Comments

  • On the Value of Wikipedia
    Fanaticism for truth and justice sounds very fine and romantic. Who could object to that? The naked truth used to be allegorically depicted as a beautiful and (obviously) naked young woman, apparently in order to ensure that the visceral (or whatever) truth of the allegory would be felt by every (or at least every male) viewer: — SophistiCat

    Nice card to pull out in a completely irrelevant context. But duly noted, you do have this card to play in a game where it doesn't matter.

    My aces beat your ... snake eyes? I guess that's a good move when you're lost anyways.

    Passion is a double-edged sword (there is that dull moderation and evenhandedness again...) — SophistiCat

    Completely agree, never said it was a single edge sword.

    What a "fanaticism for justice" and "thirst for truth" often stand for is a passion for simplistic but attractive narratives — SophistiCat

    Often, but not always by your own definition.

    For those blindly following a priest or guru or a leader promising nice things without critical thinking, I agree they should be focused on the often part of your message. For others, perhaps the not always part is the more useful extension of your message.

    Me, I would prefer mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand, or barring that, admit ignorance and impotence, than be taken for a ride by phantoms. — SophistiCat

    Well, I don't see any mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand arguments, so, yes, please go ahead and admit ignorance of the subject matter and impotence with regard your truth symbolism.

    But hey, if conspirology and populism feel right to you, then sky is the limit - or at least the so-called "most powerful office in the world," as has now been demonstrated. — SophistiCat

    You really believe a completely corrupt buffoon occupies "most powerful office in the world" as you say, and there was no conspiracies along the way, no conspiracies since, no conspiracies right now to defraud the public purse, dismantle oversight, undermine the rule of law, and many other things?

    Though I'm not so conspiratorial minded to believe Trump works directly for Putin and a couple of hundred thousand dollars spent by Russians in advertisement to an American firm operating under American regulation (and anything else Putin maybe imagined to have done) is significant compared to the billions of dollars of advertising freely provided by the American media operating under American regulation and hundreds of millions spent in "money is speech / corruption is de facto legal" election framework, but I do wonder why there are "conspiracy" laws on the books if they never happen and any case ever brought involving a conspiracy charge we should understand to imply that the judge and / or jury are "conspiracy theory" quacks and the detectives just over-imaginative hacks.

    This isn't really relevant here, but if you want to sling this sort of mud, I'm willing to get a little dirty to clear the air.

    The thing is, those who have the qualifications and the interest to check published research, for the most part can already do this, through their affiliation with institutions that provide subscriptions and library services. — SophistiCat

    There is about an order of magnitude, possibly 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, more people that could contribute to evaluating data and analysis than have free access for being a student, much less the researchers themselves.

    All these people's potential contributions aren't relevant to you?

    What makes modern science an "occult" institution is not so much physical access to scientific publications as the often high bar of competence and professionalism that is required to be even a good critic, let alone a good practitioner. Lacking that competence and professionalism, we get these "citizen scientists" posting detrended temperature graphs to prove that global warming is a hoax. (That's not an argument for hiding science from the unwashed masses behind paywalls, by the way.) — SophistiCat

    Ok, you don't actually have an argument against my point. I meant occult to mean simply "hidden from view behind a paywall". I used this particular word to also place in relief the ideals of the enlightenment, fighting against occult religious organization of society, and the current system, likewise wanting to organize society from an occulted place.

    As to your meaning, even if you really do believe the high bar of competence and professionalism provided by university education is a pre-requisite to check documents for internal consistency, I am not arguing the untrained will be able to do much. I believe the untrained should be welcome to try, but if you ask me "who's able to do this extra checking" it is exactly those competent professionals you're referring to that are now outside the university system: highly educated people doing management jobs, teaching yoga, rock climbing or photography, or, indeed, the retired, who could contribute gladly spare time to minimize the gaming of the system by those in the system who are susceptible to corruption, incentivization or censorship in one form or another working in networks large and small to slip-in profit maximizing premises, omissions or spin to serve private interests in political processes rather than true premises for public interest in political processes.

    You are very wrong to assume students and other researchers have a big incentive to point out shoddy work of the big shots. Random people on the internet, however, this is who they fear, and why the paywalls stay even if there is simply no argument to place public funded research behind private paywalls.

    I am well aware that there exist legitimate criticisms of scientific institutions and of the publishing industry, but, for better or for worse, those criticisms usually aren't easily packageable into slogans and don't invite easy solutions. — SophistiCat

    Many political problems the solutions aren't easy and the slogans misleading at best and absurd at worst.

    However, in this case the solution is pretty easy, get rid of the pay-walls, open the research, disregard the interests of corporations that profit off the system in favour of the public good (which is a simple case of passing legislation that any publicly funded research must be made publicly available - the data and the analysis) one country at a time; and in the meantime, put pressure on researches (by making the coherent moral arguments and making sure they know there's people out there like @alcontali that disdain them; i.e. that they really are losing the trust of society that they require to be relevant, and not just "the idiots" but people who know a bit about formal reasoning too), to practice open research anyways (even if it's inconvenient because the incentives aren't setup that way, there is a categorical imperative to not be a dick).

    "Public funds for public data" simply makes a lot of sense to me, but prey tell explain why it's a step towards Trumpian populism. Extra marks if you realize our current system didn't prevent Trump and climate denialism and many other insane policies (we've run the current system straight to Trump and you want to use the specter of a potential Trump to scare people away from criticizing too harshly the current system?) and so maybe it's partly to blame.

    Game, set, match — checkmate.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    ↪Coben


    Thanks.

    Though I did make one mistake on second reading ... I don't think it matters much, I'll still be up by a few dozen points. I do hope Bartricks sticks with the debate despite being pointless so far.
  • On the Value of Wikipedia
    Like ↪Bitter Crank, ↪StreetlightX and ↪unenlightened said, there are good and bad sides to Wikipedia and open-access publishing, as well as academic publishing and institutional science. Neither condemning them in toto nor unconditionally endorsing anything "open-source" like a bright-eyed fanatic is reasonable. You need to get informed and use good judgement. — SophistiCat

    This seems like a reasonable thing to say, moderation in all things, but I think is insufficient to properly address @alcontali's concerns.

