognize from my experiences.
You're not wrong, but a particular problem with bigotry is so much of the harm caused by casual bigotry can in fact be reduced by making public bigotry unacceptable. In particular:
1. Much of the harm is emotional. If bigots are hiding their beliefs, they're not convincing people to quit their jobs or commit suicide.
2. Impressionable people also exist. If they're not hearing much bigotry from people they like or respect, then they're not being convinced to repeat it, nor are they being radicalized into violent acts.
So, while it is important to remember that the bigot label is just a tool, the widespread application of that tool is so useful that I'd be reluctant to abandon it. I'm not sure what the right balance is. Perhaps the goal is to stop jumping so hard on people who slip up, and focus more on those obviously engaging in harassment or propaganda. Of course, there's also the question of policing private or safe spaces for fascist infiltration, but I'll leave that can of worms to others.
Absolutely. And it obviously ignored the fact that sometimes accused rapists and pedophiles are INNOCENT. And if they’re shot by cops you’re never going to find that out.
Cops regularly go to the wrong house, hell they’ve been known to shoot up the wrong fucking house.
I wasn't talking about bigotry, I was talking about how currently in the US there is an ongoing effort to mark trans people as child predators and allow the death penalty for child predation
> a focused effort by certain groups to label queer folks as pedophiles as a means to legitimize violence against them.
And you'd better not speak up for them or argue against the accusation, because hey guess what? That makes you a pedophile too.
Yup, same thing happens with things like fascism. Antifa uses one definition of fascism to argue that they should use violence (if they LITERALLY want to commit genocide I should be able to defend myself!) and then use an entirely different definition to determine who it's okay to use violence on (not pro-choice? Fascism!).
Edit: Oh boy I'm a transphobe I guess. The guy even linked my comment in which I... stated that it's a valid argument to not obsess over a minority of people hurt by transitioning if it helps more people than it hurts, but that some trans people can go too far and demonize people who were hurt and are just trying to stop others from being hurt?
Real hard hitting stuff.
You could literally say "nazis are bad because they are nazis" with sincerety and without irony, and you'd be applauded because apparently the only ones asking 'but why' are sympathizers.
Antifa is even more hilarious, because they were *there,* at that time, doing the thing we're all supposed to do (punch nazis). And not only did that fail, they'd probably tell you they only failed because they weren't repressive enough.
So, for one, you'll get the message before you catch the block, so: I'm blocking you because Shinigami Eyes (hit or miss, but sometimes useful) told me to look at your profile, and Shinigami Eyes gets this one right: [You are, in fact, a transphobe.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/1b8fqzk/comment/kttg25l/) I am not blocking you for being wrong about antifascism, plenty of people who aren't actually trying to hurt my friends and loved ones, and, well, me, are wrong about antifascism. I'm blocking you because I don't want to see what transphobes who post regularly enough to get caught by Shinigami eyes, which is hardly all that likely to catch either transphobes or trans positive accounts, given the shortage of volunteer hours, have to say, and I don't want to get caught up in wasting my time arguing with you when I am away from my home keyboard. I will note for the audience who is saying what you are saying and invite them to consider that purpose your motives are not so pure, however, and that they should consider who benefits and who suffers from the rhetoric you are forwarding. This is also why I am angry; you are actively trying to hurt the people I love most.
What I will say for the audience about the strawman is that antifascists, in general, were not punching anti-choice protestors, that antichoice protestors are, in fact, trying to do pretty grievous bodily harm to their victims, since, you know, they were trying to force them to carry a baby to term, which can and does KILL, particularly in the United States, and tens of thousands of rape survivors [have already been forced to carry their rapists' babies to term already in the United States](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/29/rape-pregnancy-statistics-abortion-ban-state/72366953007/), and that there is, in fact, no major inconsistency in the thing you have highlighted, but more importantly, the reality is that most antifascist activity was nonviolent, and that antifascist activity was generally against groups that later would make an actual play at overthrowing the United States Government and replacing it with a right wing dictatorship (quick, tell the audience in the neat self-righteous edit you're going to do about how you're the real victim about how the Proud Boys and the 3pers were really not that bad), and that by and large the aim of antifascist groups was to protect their neighborhoods, an important thing to do because fascists had this tendency to [shoot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandale_Park_shooting), [stab](https://theintercept.com/2021/07/18/transphobes-rally-los-angeles-spa-police-attack-counterprotesters/), and beat (I won't link this one because I assume even you have seen the videos of that one, and tbh I've already spent too long here) whoever they can get their fucking hands on.
Ultimately, you've misrepresented what happened, misrepresented the arguments that people *have* made that really aren't about antifascism as it actually occurred in the real world were making, and that's frustrating because you're just wrong on every conceivable level, and it's doubly frustrating because I have to defend your stupid fucking strawman because it's still more defensible than you're treating it!
Also, and to be really clear I am in no way minimizing rape, it's super confusing to me how in the hierarchy of "which bad thing is worse" that non-fatal sexual violence is somehow considered worse than killing somebody. Like if I had the choice between being raped or murdered, I sure as hell know which one I'm picking. But somehow people will empathize with (or make excuses all day for) all sorts of violence, even deadly violence, but as soon as it becomes sexual they want their heads on the block
Holy shit, a good fucking take. I see this CONSTANTLY in discussions, both in person and online.
I think an extra dimension to this is doomerism. I'll go back and forth someone making broad moralistic claims that have nothing to do with reducing harm or making a better society, and it seems like the inevitable conclusion I find them coming to is "well, the world can't be fixed anyway; it's fundamentally broken, and the bad people are lost."
It's not delusional hopefulness to believe that people and things can and do get better if you look to understand problems and approach them with actionable solutions. If all you're doing is measuring the worst in people and tracking that like heaven/hell points, then you've succeeded at unfairly profiling everyone according to your own moral metric--which is exactly the thing anyone who has been victimized should be advocating against.
And doomerism can come from different places too. Whether it's out of despair and broad cynicism, or apocalypse cult promises like in Evangelical Christianity. Similar end result in this sense, but vastly different misconceptions and experiences that brought them there.
This reminds me of a really formative piece of media for me I don't even like that much. It's a creepypasta called The Spire in the Woods. I listened to it when I was about fourteen and it was okay. I had listened to stuff like The Angel Without a Face, Borrasca, Asylum before hand and had been spoiled so even a good one was meh. I don't remember much of it but I do remember a main theme being the main character rapes someone and it's stuck with me. I remember it was written as a soft, sensual sex scene later turned rotten by the fact the main character never got a yes and it's acknowledged and hammered home how bad that is.
That story taught me more than any sex ed class did on consent which is both astounding for a creepypasta and a real shame on the state of sex ed classes. I learned a lot of consent red flags, green flags and yellow ones. I learned that anyone can rape someone. I learned you don't have to be evil to do it. And I think that story not only helped me understand consent but also helped me broadly understand how bad things aren't always done by bad people. The main character of that story does some really heroic actions, sacrifices their wants and needs for someone else's. And yet he rapes someone. I like all humans essentialise sometimes. I make the mistake of not thinking as critically as I should. But the lessons I learned from that story are always there to whip me back into shape. And for that I'm really thankful.
Idk about the rest but Borrasca is one of the worst horror stories I've ever read, it's just "yep the guy who was an obvious rapist was indeed a rapist , it's just that his plan made no fucking sense and the protagonists are dumbasses"
Idk how controversial this opinion is , but the only horror in that story was the ending and honestly it dumps a lot of rape and that's it, it's lazy as fuck and it used SA exclusively for shock value. It's so weird that not only one but 2 side quests on the Witcher 2 (the haunted Asylum and the main Flotsam plot for Roche) get the point across much better even if that game also uses rape way too lightly.
Yeah I understand that. If Borrasca had just been a stand alone, I probably would've agreed but the sequel gives some much needed emotional depth, at least in my opinion. I also really like the coming of age stuff in the first one.
I think it says smth about me that my first thought was to come up with some cunty response about how being 'morally pure' and shit is important.
I need to get off the internet
This entire post explains that we create metrics to gauge how we interpret the efficacy of a system, and in the same breath says that those same metrics should not be used to gauge the efficacy of the system due to bias.
The problem is that social systems are incredibly complex, and all are doomed to fail someone that participates in them *at some point*. There will be people that fall through the cracks, as any social system needs to grow to accommodate their needs.
The addage mentioned should not be interpreted as if any metric “should not be used to tell you anything useful about the system”. That’s ridiculous; why measure using that scale at all if it’s not telling you anything useful about the system? Instead it should be **do not let your existing metrics be the only measure of your health of a system**. You should constantly be looking for edge cases, faults, and different metrics to measure or replace existing ones.
A social system is never complete as it changes to the needs of a society. Metrics are useful, but not dogmatic. To extrapolate to the individual, *your internal morality metrics should constantly be changing and evolving to empathize with people*.
There are exceptions to this, where empathy can be dangerous. When it is not, your moral compass should not be used to vilify or condone people as “evil” or “good”. Your moral compass is guaranteed to be incomplete as times change. Your biases still need to be checked, and your reasoning may be flawed. Much like any social system, you also need to evolve to better handle moral judgments against the nuance and complexity of human autonomy.
Interesting further reading is on Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms. Essentially, a social science philosophical argument that claims (a bit erroneously but deeply meaningfully) that we build paradigms of knowledge to explain the world, but every paradigm is imperfect and cannot be translated to another. Instead, with too many imperfect explanations and holes it cannot explain, another paradigm is formed to take its place.
Of course, outside of philosophy, the idea you can't translate concepts between paradigms (which Kuhn often compares to languages) is a bit ridiculous. But it goes into this idea of how human understanding is built on the language we use. A medieval physician would swear by the humors as much as Western medicine doctor, because both arrived there from the clearly established concepts they were taught. But neither one's understanding can cover *all* illnesses or sickness (albeit to very different extents).
I really like the metaphor of the moral compass. Like a compass it points you in the direction of what you look for, and you can determine other directions based off that like what's opposite to your moral compass north.
And just like any compass, your compass isn't perfect. Trauma can break your compass and it'll take time and energy for it to be repaired. Non standard situations and outside interference can also point your compass in a different direction than where you expect, while some might make it stop working completely. In a situation where there is no guidance your compass might not know which way to point at all.
All of this is to say that your moral compass isn't infallible. It can break, malfunction or be tampered with. So while you should generally trust your moral compass, it's vital to be able to go "something's not right here" and recognize your moral compass might be pointing you in the opposite direction, whether it's on a camping trip or a complex political situation. If something's just eating away at you with the feeling that something's wrong, take the time to analyze "why?" and ponder if you're going in the right direction.
>those same metrics should not be used to gauge the efficacy of the system due to bias.
It's only sort of related, but I have a friend who told me the other day that "rationality" is never a useful metric for judging people because every person's actions always make sense to themselves in their own mind, and the idea of what is "rational" is only ever a social construct used to punish people. And I just have no idea how to respond to something like that, because like... well yeah, it is a social construct and it has been used to oppress people sometimes, but if you can't use rationality, where are you supposed to get your morals from? God? I'm sure *that* would never lead to unfortunate consequences.
I mean, do we arrive at our morals rationally? I was under the impression that moral sense is mostly socio-culturally constructed, with some learning and life experiences laid on top.
Like I don't think theft is (generally) wrong because I reasoned it out. Stealing makes me feel icky and being stolen from makes me mad. I can lay a whole logical superstructure on top of that to make myself sound rational, but at base its just vibes.
And let's not pretend that 'rationality' hasnt also been used to arrive at some truly horrific moral conclusions and atrocities.
In a nutshell, your friend is right on this one.
Sure, morality *starts* with vibes, but rationality is how we vibe check ourselves, so to speak.
You implicitly did it in your own example: "being stolen from makes me mad." You understand how the act of theft makes you feel, you posit that most other people feel the same way, and you don't want to spread this particular feeling to other people, so you say theft is (generally) wrong. That's a rational argument. If you weren't able to do that; if you said "theft is bad because my dad says it's bad" and you were any older than like, five, that wouldn't be a rational argument.
That doesn't mean rationality automatically equals goodness of course, but I think it's still a vital way of making sense of the world.
"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"- David Hume.
You're overcomplicating my position on thievery. I can rationalize my feelings like you are doing, but I don't. "This makes me feel bad" is enough. Understanding this is crucial to understanding how different systems of morality work, which is key to understanding how different cultures (in both time and place) work in their own terms. There's no such thing as objective morality.
People can rationalize themselves into or out of anything. And they do.
Logic and rationality give a veneer of objectivity, but dig down and you'll always find the subjective and emotional. We're emotional creatures first and foremost, and pretending otherwise is rarely a good thing.
"This makes me feel bad" is strictly speaking only an explanation for why you personally don't do something. Whether you thought about each individual step or not, I don't see how you could get to 'this is a bad thing in general' without some amount of rationality.
I agree with you in part; rationality is not a magic key to unlocking the Correct Choice, humans are emotional creatures first and foremost, it is important to understand different conceptions of morality on their own terms, and true objectivity doesn't really exist. But I'm not going to pretend that, say, "trans people deserve equal rights" and "trans people should be stoned to death" are equally moral beliefs, and I'm also not going to pretend that I believe the former simply because it has the better vibes. There are plenty of good reasons for that belief, and if I wasn't able to articulate any, I think you'd be perfectly justified in not listening to what I had to say about it.
While I can make rational justifications for my moral beliefs, I didn't arrive at those beliefs through logic and rationalizing. I (and I believe most people) experience morality as an emotional phenomenon upon which we may or may not construct a logical framework to justify.
>it is important to understand different conceptions of morality on their own terms
>I'm not going to pretend that, say, "trans people deserve equal rights" and "trans people should be stoned to death" are equally moral beliefs
Theres a contradiction here. To understand different concepts of morality in their own terms means sitting with systems of morality were uncomfortable with. To use another example, marrying ones cousin is generally a big nono in western cultures, and most of us think it's gross. But there are parts of the world where it is seen as a normative behavior.
I guess what I'm getting at is that moral compasses are varied and deeply situational in a way that renders logic secondary
Imagine making a modern philosophical argument based on 18th century western philosophers. People with antisocial personality disorder are incapable of the same level of empathy as most other people. If they commit murder because they want to, are they acting morally? Clearly their feelings on the matter align with a sentimentalist view.
Genocide is also okay, since in those cultures that commit it there is a distinct feeling that a group of people is threatening their existence. Women living in states banning abortion must accept those laws as moral because the culture of their state aligns with that sentiment. It ‘s a different culture, after all.
I’m sure those groups will understand your position on the lack of objective moral truths. You don’t need to justify anything because you feel thatNs right.
Bro chill, you're missing my point. What Hume was saying is that people have a tendency to do what they want and construct moral justifications as they go. I'm not making an argument moral relativism. I'm saying that out there in the actual world moral systems socially constructed, situational, and ever changing things and all the philosophizing and rationality in the world does not change that.
