Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Posts
So you're a theocrat, communist, monarchist, fascist... what? Perhaps you aren't familiar with what Liberalism actually is.
Liberalism: "A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority."
I am definitely not a Liberal.
I don't fit in a specific category. I'm just me.
Oh, come on. I can make you walk slower by having you read a passage using words merely related to age. Black students will do worse on standardized tests if they are asked their ethnicity beforehand. Right now I going to make you more likely to yawn. Done. There are all kinds of transient effects of this kind that we can achieve. An experiment to show the kind of connection Feral claims exists would require that the tester identify people with preexisting deterministic or libertarian beliefs and then see how likely each group was to cheat.
If you believe in democracy, you pretty much are. I have, however, named for you four different theories of government which are genuinely illiberal. They are all distinguished by 1) a terrible track record, and 2) sharing your conviction that some ideas are just too dangerous to permit in the public at large. Indeed, if there is any idea that ought to be denied anyone, it is exactly that idea and it ought to be kept from people like you.
Democracy is tyranny by majority. It's just that tyranny by majority is generally less horrible than tyranny by minority, so I support it over the other options.
There are better hypothetical systems, but they rely on false premises and raw luck. The whole "power corrupts" issue and subjectivity, largely.
I never said this.
I said SOME PEOPLE.
I said exactly what I meant, no more no less. Thank you.
So you agree.
With what I ACTUALLY wrote, no less!
Labels aside, the entire structure of our society assumes that in a free marketplace of ideas the best will win often enough and the worst lose sufficiently to permit good governance. You can of course push to scrap the whole idea, institute government censorship, perhaps develop a system to register people unfit for certain ideas, and so forth. But you must surely recognize what would follow from this system and what it would cost. I suspect that as contrarian as you may be feeling right now you recognize and deeply value the free exchange of ideas or you would not be on this forum.
Oh, there is no practical system for just keeping selected people in the dark without just imprisoning them in advance, so any effort to put your belief in practice would evolve into public censorship. Even if it didn't, I think the practice of identifying... "subversive elements" is the traditional term I believe... and controlling their access to information would produce the same results if not worse.
You wrote "some ideas." I acknowledge one, and only rhetorically.
I don't really care what labels apply. I don't follow any one group or affiliation anymore, nor shall I again, even if I happen to agree with them on many or even all issues.
And yes, I do value ideas being available for society as a whole. But keeping in mind that some people are assholes, and may not know all possible information and ideas on how to be the most effective possible asshole, I am not going to offer them that knowledge, nor encourage them to seek it. I'm not going to burn the books in the library on the subject, I'm just not going to say "Hey, child-beater, if you used a bag of oranges you could get away with that easier."
Tl;dr, do not volunteer to help people make the world a more horrible place. No slippery censorship slope. If you put it in the library, and the assholes find it and use it, well shit, that's the kind of risk that just has to be taken, and there's nothing reasonable to be done about it. But you can still keep it to yourself on a one on one basis.
I'm not advocating some sort of societal action, just being careful about what you say around horrible people.
You seem to be talking about the whole "we don't publish the critical mass of U-235" deal.
I just like to try and avoid giving bad ideas to bad people.
I don't really know where you get angry from, though. I thought I was being calm and polite the whole way through.
Next ITT: raping babies is bad.
Mind you, it probably comes up for me more than most people. I am 1) exposed to a lot of horrible people since I am not able to get the hell out of this area yet and 2) I have a great deal of unsavory knowledge and can come up with a great deal more, and tend to do so reflexively, and tend to want to point people's mistakes out.
I assume most people are too busy being horrified to come up with a list of ways to make something more horrifying, and I dearly hope that this is true.
And yes, I am probably overusing the word horrible, but you get the picture.
A little late, but you might read this:
I'm just posting because I do understand where the OP is coming from. But I don't want to get all bitter-town on the good folks of D&D. It just wouldn't be a classy thing to do. D&D is good people.
As is your analogy.
"Islam" is not an idea. It is not a point. It is not a statement, or a thesis, or an assumption. There is nothing to be misconstrued or clarified.
Speaking of biological tendencies frequently carries the implication that the person following them is partly exonerated from moral culpability. Moral culpability in a deterministic framework is not a mental schema the majority of people can wrap their head around: see Loren Michael's current thread on determinism if you think I'm wrong about that.
