:o :o :oSteersman wrote: ↑Sat Jan 01, 2022 9:42 pm
Like David Gorski over at Science-Based Medicine:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/pfizer ... vermectin/
Well, he is an important Enlightenment figure as well. The intellectual tradition that you see in Satre, Foucault and the former staff of the JREF of using liberal rationalisms' denial of traditional morality as an excuse to have orgies and/or diddle kids and spit in each others mouths goes back to de Sade.
Why?
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/08 ... 8670847830However, relating to my fairly substantial reservations about the rest of [Feser's] philosophy – at least that which I’ve so far had the opportunity to read – and to your comment, one might reasonably argue that your and Feser’s definition of “morally repugnant” is likewise dependent on whatever it is that you, he and (or) God happens not to like at the moment.
But, unfortunately and most problematically, MacDonald’s definition is his own and highly subject to the opinions and responses of other real human beings, while your ascription of such to God is the ultimate argument from an authority who, supposedly on the basis of the classical theist argument, is simply unavailable for subsequent querying and discussion on the finer points of what “He” might have actually meant.
Sure, but those people who are not religious but who are still peddling an ought - even if they try to sanctify it themselves by tieing it up in the pink ribbons of "tradition" and colourful wrapping paper - are clearly not omnipotent nor omniscient themselves so might reasonably be challenged on their claims.
A rather fascinating concept and principle, Feser's elaborations thereon being the book's more credible claims to fame and fortune. Parenthetically, I cribbed some 73 pages out of his book - along with my comments - into a Word Doc file I could send you if you were interested.fafnir wrote: ↑ <snippety doh dah; giving some consideration to those with arthritic scrolling fingers ... ;-) >
Interesting, but I don't think I'm an Aristotelian. I am interested in teleological explanations of things though.Steersman wrote: ↑From the comments in a blog post of his which was something of a response to a “discussion” with blogger and Anglican priest Eric MacDonald on his own Choice in Dying blog, although it’s no longer up and running:
Of maybe some relevance and interest is that MacDonald had become “disaffected” “with the faith he’d practised and preached all of his life” as a result of his wife’s assisted suicide in Switzerland because of her multiple sclerosis:Dr Feser, On MacDonald's blog you argue: "We Aristotelians hold that whether teleology exists and whether a divine “designer” exists are separate questions; the second doesn’t follow directly from the first. (Some of us think it follows indirectly, with further premises.)"
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/201 ... _life.html
Somewhat apropos of the latter, and of Feser's further comments on teleology in the context of biology, I often quote J.B.S. Haldane's:We can no more eliminate purpose and meaning from nature than we can square the circle. ....
In an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1948, the then-eminent (if now largely forgotten) philosopher W.T. Stace – an empiricist who was not himself in sympathy with the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy I’ve been defending [but one who had written extensively on mysticism] – said this about the moderns’ decision to abandon that philosophy [actually final causes, not the whole schmeer of A-T metaphysics]:
Hence it is simply impossible coherently to eliminate final causality or teleology from the explanation of human action. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study”. [pgs 246-247; good point; well phrased]The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called “final causes” … [belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events. …. The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world …. The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. ....
"At the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature …. Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even the subcellular level?" [Paul Davies; The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life]
Remove the teleological element in the description of DNA and genes and you strip them of everything that makes them explanatorily useful in biology. [pgs 255-256]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._HaldaneTeleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.
:-) As I said, I'm not terribly impressed with him - he'd blocked me on Twitter at one point - nor with many of his columnists, particularly those of late who are peddling transgender dogma, Harriet Hall having been consigned to the outer darkness for favourably reviewing Shrier's Irreversible Damage.AndrewV69 wrote: ↑:o :o :oSteersman wrote: ↑Sat Jan 01, 2022 9:42 pm
Like David Gorski over at Science-Based Medicine:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/pfizer ... vermectin/
Mr. Anyone who disagrees with me is a conspiracy theorist? !!!!!
:lol: :lol: :lol:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sex-ge ... mplicated/Sex is a spectrum on several axes
Science has not been able to categorically distinguish a male from a female. There’s no one simple test to determine whether an individual is a woman or a man. It’s not an either/or dichotomy, but a multidimensional spectrum on several axes, from the biological to the social to the psychological.
As I've tried to explain several times, "produces ova" or "produces sperm" - present tense indefinite - are the necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify as a female or a male. The definition for "teenager" - "a person between the ages of 13 and 19" - doesn't have to specify that if a person doesn't meet that condition then they don't qualify. It's part and parcel of foundational principles:fafnir wrote: ↑ <snip>Sure, but that quote doesn't say that their reproductive function has to be currently functioning, or indeed have ever functioned. When the clutch went in my car, it didn't stop being a car.Steersman wrote: ↑Note the standard dictionary definition and the emphasis on “reproductive functions”; no function – i.e., no ability to reproduce, no sex:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/sexEither of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
A famous biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, once argued that, wrote a book titled, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". And a corollary to that might be that nothing in evolution makes sense except in light of reproduction: no reproduction, no evolution. There's a reason why the biological definitions - and standard dictionaries - make the actual ability to reproduce an essential element:fafnir wrote: ↑Sure, but both Occam's razor and Einstein’s dictum are rules of thumb in particular domains towards particular goals. You've missed out at least two steps from your story... step 1 where for some reason we decide we are going to be classifying organisms based on reproduction. I assume somewhere there should also be a step dealing with agamogenesis and the like? Since I'm not arguing that biologists should have any definition of male and female than the one they have, I'm not sure what the purpose of this argument is.Steersman wrote: ↑Keeping in mind Occam’s razor and Einstein’s dictum about making everything as simple as possible, we first note that there are two types of organisms – those that can reproduce and those that can’t. And then further note that what differentiates the first group into two subtypes is the type of gamete produced which is essential to that process of reproduction. THEN we assign names – “males” and “females” – to those two subgroups.
So what? The question is whether being offended should carry much if any weight at all.fafnir wrote: ↑ I rather think Stephen Fry is arguing against speech codes and the like that penalise people for stating their sincerely held beliefs, not in favour of Orwellian programmes to rationalise language. Stephen Fry had a bunch of cancer treatment not so long ago. Are we sure he is still male?
"talking at cross purposes" may well be the crux of the problem. Or looking at the issue from very different perspectives with different assumptions and definitions in play; nature of the beast, at least 3 sides to every story:fafnir wrote: ↑
OK. So when I said "The ultimate arbiter of what ideas have merit is how they play out in the world." and you replied "What horse crap; another ipse dixit." you are or you aren't saying that the ultimate test of scientific models is whether they work in the world? I assume we are talking at cross purposes.
It was something of a very oblique jest relative to Hedy Lamarr and the movie Blazing Saddles.
You might just as well be, given your comments about "the moral vacuum left by religion". Your frequent appeal to tradition is little better than "the Bible tells me so". It is profoundly antithetical to the principles of rationalism, it is the counsel of ignorance, a repudiation and antithesis of Horace's sapere aude.
As I've tried to explain several times, "produces ova" or "produces sperm" - present tense indefinite - are the necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify as a female or a male. The definition for "teenager" - "a person between the ages of 13 and 19" - doesn't have to specify that if a person doesn't meet that condition then they don't qualify. It's part and parcel of foundational principles:fafnir wrote: ↑ <snip>Sure, but that quote doesn't say that their reproductive function has to be currently functioning, or indeed have ever functioned. When the clutch went in my car, it didn't stop being a car.Steersman wrote: ↑Note the standard dictionary definition and the emphasis on “reproductive functions”; no function – i.e., no ability to reproduce, no sex:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/sexEither of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
A famous biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, once argued that, wrote a book titled, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". And a corollary to that might be that nothing in evolution makes sense except in light of reproduction: no reproduction, no evolution. There's a reason why the biological definitions - and standard dictionaries - make the actual ability to reproduce an essential element:fafnir wrote: ↑Sure, but both Occam's razor and Einstein’s dictum are rules of thumb in particular domains towards particular goals. You've missed out at least two steps from your story... step 1 where for some reason we decide we are going to be classifying organisms based on reproduction. I assume somewhere there should also be a step dealing with agamogenesis and the like? Since I'm not arguing that biologists should have any definition of male and female than the one they have, I'm not sure what the purpose of this argument is.Steersman wrote: ↑Keeping in mind Occam’s razor and Einstein’s dictum about making everything as simple as possible, we first note that there are two types of organisms – those that can reproduce and those that can’t. And then further note that what differentiates the first group into two subtypes is the type of gamete produced which is essential to that process of reproduction. THEN we assign names – “males” and “females” – to those two subgroups.