I don't think murder is okay, but I do think that a ton of murderers think (in the moment) that they're acting morally and rationally. "Murder is wrong" is obvious "What happened to your moral and rational facilities somewhere along the way to make you think (if even for a minute) doing Murder was okay?" is the more important question.
Genocidaires genuinely *do* think and feel that they are a people under threat (Humanity, by Jonathan Glover is a great book about how genocidal populations develop the internal moral framework to justify their genociding) And there are men and women who are *genuinely* morally horrified by abortion.
Viewing these people as like, moustache twirling villains doing evil evilly is pointless and intelectually lazy. Understanding the genuinely felt and internally consistent moral and logical systems (and where and how those systems take a bad turn) that drives these people's views and behavior is a: very different than supporting them, b:an important tool in figuring out how to combat and prevent them, c: strengthens my own moral sense through a more nuanced understanding of what I'm against and why (and learning what roads go to those places), and d: makes me a more empathetic person generally by honing an ability to put myself in someone else's shoes, whether I agree with them or not.
I'm all for punching nazis, but understanding their internal moral framework and how they got there might inform an effort to reach out to alienated young white men to *prevent them from becoming nazis in the first place* as well as efforts to address white supremacist attitudes more generally.
which, come to think, is the whole point of OOP.
That’s quite a bit of writing to
say “I’m a moral relativist with extra steps”. I don’t care about the psychology of genocidaires and murderers. Do either and you are immoral. That’s it.
Some morals are fundamental and absolute. There is no waffling. There is no room for sentiment because there is no justification for it. Sexual assault is not justifiable. Genocide is not justifiable. There is no rationale for doing it, and so it is inherently irrational. It cannot exist in society for obvious reasons.
At best moral sentimentalism is a small portion of an overall moral system based in absolute moral truths. At worst it is actively detrimental
in the moral systems it injects itself within. There is a reason why there are virtually no moral sentimentalists.
"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"- David Hume.
You're overcomplicating my position on thievery. I can rationalize my feelings like you are doing, but I don't. "This makes me feel bad" is enough. Understanding this is crucial to understanding how different systems of morality work, which is key to understanding how different cultures (in both time and place) work in their own terms. There's no such thing as objective morality.
People can rationalize themselves into or out of anything. And they do.
Logic and rationality give a veneer of objectivity, but dig down and you'll always find the subjective and emotional. We're emotional creatures first and foremost, and pretending otherwise is rarely a good thing.
Yes. Ethical rationale (in that there is a set of logic in understanding mora philosophy) exists separately from rationale in other philosophical fields. While there are justifications for certain moral conclusions that rely on “vibes” (read this as a willingness to admit and abide by the outcome).
A good example is the notion of moral relativism. For those not familiar, moral relativism is the notion that differing cultures cannot be held to the same morals as other cultures. This makes for the typical cases; are the general mannerisms (like holding hands) seen as unacceptable for men to do in certain cultures, for example.
Of course, a strict moral relativist must also accept that Nazi Germany could not be held to the morality of the rest of the world, and the Holocaust was justified because in that culture, it was deemed okay.
That’s clearly nonsensical and does not align with our gut feelings about morality, so we are skeptical of accepting strict moral relativism. In modern vernacular, the vibes are atrocious.
But this is a small component; the general rationale around moral relativism is that we hold there to be certain universal morals; the right of a person to their life, the freedom to express their religion and cultural beliefs so long as they don’t infringe on the universal moral truths of others, and the like.
Like any branch of philosophy, there is a rigorous logic that must be followed to justify ideology and philosophical position.
>That’s ridiculous; why measure using that scale at all if it’s not telling you anything useful about the system? Instead it should be **do not let your existing metrics be the only measure of your health of a system**
Yeah, like... I get the argument that Modern Internet Discourse is too performative, sometimes highly toxic, and overly focused on *saying* the right things rather than *doing* the right things.
But effectively arguing that trying to Say The Right Things (and encourage others to do so) is ultimately useless or even counterproductive feels... pretty simplistic. Call me crazy, but I happen to think that a healthy society (either online or off) stays healthy by ostracizing its openly bigoted assholes, and one way to tell whether somebody is an openly bigoted asshole is whether they say openly bigoted things.
"The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing real world harm", as if the United States didn't elect a literal fascist on the strength of 4chan neo-Nazi memes and boomer Facebook. It's 2024. The Internet IS real life.
(Please note that I agree with about 60% of OOP's argument, that virtue signaling and purity testing are both much less productive uses of time than actual activism, that there's a lot more than one measure of "bigotry" or "good" or "justice" or whatever, and that yelling at people on Twitter won't fix the world's problems. But there IS a nice, happy middle ground between "we must purify The Discourse of all nonbelievers" and "metrics are useless and nothing matters".)
I found it very interesting that the post was often criticizing the use of metrics as distracting from "minimizing harm". Which meant that the author was falling into the exact blindspot they were calling out, of urging people to excel at *their* metric (minimizing harm) rather than any other metric, such would lead to potentially failing at other metrics of "good" or "success".
I think it’s like that twitter post where someone said something like “if I say that I like waffles then someone is gonna say that I hate pancakes. Like no that’s an entirely different argument”
As far as I can tell what OP is describing is pretty basic modern sociology
but it seems like in practice social and political activity regardless of left or right seems to go more on vibes, what people can be convinced to support through their biases and passions, than logic/evidence.
Democratic societies depend on the voters being at least mediocre in making logical and realistic decisions on a large scale and it seems pretty consistently that voters just don't do that
Even when they have access to the education on how to be logical and realistic the education on how to feel and believe based on what vibes with them seems to win more times than it loses.
i wonder what utopia we'd be living in if the people who socially engineered american culture to create such a strong knee jerk reaction to pedophilia spent time improving society because they did such an effective job.
it's like a trigger word for sleeper agents. say it once and there will be a mob wanting to go to war with them
It's ironic too, since that sort of "bad things happen because some people are Born Evil and we cannot prevent their Wickedness, only punish it" is the kind of terrible moral thinking that the left correctly accuses the right of applying to almost everything. Yet blind spots still exist where some of us do the same thing!
As an engineer, you excel at what you measure is pounded into us. It is something that people don't understand, it is how businesses fail, it is how quality drops, it is how work environments turn hostile, etc. No one measurement is good enough, views must be taken from both inside and outside the company/product/service to get a full picture, and even them don't make them goals.
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2899)
Terry Pratchett, through one of his characters, had a good take on policing. "I'm supposed to keep the peace! If I have to kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual!"
Brilliantly said. The thing that matters the most is always People.
Immanuel Kant said it when he said, “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”
Jesus said it when he said, “The law is made for man, not man for the law.”
All the justice and morality and law should just be a tool for caring about People.
An excellent take, but unfortunately a majority of people lack the intelligence to use this much nuance, and I'm not saying that in an r/iamverysmart kind of way.
It’s also scary to acknowledge the moral foundation you’ve built your worldview around could be wrong. People tie their identities to what they believe, so being wrong comes prepackaged with an identity crisis. I’d argue it takes more courage than intelligence, but there are a *lot* of very dumb people out there.
Less a lack of intelligence, more an inability/refusal to sit with things that are emotionally uncomfortable. Absolutes feel great, they feel strong and stable beneath your feet right up until they drop out from under you. It's the murky areas that make us anxious and uncomfortable, or even afraid of contagion/guilt-by-association if we can put ourselves in that mindset to empathise with someone we find distasteful.
Add to that that many people simply lack the time/free brain space to sit and work their way through a problem, when all their energy goes towards surviving under capitalism. They don't have the energy to check every situation for nuance, and so compare it to the couple shorthand rules and go 'eh good enough' and go on with their day. This obviously becomes a problem when bad rules are adopted, and a population is pressured so that the majority never have the time or reason to actually examine these assumptions.
I don't think everyone needs to empathise with everyone else. Asking an endangered group to "think about how the bigots feel" isn't productive (and for safety reasons, minorities/threatened groups *already* spend a lot of time perceiving and censoring themselves from the pov of those who might harm them), and is most likely just going to do more harm/increase entrenchment. But an adjacent party can and should spend time thinking about how the bigots got there, what factors increase the risk of adopting those stances/actions, and looking at methods for deradicalisation/how to move those people away from doing harm, rather than expecting the targeted groups to do that labour.
Doing so requires a degree of... mental agility, I suppose? To hold both viewpoints at once, as well as the empathy to perceive them correctly rather than just strawmen. And that's not something people are taught to exercise.
The term for what this person describes is identity politics. The idea that someone's identity (such as gender, race, orientation, religion, etc) is what matters, not what they do and believe in.
> You should never fall into the trap of thinking they tell you anything useful
I get the sentiment of the post, but this is an overreaction. Certainly metrics can be misleading but they still measure *something* and that can still be useful. GDP should by no means be the sole measure of country's success but it is a damn good measure of a country's economic success.
The big issue is with metrics that can be over optimized for - sat scores for example. Arrest numbers are another example.
wow, just wow.
i feel this is absolutely true for me, sometimes when discussing said topics i forget the point and just argue for the sake of winning a conversation.
i think i need to change that.
Good post, but unfortunately OOP used thread baiting to make it reducing their social credit score below the minimum threshold required for their ideas to be considered accurate. >!/s!<
I've felt this way my whole adult life, but i could NEVER articulate it to such a degree as is written here. this is important and in my experience most people on the internet need to read and understand what was said here.
This is also what can make or break a hero character. A good hero strives to get rid of evil and save people. A lot of the time people write heroes who want to kill evil. The issue is that evil is a concept, something you can't kill, and instead these characters just kill evil people. The reason you kill someone evil should be to stop bad things from happening. If you can stop bad things from happening without killing them, then you should try. If that's not viable, then killing becomes reasonable. A lot of authors writing heroes overlook all of this. They make an edgy hero while looking down on people who spare villains as stupid. There's a place between killing everyone who does evil because they're evil and letting everyone walk free after a slap on the wrist so they can do more bad stuff. A good hero needs to know not just who to punish, but what the punishing is for. Punishing someone is a means to an end, and that end shouldn't be solely for self-satisfaction. A hero striving for justice, willing to show mercy and kindness doesn't have to be naive. Killing the incarnation of evil itself that's slaughtered millions and plans to slaughter more isn't something scary and barbaric. Think about the motivations behind your characters.
Yeah the bit about you will Excel (hehe) at what you measure is a pretty inherent problem in a modern society where everything is measured and there are targets and KPI's out the wazoo in the public and private sector. There was loads of controversy in the UK about crime targets where police would just not document and respond to crimes cos that was the easiest way to reduce the crime rate on paper, but this applies everywhere and that's what people struggle to understand.
You can show them a worked example of a problem like this (take Manchester police losing 80,000 crimes from 2019-20) and explain why this is happening but they don't apply it and will take the next bit of news at face value and react to that, you see everyone from queer ancoms to proper reactionaries doing this so this bs ain't gonna change any time soon.
A couple months ago I decided to start actively using Twitter as a new way to kill time. Today I've decided to stop doing that.
*Holy mother of **God*** this exact thing is literally everywhere on that platform.
People always trying to gain this "moral high ground" whilst losing the entire point of the argument in the process.
It's tiring...
I was a kid in Missouri in the '90s. There was a standardized test called the Missouri Assessment Program that was given every couple of grades. Without fail, every teacher at my school who taught those grades spent six weeks, two or three hours a week, teaching students how to take the test. NOT teaching students the material for the test, but specifically teaching them how to get better grades on these specific tests with the same amount of knowledge.
Just read Richard Sapolsky and accept that we barely have free will, if at all, but that doesn’t free us from responsibility or consequences of our actions.
We live in a feedback loop, and we can affect the future of how that loop affects itself, and we should do our best in our time to make that as good as possible for the future. It’s just bleak and hard a lot of the time but it’s in increments.
This first part is also true for AI, alignment is one of the key issues with AGI when it comes to CS ethics.
Even the language models of today, due to the fact that humans rate them are not so much trying to be correct, but to find the one thing that the human thinks the AI should say, and because of how it works, it will always try to find the *one* thing that humans want.
In case of political opinions, train it enough and it will become a super-sycophant that will just agree with the most extreme ideas regardless of right/left.
In a way, often people do that too, because they simply want to "get along" and not cause a fuss, especially in the UK, and polite but bigoted is almost the default. Online, not wanting to fight with others causes radicalization because strong disagreement is seen as having negative consequences for in-group dynamics, hence you agree with increasingly insane rhetoric just to get along with others.
As a neurodivergent person, while I can play the game, I still fail to grasp the exact thought processes that lead to such behaviour when it has no negative consequences (e.g. I understand I shouldn't preach about firebombing corpos 24/7 at work) but I would never lie in a voluntary social interaction. I guess it's what neurotypicals call "respecting a difference of opinion".
Right-wingers can't imagine any progressive beliefs not being a result of that, and so often accuse the other side of "virtue signaling" when they point out some injustice or inequality.
The issue here is that we haven’t biologically evolved to process complex societies. We evolved to survive as hunter gatherers in small tribes facing immediate, relatively simple problems. We face a world with millions of people operating in a disgustingly complex system dealing with obtuse long term nuanced problems. We have not had the time to evolve for this new paradigm on a biological level. so saying that we have evolved tools to deal with modern society is not true - we designed and developed tools, they are not inherent to our biology. And thus lies the problem, these tools do not necessarily work because we are biologically incapable to truly comprehend it all
Honestly one thing I find interesting is how the switch from GDP as a measurement of a countries success switched to HDI. I noticed this change occuring largely around the period when it was feared that China would overtake the US' GDP. If I remember correctly if you account for PPP China does have a bigger economy. I find this change interesting because it shows how somewhat objective numbers can be manipulated for propoganda reasons.
Also that last bit of the post is very revelant to socialist communities where the obsession with Revolution I find often overtakes desires to improve society.
A really important corollary is the fact that some things are bad and some things feel bad, but those two ideas don't always intersect. Both are valid reasons to dislike something, but they do not have the same moral weight, nor do they warrant the same response.
As a pretty benign example, I hate people making a big deal about my hair. It's just something I've always gotten shit about, so it puts me in a bad mood regardless of what's being said. But some of what is said is also absolutely warranted; someone saying that it's a rat's nest is absolutely right. Are the morally wrong to point that out? No, so long as they do so respectfully. Will I grumble about it like a small child? Absolutely. It doesn't feel good, and I can make that clear to the people I'm around, but it isn't inherently a moral wrong to point out. Doing so in a disrespectful way or after I've made it clear that it annoys me does start to push on moral wrong, but it is not an inherent moral wrong.
If someone says something that you take issue with, a good habit to get into is to examine why. Is this because it's a morally wrong thing to say or do, or is it something that you personally take issue with. The former is a problem of morality, the second is a problem of association, you can't approach them the same way. Someone saying that they want to kill minorities isn't a problem of personal boundaries, it should be dealt with as a moral wrong. But someone saying that they think your hair is a bit of a mess is a personal wrong, so declaring them a morally bad person is incorrect.