    Granted, the little waskel has spiwit -- I said spiwit! Bravado, a touch of derring-do. He dares to raid us. But I think such passion for the truth and it's sharing should be first commended and any counter arguments fleshed out in the flesh.

    I agree there are serious problems with many of @alcontali's position -- such as believing bitcoin is some serious threat to government currency schemes and that bitcoin itself is somehow independent of governments being so gracious as to maintain a global internet, as well as believing logical rules and theorems somehow imply inevitable empirical affects in the real world such as mass-automation (again, that depends on governments being so gracious as to maintain a sophisticated global economy) -- and if your claim of naivity is focused on these aspects, then I agree; rarely do I come across a branch not only so close to being cut by the person resting atop it but doing the cutting so vigorous a fashion.

    However, these things mentioned in the above paragraph, as much as they betray a fool's completely misunderstanding and ignorance of the real world, are adjacent to the core contention of @alcontali's grasp of formal arguments and, though unstated, Kantian moral argument.

    I will do my best here to state this unstated argument, for the benefit not only of alcontali but your own, so that you too may emerge from a naive black and white view of the world where things are either in moderation, and so good, or then not, and so naive.

    Is fanaticism for justice a moral blemish? Is thirst for the truth savagery?

    For if we bring in a moral theory, such as Kantianism, then alcontali's position becomes very understandable. He is not saying all open source material is by definition is good, he is saying academia has failed in their duties to society insofar as they create knowledge through occulted schemes of copulation with corporations. The academic claims to have a duty to the truth and society, to teach and to guide, and the corporation claims to have a duty to money, for themselves, and to take value from society whenever possible. True, some academics see this as intrinsic tension, and some do not. But what is the argument of those academics that say "there is nothing to see here" and to put their money where their mouth is, we won't even let you see for you to judge for yourself.

    For instance, certainly, many an economist sees no problem with a private central bank with an ambiguous and opaque connection to the public sphere with the power to create money backed by the government. And, though I doubt bitcoin is going to change this, is this really a well reasoned position? Or, is the real position of the status-quo economist "well, at the end of the day, central bankers rub me the right way, so I rub them the right way, we all come into a lot of money; it's an exchange, I service them and in return look out for their interests, and that's what economics is all about; QED little padawan, QED".

    In other words, status-quo economists, the "experts" appealed to whenever the status quo comes into question, have no "document 2" in the parlance of alcontali.

    However, where alcontali diverges from the true-true about this social story, is that it's not resolved in formalism alone. Though the formalism of the claim and the justification for the claim, is the context, unjustified claims of experts do have a "document 2" which is just appeal to their own expertise; which alconti's aware of, as references their reference to their own papers, but just is not so astute in the ways of logic to realize these papers can always substitute for "document 2"

    The real issue is whether a "document 2" of just citing their own expertise is a valid justification for whatever they claim.

    Sometimes yes, but nearly all these cases that I can think of (and exceptions don't justify much hidden research), will have time constraints involved, and the expert and their document 1, the claim, and their document 2, paper trail of expertise of some sort, is the best we can do.

    But if there is no time constraint, such as justifying a claim where we can sit all day waiting for the document justifying it to accumulate both argument and empirical data, then as soon as the academic starts citing papers that are not accessible to the general population, the general population can reasonably doubt whether such research is carried out honestly by people who feel a duty to the truth and duty to society and a duty to tell the truth to society. If we can doubt their motives, then we can doubt the quality of their expertise.

    For, formalism, that we can fortunately come to understand apart from any experts claims about it, informs us another important thing, that from any contradictory statement anything can be proven. And although networks of empirical evidence may have more robustness to such errors than formal mathematics, we are well-suited to doubt that the subtlest mistake can be used to arrive at, not only a false conclusion, but a verifiable absurd conclusion. If those mistakes are hidden behind paw-walls, and there is simply not enough honest people that have access to be able to spot such mistakes, then we cannot be sure that the expert is making a recommendation that has a coherent document 2 (one that we can at least check for internal consistency) or even any document 2 other than their own expertise (which has no special relationship to their claim in question but can be attached to any and all claims).

    Why do experts tolerate and provide non-evidence, non-good-reasoning based arguments for occult research, research that is not accessible and occulted by pay-walls, is I believe for exactly the reasons alconti is proposing: anyone can check. If data is analysed to come to a conclusion, it really is as alconti says: anyone with a computer can check if that analysis was done correctly. Statistics is difficult, it's not even an expectation that most academics can even properly wield statistics as otherwise there would only be a handful of them around, almost statistically unnoticeable, so the best that can be done is to open up research and data so that anyone can check, with few exceptions.

    Why isn't this done? To shift liability to unaccountable panels of experts to arrive at public policy driven by ulterior motives than what is true.

    For instance, corporations want to put their products on the market as soon as possible, then set the bar of "proving the product is for sure dangerous" as high as possible both in terms of scientific evidence and legally. But to get permission from the government, some sort of indication that it's safe is required, if "experts" can be called on to give an unaccountable, perhaps biased by explicit or implicit conflicts of interest, this is the best scenario; the second best scenario is being allowed to submit studies that have improper statistical analysis or that are straightup fraudulent and no one bothers to check for both internal inconsistencies as well as conflicts with other published papers, as no one has time for that. In terms of profit motive, these are the plans we'd reasonably expect to be executed. The problem in this system of getting society's approval to put a product in the environment or people's bodies is that if "someone, out there" does have time to check.

    A recent scandal that shows just how vulnerable this system of occult research and expert opinion is, is the opioid crisis. How many experts from government, to hospitals, to every doctor being themselves a supposed expert, adopted the claim that opioids can be prescribed in abundance without a second document justifying this, other than other experts seeming to claim this? It turns out the precious "peer reviewed research by a high-credibility and therefore costly and pay-walled journals" justifying opioids for wide use didn't even exist. Ok, sure, science eventually caught up and realized whatever experts were involved in creating the crisis were full of shit and had no document 2 justifying the policies (other than their supposed expertise), but far after the fact, after far more money was made than will ever be recovered or commensurate with the social damage, and arguably more financial damage than would cost to just "buy the universities into open publication and open data" for if it's money they want why not just give them their 40 pieces of silver if it would avoid things like the opioid crisis.