So what? The question is whether being offended should carry much if any weight at all.fafnir wrote: ↑ I rather think Stephen Fry is arguing against speech codes and the like that penalise people for stating their sincerely held beliefs, not in favour of Orwellian programmes to rationalise language. Stephen Fry had a bunch of cancer treatment not so long ago. Are we sure he is still male?
"talking at cross purposes" may well be the crux of the problem. Or looking at the issue from very different perspectives with different assumptions and definitions in play; nature of the beast, at least 3 sides to every story:fafnir wrote: ↑
OK. So when I said "The ultimate arbiter of what ideas have merit is how they play out in the world." and you replied "What horse crap; another ipse dixit." you are or you aren't saying that the ultimate test of scientific models is whether they work in the world? I assume we are talking at cross purposes.
It was something of a very oblique jest relative to Hedy Lamarr and the movie Blazing Saddles.
You might just as well be, given your comments about "the moral vacuum left by religion". Your frequent appeal to tradition is little better than "the Bible tells me so". It is profoundly antithetical to the principles of rationalism, it is the counsel of ignorance, a repudiation and antithesis of Horace's sapere aude.
:-) Reminds me of my parents having gone off to Europe for a holiday and that on their return my dad - gawd rest his soul - had been amused to see that toilets in Germany had little platforms in the middle of the bowl raised above the water level so that one could give the result the due attention that it deserved. Never did feel a strong urge to Google that to see how accurate or common that was - TMI and all that.Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑Next time, before flushing, take some time to inspect, scrutinize, and play with your own poop. Then you'll have Kant, Hegel, et al., sussed just fine.
Now Kant was not all bad. His views on sexual morality and the death penalty, for example, are totally reactionary; that is to say they are correct.
Can confirm - spent years living in Krautland (well, "occupying" the place) and encountered the porcelain effronteries on countless occasions. Oh, the platform for catching the excreta is at the backwards edge of the bowl and extends out towards the middle. Also, and I suspect this may be an old fashioned thing, certain boxhead establishments/individuals keep a handy stash of...long cocktail sticks next to der krapper. Obviously, I need not explain their function.Steersman wrote: ↑Reminds me of my parents having gone off to Europe for a holiday and that on their return my dad - gawd rest his soul - had been amused to see that toilets in Germany had little platforms in the middle of the bowl raised above the water level so that one could give the result the due attention that it deserved. Never did feel a strong urge to Google that to see how accurate or common that was - TMI and all that.
Thanks - I think. At least one "mystery" I can go to my death-bed knowing the answer to ... ;-)Bhurzum wrote: ↑Can confirm - spent years living in Krautland (well, "occupying" the place) and encountered the porcelain effronteries on countless occasions. Oh, the platform for catching the excreta is at the backwards edge of the bowl and extends out towards the middle. Also, and I suspect this may be an old fashioned thing, certain boxhead establishments/individuals keep a handy stash of...long cocktail sticks next to der krapper. Obviously, I need not explain their function.Steersman wrote: ↑Reminds me of my parents having gone off to Europe for a holiday and that on their return my dad - gawd rest his soul - had been amused to see that toilets in Germany had little platforms in the middle of the bowl raised above the water level so that one could give the result the due attention that it deserved. Never did feel a strong urge to Google that to see how accurate or common that was - TMI and all that.
:-)Bhurzum wrote: ↑ Honestly, it's enough to warrant the attention of these chaps.
Again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQcbUXs5Ves
:-)
German ideology - reflective, philosophical
French - revolutionary, dismissive
Anglo-American - intermediate, passive
Zizek is arguing that ideology is alive and well in our respective cultures, which manifests itself even in mundane things such as the way a culture designs its toilets.
(martini1179
11 years ago)
I am glad you aren't going to be responsible for any city planning decisions near me, since really my only objection to you knocking down a thousand year old cathedral to put up a strip mall would be that it offends me.Steersman wrote: ↑So what? The question is whether being offended should carry much if any weight at all.fafnir wrote: ↑ I rather think Stephen Fry is arguing against speech codes and the like that penalise people for stating their sincerely held beliefs, not in favour of Orwellian programmes to rationalise language. Stephen Fry had a bunch of cancer treatment not so long ago. Are we sure he is still male?
Playing out in the real world can be applied to tradition, but it really applies to anything. Does it work, in the real world?Steersman wrote: ↑<snip>fafnir wrote: ↑ OK. So when I said "The ultimate arbiter of what ideas have merit is how they play out in the world." and you replied "What horse crap; another ipse dixit." you are or you aren't saying that the ultimate test of scientific models is whether they work in the world? I assume we are talking at cross purposes.
But I rather expect that what you had in mind for "how they play out in the world" had something to do with current tradition.
Everything comes at a human cost. Have Enlightenment ideas come at no human cost? The real world is a complicated beast with feedback loops and unanticipated perverse incentives. One could have an idea of a better world based on liberty, equality, brotherhood and rationalism and find that it rapidly descends into blood and madness. Theory about how to order the society is only as good as how it works in the world.
What is your real world measure for merit in a system? It feels like you would call the rat utopia a great way to manage rats because it gave them everything they desired and freed them from want and danger. Much better than the meritless systems that had gone before.
Galileo was an ass who went out of his way to publicly mock the Pope. Also, you are back to the hard sciences again. I'm not and never have been arguing about them.
No. It is simply the perspective that it is very hard to construct a society, like artificially constructing an ecosystem only much harder. Once you have released rats, or rabbits in your ecosystem, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, it is very hard to unrelease them again. Therefore proceed slowly and with caution and wherever possible build up to a big change in slow reversible steps. This is not because I am anti-knowledge, but because I'm aware of our ignorance and our track record.Steersman wrote: ↑You might just as well be, given your comments about "the moral vacuum left by religion". Your frequent appeal to tradition is little better than "the Bible tells me so". It is profoundly antithetical to the principles of rationalism, it is the counsel of ignorance, a repudiation and antithesis of Horace's sapere aude.
It was something of a rhetorical question to get you to admit – as you just did – that you really don’t have any reason at all why you would deny an ex-prostitute that opportunity. Nothing more than “feelinz”, than “tradition”, because the Bible tells you so, because you and the Church really don’t like – actually hate – prostitutes, maybe because it cuts into their profits, into their "brand".fafnir wrote: ↑Mon Jan 03, 2022 5:53 amThis is the problem with arguing with you Steersman. I spend post after post explaining this to you. Instead of taking that on board you make up a reason for me to hold this position. ….
Still society needs to have social norms, and necessarily those social norms will fail your demand for rational justification.
I’m hardly calling for a defunding of the police. You might be pleasantly surprised to know that neither is Pinker:
Think I’ve tried explaining it several times – not sure you’re really listening. Though I’ll concede we’ve been covering a lot of ground.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/1 ... table.htmlNo one has any idea why mathematics works so well to describe nature, but it is arguably an empirical fact that it works. …. The maybe most important lesson physicists have learned over the past centuries is that if a theory has internal inconsistencies, it is wrong. By internal inconsistencies, I mean that the theory’s axioms lead to statements that contradict each other.
Bravo. Now maybe you could consider trying out a few new ideas? Like letting ex-prostitutes apply for teaching jobs? Like endorsing the standard definitions for the sexes – the ones published in most reputable dictionaries – in fields other than just biology? Like considering that “tradition” is often a weak reed to be putting much faith in?
Don’t think you’ve been keeping up with current events. Large parts of biology have been riven and corrupted by the “debate” over whether sex is a spectrum or a binary which has spilled out all over the place and into various popular journals and magazines. Which leads to some very sticky wickets indeed for dysphoric and autistic children who think – or who have been tricked into thinking – that mangling their bodies will change their sex.