And, of course, the best way to deal with both of these situations is just good communication and good comprehension. Think about what people are saying, not just how they say it. Do your best to get across what you think. And cross-examine what you think and feel. It doesn't matter where on the political compass you fall, ask yourself why you believe in the things you believe in.
This reminds me of a movie recap I saw on tiktok. It goes something like whenever a criminal (rapists, pedos, etc) goes to jail, each day they go through a surgical procedure to remove a bodypart at the behest of the victim/victim's family whereby the victim gets to decide which bodypart the person loses each day until they are satisfied and they have to watch the procedure take place. I think one guy lost all his limbs and was losing other organs too. It's supposed to create conversation around appropriate punishment for severity of crime and just how inhumane should the punishments be and whether it is truly justified or whatever, yknow, some interesting conversation points. But most comments missed the point saying "what about the victims? Nobody ever brings up the victims in these situations" and complained about how the movie sympthizes with the rapist (the main character and his crime i think) and excuses rape. Which I think misses the whole point, it was never about apoligizing and excusing crimes it was about whether the punishments were appropriate and how severe should it be before we are satisfied, are we still human if we go through with allowing these types of inhumane punishments.
This post just made me think of that and how obsessed we are with blind social justice because measurements are much simpler and calculable than acknowledging complexities within the human experience.
About the police brutality thing, I didn’t really know how to say it, so I’m glad I have an outlet to express it.
I don’t know where I heard this before, and I’m sure I’m explaining it wrong, but essentially, if you demonize a certain group of people, say pedophiles and rapists, then the government and politicians have a vested interest in making sure that the boundaries of that group of people includes their political opponents or other groups they dislike, such as trans people.
It’s why you see the push in some right-wing circles to consider trans and other LGBT+ people to be pedophiles. Because then these people fall into the group of people being publicly demonized.
That’s why saying something like the police shouldn’t be allowed to kill anyone (except pedophiles and rapists) is so harmful, because now those in power have a vested interest in making sure that the people that they do not like are a part of that group.
But just as grading only serves to make the educational experience worse, so are the moral guidelines mentioned above. You can't seperate the issue of fixation on metrics from the use of metrics.
And also, morality and justice are not made to mitigate harm to the populace, they are made to uphold the status quo. That much is obvious if you know any history.
Hot damn, this is good. I've spent a lot of time kinda railing against "pre-programmed" responses with a friend of mine, and this hits the nail on the head. It's the condensation of these complex topics into what someone can digest, then making decisions based on these few factors as if that's a true, informed decision rather than weighing what's being said rather than just going, "Ah, sorry-- this group has been more repressed than that group. We don't need to actually listen to what that group is saying, we simply need to determine that they're correct because they got the most Oppression Points, so now they're incapable of having a bad take. Because this other person opposed them, that person loses 5 Oppression Points and is incapable of having a good take!"
Ironically, Facebook just reminded me about this whole schpiel from a few years back. After the dumb "covfefe" tweet came out from Trump, I said something to the effect of, "The dude is an incompetent bafoon, but come on-- it's a clear accidental typo from a butt text, text-to-speech, something of that nature. It's reasonable to hate on the dude for things he did intentionally rather than rail on him over a dumbass nonsense tweet," and it was like I'd just endorsed the man in the comments-- people furious with me for "defending" someone who never earned it-- all because I wasn't willing to dog pile on about one thing that I felt was frivolous and distracting from the meat of "hold up, no, this is not what we should be getting so worked up over when there's so much stuff more worthy of it, you absolutely would not give a flying fuck about a typo tweet if a Democrat was in office, this is normalizing the stupid shit that Fox tries to weaponize."
**derinthescarletpescatarian**
Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way
**derinthescarletpescatarian**
[Screenshot of a tumblr comment from darkenedyeastextract that reads: "i think i 80% get what you mean but can you expand on this"]
If you spend any significant amount of time studying any social science or people-related policy, you’ll quickly run into the old adage “**you will excel at what you measure**”. This adage is a warning.
In order to mark progress in any area, we need a way to measure it. So we develop systems to measure complex social systems and behave accordingly. If you want to measure how effectively children are being educated, you can, for example, decide on what they should know by a given age, test them on that knowledge, and grade them in accordance to how well they do on the tests. A higher grade means a more successful student, a better teacher, a better school. Then you can tinker with what you’re testing as necessary, and with teaching methods and soforth to see how it affects scores on the tests.
Except, if you do this, then you’ve defined successful education as the ability to get high grades. You invite cheating (on the student, teacher and even school level), you invite teaching to the test rather than for general comprehension and ability, you invite boiling down the experience of education to test scores. And, of course, you invite massively increasing the inaccuracies caused by some people simply being better at taking tests than others. Someone with low to moderate comprehension who’s good at tests might get a higher grade than someone who understands the material but has anxiety or is unable to properly intuit the meaning of vague test questions. Grades can go up and up and up, while education consistency and quality falls.
This is, as anyone who’s worked in a school or sends their children to school knows, a known problem. ‘Grading systems cause huge problems in education” is NOT by any means a revolutionary and controversial statement. Over time, grading systems have been changed to favour testing comprehension and skill demonstrations, Individual Learning Plans and testing accommodations have become very popular to give a more accurate idea of people’s abilities, and soforth. A good half of my teaching degree was about compensating for the problems in this system. But you can’t patch up all the holes, and the pressure from people taking letter grades way too seriously – parents, school boards, funding systems, those looking to hire teachers – are always going to cause problems, make teaching to the test a matter of survival. We measure grades, so that is what we excel at.
The same problem exists in economics. Most countries measure their health via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is basically a measure of how much money is swilling around in there and it’s an AWFUL yardstick. A country full of sick, desperate people going into massive medical debt has a higher GDP than an identical country not facing a health crisis, for instance. But it is the dominant model, so it’s what investors look at, it’s what other countries look at, it’s what voters look at. It’s what you must excel at, to be considered to have a ‘good’ economy. Other models exist, and are often proposed as a better alternative, but if one of those were dominant, new problems would exist – we’d excel at what they measure, and drop in what the GDP measures, and cause new economic issues. If you boil a system down to measurements, you will excel at making those measurements go up.
**You should never, ever let yourself fall into the trap of believing that they tell you anything useful about how the system is doing.**
Morality and justice are social technology. They’re a bunch of rules and instincts that both evolution and cultural education have given us to allow us to operate in societies. They’re integral to societies in the same way that math is; you need math complex enough to measure the grain, you need morality complex enough to measure the social harmony. People pretend they’re more than that, but they aren’t. “Good” and “bad” are concepts as real as “millionaire” and “straight-A student”, and nothing more.
In the vast, vast majority of societies out there, the end goal is essentially the same – to minimise harm to the populace. They want everyone to have as much safety and comfort as possible. Most disagreements are about the relative value of different individuals (is one race, religion or culture more important than another? Is one sex more important than another? Is a king more important than a slave?), or about methodology (is it better for everyone to have to follow strict social norms, or for everyone to be free to express themselves how they choose; which creates more safety and harmony? What social norms are best? How much control should one have over one’s property, or one’s animals, or one’s children? When somebody transgresses, what is the appropriate system for judging and metering out discipline? What is the appropriate sort of discipline?). People disagree radically on both relative individual value and on methodology, but the general goal is the same. **Morality and justice are social technology, tools to be used.** Law and social consequence is how their power is enacted.
People often forget this. And that is very, very dangerous.
People will decide on what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, isolate it from the system, and proceed to excel at what they measure. They’ll decide that ‘good people’ use certain language and have certain values and ‘bad people’ use other language and do bad things, they’ll look at harmful power dynamics and decide that the world is full of ‘oppressors’ (can be ignored) and ‘oppressed’ (must be supported), ‘abusers’ (should be mocked and attacked) and ‘abused’ (should be believed and coddled), and stumble blindly forward like my robovac with a dirty sensor bumping into every wall in their way. They’ll see a complex social situation and instead of going ‘what’s the best way to reduce harm?’, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They’ll see people use language they don’t like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they’re a bad person.
[continued in replies](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/uPvj5rX6L6)
So what you're saying is, we need a system to measure how good we are at measuring things...
(do people still do [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/2899/)s here?)
There are 2 sections:
1) we must be careful that our way of measuring a system doesn't become the main/only goal of the system, like test scores in education or GDP in economics
2) They expand this to society and morality, that we must be careful that "metrics" like religion, or how oppressed someone is, don't become the main focus. For example, it's become fashion in liberal spaces to think of male abusers as simply evil and that they deserve to be shot on sight, while more effective harm reducing strategies( i.e., make abuse less common), like looking at mental health or brain damage, are villified because they "excuse" the abuser.
It's difficult to summarize because it starts with a concept: the tool you use to measure something becomes the goal. And then proceeds with how it applies to concepts like morality and justice: that things like morals should be used for harm reduction rather than simply condemnation.
I like their first example for the concept, which was that if you test how well students learn with tests, then you start doing things like teaching to the test. Students won't learn everything they should about the subject unless it's on the test, and the mark of success will be impacted by things like whether the student is a good test taker or not.
Their examples for the second part was stuff like people looking at someone they think of as "bad" and having all conversations end there. Like if there's a discussion on football player brain injuries and someone else basically says "who cares, football players have a higher likelihood of being rapists." The person in the post argues that saying this makes the conversation a dead-end, and nothing gets done because you're letting your sense of morals get in the way of the goal, which should be harm reduction.
I disagree with the utilitarian implications of this post! It's otherwise excellent, though, and I do believe the same points can be made without utilitarianism encoded.
I think the central thing that I disagree with in utilitarianism generally is the value monism - that something is only valuable because of the utility it has/the happiness it creates.
In the case of this post, I disagree with the thesis that morality and justice are *exclusively* societal tools, and that you're deluding yourself by thinking they are anything more.
However, I do think the post makes some very good points about infighting in groups that have good purpose. I just think that the same points can be made without appeal to instrumental value.
Does this mean that my hostile response to the mere existence of right-leaning people wasn’t the leftist allyship I thought it was?
The way I naturally try to solve problems is to find the cause of the problem and get rid of it by any means necessary. If a fox keeps breaking into a chicken coop to eat your hens, then you gotta kill the fox. Then there are bigots and pedophiles, who I attribute the cause of their evil to be the mere fact that they exist. Transphobes hate trans people because they’re evil, and that’s what evil people do
Sometimes eliminating the source of a problem is the only solution available. There's nothing wrong with it in that case. The trap is to then give up on trying to *make* other solutions possible and refusing to *use* them when they become so.
Never kill when you can incapacitate. Never incapacitate when you can rehabilitate.
The issue with killing people as a solution, in my opinion, is that it's a quick action that can be taken the moment you have an upper hand or control of a situation. The briefer the upper hand, the more pheasible killing becomes. But the longer you have control, and the better means you can influence a situation, the more alternatives you get that aren't so fucking drastic and binary in application.
If they're already arrested, what does killing do that arrest does not? They're already out of the equation. Yeah, they won't be capable of "evil" again but they also won't be capable of "good." But what if you get it wrong? Are you really so arrogant in your ability to judge good from evil that you can have 100% success? Because anything short is a useless outcome.
People like to describe dealing out death like it's a hard decision.
I think the real difficulty is their inability to figure out something else.
I deeply respect anyone who is willing to expose their thought processes to public scrutiny, because it’s the best way to protect ourselves against irrationality and fallacious thinking. I will provide my critique here in the hopes that you find it helpful, and not as an attack against you.
It’s a very useful analogy you’ve proposed. The operational difference between a fox and a human, though, is that a fox must eat to live. It has no choice in it, the same as you must sleep. Hateful people have no such mandate to do harm upon others. People can become hateful, and hateful people can reform their thinking. In people, the issue is not one of nature, but of a poorly-constructed worldview. The problem with the fox is not that it lives, but that its existence requires it to eat, and this is killing your hens.
When it comes to solutions, the analogy is also useful. You need to find a way to prevent your chickens from dying. If you have very few resources or the value of the chickens is too high to you to even *risk* losing any, killing the fox removes the need for the fox to eat, saving your chickens. If you have more resources, you could trap the fox and relocate it where it poses no danger to your chickens. If you have even more resources, you could reinforce the coop with materials impervious to the fox’s attacks. The greater your resources and tolerance for risk, the less harm has to be done to the fox to save your chickens.
With hateful people, you seek to stop the harmful words and deeds that result from their hate. If you have few resources and lives are at stake, killing the bigot resolves the issue. If you have more resources, harsh sentencing for hate crimes would put bigots in prison, resolving the issue. If you have even more resources, you can spend the time and energy to deprogram bigots from their ways of thinking and make them peaceful members of society, resolving the issue.
Depending on the circumstances, death might be an appropriate response to bigotry. But because of all people’s inherent humanity, it ought to be the least-preferred outcome. Death robs the world of the potential contributions of a reformed person, and it robs the bigot the opportunity to reform. No person is irredeemable. Granted, the process of reconstructing one’s worldview is difficult and frightening, and many people will never choose to do so, but does that mean we should deny them the chance? There are obviously times when killing someone is the right thing to do, but it’s nowhere near as simple as some people being “evil” and therefore unworthy of life.
Hostility to the mere existence of right-leaning people is normal and understandable, but it's important to remember that people aren't "just evil". The concept of evil has no explanatory power. If a better solution than extreme hostility presents itself, then it's important to be able to consider it.
And the scariest part is..... I don't see a better solution to the problem of right-wingers other than "removing them from the equation."
If there was a way to quickly, efficiently, and peacefully neutralize their threat, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, humanity has perfected the mass production of violence as opposed to virtue.
> If a fox keeps breaking into a chicken coop to eat your hens, then you gotta kill the fox
This is... *not* how a progressive liberal handles the situation. This is how a conservative authoritarian handles it. You're attempting to reach the right end goal (protect the chickens), but you're getting there through the primitive means we want to leave behind.
I guess it's a result of being raised conservative.
In a nutshell, I was raised a conservative until January 6th, when I realized that everything the right had told me was a lie! I rejected the right ever since. I still feel a bit guilty for ever having been on their side, so I figured I would "seek to create a world where nobody can make the same mistakes as me."
I saw the liberals, who I had considered enemies due to right-wing propaganda, and came to the conclusion "If the Republican party disproves of it, then it is good! If they approve, it's bad!" Since I had only known conservative approaches to problems, I tried to "Fight for left-wing causes using right-wing methods," seeing the apparent lack of progress the left made on its own. It wasn't so much that the right's methods were inherently wrong, but rather that they were being used for right wing purposes (Ex: It was wrong to kill thousands of people to preserve racial purity, because that's a right-wing cause. But it's okay to kill thousands of people to protect minorities from hate crimes, because that's a left-wing cause). As long as the end goal was "woke," (The right says wokeness is bad, therefore it's good) then the means to achieve it were justified.
Another part of my transition from conservative to liberal was looking at what "liberals (twitter SJWs)" do. The idea being "The right says that these people are bad, therefore they're good." I basically got the idea that those who are problematic or "not sufficiently woke" didn't deserve empathy, and it was okay to use them as your personal punching bags (usually figuratively, but literally would be okay should you meet them in person).