So you're not denying that the effect? You're just saying, "Oh, there are other similar but unrelated effects, too, therefore the effect of which we speak isn't important?" Or are you saying that because it's supposedly transient (which, y'know, we don't know whether it is or not) that it's irrelevant? Both of those are significant leaps in logic.
I don't really understand why you're pursuing this line of thought. All I'm saying is this: if your point could be construed as offensive, then you should clarify it. Is that really such an onerous fucking burden?
noplzreadmypostskthxbye
Second there are alot of topics that dont get discussed, or are frankly ignored, because their is no point in discussing them. Whats that? Predisposition toward raping women? Well you know we can solve that, through natural selection. Frankly IMO we let a lot of people who should be dead walk free in our society. IMO their are certain crimes where if you commit them the only time you should ever see the light of day again is when you meet the firing squad.
I really dont view ideas as scary. Some ideas are just plain dumb, some would be very painful, considered crazy, not mesh with reality, or just plain weird. Its people who scare me. Its all well and good to imagine your tossing an enemy into a canvas bag, along with 4 cut lemons and 7 broken bottles, then tossing the bag into one of those industrial dryers, putting 10 bucks in change in the machine, and walking away.
Its quite another thing when you get people who don't just think up horribly stuff (which is normal) its the people who actually do it and have no idea that its wrong. Those people scare me. Im all for executing criminals for the protection of society, or really the protection of myself. However some people dont even need a reason, or see the need for a reason.
The point here is that most conversations dont need a devils advocate, and if they do their is alot more constructive ways of doing it than pretending to hold that opinion. For instance, you might say "While i am pro death penalty, and feel rapists/child molesters/child killers should be drug out in the street and shot i am still troubled at times by the slim possibility of killing an innocent man. What is everyones views on this, how do you rationalize it?"
Islamic Statement #1: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His prophet.
Islamic Statement #2: The Holy Qur'an is the word of God as dictated to Muhammad.
Islamic Statement #2,876: Surely God loves those who keep their duty.
Islamic Statement #34,349: Surely God will make those who believe and do good deeds enter the Gardens wherein flow rivers - they are adorned therein with bracelets of gold and with pearls.
Islamic Statement #34,350: And their garments theirein are of silk.
Islamic Idea #1: Monotheism
Islamic Idea #2: Prophets
Islamic Idea #3: Orthopraxy
I could go on for a library's worth of text, but I trust you get the point.
But let's assume you refuse to accept the analogy even so, which I'm betting you'll continue to do no matter how ridiculous it becomes. Allow me to offer some others. Requiring anyone who talks about biological impulses to assure us that rapists should be punished is like
-Requiring feminists to assure us they don't hate men
-Requiring anti-WTO protesters to assure us they aren't anarchists
-Requiring economic leftists to assure us they aren't Communists
-Requiring liberals to assure us they don't hate the US
-Requiring conservatives to assure us they don't support nuking China
And so on. Do you see how noxious, paranoid, and fundamentally hysterical that demand is? The intellectual insecurity it represents? It says, essentially, "Here is a position I despise, and I distrust and dislike those who hold it. So I'm going to associate it with this truly extreme and odious position, and require that all who hold the more reasonable version prove to me that they aren't raving lunatics each and every time they attempt to discuss the reasonable version."
It is reasonable to ask a determinist what becomes of morality. Demanding a determinist make clear that rapists should be punished is not reasonable and belies an agenda. Likewise demanding that everyone who speaks of biological tendencies simultaneously assure us that rapists should be punished is ridiculous.
I'm saying that the, given that all other effects of this kind are transient, the burden of proof is on you to show that committed determinists are less moral than libertarians over the long term. Given the gravity of the accusation I'd say the burden of proof ought to be fairly high, but the evidence of a study of this type is so weak it wouldn't meet even the most generous standard.
I trust you get mine.
Oh, I'd say the analogy has already become pretty damn ridiculous.
None of those are concrete statements of specific ideas, and so all those analogies fail for the same reason.
