I guess I have some cognitive dissonance about the sense of fervor and desperation with which this is being pursued. It’s not a trustworthy demeanor in general. It’s particularly suspicious to see it in the folks who showed very little gumption about a child sex trafficking operation. Incidentally, a key figure in the impeachment appears to be pretty fuckin creepy and at least sympathetic to pedophiles.

There is exactly one likeable thing about Trump and it’s the unlikeability of his opponents. Careful of that. I’m going back into hermit mode, wasn’t a good time to peak out!

Can someone humor me and explain what’s going on, possibly even without dismissive political buzz speak? I go into an intermittent hermit mode and am just trying get a grasp of what’s happening. How significant are the roles of Eric Ciaramella and Mark Zaid?

I don’t have a media diet. This is literally me trying to broaden my media diet. If you have truth don’t wield it like an asshole.

I’m just posting in hopes of some confirmation and/or clarification. I have had my head in the sand where I like it for quite a while but I was just reading/catching up on current politics.

Am I wrong, or didn’t the ‘whistleblower’ turn out to be a political adversary teamed up with a (pedophile?!) lawyer who was on record predicting a coup 2 years ago?

Like, first of all, WTF is going on with all these pedophiles?

Second of all, asking for Ukrainian help investigating political corruption just doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. If a frontrunning presidential candidate is involved in corruption, it’s in the interest of the US public to find out about it, right?

Public discussions about race and racism have simply become a bad faith game. Whatever combination of words you say doesn’t so much matter beyond their malleability to uncharitable interpretation.

I always thought ‘color blindness’ is more an ideal to aspire to than a trait people have. The idea that you should treat people equally regardless of skin color. It seems a pretty straightforward and laudible principle to me.

That there are actual racists who disagree with this, and that many of them of them don’t recognize their own vile pettiness for what it is, strike me as inevitable and mundane. They’ve been using a redefining-language strategy with some irritating success for some years now. I assume there is a special place in hell for the word-changing-language-degrading types.

Cuss words are somewhat arbitrary but not without utility. When kids refrain from using them, it signals some degree of effective socialization and reflects well on the parents.

When properly reserved, the verboten words pack more punch if you need them to make an emphasized point. The capacity to strike a reasonable balance is a sign of maturity (hence ‘adult language’).

You don’t think he was trying to also draw attention to (terrifying) violent bigotry in modern America?

I don’t disagree. But if we accept Harris’s assertion that this was terrorism before it turned out to be a hoax... I don’t see how the terror element is removed by virtue of it being deliberately orchestrated plot for public and political consumption.

Some stupid bullshit is orders of magnitude worse than other stupid bullshit.

Draw attention to what though?

Alt-right is a term that was ruined by disingenuous accusatory overuse straight out of the gate. But the simple answer to the question in the OP is yes. The criticism is inconsistent.

The routine racism espoused by 'minority groups' doesn't deserve the free pass it gets.

The individual is the ultimate minority. The West already figured that out and will need to do so again.

What are some metaphysical prerequisites to becoming an antinatalist?

Atheism, right?
Nihilism, but not quite... more like a desire for nihilism
What else?

What positions are incompatible?

Theism
Agnosticism
What else?

Most men I know have simply grown tired of the glaring incongruity in public gender discourse. This campaign (and I'd even say feminine campaign) to redefine masculinity antagonistically conflates the excesses of masculine traits with masculinity itself. Meanwhile, a comparable critique of femininity is intolerable misogyny.

I’m attacking the position with an experimental approach because (honestly) I suspect this sort of view is a pathology of the logos. Reason alone never seems to untangle it for the afflicted.

Here though, let me reiterate something important. There is an absolutely crucial distinction between the certainty that I should not have children and the certainty that nobody should. The former is fine and vasectomy or w/e makes sense. The latter is exactly the type of narcissism that serves as a precursor to the worst kinds of atrocity.

The moral principle of preventing suffering is a byproduct of humanity’s life affirming orientation across an enormous span of time. It exists in a context. It is not a standalone axiom of the universe. To turn it against life itself is mere rhetorical sleight of hand and this is plainly obvious to most of us.

I’m saying the antinatalist position is untenable for non-pussies. It’s radical avoidance of potential suffering at the cost of literally everything. Bad approach to life, I promise.

It’s reasonable to decide you shouldn’t have kids. But it’s villain-level confused narcissism to think you’ve discovered that nobody should.

Being a pussy is not good for you. I’m not being flippant. I don’t take it lightly. This sort of hypersensitivity to suffering is absolutely pathological. I was trying to stir something that I suspect is already known at a much deeper level than articulated sophistry - just a well intentioned shot in the dark.

It’s really a repugnant philosophical position. There are an infinite number of ways to conceptualize the world but they’re not all equal.

Surely the antinatalist must concede that they simply don’t have access to the experience of others. It is the pinnacle of arrogance to prescribe extinction by extrapolating one’s own misery, which of course is already nested in this particular existential orientation.

As I see it, the antinatalist is caught in an inbent spiral of self sustaining cynicism. There’s nothing ‘true’ about it unless you’ve already fallen in. Is it a good place to be?