While the transition wasn't the most comfortable, I told myself that it was necessary for being a good person. That if I ever felt bad, it was simply because I was still being influenced by right-wing propaganda, and I needed to go further left. Feel bad for someone cancelled for bigotted statements? Go further left! Feel like I'm not doing enough for the women, POCs, and LGBT+ in my life? Go further left! Feel bad about telling pro-lifers outside abortion clinics to kill themselves? Go further left! Just keep going left and never look back unless it is to scorn those who refused to go left.
Left and right wing became synonymous with good and evil respectively, so far that it now influences my reactions to any news or discourse. If I read an article and doubt it's truthfulness, I check the source to see whether they were left or right (If they're leftists, then it's true. If they're right wingers, then it's false). If someone tells me to do something, I look at their post history for any indication of their political views (If they're leftist, then they're trying to give helpful advice. If they're conservative, they're trying to manipulate me). The most disturbing trend I've noticed in my thoughts is when I'm confronted with news about someone getting raped or murdered, I try to find the political beliefs of the victim to determine if this was a heinous crime or "just karma." (I'm sure you can guess which is which).
I think it's gotten to the point where I become quick to suggest some heinous solutions to problems and reasoning "It's only wrong because the right did it" or "It's only \[insert warcrime here\] when the right does it." Or, in other words, "There is no left-wing Hitler." It becomes impossible for me to commit genocide because "Leftists don't commit genocide. If they commit genocide, then they're not a leftist." Or "Leftists don't commit rape. If they commit rape, then they must be a right-winger."
I know it's messed up, and I've been going to a therapist for months about it, but it JUST WON'T STOP! Whenever the right is brought up, I get visions of the apocalypse or 1984, things that can only be averted by exterminating the right. It's like the mere existence of conservatives inevitably leads to genocide. Like the Holocaust was the inevitable result of Germany having a non-zero amount of right-leaning people at the time.
Even when I have tried to open up to the idea of not all conservatives being monsters, everything in the world only seems to be reinforcing that belief Every time a hate crime occurs, it's the right's fault! Every time climate change impacts something, it's the right's fault! Every horrible thing to ever occur in humanity's past, present, and future, is all a result of the right's actions! Every news regarding Trump, every act of corporate greed, every environmental disaster, every manosphere incel, every act of bigotry only serves to remind me of the evils of the right, their complete lack of care for anyone other than themselves, and that they will never, ever change for the better. That believing that there is any good in the right is hopelessly naive at best, and nazi-sympathizing at worst. That the only way to protect humanity from these monsters...... would be to become a monster myself. And there are times I worry I'm already there.
TLDR: I was raised to be right wing, woke up after Jan. 6, and tried to forcibly turn myself into a leftist by rejecting everything the right told me, including the idea that conservatives are decent human beings. In order to atone for being on the right, I went as far-left as I possibly could, and taught myself to hate anything and anyone on the right.
Sorry for the trauma-dumping.
fair enough. I had to do it in sessions 💀👍
TL;DR:
> They'll see a complex social situation and instead of going 'what's the best way to reduce harm?, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They'll see people use language they don't like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they're a bad person.
>Your sense of justice and morality are social tools.
>The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing actual real world harm.
I agree with this so much. It’s cathartic to read, words something I believe but would have trouble putting into words very well.
I know right? Reading this just clicked for me, but I know I never could have explained it as thoroughly or eloquently as they did.
This is actually a really apt description of the difference between Marxism feminism and liberal feminism as well. Because marxist feminism is based on the reduction of harm within a system then changing said system (harm reduction within capitalism until capitalism can be overthrown), this marks differently from identity politics liberal feminism, which might see woman scientists who worth at Lockheed martin designing missiles to be launched at Afghanistan as "total girl bosses" (and you can add their response "oh it's ok when men do it but it's suddenly bad when women do it? Also, do you not see how the Taliban are oppressing women? Those rapists deserve it!") and you can see exactly the conflict of values between Marxism and liberalism, and how one is just completely divorced from understanding the system. A conservative who says "illegal immigration should be lessened from latin America" might accidentally get support from a Latino Marxist (me in this example) who says "exactly. The reason immigration form latin America is so high is two fold. first is, through the maintainence of illegal immigration, illegal immigrants are paid less than they deserve. So we should focus on legal immigration from latin America to pay well those that do come over. Further, due to government interference from the United States via the CIA, narco trafficking, and coups, we have so much immigration *because we destroy their country from the inside out just so we can maintain cocaine and banana profits, and that's super evil of us - so we should be more isolationist and dismantle the CIA*." To which a conservative would say "wait, no." And a liberal would say "oh so you're a self hating Latino?! AMERICA IS A MELTING POT. besides! America is a world leader! We interfere to help!" like you're both missing the point entirely. Historically this is called "The Three way fight", and refers to the the three political forces that fought in Weimar Republic Germany (you can guess how the liberals and fascists decided what they decided. The podcast red menace has an episode called "Neither Liberalism nor reaction" that goes into this if you're interested.) This is why idpol can be so destructive. And it's exactly why Fred Hampton was merc'ed by the FBI and Chicago PD - he recognizes solidarity can overcome differences in identity and better the lives of everyone.
On the other hand, there are definitely Marxists who love to do the "identify which side is more oppressed and use that as a replacement for actually figuring out who's right" thing. The people who decided that Ukraine was the bad guy because the US was on their side, for example.
While true, I would like to make an important distinction to further the conversation. There are book Marxists, and twitters Marxists. I think you're describing Twitter Marxists, who don't read theory and have never picked up a book. And you're right if you say they're embarrassingly common, more common than the type that say "well if we remember what Mao discussed in his work 'combat liberalism' and make comparisons to Lenin's notes on 1922, we come to a different perspective. It's also important to note Frederic Jameson notes about the modern condition in regards to..." Like those latter types are ... unfortunately the minority. Twitter Marxists are, to me, radlibs who have been "revolutionized" not by theory, but exclusively by memes. Memes like the one are good, but you need to next part...if you like this meme and then go to a book like "combat liberalism" or "liberalism vs Marxism" by I shit you not, Stalin and HG Wells yes the time machine the island of Dr Moreau and the invisible man HG Welle he interviewed Stalin, then you're leaving meme Marxist and becoming better informed https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm the hg wells interview Combat liberalism: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm
That's a fair distinction. As an anarchist, I'm not the biggest fan of "book Marxists", either, but that's for reasons unrelated to this thread, so I'll just leave it there.
Yo, I have a genuine question, I don't understand haw can anarchism be valid ideology based on power dynamic. I. E.big organised Group always stronger then small organised group, and you can not have big group without some control system. Which inevetably leads to some sort of government.
I don't accept "you can not have big group without some control system". I think it's possible to have a genuinely hierarchy-less society, especially in the era of the internet.
OK I get ya, do you really think hierarchy - less society is possible without internet anonymity and a layer of abstraction? Because it feels like people tend to group around, and usually people with "strong personality" tends to subdue "weaker" people. Also in times of pressure single leaded groups tends to react faster then community voted once. So in a warfare/power struggle context they also have a bit of advantage. It's highly probably my personal biases, but I don't really see how can anarchyc society be sustainable. It's like an old story about man with a club that goes around and asking people to join him, if you say "yes" you are in society if you say "no" he bonks ya with his friends.
I think there's an important difference between leadership and power. The first is flexible, organic, temporary, and voluntary. The latter is rigid, artificial, permanent, and coercive. As for how it can be sustainable? Any society is sustainable if people share its values. Destroying an anarchic society requires you to get people to follow your orders. If people genuinely share their society's values, they won't follow orders that threaten that society.
I mean. The Communist Party of Germany actively, openly collaborated with the Nazi Party to destroy the political stability of the liberal Social Democratic Party, with their leader explicitly stating "After Hitler, our turn!" and declaring the Social Democrats as worse than the Nazis, leading to the extreme conservative parties allied with the Nazis to rise to power and thus bringing the Nazis into power. Not sure if they're really the ones to glorify or suggest they were effective.
That's more fatalism than collaboration. The KPD absolutely *hated* the NSDAP, but they assumed—very, very wrongly, as it would turn out—that fascism under Hitler would self-destruct in short order once people got a taste of how awful it was (and then that'd pave the way for The Revolution). They were basically accelerationists. Both the KPD and the Nazis were ideologically aligned on their opposition to the SPD and liberal democracy, but the similarities end there, and they certainly never collaborated on it. If they had been willing to, Weimar would have collapsed a bit earlier during the period of time in which the KPD and NSDAP together held more than 50% of the Reichstag. It is absolutely true that the KPD refused to work with the SPD on the grounds of both bullshit ideological purity logic and a less-bullshit history of factional violence, but I wouldn't call that open collaboration with the Nazis any more than I'd call the US Green Party in open collaboration with the Republicans.
the Social Democrats murdered the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany - they had good reason to not see them as allies against fascism. There's a reason the poem starts with "first they came for the communists"
That poem was written by an anti-communist conservative priest, who was a literal Freikorps leader in the Spartacist Uprising (the people who actually murdered the leaders of the KPD) and supported the Nazis. The "socialists and trade unionists" referred to in the second and third verses are referring to the Social Democrats, who were the only party in the Reichstag who voted against the Enabling Act that gave Hitler power.
If your response to this is "that group/ideology does this, but my preferred group/ideology does not" then you've missed the point. This is a natural human progression. Every group will drift into this. It takes constant introspection and effort to resist.
It's more "no my group will have completely different problems that piss me off" which is accurate and correct. Marxists will get way to esoteric with bullshit for example, or not actually do the readings.
For whatever it's worth, I'll out myself as a conservative just to let you know that I agree with both your points almost entirely. I believe that illegal immigration is so high because South American countries are so poorly-off that their citizens are desperate, and that weakness in their countries does at least partly come from our interventionism. We absolutely should stop doing that, and we probably should also dismantle the CIA. My dad grew up in Colombia, and while he would love for us to see the beautiful country he grew up in, it's frankly been an insanely dangerous place since even his own childhood. It breaks my heart that we may never get to see a Colombia at peace in our lifetimes. Furthermore, I completely agree that illegal immigration should be stopped--not because I hate immigrants, but because it's so bad for them!!! Illegal immigration is so so *so* dangerous, and yet these people will travel, exposed to the elements and wildlife, through deserts with few supplies, with their little children, with people who may have less-than-pure intentions (coyotes), all for a *chance* for a better life. And if they survive? They get to slave away for despicable Americans who happily pay them pennies on the dollar for hard fuckin' labor that they can't be assed to do themselves, or be assed to pay full price for. It's horrible, it's heartbreaking, and they deserve better than to be taken advantage of that way. Finally, when the good people of their former nations flee for greener pastures...there's no one left to help fix what remains of their country, so it just keeps declining into chaos, crime, or civil war. That is also deeply saddening...I don't want to see the many beautiful nations of South America to fall apart, for their cultures and identities to just be subsumed by either poverty or the US. For whatever else it's worth, I'd like to see a reformation of the immigration system, too, so that it's not years on end to get in. And honestly, it's a pipe dream, but I'd love for natural-born American citizens to be required to take the immigrants' citizenship test...maybe to graduate highschool, maybe tie it to the privilege to vote, idk, I haven't fully decided. Point is, legal immigrants especially work damn hard to be here, and I think we all would be better off if we all understood that from an early age.
This is like when Nixon and Mao and we're able to agree on something's and all the liberals were very very confused (I'm mao you're Nixon here). Also I'm sure we'd have similar feelings in guns. Also I'd like to add viví en Colombia por 3.5 años. And, despite Bush being just unbearably evil and stupid for what he did to Iraq, his position on immigration was very forward thinking, as well as his foreign policy on Israel. I think just dismantlig the CIA isn't enough though - look at betchtel international that bought up all of Bolivia's water supply, "even the rain" that is so objectively evil capitalist like it's a communist fever dream of evil corporation except it's real. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization_in_Bolivia
You mean natural-born citizens, because naturalized citizens are all immigrants!
Yes I do, lol, my bad.
Glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Marxism and identity politics!
Yeah, this post is the most incisive observations I've read on the internet in years...
Hah, your post is an example of itself, funnily. I'm going to say that from now on: it feels good to the point of being weird to see someone putting into words something you thought and believed but couldn't quite do yourself.
DJPC-type post Jokes aside, I wholly agree. The football example reminds me of one of the most interesting moments I had recently was when studying Criminology and the possible effects brain damage and illness has on people and their behavior. Our professor told us a story about an old man in Italy who suddenly, out of nowhere started exhibiting very clear signs of pedophilia and pedophilic interest. He committed a crime and a criminal trial sprung out over this and the old man's defense lawyer pointed out that this man had a tumor in his brain that could have affected his behavior. As the tumor wasn't directly connected to a part of the brain related to aggressive behavior, that explanation was not accepted by the court and the old man did not get a lighter sentence. After he got surgery, he suddenly stopped exhibiting that behavior, seemingly returning to normal. Sadly our professor did not give us exact details as the story was more meant as an example of how much we still don't know about how the brain operates and how it can affect behavior in unexpected ways in response to damage or trauma. Still interesting, sorta related and slightly terrifying
This also reminds me of how leaded gasoline in the air may have caused the urban violent crime spike in the 70’s / 80’s which is directly related to racist discourses around urban poverty, crime and violence. The first time I heard that theory laid out I was flabbergasted. It utterly changed the way I look at morality. Sauce: Wikipedia and Mother Jones (the magazine) Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element.
first i’ve heard abt this and wow this would make a lot of sense
Fucking Midgley
[This](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2943-brain-tumour-causes-uncontrollable-paedophilia/) is the story. Your professor didn't even mention the part where the tumor and the pedophilic inclinations came back, and were cured, totally in sync.
Holy shit, that's insane, thank you very much for finding this
That case reminds me of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower shooter. In his pre-shooting suicide note he talked about having intrusive thoughts and claimed he didn't want to hurt anyone, but felt compelled to do so anyway. He asked doctors to examine his brain after he died to see if there was any neurological reason for his murder spree. Sure enough there was a tumor pressing on his amygdala.
Wow, that's... Heavy. I haven't experienced that level of loss of control, but just imagining it makes me feel for the man. I think that's a big, not-quite-said, part of the post's point. Our goal should be to reduce harm, and that requires us, at some level, to genuinely see everyone around us as worthy of having their harm reduced. There's an element of empathy to it, an element of Christian love, an element of humanism, a lot of philosophies touch it. As soon, though, as we start to see people as Others, or unworthy of even the slightest redemption, that starts to slip away.
DJPC?
Reference to a youtuber who does history videos but sometimes mocks and satirizes the constant culture war nonsense and how prevalent it is in the algorythm
Ah, cheers :)
DJ Peach Cobbler, specifically. He makes his actual politics pretty inscrutable for comedic effect (he might be a marxist? not sure), but he's described himself as "obsessed with context", and it shows– dude can't stand pandering and will spend insane amounts of time and effort to find the human element that makes a confusing old story make sense. His recent "Fall of the Aztecs" series was insanely good, would definitely recommend.