Hey, I know it's time consuming to set up and knock down such elaborate strawmen, but mabye you find it in your busy schedule to take five minutes to explain what is so goddamn noxious, paranoid, or hysterical about the following claim:
It is unreasonable to assume a Muslim supports terrorism, and it is equally unreasonable to suppose a determinists opposes punishing rapists. How many different ideas comprise determinism or Islam is entirely irrelevant.
It's not noxious, paranoid, or hysterical, of course. It is quite wrong. No author is responsible for the ways in which a sufficiently devoted moron might misconstrue his statements, and no reader has a right not to be offended by what he reads. The noxious, paranoid, and hysterical part is the misconstruction itself, the assumption that the most horrible and perverse possible version of the idea is the one intended until proven otherwise.
Also, learn what the fuck a strawman argument is.
Do you see that there is a fundamental difference between the following two statements?
1) "I am a determinist."
2) "I believe that there is innate neural circuitry that causes men to have a tendency towards rape."
The first does not imply anything about rape or responsibility. The second - when discussed in a thread about a rape case, which is the specific example we were talking about - does imply that.
See, I should not have let you take that statement in isolation, without taking into account the context of the post. As I said before, if statement 2 were made in a thread on evolutionary psychology or biological determinism, I would not assume that the statement had any moral implications at all. However, if it were made in response to a thread on a high-profile rape case, then I think it's perfectly understandable that somebody might misconstrue it to imply a statement on moral responsibility.
We're simply going to have to agree to disagree then. I'm arguing that a writer should be reasonably aware of how a common person might interpret his writing. You seem to be arguing that a writer has no responsibility for that at all. I simply don't see how a reasonable person can hold your view. Why bother communicating at all if don't give a shit how your communication is going to be received? You might as well just write it down in a private journal.
You've been constructing increasingly extreme simulacra of my position with each post. I understand that you're trying to establish a reductio ad absurdum argument, but there is a fine line between that a strawman, and I feel you stepped over it. Just because I think a statement carries certain implications does not mean I distrust and despise the person who uttered the statement.
That's fair, but the corrolary is "if a point is ambiguous, you should not construe it as offensive."
And that's fine, too.
Perhaps this analogy is closer to the situation you envision: someone writes in a 9/11 thread that the attacks were the result of foreign policy blunders by the US. I think it is entirely unreasonable to accuse this person of diminishing the responsibility of the terrorists, and that it is n, p & h to believe anyone condones an attack that killed thousands of innocents in the name of new Islamic empire.
I'm arguing that a)no reasonable person actually believes "innate neural circuitry makes men more likely to rape women under certain conditions" implies "men should not be punished for rape, b) that an author therefore has no responsibility to account for such people (the "devoted morons" of the quoted sentence), and c) readers have an obligation to be charitable. If you cannot be charitable, then at the least you can simply ask for clarification (so, do you think this exonerates rapists?) rather than assuming the worst for the sake of provoking confrontation.
In the case of a statement that legitimately does lead to some horrible belief, then it doesn't matter what protestations the writer makes. So long as the logic can be established from one to the other, the horrible belief will condemn the statement (or, if the statement is irrefutable, the horrible belief will unfortunately have to be accepted).
Well, quite honestly, then I'm in full agreement.
Why then, do we keep founding governments and write laws on the basic principle that everyone is equal? It's because no one can be the true judge of other people's judgment. Democracy is a hack to keep that judge at least somewhat like what the majority of sane people think it should be, but it does not make laws a magical manifestation of true morals.
As Feral said (maybe because of a similar train of thought), we should be very careful to make laws about restricting ideas and it's just good courtesy to think about the implications of voicing your ideas within a certain context to certain people.
The examples the OP's article put out bring the mindfuck to light that is making laws out of the assumption that everybody is equal, while we all know that people are not all the same. Some of them imply that our personal judgment is even less reliable than we already secretly believe, so that undermines the notion that democracy works well because most people are sane, rational people. Almost all of them would clarify the ways in which people are not equal, or discover ways to create more inequality.
We have a lot of laws that are simply wrong about their assumptions about the nature of man, however 'equal' we like to think we have made them. Abolishing the worst of them would be made easier through proper science, so it's important this kind of science is done. For example: are homosexual couples worse at bringing up adopted children than heterosexual couples? Might not seem a controversial question to us, but religious wingnuts would dismiss that question right off the bat because they fear their worldview on human nature could be altered.