    More serious, the excuse "well, science will catch up even if there are systematic weaknesses in the system" itself has only the document "well, experts say so" to back it up, and there is no time constraint where this is the best we can do. If such systemic weakness lead not only to things like the opioid crisis but to the destruction of civilization, perhaps all of humanity, how will science "catch up and correct the problem eventually"?

    And such catastrophic damage can come from two directions from this system. First, like as above, inconsistencies in "document justification for claims" that are not noticed because academics are too busy or too cowardly to verify important expert claims upon which critical public policy is based. Formalism informs us the implications of a single mistake is, if not proving all statements, is at least unknowable to it's extent of proving further false statements. Now, we cannot avoid all mistakes, but we can avoid avoidable mistakes by maximizing the checking of claims for, at at least, internal consistency. For instance, experts hatch a plan for geo-engineering that goes horribly wrong that turns out, though science is no longer around to learn from it, had subtle analytical mistakes in it's formulation, that unfortunately for us could have been spotted but weren't spotted due to a history of making such spotting as difficult as possible.

    The second catastrophic damage that can occur is that due to the occult nature of enlightenment based science today, avoidable mistakes are made due to conflicts of interest and people lose faith in the whole system and so even when there are documents that really are open to justify a claim, such that climate change is happening and is a serious problem, people are so in the habit of doubting experts, because they've seen the ulterior motives play out before that they apply the same (completely reasonable expectation) to these new claims. The claim that climate scientists have ulterior motive really is backed up by scientists having ulterior motives before (cough, cough, tabacco). In other-words, systemic weaknesses in institutional science undermine the public trust in institutional science overtime and scientists shouldn't complain about that because they only have themselves to blame. They want to classify all such criticism as word salads ... but they don't want to apply the same standard to their grant proposals.

    What can the scientist do to separate themselves from the reasonable suspicion of ulterior motives. There is only one thing: open data and analysis accessible to anyone who wants to check.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    This is a reply to the first bit - no, I care about accuracy and I am not misusing the term 'Kantian' in labeling the argument as such. But this thread is not about labels and I am not discussing it further because there is nothing to discuss. — Bartricks

    If it's not about labels why insist you're right about the label? You keep going on discussing the label all while denying that it's important to you to discuss.

    This is a reply to your second bit. Do you deny the premise? You haven't said. If you deny it, provide a case against it. — Bartricks

    You do not seem to understand the discursive method being employed here.

    I hope it will become clear to you in time.

    If you don't deny it, why do you deny my conclusion? — Bartricks

    Where do you see me denying your conclusion? Please cite me.

    My first goal is to explore what your premise implies in other areas.

    I agree that if your premise is true, and your premise implies "babies are bad to conceive because we can't get the yet-to-born-and-grow-into-an-adult person's consent makes it default wrong" then your premise also implies "government is default wrong be we likewise cannot get the consent of yet-to-be-born-and-voting-citizens".

    Now, to solve the surgeon issue of consent on unconscious patient you invoke "more good than harm" so "default consent is regrettable but we don't care about it in that situation, and you can apply the same to government "more good than harm", but then parents can also apply it to children "having children does more good than harm".

    My argument is that your premise and reasoning structure to get from "lack of consent is default wrong" to "conceiving babies is default wrong", if consistently applied also applies to governments being default wrong.

    Your only counter argument to this is a vague reference to "arguments somewhere that justify governments" that reside in a vast literature, or then simply denying it's relevant:

    What about your government cases? Well, exactly the same applies. They're simply not relevantly analogous to procreation cases. — Bartricks

    Did I say it's an analogy? No, I'm trying to apply the principle of morality of "lack of consent is default wrong (if it significantly affects the person)" to government. You've proposed a principle, but you seem to think principles can't be applied elsewhere.

    So all you're doing is pointing out that sometimes we are plausibly justified in doing things that significantly affect others without their prior consent - which isn't in dispute. — Bartricks

    Great, this isn't in dispute, so I guess you agree that as long as parents are plausibly justified in having children then all's ok, even if that significantly affects their yet-to-be-born baby. That argument structure isn't in dispute. Case seems to be closed.

    But keep in mind, I am not denying your premise here, you're denying your premise by arriving at contradictory treatment of your premise.

    What I am trying to demonstrate to you is that your argument does not live in a quarantine.

    You seem to be perfectly happy over-ruling your premise in the case of the surgeon, in the case of children, in the case of government. But then what does "default wrong" even mean if we dismiss it so easily?

    You want to live in a status quo world where the water runs and the tea flows, and you want to rely on completely normal and usual arguments that prop-up the status quo, but then, with surgical precision, you want to excise the minimum out of the status quo where it concerns people being happy about parents conceiving babies, most of the time, and carefully insert a stent of your new premise that implies conceiving babies is always bad, no one should do it, without disturbing any other organ of the body politic.

    This is an incredibly difficult task. Any tiny mistake and you end up with uncontrolled bleeding of the status quo: that a surgeon is wrong to force their (much less the government's) view of right and wrong onto their unconscious patient to make a plausible case that their doing more good than harm, that of course we need to ask children consent about everything (if we are worried about consent before their born it's preposterous to then immediately ignore it when they can make some physical sign of what they want), and certainly government's need just as much as parents the consent of the unborn for any action that will significantly affect the unborn (it takes a village to raise a child and so the whole village is default wrong not getting consent about any actions that significantly affect the unborn child).

    Once you navigate through all these issues, what I think you will find is that your argument is transforming with everyone of your posts to a consequentialist argument that the consent isn't really the problem, we easily ignore consent in every other case that it's logically impossible to resolve a situation based on consent, but rather the problem is the presumed harm the baby will eventually encounter.

    Procreation does not prevent something bad happening to the person who otherwise would not be created - as I said in my opening post (maybe you should re-read it). — Bartricks

    This is your actual argument, and it does not mention consent, but rather not-procreating necessarily avoids all harm to the not-born-infant ... but it also necessarily avoids all good things too.