What? Still not sure you really understand the process of categorization. Maybe a convoluted topic and process but, as I’ve said many times, most categories – “teenager”, “bachelor”, “male”, “female”, etc – are based on necessary and sufficient conditions for membership. Not sure that “arbitrary” is particularly relevant or germane; think you’re barking up the wrong tree there.fafnir wrote: ↑Mon Jan 03, 2022 5:53 amThat there is a property that one can form a category around doesn't make it non-arbitrary to choose this property to form this category. This is a ridiculous digression from the question the question of societies which I think is the main topic.Steersman wrote: ↑ Not at all sure you really get the concept of anisogamy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy
No doubt many proponents of science and reason more generally seem to think they have a wider applicability and broader capabilities than is entirely justified – hence my references to Medawar’s The Art of the Soluble.The term scientism is often used critically, implying an unwarranted application of science in situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards.
More generally, scientism is often interpreted as science applied "in excess”.
Daniel Dennett responded to religious criticism of his 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by saying that accusations of scientism "[are] an all-purpose, wild-card smear ... When someone puts forward a scientific theory that [religious critics] really don't like, they just try to discredit it as 'scientism'. But when it comes to facts, and explanations of facts, science is the only game in town".
Sure. But eggs, omelettes. Your “tradition” just looks like an excuse to avoid facing and dealing with egregious inequalities:fafnir wrote: ↑
Everything comes at a human cost. Have Enlightenment ideas come at no human cost? The real world is a complicated beast with feedback loops and unanticipated perverse incentives. One could have an idea of a better world based on liberty, equality, brotherhood and rationalism and find that it rapidly descends into blood and madness. Theory about how to order the society is only as good as how it works in the world.
The forward thinking minds of Europe had boundless optimism about the new dawn of the French revolution. That turned out to not quite go how they thought. The same class of people thought Marxism would lead to the end of history. Again, that did go as it was expected to. It's much easier to come up with a theory for how to make the world better that looks convincing than it is to come up with a theory that actually makes the world better. Perhaps it would have been very cruel and heartless to support the ancien regime over the revolution, or the Tzar over the Bolsheviks, but I wonder if that wouldn't have been the side of less suffering for all that?
Hard sciences don't generally approach things in the way you want social theories approached. No matter how good the theory looks, hard sciences generally try to test the theory in the world before pulping the old textbooks and taking an axe to the old equipment. That's all I'm arguing. Test the theories in the world and think about how they actually perform before throwing out the old theories.
Revolutions tend to be akin to pyrrhic victories. But for those on the bottom of the heap that tends to be somewhat academic or of second-order importance:The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
The same reason, as an untrained surgeon it might be a bad idea to remove organs that I couldn't see a purpose of. You have it as an article of faith that the utopia of the French revolution is possible, that the nature of man in a state of nature is good and that if you cut away social restraint a better world will emerge. I lack this faith.Steersman wrote: ↑ It was something of a rhetorical question to get you to admit – as you just did – that you really don’t have any reason at all why you would deny an ex-prostitute that opportunity. Nothing more than “feelinz”, than “tradition”, because the Bible tells you so, because you and the Church really don’t like – actually hate – prostitutes, maybe because it cuts into their profits, into their "brand".
They are certainly not concerned about social justice as you define it. You have to use their definitions, their theory and their idea of "the good" to determine whether their positions are rational, not yours.Steersman wrote: ↑As the proponents of that “social sciences” definition for racism are clearly less concerned about “social justice” than in indulging their manifest hate for whites – at least as far as their egregious bias in favour of “cracker” over “nigger” is concerned: epithets are bad unless they’re directed at people they hate.
Perhaps that is because you are less consistent and have less thoroughly worked out theories to base your opinions on than the activists? Pinker's theory convinced him of "Bakunin's anarchism". Application in the real world of the sort I keep recommending smacked down his theory. Still, both he and you are super confident that the current theory is going to work out great.Steersman wrote: ↑ I’m hardly calling for a defunding of the police. You might be pleasantly surprised to know that neither is Pinker:
https://iainuki.livejournal.com/77686.html
A process like your rationalist project that demands institutions and traditions meet standards that cannot be met and replaces them with ideas that make good theoretical sense, like "Bakunin's anarchism" is a call to pull down everything disguised by making a broadly applicable argument only about the next few inches of the hill. Obviously it will only be applied in practice to things whose destruction allows people to centralise power, but it amounts to randomly cutting away the structure of society. You have faith that what ever the new version of "Bakunin's anarchism" will be great, I don't share your faith.Steersman wrote: ↑You seem so afraid of slippery slopes that you think any challenge to any of your vaunted traditions is tantamount to opening the gates to the “Mongol hordes”, to traversing the upper regions of Mt. Everest with no more than running shoes on our feet and a windbreaker on our backs.
Nothing in the chaotic muddle that is a culture and it's norms and institutions is perfect. Everything isn't as good as it might be. The idea of comparing social norms and institutions to theoretical perfection is naive in the extreme and amounts to a call to pull it all down. "Bakunin's anarchism" is probably a far more consistent theory of the law and order than the relatively theory free, organically grown up actual police services is able to put into practice. One exists in the world of theory where consistency is possible and everybody behaves according to theory, the other is in the real world and has to negotiate and make allowances for the contradictions, confusions, complexity and trade offs of life.Steersman wrote: ↑Think I’ve tried explaining it several times – not sure you’re really listening. Though I’ll concede we’ve been covering a lot of ground.
But the short answer is that if a theory has contradictions then it’s generally wrong or not as applicable or useful as it might otherwise be.
Which is why whether it works in the real world is really what it comes down to. You can't know that your theory is consistent, and even if it was you can't know that is talking about this world. Logical consistency is far less important than how the theory actually plays out in the real world. Is "Bakunin's anarchism" wrong because it is inconsistent, or is it wrong because it doesn't work?
I'm well aware of this. The problem is that if you want a theory to answer general social questions like "should prostitution be normalised", either it is simple and effectively a question begging assertion or it's too complicated to really say whether it is consistent or not. You are just replacing a set of cultural assumptions that have been tried out in the world over a long period and for which we have a good idea of the upsides and downsides, with a set that leads people to think "Bakunin's anarchism" is plausible until it is repeatedly shown to be a failure. Your next "Bakunin's anarchism" is normalising prostitution, we will doubtless see how that plays out.Steersman wrote: ↑More or less exactly what “social sciences” are engaged in doing far too often:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
Given the choice between an inconsistent theory that works tolerably well and something rigorously thought out like "Bakunin's anarchism" that fails spectacularly in the real world, I choose inconsistency. Even mathematics has to show that the assumptions being applied to any given problem are actually valid and lead to true conclusions. You are complaining that traditional social norms are not consistent but whose results most people are prepared to live with, and seeking to replace them with new norms that are either assertions, or can't be shown to be consistent, and might not actually work even if they are consistent because "nice idea, wrong species".Steersman wrote: ↑See also physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/1 ... table.htmlNo one has any idea why mathematics works so well to describe nature, but it is arguably an empirical fact that it works. …. The maybe most important lesson physicists have learned over the past centuries is that if a theory has internal inconsistencies, it is wrong. By internal inconsistencies, I mean that the theory’s axioms lead to statements that contradict each other.
Sounds like another good idea like "Bakunin's anarchism". How do you propose to show it's actually a good idea in application?Steersman wrote: ↑Bravo. Now maybe you could consider trying out a few new ideas? Like letting ex-prostitutes apply for teaching jobs?
Good luck with your one man mission.
Traditions have survived the test of not being absolutely retarded ideas like "Bakunin's anarchism". We at least know that looking down on prostitutes isn't that stupid. That's the low hurdle I'm asking your ideas to cross. You keep asking me to take away the hurdle.
I'm taking a break from talking about your crusade.Steersman wrote: ↑Don’t think you’ve been keeping up with current events. Large parts of biology have been riven and corrupted by the “debate” over whether sex is a spectrum or a binary which has spilled out all over the place and into various popular journals and magazines. Which leads to some very sticky wickets indeed for dysphoric and autistic children who think – or who have been tricked into thinking – that mangling their bodies will change their sex.
No. There are a bunch of enlightenment assumptions that you are using to arrive at the conclusion that normalising prostitutes being teachers is a good thing. You aren't testing that in the real world. You aren't deriving that from anything well established. You just have the same kind of enlightenment assumptions that led Pinker to think "Bakunin's anarchism" was a good idea and you claim running the world on those assumptions is "rational".Steersman wrote: ↑<snip definition of female stuff>fafnir wrote: ↑Mon Jan 03, 2022 5:53 amThat there is a property that one can form a category around doesn't make it non-arbitrary to choose this property to form this category. This is a ridiculous digression from the question the question of societies which I think is the main topic.Steersman wrote: ↑ Not at all sure you really get the concept of anisogamy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy
But the “main topic” seems to be the question or whether the principles of rationalism have applicability far outside of just the “hard sciences”. You seem rather desperate to compartmentalize them there as a way to evade the “demand for rational justification”, as a way of putting claims to infallibility beyond reproach under the cloak of tradition.