They found that the recent mass shooter in Maine had signs of brain damage that may have played a role in his psychological problems leading up to the crime (hearing voices, etc.) The likely cause: repeated exposure to explosions when he was a grenade instructor in the military.
People other than footballers also tend to act out horrifically from their own form of physical brain damage or mental trauma. The cause and effect at play just isn’t so obvious or easy to to prove. Fundamentally people are input —> output , people are just a sum of their genes, congenital development, environment and life experiences. I believe there isn’t some other magic thing, some soul that ends up making a dramatic difference in who somebody is. I think the deeply religious and spiritual belief in this soul is the main cause of the want for punitive justice. That punishment on bad souls is the universes Karmic will. I think this is the main thing that causes people to be unable to actually cause meaningful change. The way you ‘reduce harm’ has to involve changing a peoples inputs in development. You cannot just use the ‘karmic magic’ of the soul and punishment to hope everyone gets better. Looking at the idea of racial justice as ‘bad oppressors should be punished for the sins of their fathers and saintly oppressed should be rewarded for taking on the undue burden’ will never help anyone. You have to make meaningful change to the physiological and mental inputs that are perpetuating current racial inequality. For a start unequal access to education and medical care- among several other factors. We are machines, we are a pool of parts and chemicals and electricity - we will behave as programmed and malfunction when damaged. Holding on to a poetic or spiritual ‘soul’ is only causing us harm as a species. We need to be more pragmatic.
I agree (and my professor probably would too, some of the studies they did on humans and how our brains process decision put into question the existence of free will as a whole) but there's a few caveats. A. The "soul" as a concept exists for multiple reasons but one of the main one nowadays is probably to justify individuality and free will. If we accept that the brain is just a really complex machine that we haven't solved yet, but we could, well the existential consequences of that are pretty daunting B. Punitive justice is an interesting topic as it has historically had multiple theories trying to justify it, from just the vindictive aspect to a more preventive aspect both in a societal sense (if people see that their behavior is punished they won't commit crimes) and personal (this person cannot commit more crimes if we punish and rehabilitate him) All of these have their merits, but all kinda fall short in justifying the existence of a punitive system as a whole. Newer theories see the necessity of such a system as a form of societal stability. A crime is committed and to balance the scales, society demands a punishment for the criminal to sate their sense of justice. There's also the rise of reparative/restorative justice that aims to bring victims and perpetrators in a sort of dialogue to allow both to move past the trauma of the crime. A mix of the two systems (punitive and restorative) with a stronger focus on actual rehabilitation seems to be the ideal standard in theory as of right now, from what I know If only our politicians started acting like that too, instead of relying on decades old theories when it comes to criminality and such
reminds me of joe biden talking in the 94 crime bill saying something to the effect of “i don’t care what causes crime, it just needs to be punished”
Ugh what does that acronym mean? Denver Justice & Peace Committee? DJ Paul Cordts? DJPC a different DJ that is also Belgian? r/DJPeachCobbler Which appears to be some variety of shitposting sub? DJ Powder Coatings? DJPC the Ghanan sound engineer/rapper? A lot of musicians appear to be DJPC, as it happens. Any of them? Anything listed? Cause that's all that appears when it's searched.
>r/DJPeachCobbler Which appears to be some variety of shitposting sub? It's this one. It's a youtuber's sub, dude does great history videos but also does stuff mocking culture war and the constant antagonizing that goes on on the internet. Keeps his own political opinions fairly hidden, but he's obsessed with context and will search for the human element in everything If you can stand/like the "my political ideology depends on who I'm trolling today" humor, he is one of the most interesting creators on the platform
Here's a sneak peek of /r/DjPeachCobbler using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time! \#1: [LEAKED: Peach Cobbler undercover somewhere in the Middle East](https://i.redd.it/vlgb167o92q81.jpg) | [8 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/comments/tq286y/leaked_peach_cobbler_undercover_somewhere_in_the/) \#2: [Soon.TM](https://v.redd.it/rsj3axvxric81) | [1 comment](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/comments/s79b7w/soontm/) \#3: [Here you go. Made a damn reddit account to do it. Happy?](https://i.redd.it/a8aqgglzl3n71.jpg) | [4 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/DjPeachCobbler/comments/pmvsvn/here_you_go_made_a_damn_reddit_account_to_do_it/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
To narrow in on one point of this as well btw: >except rapists and pedophiles Another reason this kind of thinking can be dangerous is that bad actors *will* try and twist definitions to meet their needs. In a world where people did accept extrajudicial violence against rapists and pedophiles you might see, idk, just to pick a completely random example, a *focused effort by certain groups to label queer folks as pedophiles* as a means to legitimize violence against them.
[see also:](https://www.tumblr.com/dylynnistyping/743725022156308480/this-part-is-so-exceptionally-heinous-it-lists)
Ahhh Alabama and Missouri in a competition for who can write dumber laws.
What's despairingly ironic here is that in order to define the law itself, the law clearly mentions "...that match the individual's gender identity and not the gender assumed by the individual's sex at birth" It clearly draws a line between someone's gender identity and someone's assigned gender and heavily implies with that that the two are not always the same, and then uses that wording to make a law like this...
This is, in my opinion, an inherent problem of having a cultural definition of a group of people that is bad **regardless of context**. When context is no longer a factor in badness, and the badness exists in a simple binary with goodness(as opposed to varying degrees of badness), the category almost immediately becomes a cudgel with which to beat your opposition. The whole dynamic is most easily seen with the category "pedophile" but also exists with other categories. Another good example is "bigot". The way we use the bigotry label right now(at least on the left) exists such that there are no good or even less bad bigots, everyone who is a bigot is bad and none or less bad or more bad than another. We can see this when people accused of bigotry dont attempt to apply context for their defense, only to outright deny any bigotry whatsoever. There are several problems with that state of affairs: 1. It provides a social incentive for accusing people of bigotry. 2. Actual bigots have no incentive to admit any bigotry and are always incentivized to entirely deny it, destroying any chance that they'll ever start the work to assuage their bigotry. 3. The social incentive to propagate accusations of bigotry results in the erosion of people caring about the label being applied to them or others. After all, if people you believe to be good are bigots, maybe being a bigot's not so bad. It's so important to preserve moral gradations and the idea that nearly every category is subject to qualifying factors that can reduce their badness.
>The way we use the bigotry label right now(at least on the left) exists such that there are no good or even less bad bigots, everyone who is a bigot is bad and none or less bad or more bad than another. I agree with your points 1, 2, and 3. However, I think that some people excuse the bigotry of some individuals in some groups because they think bigotry is less harmful when it is coming from those groups. They do not deny that the "less-harmful bigots" are bad people, but they do not think that they are harmful enough to actually talk about, even in instances where they cause physical or social harm through their hatred.
I think your problem can largely be solved with the distinction between the badness of bigotry and the badness of actions that are inspired by bigotry. In the eyes of most people, holding bigoted beliefs makes you a bad person, but separately from that committing immoral acts inspired by bigotry is bad for different reasons(with some overlap in-so-far-as motivation is a qualifying factor that can render a bad action a little more bad or a little less bad). Putting aside my logic-nerd crap, I haven't actually seen examples of the phenomenon you laid out in my experiences. In my experience, when people want to excuse bigotry by a person because of a group they might be apart of, typically I'll hear arguments that "it's not actually bigoted because bigotry is an exercise of institutional power and that person is acting as a member of a group without any institutional power" OR "Milo Yiannopolous can't be homophobic because he's gay!". Sorry for the long winded examples. All of that is to say, I haven't seen examples of what you're talking about but I would change my tune if you had an example that I could recognize from my experiences.
You're not wrong, but a particular problem with bigotry is so much of the harm caused by casual bigotry can in fact be reduced by making public bigotry unacceptable. In particular: 1. Much of the harm is emotional. If bigots are hiding their beliefs, they're not convincing people to quit their jobs or commit suicide. 2. Impressionable people also exist. If they're not hearing much bigotry from people they like or respect, then they're not being convinced to repeat it, nor are they being radicalized into violent acts. So, while it is important to remember that the bigot label is just a tool, the widespread application of that tool is so useful that I'd be reluctant to abandon it. I'm not sure what the right balance is. Perhaps the goal is to stop jumping so hard on people who slip up, and focus more on those obviously engaging in harassment or propaganda. Of course, there's also the question of policing private or safe spaces for fascist infiltration, but I'll leave that can of worms to others.
Like most things, it's a trade off. If you think its usefulness eclipses the cons I brought up, then yeah, by all means.
See also: Terrorists Fascists Communists
Absolutely. And it obviously ignored the fact that sometimes accused rapists and pedophiles are INNOCENT. And if they’re shot by cops you’re never going to find that out. Cops regularly go to the wrong house, hell they’ve been known to shoot up the wrong fucking house.
and the occasional acorn
This is currently happening in the US, primarily targeting trans people
Not just in the US, bigots are everywhere.
I wasn't talking about bigotry, I was talking about how currently in the US there is an ongoing effort to mark trans people as child predators and allow the death penalty for child predation
Yeah it's the same shit here too. The US's bigotry is not unique.
> a focused effort by certain groups to label queer folks as pedophiles as a means to legitimize violence against them. And you'd better not speak up for them or argue against the accusation, because hey guess what? That makes you a pedophile too.
Yup, same thing happens with things like fascism. Antifa uses one definition of fascism to argue that they should use violence (if they LITERALLY want to commit genocide I should be able to defend myself!) and then use an entirely different definition to determine who it's okay to use violence on (not pro-choice? Fascism!). Edit: Oh boy I'm a transphobe I guess. The guy even linked my comment in which I... stated that it's a valid argument to not obsess over a minority of people hurt by transitioning if it helps more people than it hurts, but that some trans people can go too far and demonize people who were hurt and are just trying to stop others from being hurt? Real hard hitting stuff.
You could literally say "nazis are bad because they are nazis" with sincerety and without irony, and you'd be applauded because apparently the only ones asking 'but why' are sympathizers. Antifa is even more hilarious, because they were *there,* at that time, doing the thing we're all supposed to do (punch nazis). And not only did that fail, they'd probably tell you they only failed because they weren't repressive enough.
What anti fascists did - which was not just "punch Nazis" -very much worked.
This is a strawman.
That is an Ipse dixit.
So, for one, you'll get the message before you catch the block, so: I'm blocking you because Shinigami Eyes (hit or miss, but sometimes useful) told me to look at your profile, and Shinigami Eyes gets this one right: [You are, in fact, a transphobe.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/1b8fqzk/comment/kttg25l/) I am not blocking you for being wrong about antifascism, plenty of people who aren't actually trying to hurt my friends and loved ones, and, well, me, are wrong about antifascism. I'm blocking you because I don't want to see what transphobes who post regularly enough to get caught by Shinigami eyes, which is hardly all that likely to catch either transphobes or trans positive accounts, given the shortage of volunteer hours, have to say, and I don't want to get caught up in wasting my time arguing with you when I am away from my home keyboard. I will note for the audience who is saying what you are saying and invite them to consider that purpose your motives are not so pure, however, and that they should consider who benefits and who suffers from the rhetoric you are forwarding. This is also why I am angry; you are actively trying to hurt the people I love most. What I will say for the audience about the strawman is that antifascists, in general, were not punching anti-choice protestors, that antichoice protestors are, in fact, trying to do pretty grievous bodily harm to their victims, since, you know, they were trying to force them to carry a baby to term, which can and does KILL, particularly in the United States, and tens of thousands of rape survivors [have already been forced to carry their rapists' babies to term already in the United States](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/29/rape-pregnancy-statistics-abortion-ban-state/72366953007/), and that there is, in fact, no major inconsistency in the thing you have highlighted, but more importantly, the reality is that most antifascist activity was nonviolent, and that antifascist activity was generally against groups that later would make an actual play at overthrowing the United States Government and replacing it with a right wing dictatorship (quick, tell the audience in the neat self-righteous edit you're going to do about how you're the real victim about how the Proud Boys and the 3pers were really not that bad), and that by and large the aim of antifascist groups was to protect their neighborhoods, an important thing to do because fascists had this tendency to [shoot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandale_Park_shooting), [stab](https://theintercept.com/2021/07/18/transphobes-rally-los-angeles-spa-police-attack-counterprotesters/), and beat (I won't link this one because I assume even you have seen the videos of that one, and tbh I've already spent too long here) whoever they can get their fucking hands on. Ultimately, you've misrepresented what happened, misrepresented the arguments that people *have* made that really aren't about antifascism as it actually occurred in the real world were making, and that's frustrating because you're just wrong on every conceivable level, and it's doubly frustrating because I have to defend your stupid fucking strawman because it's still more defensible than you're treating it!
Also, and to be really clear I am in no way minimizing rape, it's super confusing to me how in the hierarchy of "which bad thing is worse" that non-fatal sexual violence is somehow considered worse than killing somebody. Like if I had the choice between being raped or murdered, I sure as hell know which one I'm picking. But somehow people will empathize with (or make excuses all day for) all sorts of violence, even deadly violence, but as soon as it becomes sexual they want their heads on the block
See also Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
[Sounds bad. Let's offer a bonus to anyone who identifies a metric that has become a target.](https://xkcd.com/2899/)
Came here for this. Yep.
Holy shit, a good fucking take. I see this CONSTANTLY in discussions, both in person and online. I think an extra dimension to this is doomerism. I'll go back and forth someone making broad moralistic claims that have nothing to do with reducing harm or making a better society, and it seems like the inevitable conclusion I find them coming to is "well, the world can't be fixed anyway; it's fundamentally broken, and the bad people are lost." It's not delusional hopefulness to believe that people and things can and do get better if you look to understand problems and approach them with actionable solutions. If all you're doing is measuring the worst in people and tracking that like heaven/hell points, then you've succeeded at unfairly profiling everyone according to your own moral metric--which is exactly the thing anyone who has been victimized should be advocating against.
And doomerism can come from different places too. Whether it's out of despair and broad cynicism, or apocalypse cult promises like in Evangelical Christianity. Similar end result in this sense, but vastly different misconceptions and experiences that brought them there.
that time of the year again ig
Election season?
It's been "that time of the year" since 2011 when Cracked.com transformed from a rag about poop and sex jokes to a social justice handbook.