    If the surgeon is "overall justified" in carrying out the surgery on the unconscious parent because it's likely to be more good than bad (saving the life, probably, is more good than the resulting pain and scars from being saved, in the moral system of the surgeon and not the patient, who we know nothing about and may have even just attempted suicide from which we can imply a disagreement with the surgeons ethics) then why not the parent if they too feel it's plausibly good conditions for their child; likewise, if we ignore consent of real children because it does more good than harm to them why can't we ignore the consent of the unborn-child on the same grounds; and, finally, if we view government and social institutions, despite their problems, as overall justified if they have a plausible case for doing more good than harm concerning the future of their citizens, again why aren't parents allowed to make the same judgement call to their future citizen (if you allow me for a moment to make the Kantian claim that people are sovereign, i.e. have rights, over their own bodies).

    These questions are not simple to answer. Your premise is and your way of reasoning to your conclusion is a radical departure from how society has gotten along and what most people think is true.

    Are you convinced that not only is your argument true but that it doesn't affect much the rest of the status quo, because you have some plausible grounds to assume "sure, this is a very different thing than most people believe and radically alters the course of society (to no longer existing), but of course has no other radical consequence" because you've really thought it through? Or, rather, because you prefer a cowardly disposition and don't want to be a position of advocating for the ceasing-to-exist of society but then potentially living uncomfortable tea-lacking situations of society ceasing to function due to insufficient consent of the people that would be significantly affected by society's activity to those ends.

    This is a reply to the final bit - no, I don't 'want' antinatalism to be true. Even if I did - and I repeat, I don't - that would be irrelevant to the credibility of the argument. — Bartricks

    Again, in another realm where you have actually put in the work to understand your own argument and it's implications, maybe this would be a point for you.

    However, in this realm, you've just ignored most of the criticism you've encountered here, not just from me but the other posters (and I don't even have the worst criticism, of principle, just showing that lot's of other things seem to be implied by your principle which a brave person, if they were honest, would simply accept), which indicates a psychology in denial and doesn't want to question its world view, but wants the argument to be right to satisfy ulterior motives that the argument serves or then your own ego.

    Or so is my hypothesis about your state of mind. Let's put it to the test, can you deal with not only the criticism in this response but can you go back and actually deal with all the criticism you've already received? Surely, someone who "don't 'want' antinatalism to be true" would take all criticism offered very seriously.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    The argument is Kantian and it isn't my fault you don't know what that word means. This thread is not about a label, it is about an argument. — Bartricks

    You don't want to argue your point about the label, but you're certain your right about that point and arguing about it?

    Maybe, in other contexts, against less experienced debaters, maybe you'd be scoring a point by trying to "be above labels and focused on content", and maybe you're imagining even now that because in some hypothetical realm you've scored a point that you've scored a point in this realm. Well it's time to get for realz.

    I've already said that if you don't want to discuss the label, fine, let's discuss the content, but then you have to accept that people may point out why you may have mislabeled your argument. If you don't care about labels, then your point of "go make another thread about it then", is a good one, another point in the hypothetical realm where nothing needs be connected or your discussing with people who don't know how to argue.

    But you do care about labels as you insist your right about the label and I'm wrong. Your insistence is incompatible with your claim you don't care about labels and is also incompatible with your claim that people who want to argue about the label should do so in another thread: You are arguing about the label!

    The label is correct, but I am not debating it further here - start your own thread about Kantianism and what it has to involve if you want. But this thread was started by me - me, not you - to discuss a particular 'argument', not a 'label'. Okay?! — Bartricks

    This is exactly what arguing about the label looks like. You say you're right and I'm wrong, the exact format we'd expect of a difference that merits arguing.

    Simply cause you started the thread doesn't give you some "last word right" about a claim. If you really do want that argument to be elsewhere, what's coherent with that desire is "well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, people can start a new thread to discuss that, but I'm not interested in the label so let's get back on track". But you don't say this, you insist you're right, without citing Kant, any secondary sources of Kant, anyone defending the idea that the name Kant now represents a whole class of ideas that may include things radically incompatible with anything Kant ever said, nor have you offered such a commentary.

    Furthermore, I've already stated I'm fine with you continuing to call your argument Kantian if you clarify what you mean by that. I've described, in my view, the core elements of Kantianism that make Kantianism incompatible with your argument. If you said, well "my version doesn't include any of that, and Kantianism to me is just about respecting consent", I've already stated I'd be willing, for the purpose of this discussion, to continue with your definition of Kantianism.

    It may surprise you that I also don't care about labels, I care about meaning; it just so happens that we can't just magically infuse our words with the meaning we want, we need to use social conventions to get started (i.e words and what they would usually mean in the given context). To me Kantianism is not a social convention describing what you want in this context, and so just liable to just create confusion; now, if you want to give me a long history lesson to show I'm mistaken, and most people are not confused by the social convention (i.e. words) and how your using it, great; maybe I am wrong. Now, if you don't care about history or what the social convention is, you can just say "well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but I'm making a new social convention and by Kantianism I mean such and such"; or you could follow the convention in such contexts and coin a new term like "anti-natalism Kantianism" to indicate your attempting to make the intersection of these two concepts.

    There are lot's of options other than just insisting that your right but also insisting that you need not back up your reasons that you think your right because the point doesn't matter to you. That's just a silly position.

    As for what you say about governments and surgeons - which premise are you trying to challenge with these examples? Presumably this one:

    1. It is default wrong to perform an act if doing it will significantly affect another person without their prior consent.     — Bartricks

    Probably? Literally the reference to your premise is in quotes in the second paragraph of my argument:

    Other posters have outlined the problems in principle that you need to overcome, but you seem genuinely flustered by the people here not agreeing to your premise, which you have finally been kind enough to reveal that "lack of consent is wrong by default". — boethius

    Again, maybe in another hypothetical realm where I mentioned you "revealed your premise" but then went onto argue something without making explicit what premise I'm talking about, point for you. In this realm, unfortunately, it's a silly mistake to not read someone's criticism and then take the high ground of linguistic accuracy (again, incompatible with the wanton labeling move, a very imprecise game).