It seems like if the thing in question really is Science, rather than Scientism, it should be able to prove itself empirically. Was "Bakunin's anarchism" an example of Pinker going too far with some rationalist cloud castle? - reality had the answer. Is your keenness to normalise prostitutes being teachers an example of you being overconfident in and overapplying a line of reasoning? - the real world will surely tell us if we ask it. Given that your process for coming to your view on prostitutes seems similar to Pinker's process for favouring "Bakunin's anarchism" I'm puzzled by your continued confidence.Steersman wrote: ↑Daniel Dennett responded to religious criticism of his 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by saying that accusations of scientism "[are] an all-purpose, wild-card smear ... When someone puts forward a scientific theory that [religious critics] really don't like, they just try to discredit it as 'scientism'. But when it comes to facts, and explanations of facts, science is the only game in town".
You overapply and are overconfident in reason and logic. The low, low bar I have is.... how does it actually perform in the real world. "Bakunin's anarchism" failed that test. Personally I doubt anybody with the power to implement the kind of social changes you want is going to willingly do it in a way to make the results easy to determine, or role back if they turn out to be bad. These things aren't examples of science, or rationality..... nobody is actually reasoning this stuff out, or testing it. It's just the liberal dogma, that man freed from the constraints of social norms will be free and good, being implemented. Let's hope it turns out to be true. The previous dogma held the West together for 1500 years. Will the cult of the individual do as well?Steersman wrote: ↑No doubt many proponents of science and reason more generally seem to think they have a wider applicability and broader capabilities than is entirely justified – hence my references to Medawar’s The Art of the Soluble.
But it also seems clear that many “traditionalists”, many “social scientists” are engaged in peddling egregious woo, rank insanity, and outright “magical thinking” because they haven’t got a clue about the most basic elements of reason and logic.
Looks to a progressive liberal, sure. You have the common progressive liberal assumption that you simply need to implement the world as it should be for a new Jerusalem to appear. Don't like inequality, make things be equal. You then intepret the real world as if it was implemented like this. Your world view is the world view of an intelligent design advocate, you just apply it to society rather than nature. Society is evolved. Every civilization that has ever been hasn't been unequal because somebody decided that inequality was a goal in the same axiomatic way you do for equality. Inequality is in the nature of the world. You are in both a battle with reality and a battle with liberty and a battle with human happiness if you make Earthly equality any kind of absolute good. You are making the same utopian dreamer mistake as Pinker with "Bakunin's anarchism".Steersman wrote: ↑Sure. But eggs, omelettes. Your “tradition” just looks like an excuse to avoid facing and dealing with egregious inequalities:fafnir wrote: ↑
Everything comes at a human cost. Have Enlightenment ideas come at no human cost? The real world is a complicated beast with feedback loops and unanticipated perverse incentives. One could have an idea of a better world based on liberty, equality, brotherhood and rationalism and find that it rapidly descends into blood and madness. Theory about how to order the society is only as good as how it works in the world.
The forward thinking minds of Europe had boundless optimism about the new dawn of the French revolution. That turned out to not quite go how they thought. The same class of people thought Marxism would lead to the end of history. Again, that did go as it was expected to. It's much easier to come up with a theory for how to make the world better that looks convincing than it is to come up with a theory that actually makes the world better. Perhaps it would have been very cruel and heartless to support the ancien regime over the revolution, or the Tzar over the Bolsheviks, but I wonder if that wouldn't have been the side of less suffering for all that?
Hard sciences don't generally approach things in the way you want social theories approached. No matter how good the theory looks, hard sciences generally try to test the theory in the world before pulping the old textbooks and taking an axe to the old equipment. That's all I'm arguing. Test the theories in the world and think about how they actually perform before throwing out the old theories.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Wow, I am entirely incapable of stopping the march towards entropy, and I doubt anybody else is capable of stopping it in a way any of us are going to enjoy. It's baked into the culture now. We are busily implementing the culture of Weimar, or the pre-Stalin USSR. I'm sure this time the plan will go great and not lead to a terrible disaster.
Witnesses have claimed that the turnstile was wearing a "MAGA" hat and was heard saying "This is Trump country, n****r!"Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑ Man breaks neck and dies trying to jump turnstile in NYC subway:
https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/nyc-man-j ... NYPTwitter
Prediction: calls for 'racist' turnstiles to be removed in all NYC subway stations.
Afterall, who is most impacted by measures to stop people not paying for things? What are such measures but Jim Crow 2.0?Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑ Man breaks neck and dies trying to jump turnstile in NYC subway:
https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/nyc-man-j ... NYPTwitter
Prediction: calls for 'racist' turnstiles to be removed in all NYC subway stations.
:-) No doubt soon to be a big-budget musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber Himself ....John D wrote: ↑ TITLE: The Steersman loses his car (Subtile: Off to the hoosegow)
<snip>
Judge: "There are no layers. A lawyer is a person that practices law. There is no one here practicing the law. There were some lawyers previously, but since they are not currently practicing the law... well they are no longer lawyers. We must be precise in our language!"
Steers (mumbling to himself): "It's a fair court."
:-) Something of a "venerable" history to blaming inanimate objects, the classic case being "the whipping of the Hellespont":Bhurzum wrote: ↑Witnesses have claimed that the turnstile was wearing a "MAGA" hat and was heard saying "This is Trump country, n****r!"Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑ Man breaks neck and dies trying to jump turnstile in NYC subway:
https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/nyc-man-j ... NYPTwitter
Prediction: calls for 'racist' turnstiles to be removed in all NYC subway stations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_IAccording to the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes's first attempt to bridge the Hellespont ended in failure when a storm destroyed the flax and papyrus cables of the bridges. In retaliation, Xerxes ordered the Hellespont (the strait itself) whipped three hundred times, and had fetters thrown into the water.
https://english.stackexchange.com/quest ... te-objectsIn a recent court case in Darlington, a man was convicted of destroying a door with a machete. He was sentenced to some trifling inconvenience, but the magistrates were careful to order the destruction of the machete; clearly they have identified the real culprit, and have ensured no further offences will be possible.
The same thought processes were embedded in English law up to 1846 in the notion of the deodand, some object that caused a death and was therefore forfeit to the Crown.
What horse crap. You seem to "think" that me calling for accurate definitions and not stereotyping people is tantamount to, the precursor to my inevitable master plan of closing of all the churches - replacing them all with strip-malls, to the repudiation of every tradition, to the strangling of every priest with the entrails of every noble man - or noble woman ("adult human female [produces ova]" as a bonus track for those paying attention ...) as the case may be. Some evidence to think that your family tree is littered with those of both types.fafnir wrote: ↑ <snip>
Like I said before. Your view isn't really a rational view at all. You just have a bunch of liberal assumptions about how the world should work and want to implement them.
Wow, I am entirely incapable of stopping the march towards entropy, and I doubt anybody else is capable of stopping it in a way any of us are going to enjoy. It's baked into the culture now. We are busily implementing the culture of Weimar, or the pre-Stalin USSR. I'm sure this time the plan will go great and not lead to a terrible disaster.
Apparently coined by Benjamin Franklin, circa 1736:An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I'm in central France, it's lovely and there's lots of cheese.
Hazel is a great burner, hot and fast. We coppice it every 7-8 years, gives a perfect-sized log for our big 100kw wood gasification boiler. Use it to help along the 300 yr old oak from 6 trees the bastard local council made us take down because they were within 2 metres of our road boundary. Love that French bureaucracy.Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑ Does Hazel burn nice?
My workhorse is an MS 260. Thinking of getting a 462 for larger stuff, including all the Digger Pines dying of bark beetles. Also a Stihl pole saw and wicked brush cutter that'll take down 3" saplings. GF has a Milwaukee cordless saw, which I borrow often. Like you say, good for processing and limbing, very convenient, but strains at bucking. I also now have a 25-ton splitter, don't know how I lived without one before.
California just banned all two-stroke engines, i.e., everything mentioned above. Molon Labe.