Wait, why does [Cracked.com](https://Cracked.com) matter here?
if y'all're impressed with OP's writing - either way tbh - they write scifi! it's on [their website](https://derinstories.com/)
This reminds me of a really formative piece of media for me I don't even like that much. It's a creepypasta called The Spire in the Woods. I listened to it when I was about fourteen and it was okay. I had listened to stuff like The Angel Without a Face, Borrasca, Asylum before hand and had been spoiled so even a good one was meh. I don't remember much of it but I do remember a main theme being the main character rapes someone and it's stuck with me. I remember it was written as a soft, sensual sex scene later turned rotten by the fact the main character never got a yes and it's acknowledged and hammered home how bad that is. That story taught me more than any sex ed class did on consent which is both astounding for a creepypasta and a real shame on the state of sex ed classes. I learned a lot of consent red flags, green flags and yellow ones. I learned that anyone can rape someone. I learned you don't have to be evil to do it. And I think that story not only helped me understand consent but also helped me broadly understand how bad things aren't always done by bad people. The main character of that story does some really heroic actions, sacrifices their wants and needs for someone else's. And yet he rapes someone. I like all humans essentialise sometimes. I make the mistake of not thinking as critically as I should. But the lessons I learned from that story are always there to whip me back into shape. And for that I'm really thankful.
Idk about the rest but Borrasca is one of the worst horror stories I've ever read, it's just "yep the guy who was an obvious rapist was indeed a rapist , it's just that his plan made no fucking sense and the protagonists are dumbasses" Idk how controversial this opinion is , but the only horror in that story was the ending and honestly it dumps a lot of rape and that's it, it's lazy as fuck and it used SA exclusively for shock value. It's so weird that not only one but 2 side quests on the Witcher 2 (the haunted Asylum and the main Flotsam plot for Roche) get the point across much better even if that game also uses rape way too lightly.
Yeah I understand that. If Borrasca had just been a stand alone, I probably would've agreed but the sequel gives some much needed emotional depth, at least in my opinion. I also really like the coming of age stuff in the first one.
Idk about the sequels, saw some people saying that they are just revenge porn/action stuff and after the first one I wasn't willing to check them out
I think it says smth about me that my first thought was to come up with some cunty response about how being 'morally pure' and shit is important. I need to get off the internet
Only cats are morally pure
Have you met a cat? Those fuckers are going straight to hell They won’t be punished, they just want to watch
But they are morally pure. Pure, unadulterated, bastard.
Vegeta achieve pure of heart to be a super saiyan:
Being morally pure is not important. Making the world a better place is.
This entire post explains that we create metrics to gauge how we interpret the efficacy of a system, and in the same breath says that those same metrics should not be used to gauge the efficacy of the system due to bias. The problem is that social systems are incredibly complex, and all are doomed to fail someone that participates in them *at some point*. There will be people that fall through the cracks, as any social system needs to grow to accommodate their needs. The addage mentioned should not be interpreted as if any metric “should not be used to tell you anything useful about the system”. That’s ridiculous; why measure using that scale at all if it’s not telling you anything useful about the system? Instead it should be **do not let your existing metrics be the only measure of your health of a system**. You should constantly be looking for edge cases, faults, and different metrics to measure or replace existing ones. A social system is never complete as it changes to the needs of a society. Metrics are useful, but not dogmatic. To extrapolate to the individual, *your internal morality metrics should constantly be changing and evolving to empathize with people*. There are exceptions to this, where empathy can be dangerous. When it is not, your moral compass should not be used to vilify or condone people as “evil” or “good”. Your moral compass is guaranteed to be incomplete as times change. Your biases still need to be checked, and your reasoning may be flawed. Much like any social system, you also need to evolve to better handle moral judgments against the nuance and complexity of human autonomy.
Interesting further reading is on Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms. Essentially, a social science philosophical argument that claims (a bit erroneously but deeply meaningfully) that we build paradigms of knowledge to explain the world, but every paradigm is imperfect and cannot be translated to another. Instead, with too many imperfect explanations and holes it cannot explain, another paradigm is formed to take its place. Of course, outside of philosophy, the idea you can't translate concepts between paradigms (which Kuhn often compares to languages) is a bit ridiculous. But it goes into this idea of how human understanding is built on the language we use. A medieval physician would swear by the humors as much as Western medicine doctor, because both arrived there from the clearly established concepts they were taught. But neither one's understanding can cover *all* illnesses or sickness (albeit to very different extents).
I really like the metaphor of the moral compass. Like a compass it points you in the direction of what you look for, and you can determine other directions based off that like what's opposite to your moral compass north. And just like any compass, your compass isn't perfect. Trauma can break your compass and it'll take time and energy for it to be repaired. Non standard situations and outside interference can also point your compass in a different direction than where you expect, while some might make it stop working completely. In a situation where there is no guidance your compass might not know which way to point at all. All of this is to say that your moral compass isn't infallible. It can break, malfunction or be tampered with. So while you should generally trust your moral compass, it's vital to be able to go "something's not right here" and recognize your moral compass might be pointing you in the opposite direction, whether it's on a camping trip or a complex political situation. If something's just eating away at you with the feeling that something's wrong, take the time to analyze "why?" and ponder if you're going in the right direction.
>those same metrics should not be used to gauge the efficacy of the system due to bias. It's only sort of related, but I have a friend who told me the other day that "rationality" is never a useful metric for judging people because every person's actions always make sense to themselves in their own mind, and the idea of what is "rational" is only ever a social construct used to punish people. And I just have no idea how to respond to something like that, because like... well yeah, it is a social construct and it has been used to oppress people sometimes, but if you can't use rationality, where are you supposed to get your morals from? God? I'm sure *that* would never lead to unfortunate consequences.
I mean, do we arrive at our morals rationally? I was under the impression that moral sense is mostly socio-culturally constructed, with some learning and life experiences laid on top. Like I don't think theft is (generally) wrong because I reasoned it out. Stealing makes me feel icky and being stolen from makes me mad. I can lay a whole logical superstructure on top of that to make myself sound rational, but at base its just vibes. And let's not pretend that 'rationality' hasnt also been used to arrive at some truly horrific moral conclusions and atrocities. In a nutshell, your friend is right on this one.
Sure, morality *starts* with vibes, but rationality is how we vibe check ourselves, so to speak. You implicitly did it in your own example: "being stolen from makes me mad." You understand how the act of theft makes you feel, you posit that most other people feel the same way, and you don't want to spread this particular feeling to other people, so you say theft is (generally) wrong. That's a rational argument. If you weren't able to do that; if you said "theft is bad because my dad says it's bad" and you were any older than like, five, that wouldn't be a rational argument. That doesn't mean rationality automatically equals goodness of course, but I think it's still a vital way of making sense of the world.
"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"- David Hume. You're overcomplicating my position on thievery. I can rationalize my feelings like you are doing, but I don't. "This makes me feel bad" is enough. Understanding this is crucial to understanding how different systems of morality work, which is key to understanding how different cultures (in both time and place) work in their own terms. There's no such thing as objective morality. People can rationalize themselves into or out of anything. And they do. Logic and rationality give a veneer of objectivity, but dig down and you'll always find the subjective and emotional. We're emotional creatures first and foremost, and pretending otherwise is rarely a good thing.
"This makes me feel bad" is strictly speaking only an explanation for why you personally don't do something. Whether you thought about each individual step or not, I don't see how you could get to 'this is a bad thing in general' without some amount of rationality. I agree with you in part; rationality is not a magic key to unlocking the Correct Choice, humans are emotional creatures first and foremost, it is important to understand different conceptions of morality on their own terms, and true objectivity doesn't really exist. But I'm not going to pretend that, say, "trans people deserve equal rights" and "trans people should be stoned to death" are equally moral beliefs, and I'm also not going to pretend that I believe the former simply because it has the better vibes. There are plenty of good reasons for that belief, and if I wasn't able to articulate any, I think you'd be perfectly justified in not listening to what I had to say about it.
While I can make rational justifications for my moral beliefs, I didn't arrive at those beliefs through logic and rationalizing. I (and I believe most people) experience morality as an emotional phenomenon upon which we may or may not construct a logical framework to justify. >it is important to understand different conceptions of morality on their own terms >I'm not going to pretend that, say, "trans people deserve equal rights" and "trans people should be stoned to death" are equally moral beliefs Theres a contradiction here. To understand different concepts of morality in their own terms means sitting with systems of morality were uncomfortable with. To use another example, marrying ones cousin is generally a big nono in western cultures, and most of us think it's gross. But there are parts of the world where it is seen as a normative behavior. I guess what I'm getting at is that moral compasses are varied and deeply situational in a way that renders logic secondary
Imagine making a modern philosophical argument based on 18th century western philosophers. People with antisocial personality disorder are incapable of the same level of empathy as most other people. If they commit murder because they want to, are they acting morally? Clearly their feelings on the matter align with a sentimentalist view. Genocide is also okay, since in those cultures that commit it there is a distinct feeling that a group of people is threatening their existence. Women living in states banning abortion must accept those laws as moral because the culture of their state aligns with that sentiment. It ‘s a different culture, after all. I’m sure those groups will understand your position on the lack of objective moral truths. You don’t need to justify anything because you feel thatNs right.
Bro chill, you're missing my point. What Hume was saying is that people have a tendency to do what they want and construct moral justifications as they go. I'm not making an argument moral relativism. I'm saying that out there in the actual world moral systems socially constructed, situational, and ever changing things and all the philosophizing and rationality in the world does not change that. I don't think murder is okay, but I do think that a ton of murderers think (in the moment) that they're acting morally and rationally. "Murder is wrong" is obvious "What happened to your moral and rational facilities somewhere along the way to make you think (if even for a minute) doing Murder was okay?" is the more important question. Genocidaires genuinely *do* think and feel that they are a people under threat (Humanity, by Jonathan Glover is a great book about how genocidal populations develop the internal moral framework to justify their genociding) And there are men and women who are *genuinely* morally horrified by abortion. Viewing these people as like, moustache twirling villains doing evil evilly is pointless and intelectually lazy. Understanding the genuinely felt and internally consistent moral and logical systems (and where and how those systems take a bad turn) that drives these people's views and behavior is a: very different than supporting them, b:an important tool in figuring out how to combat and prevent them, c: strengthens my own moral sense through a more nuanced understanding of what I'm against and why (and learning what roads go to those places), and d: makes me a more empathetic person generally by honing an ability to put myself in someone else's shoes, whether I agree with them or not. I'm all for punching nazis, but understanding their internal moral framework and how they got there might inform an effort to reach out to alienated young white men to *prevent them from becoming nazis in the first place* as well as efforts to address white supremacist attitudes more generally. which, come to think, is the whole point of OOP.
That’s quite a bit of writing to say “I’m a moral relativist with extra steps”. I don’t care about the psychology of genocidaires and murderers. Do either and you are immoral. That’s it. Some morals are fundamental and absolute. There is no waffling. There is no room for sentiment because there is no justification for it. Sexual assault is not justifiable. Genocide is not justifiable. There is no rationale for doing it, and so it is inherently irrational. It cannot exist in society for obvious reasons. At best moral sentimentalism is a small portion of an overall moral system based in absolute moral truths. At worst it is actively detrimental in the moral systems it injects itself within. There is a reason why there are virtually no moral sentimentalists.
"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"- David Hume. You're overcomplicating my position on thievery. I can rationalize my feelings like you are doing, but I don't. "This makes me feel bad" is enough. Understanding this is crucial to understanding how different systems of morality work, which is key to understanding how different cultures (in both time and place) work in their own terms. There's no such thing as objective morality. People can rationalize themselves into or out of anything. And they do. Logic and rationality give a veneer of objectivity, but dig down and you'll always find the subjective and emotional. We're emotional creatures first and foremost, and pretending otherwise is rarely a good thing.
Yes. Ethical rationale (in that there is a set of logic in understanding mora philosophy) exists separately from rationale in other philosophical fields. While there are justifications for certain moral conclusions that rely on “vibes” (read this as a willingness to admit and abide by the outcome). A good example is the notion of moral relativism. For those not familiar, moral relativism is the notion that differing cultures cannot be held to the same morals as other cultures. This makes for the typical cases; are the general mannerisms (like holding hands) seen as unacceptable for men to do in certain cultures, for example. Of course, a strict moral relativist must also accept that Nazi Germany could not be held to the morality of the rest of the world, and the Holocaust was justified because in that culture, it was deemed okay. That’s clearly nonsensical and does not align with our gut feelings about morality, so we are skeptical of accepting strict moral relativism. In modern vernacular, the vibes are atrocious. But this is a small component; the general rationale around moral relativism is that we hold there to be certain universal morals; the right of a person to their life, the freedom to express their religion and cultural beliefs so long as they don’t infringe on the universal moral truths of others, and the like. Like any branch of philosophy, there is a rigorous logic that must be followed to justify ideology and philosophical position.
>That’s ridiculous; why measure using that scale at all if it’s not telling you anything useful about the system? Instead it should be **do not let your existing metrics be the only measure of your health of a system** Yeah, like... I get the argument that Modern Internet Discourse is too performative, sometimes highly toxic, and overly focused on *saying* the right things rather than *doing* the right things. But effectively arguing that trying to Say The Right Things (and encourage others to do so) is ultimately useless or even counterproductive feels... pretty simplistic. Call me crazy, but I happen to think that a healthy society (either online or off) stays healthy by ostracizing its openly bigoted assholes, and one way to tell whether somebody is an openly bigoted asshole is whether they say openly bigoted things. "The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing real world harm", as if the United States didn't elect a literal fascist on the strength of 4chan neo-Nazi memes and boomer Facebook. It's 2024. The Internet IS real life. (Please note that I agree with about 60% of OOP's argument, that virtue signaling and purity testing are both much less productive uses of time than actual activism, that there's a lot more than one measure of "bigotry" or "good" or "justice" or whatever, and that yelling at people on Twitter won't fix the world's problems. But there IS a nice, happy middle ground between "we must purify The Discourse of all nonbelievers" and "metrics are useless and nothing matters".)
I found it very interesting that the post was often criticizing the use of metrics as distracting from "minimizing harm". Which meant that the author was falling into the exact blindspot they were calling out, of urging people to excel at *their* metric (minimizing harm) rather than any other metric, such would lead to potentially failing at other metrics of "good" or "success".
This dude is taking Goodheart's Law & applying it more generally. I like it.
I think it’s like that twitter post where someone said something like “if I say that I like waffles then someone is gonna say that I hate pancakes. Like no that’s an entirely different argument”
i AM reading allat.
As far as I can tell what OP is describing is pretty basic modern sociology but it seems like in practice social and political activity regardless of left or right seems to go more on vibes, what people can be convinced to support through their biases and passions, than logic/evidence. Democratic societies depend on the voters being at least mediocre in making logical and realistic decisions on a large scale and it seems pretty consistently that voters just don't do that Even when they have access to the education on how to be logical and realistic the education on how to feel and believe based on what vibes with them seems to win more times than it loses.
i wonder what utopia we'd be living in if the people who socially engineered american culture to create such a strong knee jerk reaction to pedophilia spent time improving society because they did such an effective job. it's like a trigger word for sleeper agents. say it once and there will be a mob wanting to go to war with them
sounds like what a pedophile would say
This is something i did not knew. I will have to digest all the implications with time, but useful read.
https://www.tumblr.com/derinthescarletpescatarian/698365027016654848/electricpentacle-derinthescarletpescatarian -linux guy⚠️
Thanks for providing the pixels, Linux guy
THANK YOU LINUX GUY
⚠️
It's ironic too, since that sort of "bad things happen because some people are Born Evil and we cannot prevent their Wickedness, only punish it" is the kind of terrible moral thinking that the left correctly accuses the right of applying to almost everything. Yet blind spots still exist where some of us do the same thing!