    I'm not even citing myself way-back somewhere, but the exact post your replying to.

    Yes? Well, a) how does it challenge that premise given that the premise does not say that it is always and everywhere wrong? You need to show that it is not even default wrong, not just that there are a whole range of scenarios in which it is overall justified - for by definition, that is consistent with premise 1. — Bartricks

    No, I don't need to show anything.

    You don't understand my point, read it again.

    I'm saying, let's assume it's default wrong; first question for you, what principles come into play that override the "default wrong" for cases of surgery? If it's the presumption that the person wants to live, why not apply the same principle to the pre-conception unborn. Why does the "default wrong" not important in one case, but suddenly is important in the next?

    These are questions for you, based on your premise.

    And you explain:

    Of course surgeons are often going to be justified in performing operations without a person's consent. But a) it is regrettable that they have to do without it (if, for instance, a surgeon performed an operation without getting the consent of someone who was perfectly capable of giving it, then we'd all recognise that what the surgeon did was seriously wrong; and when consent is impossible its absence is still bad, it just doesn't operate to make the act overall wrong because there are countervailing moral positives that make it overall right. — Bartricks

    Ok, so it's regrettable we can't ask the unborn pre-conceived, let's assume that's bad, just like the surgeon who still operates because of countervailing moral positives, anyone wanting to conceive can invoke the same countervailing positives to justify conceiving a baby.

    Or not? What are the countervailing positives, why do they matter in one case and not the other?

    b) in the case of governments you can't seriously be maintaining that consent is irrelevant to their legitimacy? — Bartricks

    Did I say that? Please cite me if you think I said that.

    Now, I think most would agree here that there can be just governments and unjust governments, but even concerning only just governments, an argument defending a just government can't possibly be based on the consent or everyone that government significantly affects. Not only a single person not consenting then makes the government "default wrong", but many can't consent, in particular unborn children. — boethius

    I explicitly say "an argument defending a just government can't possibly be based on the consent or everyone that government significantly affects". Everyone, does this imply I'm saying "consent is irrelevant", or am I saying literally " an argument defending a just government can't possibly be based on the consent or everyone that government significantly affects" because that's what I literally said.

    I'm aware governments try to seek consent of people on occasion, sometimes even most of them.

    That leaves whole classes of cases where the government ignores consent. Consent of individual that disagree with the government and don't consent to anything (do we care about that, no). Consent of suspects under arrest. Consent of children.

    Most importantly ...

    I mean blimey, there's a vast, vast literature on what it takes for governments to be justified in their activities and a great, great deal of it focusses on the issue of consent. — Bartricks

    Yes! There is a lot of literature and theories, and none of them obtain the consent of unborn preconceived children!

    If it's not legitimate to conceive a child without their consent, what's the legitimacy basis of the government which also operates without consent of the unborn preconceived? And in so operating, significantly affecting these future children of parents that didn't get the anti-natalist message as well as anti-natalists that made a mistake and birthed a child.

    Isn't the whole government default wrong by your definition? What's the countervailing moral positives to justify it compatible with your premise? (a great many theories incompatible with your premise don't help your case)

    If "perpetuating society in a coherent fashion possibly with the consent of, if not everyone, at least a bunch of people (but not children, never children)" is a countervailing moral positive that makes government ok, why can't parents chime in and say "we're perpetuating society too and that's a countervailing moral positive that makes it all overall good, despite the lack of consent of the unborn preconceived being in itself regrettable".

    So the fact that most citizens in a community have not, in fact, given explicit consent to be governed is an age old problem - now, I am not saying that some kind of extreme anarchist position is right, I am just pointing out that it speaks to the overwhelming plausibility of premise 1 that virtually every political philosopher there has ever been recognises that there is an issue here that needs to be thought about, not just dismissed. — Bartricks

    Again, read:

    Now, I think most would agree here that there can be just governments and unjust governments, but even concerning only just governments, an argument defending a just government can't possibly be based on the consent or everyone that government significantly affects. Not only a single person not consenting then makes the government "default wrong", but many can't consent, in particular unborn children. — boethius

    I say "but even concerning only just governments", so I'm not even talking about dictatorships and bad governance. Of course political philosophers have thought about consent, it's called democracy. But does democracy represent even everyone alive consenting to it? No. Does democracy represent the consent of people yet to be born? No.

    What's the justification of government based on your premise?

    It seems to me there is no justification based on your premise, and why would you even be concerned about that? Why not embrace the end of society that anti-natalism entails?

    Now, one option you have is to indeed say "that's correct, we should not have babies and we should not have government, let's speed up the end when and where we can".

    Another option is to bring in more premises that somehow justify government but not having babies. You've referenced the "vast, vast literature on what it takes for governments to be justified" which parts of this vast literature view the preservation of society as irrelevant to government? I think you will find if you cared to read part of this vast literature, most of the authors assume preserving and perpetuating society is a good thing and the main activity of government (if not actively, making conditions favorable to it happening); if they (these political philosophers) are backing you up about justifying the idea of government, why are you dismissing anything they've said about preserving society. Can you find even one theory that's justifying government to preserve society but ... only until everyone is dead of old age because there are no more children.

    You want anti-natalism to be true but you also want government to continue in order to live your comfortable tea-drinking life, it's up to you to show how these are compatible. You can't just say "well, people have justifications for government"; it's likely a great many of them would disagree with anti-natalism, so some new arguments are required.
  • Rebuttal to a Common Kantian Critique
    I don't think that many people really intend to be lazy, for example. — Terrapin Station

    Though I think this general topic is up for debate -- for instance, in another thread I defended the position people can intend to believe lies that they know on some level to be lies -- in this case, context of a job (and I even added the sub-clause of "doing the minimum effort on the job" to qualify what I am referring to when I say lazy), someone who decides to put in the minimum, for whatever reason, I agree may not be intending to "be a lazy person", but that doesn't exclude them forming the goal to be lazy at that particular job (whether they don't like their employer, don't think the effort asked is commensurate with the pay, or they just think it's what cool kids do, they can even put in extra effort to be as lazy as possible, then even brag to friends about it; more than a few negligence cases have gone down this way).
  • Rebuttal to a Common Kantian Critique
    ↪Terrapin Station


    To clarify to you and other readers why I'm teasing out that point, it's to show how much our system is Kantian.