:-) :romance-adore: ;)HunnyBunny wrote: ↑ <snip>
Anyway, all the best to anyone who still reads here, if the Pit does indeed get filled in. Except Steers.
But agree with you there.HunnyBunny wrote: ↑ Thanks for all your efforts FT.
The issue is how broadly your arguments can be applied. The fact that you are inconsistent in what you choose to apply your arguments to doesn't strike me as a defence, particularly given your stance on rationalism and consistency. As with so much else, you just don't try to rebut these kinds of criticisms of your arguments, you just go back to restating your assertions.Steersman wrote: ↑What horse crap. You seem to "think" that me calling for accurate definitions and not stereotyping people is tantamount to, the precursor to my inevitable master plan of closing of all the churches - replacing them all with strip-malls, to the repudiation of every tradition, to the strangling of every priest with the entrails of every noble man - or noble woman ("adult human female [produces ova]" as a bonus track for those paying attention ...) as the case may be. Some evidence to think that your family tree is littered with those of both types.fafnir wrote: ↑ <snip>
Like I said before. Your view isn't really a rational view at all. You just have a bunch of liberal assumptions about how the world should work and want to implement them.
Wow, I am entirely incapable of stopping the march towards entropy, and I doubt anybody else is capable of stopping it in a way any of us are going to enjoy. It's baked into the culture now. We are busily implementing the culture of Weimar, or the pre-Stalin USSR. I'm sure this time the plan will go great and not lead to a terrible disaster.
I did. You ignored my response.
I would say it is almost certainly too late for any remotely appetising cure, and it's not like there is any prospect of a cure being given any time soon. Decade after decade has been cultural progress in the Progressive Liberal Enlightenment direction. The world has been remade in the image of the Enlightenment ideals you support - liberty, equality etc. At best "conservatives" in office serve to release the pressure built up by these changes.
No. As I've explained to you. The good thing about the American revolution was that, unlike the French and Russian ones, it wasn't done exclusively by people with your Progressive Liberal confidence to tear everything down and reimplement the whole thing based on axioms, reason and theory. It seems to me that the American revolution was far more pragmatic than that. Vivendi liberals if you will. That system falls apart with the Civil War and is gone by FDR. Civil Rights legislation is built on its ashes. The Founding Fathers applied quite a bit of prevention, but that clearly wasn't enough.
You have this mile-wide brush of a bogeyman of the "Progressive Liberal" and his "cult of the the individual" that you try to tar everyone with without providing much in the way of evidence to go along with your bill of particulars. Where - exactly - am I promoting or endorsing any specific "progressive liberal" policies?fafnir wrote: ↑The issue is how broadly your arguments can be applied. The fact that you are inconsistent in what you choose to apply your arguments to doesn't strike me as a defence, particularly given your stance on rationalism and consistency. As with so much else, you just don't try to rebut these kinds of criticisms of your arguments, you just go back to restating your assertions.Steersman wrote: ↑
What horse crap. You seem to "think" that me calling for accurate definitions and not stereotyping people is tantamount to, the precursor to my inevitable master plan of closing of all the churches - replacing them all with strip-malls, to the repudiation of every tradition, to the strangling of every priest with the entrails of every noble man - or noble woman ("adult human female [produces ova]" as a bonus track for those paying attention ...) as the case may be. Some evidence to think that your family tree is littered with those of both types.
Tell me, where does your Progressive Liberalism draw the line? .....
... done exclusively by people with your Progressive Liberal confidence to tear everything down and reimplement the whole thing based on axioms, reason and theory. ....
Don't think you really understood my point. It's not just your rather pigheaded and quite clueless defense of tradition that's the problem. It's that you refuse to consider that that defense blinds you to the possibility that maybe some proactive policies, a few ounces of prevention might well forestall the revolution or similar eventualities you're clearly afraid of happening.fafnir wrote: ↑I did. You ignored my response.
Your Kennedy quote was "Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolution inevitable". You were attacking my defence of tradition. I told you that in my opinion tradition had lost and effectively the continued victory of your position would continue until it caused so much damage that we have a Weimar, or pre-Stalin USSR situation and something comes along to attempt to restore order. Unless we suppose that some liberal version of the Communist utopian end of history populated by new liberal communist men is where we are heading, then the contradictions in this must eventually run the train off the rails. I considered Kennedy, and I responded.
He's being mocked for his adolescent taste. He should double-down & show them his Punisher comics.mordacious1 wrote: ↑ This is just weird:
https://www.newsmax.com/us/progressives ... d/1051002/
I’m just glad to hear that there are football players that own books.
I don't tar everyone. Just Progressive Liberals.Steersman wrote: ↑You have this mile-wide brush of a bogeyman of the "Progressive Liberal" and his "cult of the the individual" that you try to tar everyonefafnir wrote: ↑The issue is how broadly your arguments can be applied. The fact that you are inconsistent in what you choose to apply your arguments to doesn't strike me as a defence, particularly given your stance on rationalism and consistency. As with so much else, you just don't try to rebut these kinds of criticisms of your arguments, you just go back to restating your assertions.Steersman wrote: ↑
What horse crap. You seem to "think" that me calling for accurate definitions and not stereotyping people is tantamount to, the precursor to my inevitable master plan of closing of all the churches - replacing them all with strip-malls, to the repudiation of every tradition, to the strangling of every priest with the entrails of every noble man - or noble woman ("adult human female [produces ova]" as a bonus track for those paying attention ...) as the case may be. Some evidence to think that your family tree is littered with those of both types.
Tell me, where does your Progressive Liberalism draw the line? .....
... done exclusively by people with your Progressive Liberal confidence to tear everything down and reimplement the whole thing based on axioms, reason and theory. ....
Well, wanting to normalise well known prostitutes being teachers seems kind of progressive to me, but it's not really about policies. It's about your Liberal beliefs and your faith in Progress. At the most basic and trite level that's what makes you a Progressive Liberal. If you prefer the Sowell way of putting it, you are a Liberal with the Unconstrained Vision.
It's not about the policies you happen to propose, it's about your reasoning. You reason from Progressive Liberal assumptions.Steersman wrote: ↑About all I'm advocating is rational definitions - following Voltaire's lead about defining our terms.
I don't see what they have to do with it. Whether you are a Progressive Liberal or not is about how you reason about those ideas not the ideas themselves, they seem like pretty standard Enlightenment Liberal axioms to me. For myself, not being a Liberal, I'm really not for or against any of those things in an absolute and unqualified sense. It would depend on how they are implemented, what the environment they are being implemented into etc...
Exactly, you are a Progressive Liberal. I've asked you, I don't know how many times, about whether you think there may be any negative impacts on society from normalising well known prostitutes being teachers, you've brushed this aside every time. Your lack of concern about unintended negative side effects of your policy is an example of Progressive Liberal thought. I certainly don't deny that there are potential downsides to the social exclusion of any group, but then I'm not a Progressive. Life is a series of tradeoffs.Steersman wrote: ↑And I've likewise argued for not stereotyping people - not judging an entire group by some misperceptions of a narrow segment of the group. Your "We at least know that looking down on prostitutes isn't that stupid" has to be a classic in that department - I expect that you and the Green River Killer would have been fast friends ....
Again, you are unable to think outside your own Liberal Progressive Individualist world view. I've explained this to you. I'm not claiming that all well known prostitutes in all classrooms would make bad teachers. I'm not an individualist though and I don't reduce all problems down to "is it possible that this policy could be unfair to a single individual". Of course it could be, that's true for pretty much any policy that doesn't just say "do as though wilt". My argument, as I have told you repeatedly, and which you ignore because it isn't how you think about the world, is I believe there would be unintended negative consequences at the level of the culture by doing this.Steersman wrote: ↑I'm surprised that you don't go whole-hog and assert that all Jews are shylocks, that all women are soft in the head or at least "logic-challenged", that all French are "cowardly, arrogant, chauvinistic, erotomaniacs", that all Brits are "drunken, semi-clad hooligans", that all Americans are gun-toting, knuckle-dragging denizens of trailer-parks. Not to mention similar stereotypes for all other ethnic groups.
Sure, you are against a rival group of Liberal Progressives who are more radical than you. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks disagreeing with each other didn't mean that both groups weren't Marxists.