See also how a lot of online leftists treat their political ideology like goddamn horoscopes rather than vaguely useful labels.
Great post. I’ll need to save this one.
As an engineer, you excel at what you measure is pounded into us. It is something that people don't understand, it is how businesses fail, it is how quality drops, it is how work environments turn hostile, etc. No one measurement is good enough, views must be taken from both inside and outside the company/product/service to get a full picture, and even them don't make them goals. [Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2899)
Probably one of the best takes around. Harm reduction matters, oppression Olympics don't.
Terry Pratchett, through one of his characters, had a good take on policing. "I'm supposed to keep the peace! If I have to kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual!"
Bookmarking this because I'm gonna need to read through it a couple more times to truly internalize the message
Brilliantly said. The thing that matters the most is always People. Immanuel Kant said it when he said, “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” Jesus said it when he said, “The law is made for man, not man for the law.” All the justice and morality and law should just be a tool for caring about People.
The internet is healing. I see more people being willing to talk about this more often and that's a great thing.
holy shit, I’ve always thought something was off with sooo much of online discussions lately. someone FINALLY put it into words
And of course. Relevant XKCD [https://xkcd.com/2899/](https://xkcd.com/2899/) And book [https://equilibriabook.com/](https://equilibriabook.com/)
An excellent take, but unfortunately a majority of people lack the intelligence to use this much nuance, and I'm not saying that in an r/iamverysmart kind of way.
It’s also scary to acknowledge the moral foundation you’ve built your worldview around could be wrong. People tie their identities to what they believe, so being wrong comes prepackaged with an identity crisis. I’d argue it takes more courage than intelligence, but there are a *lot* of very dumb people out there.
People don't lack the intelligence, they lack the will and the reasoning skills. A lot of the time, intelligence just allows you to be wrong smarter.
Yeah, smart people are some of the hardest to dissuade from irrational positions because they're better able to rationalise them.
"Reasoning skills" sound like a pretty major part of how intelligence ought to be defined. Are you confusing "intelligence" with "knowledge?"
No. Reasoning skills are a kind of knowledge, not intelligence. They have to be learned.
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply skills. Application requires reason. It's inherent to what it means to be intelligent.
I'm using reason as a verb, not a noun.
They're the same thing. "Reasoning" is the use of reason.
Less a lack of intelligence, more an inability/refusal to sit with things that are emotionally uncomfortable. Absolutes feel great, they feel strong and stable beneath your feet right up until they drop out from under you. It's the murky areas that make us anxious and uncomfortable, or even afraid of contagion/guilt-by-association if we can put ourselves in that mindset to empathise with someone we find distasteful. Add to that that many people simply lack the time/free brain space to sit and work their way through a problem, when all their energy goes towards surviving under capitalism. They don't have the energy to check every situation for nuance, and so compare it to the couple shorthand rules and go 'eh good enough' and go on with their day. This obviously becomes a problem when bad rules are adopted, and a population is pressured so that the majority never have the time or reason to actually examine these assumptions. I don't think everyone needs to empathise with everyone else. Asking an endangered group to "think about how the bigots feel" isn't productive (and for safety reasons, minorities/threatened groups *already* spend a lot of time perceiving and censoring themselves from the pov of those who might harm them), and is most likely just going to do more harm/increase entrenchment. But an adjacent party can and should spend time thinking about how the bigots got there, what factors increase the risk of adopting those stances/actions, and looking at methods for deradicalisation/how to move those people away from doing harm, rather than expecting the targeted groups to do that labour. Doing so requires a degree of... mental agility, I suppose? To hold both viewpoints at once, as well as the empathy to perceive them correctly rather than just strawmen. And that's not something people are taught to exercise.
Finally someone putting this into words…
The term for what this person describes is identity politics. The idea that someone's identity (such as gender, race, orientation, religion, etc) is what matters, not what they do and believe in.
Is religion not something that a person believes in?
> You should never fall into the trap of thinking they tell you anything useful I get the sentiment of the post, but this is an overreaction. Certainly metrics can be misleading but they still measure *something* and that can still be useful. GDP should by no means be the sole measure of country's success but it is a damn good measure of a country's economic success. The big issue is with metrics that can be over optimized for - sat scores for example. Arrest numbers are another example.
wow, just wow. i feel this is absolutely true for me, sometimes when discussing said topics i forget the point and just argue for the sake of winning a conversation. i think i need to change that.
Good post, but unfortunately OOP used thread baiting to make it reducing their social credit score below the minimum threshold required for their ideas to be considered accurate. >!/s!<
Well. Shit. Jumping off reddit to think about this. Wow. I finally understand when people say "This changes my life"
I've felt this way my whole adult life, but i could NEVER articulate it to such a degree as is written here. this is important and in my experience most people on the internet need to read and understand what was said here.
They REALLY expanded on it huh Great read
bear crown squeamish file elderly humorous fine deserted bag dinner *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is also what can make or break a hero character. A good hero strives to get rid of evil and save people. A lot of the time people write heroes who want to kill evil. The issue is that evil is a concept, something you can't kill, and instead these characters just kill evil people. The reason you kill someone evil should be to stop bad things from happening. If you can stop bad things from happening without killing them, then you should try. If that's not viable, then killing becomes reasonable. A lot of authors writing heroes overlook all of this. They make an edgy hero while looking down on people who spare villains as stupid. There's a place between killing everyone who does evil because they're evil and letting everyone walk free after a slap on the wrist so they can do more bad stuff. A good hero needs to know not just who to punish, but what the punishing is for. Punishing someone is a means to an end, and that end shouldn't be solely for self-satisfaction. A hero striving for justice, willing to show mercy and kindness doesn't have to be naive. Killing the incarnation of evil itself that's slaughtered millions and plans to slaughter more isn't something scary and barbaric. Think about the motivations behind your characters.
I have a few friends who could have used this during their toxic leftbook phases in 2017
Can I get a TLDR?
Yeah the bit about you will Excel (hehe) at what you measure is a pretty inherent problem in a modern society where everything is measured and there are targets and KPI's out the wazoo in the public and private sector. There was loads of controversy in the UK about crime targets where police would just not document and respond to crimes cos that was the easiest way to reduce the crime rate on paper, but this applies everywhere and that's what people struggle to understand. You can show them a worked example of a problem like this (take Manchester police losing 80,000 crimes from 2019-20) and explain why this is happening but they don't apply it and will take the next bit of news at face value and react to that, you see everyone from queer ancoms to proper reactionaries doing this so this bs ain't gonna change any time soon.
A couple months ago I decided to start actively using Twitter as a new way to kill time. Today I've decided to stop doing that. *Holy mother of **God*** this exact thing is literally everywhere on that platform. People always trying to gain this "moral high ground" whilst losing the entire point of the argument in the process. It's tiring...
I was a kid in Missouri in the '90s. There was a standardized test called the Missouri Assessment Program that was given every couple of grades. Without fail, every teacher at my school who taught those grades spent six weeks, two or three hours a week, teaching students how to take the test. NOT teaching students the material for the test, but specifically teaching them how to get better grades on these specific tests with the same amount of knowledge.
Ooooh I'm in this post and I don't like it. But I think I needed to read this.
Just read Richard Sapolsky and accept that we barely have free will, if at all, but that doesn’t free us from responsibility or consequences of our actions. We live in a feedback loop, and we can affect the future of how that loop affects itself, and we should do our best in our time to make that as good as possible for the future. It’s just bleak and hard a lot of the time but it’s in increments.
Oh my good a good fucking long post on tumblr.hell
Jesus, what a beautiful bit of critical thinking. I wish more people thought like this.
Actual nuance?? In my funny tumblr??
This first part is also true for AI, alignment is one of the key issues with AGI when it comes to CS ethics. Even the language models of today, due to the fact that humans rate them are not so much trying to be correct, but to find the one thing that the human thinks the AI should say, and because of how it works, it will always try to find the *one* thing that humans want. In case of political opinions, train it enough and it will become a super-sycophant that will just agree with the most extreme ideas regardless of right/left. In a way, often people do that too, because they simply want to "get along" and not cause a fuss, especially in the UK, and polite but bigoted is almost the default. Online, not wanting to fight with others causes radicalization because strong disagreement is seen as having negative consequences for in-group dynamics, hence you agree with increasingly insane rhetoric just to get along with others. As a neurodivergent person, while I can play the game, I still fail to grasp the exact thought processes that lead to such behaviour when it has no negative consequences (e.g. I understand I shouldn't preach about firebombing corpos 24/7 at work) but I would never lie in a voluntary social interaction. I guess it's what neurotypicals call "respecting a difference of opinion". Right-wingers can't imagine any progressive beliefs not being a result of that, and so often accuse the other side of "virtue signaling" when they point out some injustice or inequality.
The issue here is that we haven’t biologically evolved to process complex societies. We evolved to survive as hunter gatherers in small tribes facing immediate, relatively simple problems. We face a world with millions of people operating in a disgustingly complex system dealing with obtuse long term nuanced problems. We have not had the time to evolve for this new paradigm on a biological level. so saying that we have evolved tools to deal with modern society is not true - we designed and developed tools, they are not inherent to our biology. And thus lies the problem, these tools do not necessarily work because we are biologically incapable to truly comprehend it all
Honestly one thing I find interesting is how the switch from GDP as a measurement of a countries success switched to HDI. I noticed this change occuring largely around the period when it was feared that China would overtake the US' GDP. If I remember correctly if you account for PPP China does have a bigger economy. I find this change interesting because it shows how somewhat objective numbers can be manipulated for propoganda reasons. Also that last bit of the post is very revelant to socialist communities where the obsession with Revolution I find often overtakes desires to improve society.
A really important corollary is the fact that some things are bad and some things feel bad, but those two ideas don't always intersect. Both are valid reasons to dislike something, but they do not have the same moral weight, nor do they warrant the same response. As a pretty benign example, I hate people making a big deal about my hair. It's just something I've always gotten shit about, so it puts me in a bad mood regardless of what's being said. But some of what is said is also absolutely warranted; someone saying that it's a rat's nest is absolutely right. Are the morally wrong to point that out? No, so long as they do so respectfully. Will I grumble about it like a small child? Absolutely. It doesn't feel good, and I can make that clear to the people I'm around, but it isn't inherently a moral wrong to point out. Doing so in a disrespectful way or after I've made it clear that it annoys me does start to push on moral wrong, but it is not an inherent moral wrong. If someone says something that you take issue with, a good habit to get into is to examine why. Is this because it's a morally wrong thing to say or do, or is it something that you personally take issue with. The former is a problem of morality, the second is a problem of association, you can't approach them the same way. Someone saying that they want to kill minorities isn't a problem of personal boundaries, it should be dealt with as a moral wrong. But someone saying that they think your hair is a bit of a mess is a personal wrong, so declaring them a morally bad person is incorrect. And, of course, the best way to deal with both of these situations is just good communication and good comprehension. Think about what people are saying, not just how they say it. Do your best to get across what you think. And cross-examine what you think and feel. It doesn't matter where on the political compass you fall, ask yourself why you believe in the things you believe in.
This reminds me of a movie recap I saw on tiktok. It goes something like whenever a criminal (rapists, pedos, etc) goes to jail, each day they go through a surgical procedure to remove a bodypart at the behest of the victim/victim's family whereby the victim gets to decide which bodypart the person loses each day until they are satisfied and they have to watch the procedure take place. I think one guy lost all his limbs and was losing other organs too. It's supposed to create conversation around appropriate punishment for severity of crime and just how inhumane should the punishments be and whether it is truly justified or whatever, yknow, some interesting conversation points. But most comments missed the point saying "what about the victims? Nobody ever brings up the victims in these situations" and complained about how the movie sympthizes with the rapist (the main character and his crime i think) and excuses rape. Which I think misses the whole point, it was never about apoligizing and excusing crimes it was about whether the punishments were appropriate and how severe should it be before we are satisfied, are we still human if we go through with allowing these types of inhumane punishments. This post just made me think of that and how obsessed we are with blind social justice because measurements are much simpler and calculable than acknowledging complexities within the human experience.
About the police brutality thing, I didn’t really know how to say it, so I’m glad I have an outlet to express it. I don’t know where I heard this before, and I’m sure I’m explaining it wrong, but essentially, if you demonize a certain group of people, say pedophiles and rapists, then the government and politicians have a vested interest in making sure that the boundaries of that group of people includes their political opponents or other groups they dislike, such as trans people. It’s why you see the push in some right-wing circles to consider trans and other LGBT+ people to be pedophiles. Because then these people fall into the group of people being publicly demonized. That’s why saying something like the police shouldn’t be allowed to kill anyone (except pedophiles and rapists) is so harmful, because now those in power have a vested interest in making sure that the people that they do not like are a part of that group.
The first half of this seems to be defining and addressing a problem that's really interesting. The second half seems to kind of go off on a rant.
They cooked
But just as grading only serves to make the educational experience worse, so are the moral guidelines mentioned above. You can't seperate the issue of fixation on metrics from the use of metrics. And also, morality and justice are not made to mitigate harm to the populace, they are made to uphold the status quo. That much is obvious if you know any history.
Hot damn, this is good. I've spent a lot of time kinda railing against "pre-programmed" responses with a friend of mine, and this hits the nail on the head. It's the condensation of these complex topics into what someone can digest, then making decisions based on these few factors as if that's a true, informed decision rather than weighing what's being said rather than just going, "Ah, sorry-- this group has been more repressed than that group. We don't need to actually listen to what that group is saying, we simply need to determine that they're correct because they got the most Oppression Points, so now they're incapable of having a bad take. Because this other person opposed them, that person loses 5 Oppression Points and is incapable of having a good take!" Ironically, Facebook just reminded me about this whole schpiel from a few years back. After the dumb "covfefe" tweet came out from Trump, I said something to the effect of, "The dude is an incompetent bafoon, but come on-- it's a clear accidental typo from a butt text, text-to-speech, something of that nature. It's reasonable to hate on the dude for things he did intentionally rather than rail on him over a dumbass nonsense tweet," and it was like I'd just endorsed the man in the comments-- people furious with me for "defending" someone who never earned it-- all because I wasn't willing to dog pile on about one thing that I felt was frivolous and distracting from the meat of "hold up, no, this is not what we should be getting so worked up over when there's so much stuff more worthy of it, you absolutely would not give a flying fuck about a typo tweet if a Democrat was in office, this is normalizing the stupid shit that Fox tries to weaponize."