    Criminal liability is never on the person who really does have good intentions, if that can be demonstrated. Likewise, truth telling in court never creates a criminal liability. These liabilities can almost never be created due to these things regardless of consequences that then ensue. These are very Kantian principles and society functions with them.

    Truth telling under duress (for ordinary citizens) almost never creates a criminal liability (nearly all cases we can imagine where it's debatable are going to be agents of the state, not the "murderer at the door" scenario Kant addresses; maybe we can put our minds together to create a situation for an ordinary citizen that has similar problems, but it's not easy to do and it will be far removed from an ordinary crime of "gun in face followed by truth divulged"). And I know of almost no argument that not only is one liable to not-tell-the-truth to the murderer, but one is liable to make up a crafty lie. So even people who defend the liar on moral grounds, I have never seen an argument that there is also legal liability to come up with a good lie in such situations (and this is the point Kant's making in the murderer-at-the-door essay).

    Kant's defense (in terms of criminal liability) of the truth teller to the murderer is pre-ambled with "a yes or no answer cannot be avoided" and so Kant's playing the "what if game"; all situations I can think of where criminal liability for truth telling emerge, it is next to the option of telling the truth that one may not answer that question due to various pre-existing duties (and usually, but not always, duress can excuse those duties; i.e. if you phone up a banker and he just passes out the true details needed to access client accounts this is certainly a crime of the banker and likely civil liability of the bank, but if you kidnap the bankers family and coerce the banker to giving these true details, no criminal liability is created with the truth telling; for such kinds of situations to create criminal liability on the truth-teller, are going to require agents of the state protecting nuclear weapons, or something similarly super important, to, maybe, make those agents criminally liable for not resisting coercion, at some extremely high threshold, that they've likely previously agreed to; and again they would usually not be liable for failing to make up a good enough lie, even more extreme situations are needed for that to be in up for debate).
  • Rebuttal to a Common Kantian Critique
    The basic idea is that if you didn't take normal, "reasonable" precautions, you're going to have some degree of liability due to negligence. — Terrapin Station

    Yes, that's the basic idea of negligence, but not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm making is that the negligence is in intention despite not "wishing for bad things to happen" in our legal doctrines. Someone unfamiliar with our these legal frameworks would not immediately realize this, because society doesn't talk this way. We usually say "sure, you didn't intend for the crane to fall, but you were irresponsible in managing the crane, so much so it's criminal"; what's left out is that the determining of "irresponsible" requires intentional faults (cutting corners to save money, drinking on the job, or just laziness, the intention to provide minimal effort, at a level incompatible with what the task demands etc.).
  • Rebuttal to a Common Kantian Critique
    ↪Terrapin Station


    It's not convoluted, I am trying to highlight the difference between the colloquial "I didn't intend that to happen" and the legal technical requirement to find fault in intention to determine criminal liability. If one can really show one's intentions where completely responsible and what seems like criminal liability is due to incompetence that oneself didn't have the competence to realize, it's possible to shift the liability up the chain to whoever hired you.

    If "I didn't intend it" really is true, and really has facts to back that statement up with all the responsible steps taken that align with that intention, most legal systems don't find criminal liability; one really did not wrong in our legal doctrines regardless of the events that one "physically caused" (in at least a proximate sense).

    Making this technical distinction with "I didn't intend to" in the common sense of just "well I didn't think that would happen, even if, yes, I realize it was a big risk to drink and drive and I could have taken steps to avoid that", is not a straightforward clarification, since the same words are used.
  • Rebuttal to a Common Kantian Critique
    That's not necessarily the case. The could be liable due to negligence. It depends on the situation. Basically, you're not off the hook no matter what just because you didn't intend to kill (or maim or whatever) anyone. — Terrapin Station

    Did you read my next sentence?
  • Rebuttal to a Common Kantian Critique
    As to good intentions, those pave the road to hell. Therefore, not good intentions, but right intentions, a whole other animal, and nowhere near as easy. — tim wood

    I have to interject here and point out that right intentions are by definition good intentions. When we say "good intentions" are no excuse in a non-technical-philosophic context (which Kantianism is not), what is actually being meant is that "plausible deniability well-wishing" is no excuse.

    For instance, if someone really did not intend to cause the death of another individual, even if they physically did, it's ruled an accident; the intentions where good and so there is no liability. If someone caused the death due to creating circumstances that they could have easily avoided, even though colloquially we understand the meaning of "I didn't mean that to happen", the liability comes precisely because their irresponsible actions leading up to the accident betray an "insufficient intention to not kill someone by avoidable accident".

    Though I agree otherwise with your rebuttal, there are some points you maybe missing that can add further weight to your position (which I would tend to agree is sufficient to show Kantianism isn't fatally menaced by this line of criticism; as even if it was, then that more important maxim by which the maxim not to lie is constrained would just be the more important maxim; Kant has hard time of conceiving of a more important maxim than the truth, but for good reason).

    The specific murderer at the door scenario Kant addresses is first and foremost in terms of legal doctrine against a criticism that this sort of truth telling would collapse society.

    Today, the best defense isn't Kant's original defense, but to point out Kant's legal doctrine is extremely popular, most people and governments accept it; so, clearly society can function with such a doctrine.

    If a parent, with a gun pointed in their face, told a true answer to a criminal about the whereabouts of their children, we do not hold the parents liable. Likewise, if someone tells the truth in court under oath and this leads to harms, even if those harms can be argued to be greater than whatever the court accomplished with the truth, the truth teller is not only never liable for damages due to the truth telling, but always liable for telling a lie in court regardless of how good the excuse is. These legal doctrines are direct near mirror reflections of Kant's position.