It depends what one means. I certainly agree that if you walk off a cliff you will fall. I think I've just been talking about the categorisation of objects in the world and language. It's not something I have thought about very hard, but I would say that there is a core of obvious truth to social constructivism that in the post war period got wrapped in layers of bullshit in order to achieve political ends.Steersman wrote: ↑Your apparent rejection of the alternative, objective narratives, seems to preclude any rational criticisms of various social constructionists. You say you don't qualify as a member of that group - supposedly because you at least concede, thankfully, that biology has some bearing on different behaviours by sex (gametes!). However, that's not the defining or essential but quite problematic aspect of that group - as Nietzche put it in that article, it's the idiotic claim that "Facts do not exist, only interpretations."
Probably if you pick things that are actually true you can find many different groups who at least agree on some part of it. In as much as I and they are both social constructivists, I am a constrained vision one, they are unconstrained vision. The problems you are complaining about are unconstrained vision problems, that is to say progressive problems.
No! Facts can certainly contradict tradition. I've already been over this with you. We covered this in talking about religion where I said that social beliefs might be a net social good, or even critical to a society, even if they weren't literally true. I also said that the test of all things was how they worked out in the world, you disagreed with that, remember?
I should regard implementing progressive policies in the faith that progressive policies are necessarily good as "a few ounces of prevention" to my fear of social collapse caused by implementing progressive policies in the faith that progressive policies are necessarily good? Your well-known prostitutes being teachers idea is a classic example. Unintended negative consequences of this policy don't seem to be part of the thinking for you.Steersman wrote: ↑Don't think you really understood my point. It's not just your rather pigheaded and quite clueless defense of tradition that's the problem. It's that you refuse to consider that that defense blinds you to the possibility that maybe some proactive policies, a few ounces of prevention might well forestall the revolution or similar eventualities you're clearly afraid of happening.fafnir wrote: ↑I did. You ignored my response.
Your Kennedy quote was "Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolution inevitable". You were attacking my defence of tradition. I told you that in my opinion tradition had lost and effectively the continued victory of your position would continue until it caused so much damage that we have a Weimar, or pre-Stalin USSR situation and something comes along to attempt to restore order. Unless we suppose that some liberal version of the Communist utopian end of history populated by new liberal communist men is where we are heading, then the contradictions in this must eventually run the train off the rails. I considered Kennedy, and I responded.
:-) Reminds me of a high school teacher of mine - probably grade 8 - and her affectionate or "come hither" smile, a Mona Lisa smile if there ever was one. Often puzzle and think about it - was there some "tilt to my kilt" that she was aware of and that I wasn't? "If I had only known then ..." it could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship if not something substantially more. C'est la vie ...Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑It's about how Steerz meets women, honorary and otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M4_Ommfvv0
And "sad" not least because the "normalization" of that rather demented view tends to give free rein to the psychotics. Apropos of which, a further elaboration on the Green River Killer:There is no hope for such as I on earth, nor yet in Heaven;
Unloved I live, unloved I die, unpitied, unforgiven;
A loathèd jade, I ply my trade, unhallowed and unshriven. ....
Was I not born to walk in scorn where others walk in pride? ....
And the broader answer to that question is part and parcel of Fafnir's claim of a "moral failing" and his "We at least know that looking down on prostitutes isn't that stupid". Buy a gun in the first act then ya gotta use it by the third ...In a calm voice and with an expressionless gaze, a bespectacled 54-year-old Washington State resident by the name of Gary Ridgway confessed to killing 48 women.
To be accurate, Ridgway raped, choked, killed and discarded 48 women, including many teenagers as young as 15 years of age. ....
But the question remains: Why was he allowed to kill, again and again, when so much evidence had already pointed in his direction two decades ago?
The answer, in great part, lies in Ridgway’s own admission of who he preyed upon. ....
“I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex,” Ridgway said in his confessional statement. ....
In Ridgway’s mind, he even believed that he was helping the police out, as he admitted in one interview with investigators.
“I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing prostitutes,” he said. “Here you guys can’t control them, but I can.”
Prostitutes were an infestation, a sickly disease to which Ridgway thought he had the cure. So he “cured” young women of what he saw as their pathetic and undeserving lives. Not everyone he killed was a prostitute, but in his mind, they all deserved what they got. ....
Amen to that lady, may your tribe increase.2021 marked seven years since I started doing sex work. I was closeted most of the time. My family didn’t know, until they did. No one was thrilled when they found out.
It’s a lot more difficult for anyone to accept you or be proud of you if you don’t accept and you are not proud of yourself. And the truth is that it took me many years to fully believe that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I have enough humility to know that I still can’t say for certain that sex work isn’t wrong. I just know that there’s no ethical system I can currently buy into that prohibits adult, consensual sex work. But it took me a long time to get there. I grew up believing that any sex outside of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage was wrong. I had enough confidence that might not be true to try sex work. But it’s taken me years of doing sex work and listening to sex workers and reading the research on sex and sex work to be as confident as I am right now that there’s nothing measurably inherently immoral or unethical about it.
Explain what you mean by "honourable" if you think it is wrong to say that being a prostitute is less than honourable?Steersman wrote: ↑But rather sad that sexworkers get a far worse press than they really deserve, that theirs is seen as a less than "honourable profession":
Perhaps she was born to "walk in pride", but then she decided to become a prostitute. Lots of antisocial behaviours result in society looking on the people who do them with scorn. Near me we have gangs of professional begging pretend cripples. Is that too an honourable profession?
You think the Green River killer murdered 48 people because society told him it was ok? #TeachMenNotToRape. I don't think society says it's OK to murder people. Is your argument that society shouldn't view any groups negatively lest psychos take that as an instruction to go to work? Or, are you on a Gladstone like mission and this protection should only apply to prostitutes?
Looking down on prostitutes has survived for thousands of years. The idea of doing without the police that Pinker thought was great didn't survive a day, yet people keep wanting to try it again, and again. If you want to argue that it isn't stupid, or is less immediately self refuting than looking down on prostitutes, go ahead.
The claim isn't and hasn't been, as I have told you repeatedly that every prostitute is a bad person unworthy of compassion, or indeed that any are. Are you capable of understanding an argument that doesn't limit the scope of consideration to one individual and what they deserve? You seem to view all ethical questions in this way. As Clint Eastwood says, "deserve's got nothing to do with it".
I'm not at all sure this is normalising things in the way you think. A prostitute mocking and shaming a man with her sexual desirability, power and experience while implying that his masculinity is weak and fragile strikes me as bullying, and bullying of a quite unpleasant kind. There are also tones of homophobia in implying she had tricked him into kissing lips that had sucked so many cocks. Did the audience really come away going "wow, she is just like us?".Steersman wrote: ↑Reminds me of having read Xavier Hollander's The Happy Hooker, probably some 45 to 50 years ago - I know, shocking; the leaves that are green turn to brown, life's a bitch and all that. But one passage that sticks out is where she had been giving a public talk about her book and experiences, and she had asked if there were any guys in the audience who would like to come up on the stage and kiss her on the mouth. At least one guy had "honoured her offer" and did so to which Xavier had responded with, "Congratulations, you've just kissed the lips that have sucked a thousand cocks." :shock: Though maybe moot how different that is from kissing the lips that have sucked several cocks hundreds of times.
What an incredible and transgressive act, to move the overton window in the same way it had been going since WW2 and in the officially approved direction. Stunning and brave.
So, she's "interrogate existing power structures" and has got the neo-Marxist vocabulary down at least. Taking advice on sexual politics from people at the transgressive fringes is a great idea if you want to deconstruct society and rebuild it again from the rubble. As with all the rest of such Progressive madness what you are doing is making the world in the image of freaks and weirdos.Steersman wrote: ↑Something else in the same vein - or vain as the case may be, a blog post by Cathy Reisenwitz:
She should talk to you.
That maybe says more about her state of mind than the state of ethics. Anyway, maybe no ethical system she could believe in prohibits her from running up unsustainable credit card debt... but equally it probably isn't a good things to do and if you've done it, demanding society normalise doing it as the solution to your difficulties is perverse and feels like personality disorder territory to me.
Well, she certainly does sound like a disinterested party in this discussion. If a practicing prostitute isn't willing to accept any system of ethics that disapproves of prostitution, then I guess it's not immoral. Do you happen to know if the prostitute murderer you cited earlier believes in systems of ethics that consider murdering prostitutes bad? I got the impression that, like the prostitute, he rationalised what he was doing.Steersman wrote: ↑prostitute wrote:I had enough confidence that might not be true to try sex work. But it’s taken me years of doing sex work and listening to sex workers and reading the research on sex and sex work to be as confident as I am right now that there’s nothing measurably inherently immoral or unethical about it.