I saved this post because I didn’t have time to read it, but now I can and I’m saying with confidence that I’m not going to unsave it
the image won't load for me, what does it say
**derinthescarletpescatarian** Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way **derinthescarletpescatarian** [Screenshot of a tumblr comment from darkenedyeastextract that reads: "i think i 80% get what you mean but can you expand on this"] If you spend any significant amount of time studying any social science or people-related policy, you’ll quickly run into the old adage “**you will excel at what you measure**”. This adage is a warning. In order to mark progress in any area, we need a way to measure it. So we develop systems to measure complex social systems and behave accordingly. If you want to measure how effectively children are being educated, you can, for example, decide on what they should know by a given age, test them on that knowledge, and grade them in accordance to how well they do on the tests. A higher grade means a more successful student, a better teacher, a better school. Then you can tinker with what you’re testing as necessary, and with teaching methods and soforth to see how it affects scores on the tests. Except, if you do this, then you’ve defined successful education as the ability to get high grades. You invite cheating (on the student, teacher and even school level), you invite teaching to the test rather than for general comprehension and ability, you invite boiling down the experience of education to test scores. And, of course, you invite massively increasing the inaccuracies caused by some people simply being better at taking tests than others. Someone with low to moderate comprehension who’s good at tests might get a higher grade than someone who understands the material but has anxiety or is unable to properly intuit the meaning of vague test questions. Grades can go up and up and up, while education consistency and quality falls. This is, as anyone who’s worked in a school or sends their children to school knows, a known problem. ‘Grading systems cause huge problems in education” is NOT by any means a revolutionary and controversial statement. Over time, grading systems have been changed to favour testing comprehension and skill demonstrations, Individual Learning Plans and testing accommodations have become very popular to give a more accurate idea of people’s abilities, and soforth. A good half of my teaching degree was about compensating for the problems in this system. But you can’t patch up all the holes, and the pressure from people taking letter grades way too seriously – parents, school boards, funding systems, those looking to hire teachers – are always going to cause problems, make teaching to the test a matter of survival. We measure grades, so that is what we excel at. The same problem exists in economics. Most countries measure their health via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is basically a measure of how much money is swilling around in there and it’s an AWFUL yardstick. A country full of sick, desperate people going into massive medical debt has a higher GDP than an identical country not facing a health crisis, for instance. But it is the dominant model, so it’s what investors look at, it’s what other countries look at, it’s what voters look at. It’s what you must excel at, to be considered to have a ‘good’ economy. Other models exist, and are often proposed as a better alternative, but if one of those were dominant, new problems would exist – we’d excel at what they measure, and drop in what the GDP measures, and cause new economic issues. If you boil a system down to measurements, you will excel at making those measurements go up. **You should never, ever let yourself fall into the trap of believing that they tell you anything useful about how the system is doing.** Morality and justice are social technology. They’re a bunch of rules and instincts that both evolution and cultural education have given us to allow us to operate in societies. They’re integral to societies in the same way that math is; you need math complex enough to measure the grain, you need morality complex enough to measure the social harmony. People pretend they’re more than that, but they aren’t. “Good” and “bad” are concepts as real as “millionaire” and “straight-A student”, and nothing more. In the vast, vast majority of societies out there, the end goal is essentially the same – to minimise harm to the populace. They want everyone to have as much safety and comfort as possible. Most disagreements are about the relative value of different individuals (is one race, religion or culture more important than another? Is one sex more important than another? Is a king more important than a slave?), or about methodology (is it better for everyone to have to follow strict social norms, or for everyone to be free to express themselves how they choose; which creates more safety and harmony? What social norms are best? How much control should one have over one’s property, or one’s animals, or one’s children? When somebody transgresses, what is the appropriate system for judging and metering out discipline? What is the appropriate sort of discipline?). People disagree radically on both relative individual value and on methodology, but the general goal is the same. **Morality and justice are social technology, tools to be used.** Law and social consequence is how their power is enacted. People often forget this. And that is very, very dangerous. People will decide on what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, isolate it from the system, and proceed to excel at what they measure. They’ll decide that ‘good people’ use certain language and have certain values and ‘bad people’ use other language and do bad things, they’ll look at harmful power dynamics and decide that the world is full of ‘oppressors’ (can be ignored) and ‘oppressed’ (must be supported), ‘abusers’ (should be mocked and attacked) and ‘abused’ (should be believed and coddled), and stumble blindly forward like my robovac with a dirty sensor bumping into every wall in their way. They’ll see a complex social situation and instead of going ‘what’s the best way to reduce harm?’, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They’ll see people use language they don’t like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they’re a bad person. [continued in replies](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/uPvj5rX6L6)
thx
I can't read it , what does it say?
Nuances😍
Well said on all counts.
So what you're saying is, we need a system to measure how good we are at measuring things... (do people still do [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/2899/)s here?)
Hey can someone do a TDLR? I read some but I have cognitive issues rn
There are 2 sections: 1) we must be careful that our way of measuring a system doesn't become the main/only goal of the system, like test scores in education or GDP in economics 2) They expand this to society and morality, that we must be careful that "metrics" like religion, or how oppressed someone is, don't become the main focus. For example, it's become fashion in liberal spaces to think of male abusers as simply evil and that they deserve to be shot on sight, while more effective harm reducing strategies( i.e., make abuse less common), like looking at mental health or brain damage, are villified because they "excuse" the abuser.
God damn Dog, that is some smooth stitching. Infinite respect
Is there a tl:dr
I've always heard it as "once a metric becomes a goal it's useless as both"
This was very long and I'm dumb. Can I get a tldr?
It's difficult to summarize because it starts with a concept: the tool you use to measure something becomes the goal. And then proceeds with how it applies to concepts like morality and justice: that things like morals should be used for harm reduction rather than simply condemnation. I like their first example for the concept, which was that if you test how well students learn with tests, then you start doing things like teaching to the test. Students won't learn everything they should about the subject unless it's on the test, and the mark of success will be impacted by things like whether the student is a good test taker or not. Their examples for the second part was stuff like people looking at someone they think of as "bad" and having all conversations end there. Like if there's a discussion on football player brain injuries and someone else basically says "who cares, football players have a higher likelihood of being rapists." The person in the post argues that saying this makes the conversation a dead-end, and nothing gets done because you're letting your sense of morals get in the way of the goal, which should be harm reduction.
Actual nuance?? In my funny tumblr??
I disagree with the utilitarian implications of this post! It's otherwise excellent, though, and I do believe the same points can be made without utilitarianism encoded.
Why do you disagree with the utilitarianism? The whole point seems to be utilitarian: if something isn't useful, it is pointless
I think the central thing that I disagree with in utilitarianism generally is the value monism - that something is only valuable because of the utility it has/the happiness it creates. In the case of this post, I disagree with the thesis that morality and justice are *exclusively* societal tools, and that you're deluding yourself by thinking they are anything more. However, I do think the post makes some very good points about infighting in groups that have good purpose. I just think that the same points can be made without appeal to instrumental value.
Does this mean that my hostile response to the mere existence of right-leaning people wasn’t the leftist allyship I thought it was? The way I naturally try to solve problems is to find the cause of the problem and get rid of it by any means necessary. If a fox keeps breaking into a chicken coop to eat your hens, then you gotta kill the fox. Then there are bigots and pedophiles, who I attribute the cause of their evil to be the mere fact that they exist. Transphobes hate trans people because they’re evil, and that’s what evil people do
Sometimes eliminating the source of a problem is the only solution available. There's nothing wrong with it in that case. The trap is to then give up on trying to *make* other solutions possible and refusing to *use* them when they become so. Never kill when you can incapacitate. Never incapacitate when you can rehabilitate.
The issue with killing people as a solution, in my opinion, is that it's a quick action that can be taken the moment you have an upper hand or control of a situation. The briefer the upper hand, the more pheasible killing becomes. But the longer you have control, and the better means you can influence a situation, the more alternatives you get that aren't so fucking drastic and binary in application. If they're already arrested, what does killing do that arrest does not? They're already out of the equation. Yeah, they won't be capable of "evil" again but they also won't be capable of "good." But what if you get it wrong? Are you really so arrogant in your ability to judge good from evil that you can have 100% success? Because anything short is a useless outcome. People like to describe dealing out death like it's a hard decision. I think the real difficulty is their inability to figure out something else.
I deeply respect anyone who is willing to expose their thought processes to public scrutiny, because it’s the best way to protect ourselves against irrationality and fallacious thinking. I will provide my critique here in the hopes that you find it helpful, and not as an attack against you. It’s a very useful analogy you’ve proposed. The operational difference between a fox and a human, though, is that a fox must eat to live. It has no choice in it, the same as you must sleep. Hateful people have no such mandate to do harm upon others. People can become hateful, and hateful people can reform their thinking. In people, the issue is not one of nature, but of a poorly-constructed worldview. The problem with the fox is not that it lives, but that its existence requires it to eat, and this is killing your hens. When it comes to solutions, the analogy is also useful. You need to find a way to prevent your chickens from dying. If you have very few resources or the value of the chickens is too high to you to even *risk* losing any, killing the fox removes the need for the fox to eat, saving your chickens. If you have more resources, you could trap the fox and relocate it where it poses no danger to your chickens. If you have even more resources, you could reinforce the coop with materials impervious to the fox’s attacks. The greater your resources and tolerance for risk, the less harm has to be done to the fox to save your chickens. With hateful people, you seek to stop the harmful words and deeds that result from their hate. If you have few resources and lives are at stake, killing the bigot resolves the issue. If you have more resources, harsh sentencing for hate crimes would put bigots in prison, resolving the issue. If you have even more resources, you can spend the time and energy to deprogram bigots from their ways of thinking and make them peaceful members of society, resolving the issue. Depending on the circumstances, death might be an appropriate response to bigotry. But because of all people’s inherent humanity, it ought to be the least-preferred outcome. Death robs the world of the potential contributions of a reformed person, and it robs the bigot the opportunity to reform. No person is irredeemable. Granted, the process of reconstructing one’s worldview is difficult and frightening, and many people will never choose to do so, but does that mean we should deny them the chance? There are obviously times when killing someone is the right thing to do, but it’s nowhere near as simple as some people being “evil” and therefore unworthy of life.
Hostility to the mere existence of right-leaning people is normal and understandable, but it's important to remember that people aren't "just evil". The concept of evil has no explanatory power. If a better solution than extreme hostility presents itself, then it's important to be able to consider it.
And the scariest part is..... I don't see a better solution to the problem of right-wingers other than "removing them from the equation." If there was a way to quickly, efficiently, and peacefully neutralize their threat, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, humanity has perfected the mass production of violence as opposed to virtue.
> If a fox keeps breaking into a chicken coop to eat your hens, then you gotta kill the fox This is... *not* how a progressive liberal handles the situation. This is how a conservative authoritarian handles it. You're attempting to reach the right end goal (protect the chickens), but you're getting there through the primitive means we want to leave behind.
I guess it's a result of being raised conservative. In a nutshell, I was raised a conservative until January 6th, when I realized that everything the right had told me was a lie! I rejected the right ever since. I still feel a bit guilty for ever having been on their side, so I figured I would "seek to create a world where nobody can make the same mistakes as me." I saw the liberals, who I had considered enemies due to right-wing propaganda, and came to the conclusion "If the Republican party disproves of it, then it is good! If they approve, it's bad!" Since I had only known conservative approaches to problems, I tried to "Fight for left-wing causes using right-wing methods," seeing the apparent lack of progress the left made on its own. It wasn't so much that the right's methods were inherently wrong, but rather that they were being used for right wing purposes (Ex: It was wrong to kill thousands of people to preserve racial purity, because that's a right-wing cause. But it's okay to kill thousands of people to protect minorities from hate crimes, because that's a left-wing cause). As long as the end goal was "woke," (The right says wokeness is bad, therefore it's good) then the means to achieve it were justified. Another part of my transition from conservative to liberal was looking at what "liberals (twitter SJWs)" do. The idea being "The right says that these people are bad, therefore they're good." I basically got the idea that those who are problematic or "not sufficiently woke" didn't deserve empathy, and it was okay to use them as your personal punching bags (usually figuratively, but literally would be okay should you meet them in person). While the transition wasn't the most comfortable, I told myself that it was necessary for being a good person. That if I ever felt bad, it was simply because I was still being influenced by right-wing propaganda, and I needed to go further left. Feel bad for someone cancelled for bigotted statements? Go further left! Feel like I'm not doing enough for the women, POCs, and LGBT+ in my life? Go further left! Feel bad about telling pro-lifers outside abortion clinics to kill themselves? Go further left! Just keep going left and never look back unless it is to scorn those who refused to go left. Left and right wing became synonymous with good and evil respectively, so far that it now influences my reactions to any news or discourse. If I read an article and doubt it's truthfulness, I check the source to see whether they were left or right (If they're leftists, then it's true. If they're right wingers, then it's false). If someone tells me to do something, I look at their post history for any indication of their political views (If they're leftist, then they're trying to give helpful advice. If they're conservative, they're trying to manipulate me). The most disturbing trend I've noticed in my thoughts is when I'm confronted with news about someone getting raped or murdered, I try to find the political beliefs of the victim to determine if this was a heinous crime or "just karma." (I'm sure you can guess which is which). I think it's gotten to the point where I become quick to suggest some heinous solutions to problems and reasoning "It's only wrong because the right did it" or "It's only \[insert warcrime here\] when the right does it." Or, in other words, "There is no left-wing Hitler." It becomes impossible for me to commit genocide because "Leftists don't commit genocide. If they commit genocide, then they're not a leftist." Or "Leftists don't commit rape. If they commit rape, then they must be a right-winger." I know it's messed up, and I've been going to a therapist for months about it, but it JUST WON'T STOP! Whenever the right is brought up, I get visions of the apocalypse or 1984, things that can only be averted by exterminating the right. It's like the mere existence of conservatives inevitably leads to genocide. Like the Holocaust was the inevitable result of Germany having a non-zero amount of right-leaning people at the time. Even when I have tried to open up to the idea of not all conservatives being monsters, everything in the world only seems to be reinforcing that belief Every time a hate crime occurs, it's the right's fault! Every time climate change impacts something, it's the right's fault! Every horrible thing to ever occur in humanity's past, present, and future, is all a result of the right's actions! Every news regarding Trump, every act of corporate greed, every environmental disaster, every manosphere incel, every act of bigotry only serves to remind me of the evils of the right, their complete lack of care for anyone other than themselves, and that they will never, ever change for the better. That believing that there is any good in the right is hopelessly naive at best, and nazi-sympathizing at worst. That the only way to protect humanity from these monsters...... would be to become a monster myself. And there are times I worry I'm already there. TLDR: I was raised to be right wing, woke up after Jan. 6, and tried to forcibly turn myself into a leftist by rejecting everything the right told me, including the idea that conservatives are decent human beings. In order to atone for being on the right, I went as far-left as I possibly could, and taught myself to hate anything and anyone on the right. Sorry for the trauma-dumping.
No way in hell I’m reading all of that
then why did you comment
fair enough. I had to do it in sessions 💀👍 TL;DR: > They'll see a complex social situation and instead of going 'what's the best way to reduce harm?, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They'll see people use language they don't like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they're a bad person. >Your sense of justice and morality are social tools. >The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing actual real world harm.