    The last case, of lying to a criminal creates a liability, is also true in legal doctrines of most countries. If one makes a lie to guide events to a better destination, one must get it right! If a lie is irresponsible and actually causes far worse outcomes, that creates a liability. Though in criminal activity under duress things get complicated and extreme and most lying would be excusable on the same grounds that telling the truth is excusable under duress. However, an adjacent example elucidates the basic principle, telling someone a lie that then leads to harm from that person acting on the assumption of that lie creates a liability, but telling the truth almost never creates a liability, if the person causes harm based on that true information the responsibility lies with them.

    Also of note, Kant only says, at least as that essay goes, that the lie creates a liability, that does not by extension mean it is immoral, just one is now responsible (minimizing responsibility is not a Kantian principle).

    For instance, one really can have a good enough excuse to lie under oath (in ones moral system, that may or may not be Kantian), and accept that the courts can never accept that as "good enough to excuse the crime of perjury" and must punish all cases of perjury, including one's morally justified perjury, not merely for the practical aim of maintaining credibility but the much more important reason of principle that if "perjury can be ok, then all cases of perjury can be adjudicated to determine if it's ok or not-ok instance of perjury, in further court proceeding in which perjury may also be legal and need to be adjudicated, and so on and so forth". In other-words, one can commit perjury on moral grounds while simultaneously support society's prosecution of the perjury if one is found out; this is not a contradictory position and highlights how and why morality does not equate to legality.

    Lastly, an important point on this issue is that society really can function with only truth telling. Even if everyone tells the murderer the truth, that does not stop people tracking the murderer down, apprehending the murderer and removing the threat from society and deciding what to do with the murderer in a truth-telling based system of discourse. Kant was responding to a criticism that society would completely fall apart, not a criticism that in some edge cases it will seem to us justifiable to lie; since the criticism is about society functioning at all, Kant responds from a legal point of view. Would it happen sometimes that the murderer does more harm from people telling them the truth on their murder spree? probably. Likewise, does a society dedicated to the truth that doesn't tolerate lies breed less murderous rage? probably too. And furthermore, is a society so dedicated to the truth less likely to collectively murder far more people in organized and unjust wars? arguably, yes. So, like most (possibly all) points consequentialists make, it does not really resolve anything, and it's easy to defend Kant even in radical truth telling (it does not lead to absurd results, it's just uncomfortable to a society comfortable with lying in marketing, to get ahead, in politics; and we are seeing today that that comfort doesn't stay comfortable for long etc.).

    I think the myth that there is a dichotomy stems from there being too many defenses of Kants view to choose from.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    ↪Bartricks


    You seem to be again back to abandoning your argument as "Kantian", and simply focusing on the consent.

    Other posters have outlined the problems in principle that you need to overcome, but you seem genuinely flustered by the people here not agreeing to your premise, which you have finally been kind enough to reveal that "lack of consent is wrong by default".

    I've already mentioned that the, pretty big example in my view, that the basic nature of government is based on not getting everyone's consent of people affected by government actions, which are very, very significant. There are various theories that society in general or governments in particular can propose to prop-up "consent of the governed" ... but people don't have to consent to those theories. I.e. the government didn't ask my consent to tax me and threaten me with jail if I don't comply, and if the government or anyone else offers a rational justification that my consent is implied, well I didn't consent to have a significant and painful challenge to my belief system thrown at me.

    Now, I think most would agree here that there can be just governments and unjust governments, but even concerning only just governments, an argument defending a just government can't possibly be based on the consent or everyone that government significantly affects. Not only a single person not consenting then makes the government "default wrong", but many can't consent, in particular unborn children. Now, I of course realize your advocating children not be born, but insofar as it's likely children will continue to be born anyway (for at least a time) how are the significant actions government takes in the meantime possibly justifiable if the (unfortunate as these births may be from the perspective of anti-natalism) unborn children aren't obtained.

    I use the government as an example because anti-natalists are usually not for actively destroying society as it is now, but propose we get along, which includes having these governments around, and just let society peter out through not conceiving and giving birth. Insofar as this is the case, that your anti-natalist proposal is not by extension advocating throwing in the towel on any social organization at all mean-time, an idea of justice and good governance is required, which cannot be predicated on the consent of everyone, it just doesn't work as shown above. So, how do you deal with government actions that significantly affect people that do not consent, not only people alive today but the unborn?

    To be perfectly clear, the lack of consent of the unborn in your proposal is relevant to it being right not to conceive them and wrong to conceive them, so it seems to follow that the lack of consent of the unborn (whether born to people that are acting wrongly and birthing new people or then to anti-natalists that made a contraceptive mistake) likewise cannot be obtained for government action today and so no government action (that significantly affects future people) is justifiable.

    This is one hurdle, and I use government as the example because your idea that you can live peacefully and never significantly affect people without their consent is not because that's not what you do, but because those actions of yours are performed on your behalf through the agency of government you support through your quotidian arrangement, out of the way as it maybe, and participation in society. You are living in a dream world if you think this is not the case, and your peaceful tea drinking is the limit to your affect on others.

    But there are other hurdles as well. For instance, it's generally recognized that surgeons should have the consent of their patients ... unless they can't get that consent, the default is not "this operation is a significant affect on this person and therefore wrong without consent" but the presumption is to save people's lives even if they are unable to consent, such as due to being unconscious, because individual life has value. Likewise, even when consent is possible it is not in itself sufficient to close the debate. Fairly young children can make informed consent, but the government does not respect the moral autonomy of children, but places it with the parents and even then can overrule the consent of the parents if there is sufficient cause to (i.e. that the parents are not acting in the interests of their children, as we usually suppose, and that interest cannot be derived from consent, as we've already decided that's irrelevant for this issue to even arise, but rather that the presumption that life has value; if we did not both A. presume a child's life has value and B. the child's consent to action required to protect that value is irrelevant, then there is no basis to intervene to protect children from harm, nor basis to intervene to protect children from self-harm that they do not consent to, and the argument simply repeats when we want to remove the consent society has displaced from the child to the parent).

    Not only is the above lack of relevance of child consent in lot's of things a major cliff you'll need to scale (as other posters have already pointed out), since if we don't seek the consent of children to protect those children from harm on the presumption of their right to live then why is consent suddenly relevant before they are even alive for us to ignore their ability to consent until we decide otherwise? But it doesn't end there.