No. The world would be better if there were fewer prostitutes, not more.
Which seems to include everyone to the left of Attila the Hun ...
Sure would like to know whether you'd like to go back to the Dark Ages or before and let the "doctors" of that time minister to your wife in a difficult childbirth. Or to your kids with any number of childhood diseases.
Really don't think you're paying attention. Think I've explained it several times, one way or another.fafnir wrote: ↑Exactly, you are a Progressive Liberal. I've asked you, I don't know how many times, about whether you think there may be any negative impacts on society from normalising well known prostitutes being teachers, you've brushed this aside every time. Your lack of concern about unintended negative side effects of your policy is an example of Progressive Liberal thought. I certainly don't deny that there are potential downsides to the social exclusion of any group, but then I'm not a Progressive. Life is a series of tradeoffs.Steersman wrote: ↑And I've likewise argued for not stereotyping people - not judging an entire group by some misperceptions of a narrow segment of the group. Your "We at least know that looking down on prostitutes isn't that stupid" has to be a classic in that department - I expect that you and the Green River Killer would have been fast friends ....
You can believe in the trinity and transubstantiation if you want. But that hardly makes it a fact.
Progress ... Many of those you're defending seem rather unclear on the concept:fafnir wrote: ↑It depends what one means. I certainly agree that if you walk off a cliff you will fall.Steersman wrote: ↑Your apparent rejection of the alternative, objective narratives, seems to preclude any rational criticisms of various social constructionists. You say you don't qualify as a member of that group - supposedly because you at least concede, thankfully, that biology has some bearing on different behaviours by sex (gametes!). However, that's not the defining or essential but quite problematic aspect of that group - as Nietzche put it in that article, it's the idiotic claim that "Facts do not exist, only interpretations."
Something I'd more or less agree with, not least because I've often said that the social constructionists have a point, at least when it comes to arguing that our definitions are, in fact, "socially constructed".fafnir wrote: ↑I think I've just been talking about the categorisation of objects in the world and language. It's not something I have thought about very hard, but I would say that there is a core of obvious truth to social constructivism that in the post war period got wrapped in layers of bullshit in order to achieve political ends.
Yes, because you think "how they worked out in the world" is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Cases in point being your "the moral vacuum left by religion" and insistence on anathematizing prostitutes - more precisely, not that this cuts a lot of ice with you, an ex-prostitute.fafnir wrote: ↑No! Facts can certainly contradict tradition. I've already been over this with you. We covered this in talking about religion where I said that social beliefs might be a net social good, or even critical to a society, even if they weren't literally true. I also said that the test of all things was how they worked out in the world, you disagreed with that, remember?
Don't see that your "tradition" of defending religion, social constructionist claptrap, "the ancien regime over the revolution, or the Tzar over the Bolsheviks", or anathematizing prostitution, is "giving" all that much. Pointing to some general progress while repudiating it with your next sentence is not all that helpful - or intellectually honest.
:-) Reminds me of a joke about 3 types of women - not to say that they're exhaustive ... ;-) - and what they say during sex:Matt Cavanaugh wrote: ↑ c'mon, steerz, stop beating around the bush!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0eu3fZnhgY
It's a common phrase - some lawyers even claim to be engaged in one of them. Partly why I put it in quotes. And partly because most people don't think prostitution qualifies.fafnir wrote: ↑Explain what you mean by "honourable" if you think it is wrong to say that being a prostitute is less than honourable?Steersman wrote: ↑But rather sad that sexworkers get a far worse press than they really deserve, that theirs is seen as a less than "honourable profession":
Rather doubt begging provides much in the way of a tangible quid pro quo, in notable contradiction to prostitution.fafnir wrote: ↑ <snip>
Perhaps she was born to "walk in pride", but then she decided to become a prostitute. Lots of antisocial behaviours result in society looking on the people who do them with scorn. Near me we have gangs of professional begging pretend cripples. Is that too an honourable profession?
Not sure what "moral intuitions" you think might adjudicate that case.So, these days there isn’t much Kant in the Kantianism of the liberals who look to him as the great hero of the “Enlightenment”. …. Following John Rawls, they tend to see moral reasoning as an exercise in bringing our “moral intuitions” into “reflective equilibrium” by considering what principles the parties to a social contract would agree to follow, and where this contract scenario differs from Hobbes’ by taking for granted that the parties already regard each other as having moral worth. …. “Well, OK”, you might say, “but what justifies the key presupposition that people <i>really have</i> moral worth in the first place?” That, of course, is the [$64,000] question. In other words, we’re back once again to a basically Humean-Hobbesian subjectivist account of morality, only the subjectivism is buried under heavy dollops of Kantian verbiage and obscurantist talk of “intuitions”. [pg 219]
Not at all. But you might actually try reading that article and reflecting on it, in particular:fafnir wrote: ↑You think the Green River killer murdered 48 people because society told him it was ok? #TeachMenNotToRape. I don't think society says it's OK to murder people. Is your argument that society shouldn't view any groups negatively lest psychos take that as an instruction to go to work? Or, are you on a Gladstone like mission and this protection should only apply to prostitutes?
I'm hardly unique in drawing something in the way of a connection between that "dehumanization" - e.g., "We at least know that looking down on prostitutes isn't that stupid" - and those crimes.Attitudes toward prostitutes -- their very dehumanization -- underlies the Green River Killer case, and yet prostitutes are the aspect of this story that has been least discussed.
What a ridiculous argument; you're grabbing at straws. Some fans kill various celebrities, and some patients of doctors and psychologists and therapists do likewise. You seriously think that we should close Hollywood - even if that might be a good idea for other reasons - and criminalize psychological therapy because some patients go off the rails?fafnir wrote: ↑ The other thought I have is, does anyone actually have the power to normalise prostitution in a way where isolated men with mental problems, or poor impulse control who pay women for sex knowing they wouldn't have sex with them out of choice are not going to feel belittled or degraded and come to hate them. I can see you normalising it so that there are more prostitutes. I'm struggling to imagine how you are going to change the world so that a small proportion of the clients of prostitutes don't end up with some very mixed up and potentially violent feelings about them. Is the aim of this actually to cut down on prostitute murders? It feels to me like those anti-rape activists who fight against efforts to advise women on safety and instead organise slutwalks.
And so has burning people at the stake or crucifying them ...
I'm beginning to think that you're a dishonest fraud. Pinker had been in favour of "doing without the police". And then he apparently changed his mind, something you apparently refuse to accept:
You have any evidence that he still subscribes to "Bakunin's anarchism"? :think: :roll:As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. ....
What horse crap. You're still using some "character flaws" of one or several members of a particular group to condemn them all. Outright stereotyping, egregious sexism and racism.fafnir wrote: ↑The claim isn't and hasn't been, as I have told you repeatedly that every prostitute is a bad person unworthy of compassion, or indeed that any are. Are you capable of understanding an argument that doesn't limit the scope of consideration to one individual and what they deserve? You seem to view all ethical questions in this way. As Clint Eastwood says, "deserve's got nothing to do with it".
In your entirely unevidenced opinion.
Probably some justification for that "heartbreaking backstories" argument. Kind of amused to see the Black Lives Matter crowd cross the line to stand with Smollett:
https://archive.fo/g16bwfafnir wrote: ↑ Honestly, Steesman... to normalise prostitution I think you are going to need to widen the scope of your project to rationalise the definition of female. You need to refound the nature of sexual relationships on a firm rationalist liberal foundation (maybe based on contract law and blockchain). The Communists were hoping for a new Communist man to emerge, at which point true Communism would be possible. The founders of the EU had the same hope for a European man. To normalise prostitution we need a Steers-man.
Certainly not. We are living in an age where progressive liberal values have been the default assumption for a while now. Naturally they are widely held. As I said before, the Founding Fathers were certainly not all Progressive Liberals.
Because there has been progress in medicine I should also accept the normalisation of prostitutes because you can't have one without the other? Perhaps, in which case maybe scientific advance is self limiting and inevitably leads to social collapse. In any case, I am weak and soft and addicted to arguing on the internet, I would not do well in the Dark Ages. Still, I'm sure many people lived happy lives. I'm not sure how one would go about establishing whether people were happier then or now.Steersman wrote: ↑Sure would like to know whether you'd like to go back to the Dark Ages or before and let the "doctors" of that time minister to your wife in a difficult childbirth. Or to your kids with any number of childhood diseases.