Antinatalism appeals to those who’ve suffocated the hero within. Suffering of any kind is utterly unjustifiable... when you’re a pussy.

What polarizing times. I don't think talking in left vs right ever ends up being productive. I've always avoided it personally but I'm sort of bemused to watch it in action over (what has now been) some time. The labels that get ascribed have totally shifted; no idea how any of you keep up.

Whoever came up with all the new genders should get started on a much more granular set of political identities - those might actually have some utility. Politics should definitely be less binary than gender.

Thanks, that's helpful.

So when a person expresses masculine traits to the world they are expressing an aspect of their gender which is an aspect of their identity. But they can also express these traits to themselves: reflecting upon how, as a man, they feel that.... — Moliere

What are some examples of masculine traits?

I understand where you're coming from. I think the cognitive dissonance stems from an attempt to reconcile multiple narratives about these issues. It's sometimes easy to mistake two separate positions for the same thing due to the overlapping themes. In addition to that, many of these positions seem internally inconsistent. I've been picking up on a certain recurring theme: anti-something positions that sneakily presuppose the something they're attacking.

So you don't think sex and gender are synonymous? Is gender is a social construct? — bloodninja

I think they used to be synonymous but have drifted apart. And I suspect gender is a poorly defined fraught concept now, post-drift. Trying to sort it out.

Can you elaborate on what gender means to you? Expressions and impressions about what? Is my affinity for pinstripes part of my gender?

If you are a biological determinist, or biological essentialist, about sex and gender, for instance, you are likely to judge that someone who doesn't comply with a demand regarding how people of a given sex ought to behave isn't entitled to be considered normal. — Pierre-Normand

I think this is part of what I wanted to get at.

If I don't behave normally, I'm not entitled to be considered normal. But it need not be a pejorative thing. I think the healthy thing for a nonconformist to do is to accept that they aren't normal, rather than campaign to redefine normal. My sense is that this is a big part of what's going on.

I'd have a few people run it, but randomly selected from the population with incentives for corruption mitigated in deliberate ways.

I agree, I don't find talking in terms of left and right very useful. The definitions shift over time. Better to be as specific as possible and not treat problems as some other group's affliction.

The claims aren't addressing those concerns. They're being made to suggest/demonstrate we're not able to have intellectually honest dialogue about serious, complicated, difficult topics. It's become a big problem.

Yet again, the responses seem indicative of the climate. What Pinker said was true. Is it that folks really don't believe the claims are true? Or is it a lack of trust regarding the conclusions others might draw from the truths?

I suspect it's the latter and I suggest it's bad strategy to shout people down, shame, or otherwise silence them pre-emptively.

I think they're most usefully treated as metaphors for how you should expect your inner world to turn out based on the way you live. In a sense, nobody ever really gets away with anything.

Taken more literally, the concepts are deeply problematic. Eternity has a way of trivializing all things. It could never be a just and proportionate consequence to anything. And if they're fundamentally unjust, the dichotomy itself, as a package deal, is basically hell.

The inelegant design examples remind me of the way overly-collaborative projects turn out over time. This happens a lot in administration. Lots of things are designed bottom up like that.

See, this is the fundamental problem of antinatalism. You don't understand other people. Yet you feel qualified to prescribe them extinction.

I'm performing my own philosophy in this case. It's OK that you don't get it.

Antinatalism deserves to be singled out as arrogant and presumptuous, so no problem.

Thanks, interesting.

I do see it as a 'flipping over the game board' response. Anyone else? What makes people flip over game boards? How might we avoid eliciting this response?

If you have the time/means, I'd be interested to know the demographics. I have the sense that these are mostly young white men age 15-35 with most of the cluster near 18-20.

'We' being people who value human life. Governments are made of people. But the point of the comment was more that it's not so easy to treat the source of this pathology. And so, in principle, I don't think we should belittle strategies that treat symptoms.

The source of the problem is not quite that Americans have guns. That's certainly part of it, but it's complicated. e.g. 100% of the people doing this are young men. I think to take this seriously we need to look very closely at what we're doing to young men in public education. It seems a number of young men are flipping over the game board on a terrifyingly regular basis in America. Why? It's not just access to guns. If we get rid of all guns will they build pipe bombs? I don't know.

If you want to get to the fundamental issue we should think about how to disarm governments too.

That we're all subsets of the same source of consciousness, and that this is something like the fundamental nature of reality.

Cool. No judgment from me one way or the other but I suppose it lends credibility to the insights if they're corroborated soberly.

Of the folks here who lean towards the mind being primary, how many of you would say you've gained insights from psychedelics?

Full disclosure - I've had an experience where this seemed obvious. Never been sure how much to make of it.

The humility in my position is that I put myself on even ground with everyone else. When someone talks about silencing 'some ideas' I assume none of them will happen to be their own. My position doesn't depend on free speech being the pinnacle of virtues because I find it perfectly consistent with all other virtues. In the end, we can't control other people and they're capable of far worse than speech.

Edit - and look, I want to acknowledge that I follow your argument and I consider you a reasonable guy. But I'm tending to disagree subtly, yet strongly, each step of the way. That's all it takes to end up with very different conclusions. That's exactly what makes me feel we should be very careful with this.