No Steersman, what happens is that you don't listen to or understand the positions of the people you are arguing with.
Right, so because we have discovered new and more efficient ways of manipulating the environment I should have faith that things like disbanding the police, or normalising prostitution will work out in the wash? It's not at all uncommon for once great civilizations to get soft and comfortable, turn inwards and unravel. The mouse utopia.Steersman wrote: ↑For example, to draw a line under that point, you repeatedly blather on about "faith in Progress (!!11!! :roll: )" supposedly being "a bad thing" yet will, if pressed, probably concede that that's the case - except for "sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health and peace" .... :roll:
The peace where the US is at war 2 years out of every 3 for a century? Within any empire there is generally peace until the empire starts to collapse. I still don't think that because medicine has improved in the past 200 years one shouldn't be suspicious of normalising prostitution. This is a faith based argument about "progress" (as defined by who?) being good and going on to the utopian end of history - Progressive Liberalism. If anything, I would say the technical advance is allowing us to mask the societal cost of progressive liberal policies. Technical progress had better hit the singularity soon to allow luxury gay space communism, or I think we will collapse. Fewer and fewer people want to/think they have to work.
What bit of that do you disagree with? That you are a progressive liberal? You believe in liberal values. Am I overstating your confidence in social engineered solutions like standardising the definitions of words?Steersman wrote: ↑Really don't think you're paying attention. Think I've explained it several times, one way or another.fafnir wrote: ↑Exactly, you are a Progressive Liberal. I've asked you, I don't know how many times, about whether you think there may be any negative impacts on society from normalising well known prostitutes being teachers, you've brushed this aside every time. Your lack of concern about unintended negative side effects of your policy is an example of Progressive Liberal thought. I certainly don't deny that there are potential downsides to the social exclusion of any group, but then I'm not a Progressive. Life is a series of tradeoffs.Steersman wrote: ↑And I've likewise argued for not stereotyping people - not judging an entire group by some misperceptions of a narrow segment of the group. Your "We at least know that looking down on prostitutes isn't that stupid" has to be a classic in that department - I expect that you and the Green River Killer would have been fast friends ....
No, that isn't my argument.
Acknowledge it? I've been going on about it for weeks while you have been talking as if such things don't exist and all we need to do is remove social constraints from individuals to make the world better. I kept asking you about what the wider impact of doing that would be and you ignored the question. This is the problem you ignore the bulk of the argument and just use my posts for jumping off points for long quotes from Pinker on something that isn't really what I was talking about.
OK, so the academic consensus in the social sciences seems to be that men who want to be women are women and are stunning and brave. Progress, let's go with that. Don't stand in the way of progress! Do you want people to die from medieval diseases?
Right, so quit standing in the way of progress that you think is a bad idea. Don't you know that progress up until now has been great. #TransWomenAreWomen. Just look what ideas like the great society did to get the urban black population out of poverty (naysayers called it a welfare trap, boy were they proved wrong). Look at the success the pharmaceutical industry has had improving the lives of the downtrodden with new wonder drugs like fentanyl. I believe we can have such successes again!
Only if you insist on looking at the issue through a progressive liberal frame which just ignores these issues.
Like this. Argument dealt with by refusing to talk about it. That's my concern about negative side effects of your ideas dealt with.
Wanting to consider what the effects of a policy might be is being "as bad as the woke"? If the effects of a policy aren't what the policy is about, why are we wanting to do it?
As I have explained many, many times I am not arguing that having been a prostitute necessarily preclude the ability to perform the duties of a teacher. You are reducing this to purely a question of the individual prostitute and what she deserves. More than that, if universal principles are being broken, they are your principles, not mine. I've explained that I'm not really big on universal principles, I'm more interested in outcomes.Steersman wrote: ↑How, exactly - as I've asked several times - will having been a prostitute necessarily preclude the ability to perform the duties of a teacher? All you've got is special pleading, citing tradition as some bogus "exception to a general or universal principle, without justifying the special exception".
It's one approach. Another is yours where you exclude from discussion the wider outcomes of your policy proposals.
I don't, but sure. You can believe that normalising prostitution is a good idea as well, but that isn't a fact either. Excluding the wider consequences of doing such a thing just moves the problems with the argument elsewhere.
But your arguments aren't about facts. You don't believe that prostitutes should be normalised because of facts. Remember, I'm the one who is interested in outcomes in the real world, you are the one who is all about principles. You believe they should be normalised because you believe in liberal principles and you have faith that the application of those principles will take society to a good place. Social constructivism really has nothing to do with it.
Not at all. You haven't pushed on any tradition with facts. You just keep restating an argument that goes:
It's not progress because I've already told you repeatedly that I'm not arguing against hard science. It's just that you do not take on board other peoples positions.Steersman wrote: ↑Progress ... Many of those you're defending seem rather unclear on the conceptfafnir wrote: ↑It depends what one means. I certainly agree that if you walk off a cliff you will fall.Steersman wrote: ↑Your apparent rejection of the alternative, objective narratives, seems to preclude any rational criticisms of various social constructionists. You say you don't qualify as a member of that group - supposedly because you at least concede, thankfully, that biology has some bearing on different behaviours by sex (gametes!). However, that's not the defining or essential but quite problematic aspect of that group - as Nietzche put it in that article, it's the idiotic claim that "Facts do not exist, only interpretations."
I'm not sure what the point of that quote was given that it seems to be saying the social constructivist was being accused of taking a more radical position than he actually held. In any case, all this just leads in the direction of more talking about the definitions of words which continues a massive digression into the pointless.
No. As I've told you over and over, different definitions are better than others for different things. Because I don't agree with you that there is necessarily a single best definition for "female" that applies in all contexts, you keep taking me to be denying that there is any reason to prefer one definition over another. Disagreeing with you over which definition is best isn't the same as rejecting the idea that some definitions may be better than others.Steersman wrote: ↑Something I'd more or less agree with, not least because I've often said that the social constructionists have a point, at least when it comes to arguing that our definitions are, in fact, "socially constructed".fafnir wrote: ↑I think I've just been talking about the categorisation of objects in the world and language. It's not something I have thought about very hard, but I would say that there is a core of obvious truth to social constructivism that in the post war period got wrapped in layers of bullshit in order to achieve political ends.
But you and they seem rather remarkably reluctant - being charitable - to give any thought at all as to how and why some definitions might be better than others.
No, I'm not reading your essays on Boolean logic. If you have something relevant to say, say it here.Steersman wrote: ↑As you seem to have some handle on feedback systems and the principles behind them, and some appreciation of Boolean logic, you might try reading several of my essays at LetterWiki and Medium.
It's not a get out of jail free card. It's a low bar you have to get over. Show that your untested idea is better than the already tested idea. Isn't that science?Steersman wrote: ↑Yes, because you think "how they worked out in the world" is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Cases in point being your "the moral vacuum left by religion" and insistence on anathematizing prostitutes - more precisely, not that this cuts a lot of ice with you, an ex-prostitute.fafnir wrote: ↑No! Facts can certainly contradict tradition. I've already been over this with you. We covered this in talking about religion where I said that social beliefs might be a net social good, or even critical to a society, even if they weren't literally true. I also said that the test of all things was how they worked out in the world, you disagreed with that, remember?
Again, you drag from me concessions that I am happy to make because they are obviously true and have never denied them. Liberal Progressives believe in an attainable utopia, I certainly don't. All societies could be better.
Not at all. That's what seeing how they play out in the world is about, the thing you aren't interested in.
One moment, the social constructivist position I actually hold you just said you agreed with - "social constructionists have a point, at least when it comes to arguing that our definitions"
You are equivocating. The "giving" was in terms of Conservatives giving ground to avoid a revolution. I pointed out that if you look at the way society has moved since the 18th Century conservatives have given nearly all the ground they stood on. I then suggested that any revolution wasn't going to come from conservatives failure to give. Now you are using "giving" in a different sense to demand I approve of all of the changes, including the change you want to make.
Progress from your perspective, not necessarily from mine. Pointing out that your side of this has been very successful in getting its way, if not necessarily in getting the outcomes it expects, but then saying that I think many aspects of that have been net negatives isn't a contradictory position.