    First responders and surgeons not only save the lives of the unconscious, but also the failed suicides, so if "well, we presume injured people would consent to live ... but we presume the unborn don't want to live!" is even an argument, how do you deal with saving the lives of failed suicides where there's strong evidence that there is no consent for such significant life saving measures.

    Now, you can advocate for doctors not saving unconscious failed suicides, that the presumption that unconscious people want to be saved is not valid and therefore the presumption the unborn want to be born is not valid on similar grounds, that all actions significantly affecting children require their consent (i.e. feeding a baby requires consent as it significantly affects the baby to be fed or not), that no government action is justifiable if one person significantly affected does not consent to it including the unborn, and you'll still have the problems of principle to deal with that other posters have brought up.

    My purpose here is to point out the enormous nature of the task you have set yourself; consent, as practiced today in society, is not straightforward at all like a "default wrong" that you suggest -- we easily cast it aside when more important things are at play (from arresting criminal suspects without their consent, to coercing everyone to pay taxes regardless of consent), when we don't find the consent credible (children and mentally ill), or consent is not available (unconscious or yet to be born) -- so you'll need to show us why when society ignores consent it maybe "default wrong" but actually right for other reasons that don't simultaneously undermine anti-natalism (the "right wrongs" that has been described to you), or then accept what seem like the obvious implications of your position which is no "significant actions" are ever justified including to do nothing and die (as loved ones are significantly affected by you thirsting to death too); which can be a coherent anti-natalist position as far as it goes (if we shouldn't be alive, we are perhaps in an impossible moral bind and nothing at all can be justified, except through careful reasoning that avoids the pitfalls of self-refuting nihilism, somehow we can still know that the only action that "for sure" is not justifiable amongst all the equally not justifiable actions, more wrong among only wrong actions, is to have more children).
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    I should also say that you seem fundamentally to misunderstand Kant's ethics - so, you say that Kant places supreme value on one's own value and that it somehow follows from this that therefore Kant would be in favour of promoting the existence of more people. — Bartricks

    My argument of why it's difficult to derive anti-natalism form Kant's ethics was an outline, to backup my claim that your OP maybe a deontological argument for anti-natalism but does not seem to me Kantian. You provide no reason in your OP of why your title is an accurate description and then clarified you just want to discuss your argument as it is, that the label Kantian doesn't matter to you, which is fine, I just don't have much to add on-top of other posters who have already spoke.

    Now it seems the label Kantian does seem to matter to you, and discussing that is fine too, it seems relevant to the title of the thread.

    I do not say Kant places "supreme value" on the individual, but fundamental value.

    This fundamental value is posited in order to assign value to thoughts and conclusions. If I have no value, my conclusion that I have no value has no value; which is a problematic starting point for thought and action.

    Kant also places fundamental value on civil society, that duties and justice depend on participation in civil society. If one were to "opt-out" of civil society, Kant basically accepts that "law of the jungle" arguments would be valid, and so places a moral obligation to enter civil society relation if one can, in order for right action to be determinable.

    Kant doesn't necessarily say these are the "supreme good" but they are good things in Kant's system.

    The typical problem of anti-natalism in Kant's system is that it implies oneself and society should not exist, this undermines the above core principles. Oneself and others have value in Kantianism, "one does not wish for oneself to not-exist". In other words the principle is not universalizable, one wishes ones own existence despite one not "deciding to be born", and therefore one gives the benefit of the doubt that other people who likewise did not "decide to be born" also merit existence.

    These value argument about oneself and society precede arguments of "right action" in civil society, which depends a lot, as you say, on respecting everyone's free will and as ends in themselves.

    Keep in mind also that Kant is a deist, and holds typical views that creation has meaning and humans are created from a divine source, so "being born" is perhaps mysterious but isn't bad.

    Now, you can take away Kant's deism, take away assigning value to society, take away assigning value to civil society, take away assigning value to oneself, and with these qualification and still call such as system Kantian. If you make it clear you're not interested in these aspects of Kantianism, ok (if you explain your label, I have no problem discussing henceforth with that explanation for this discussion).

    Or, you can attempt to show that anti-natalism follows reasonably from deism, assigning value to oneself and one's birth, assigning value to society and it's continuation (up until now at least).

    But I have not seen such an argument; your argument seems very focused on consent, which plays a part in many moral and legal questions in Kantianism but isn't fundamental; Kant does not try to derive all moral questions from consent. Maybe other Kantians view things differently, or you are able to cite any of Kant's writing that would lead us to take consent as fundamental in Kantianism.

    As a clarifying note, free will and consent are not the same thing. There's lot's of things civil society allows and other people do generally that I don't consent to, and there's no argument in Kantianism that my consent is required; sometimes consent is relevant and sometimes not.

    So, the fact you think that, having established that X is valuable, Kant would then proceed to promote that value shows that you don't understand Kant's view, or a Kantian view. — Bartricks

    The concept of value doesn't somehow disappear in Kantianism or deontological system generally. When Kant says "treat others as ends in themselves, not means to an end" this is assigning value to individuals beyond the value they can contribute to some other goal. Individuals have value and thus should be respected. Kant values a lot of things.

    Kant values justice and then promotes justice, maximum justice. Kant values truth and promotes more truth being discovered and being available to people, maximum truth (too maximum truth for some people, that this is the usual criticism of Kant). Kant values the individual's moral autonomy and promotes respect for individual moral autonomy. Kant value society and promotes the continuation of society.

    Kantians generally don't view consequentialists as doing something fundamentally different in moral philosophy, just doing it in a seemingly clever but actually stupid way. It seems clever to talk of "happiness maximization", but if this concept can't be actually be constructed without reference to the good (and no consequentialist, utilitarian, emotivist has ever done so), then you require a deontology to input into your "happiness maximizing" scheme: the same moral philosophy would result (if one wasn't so happy to be doing economics in the interim that the scheme actually gets completed someday). That consequentialists require determining what is valuable does not somehow exclude deontologists, much less Kantians, from also determining what has value.

    As mentioned, having "as many babies as possible" is not universalizable as this turns people into the means to the end of having babies, but neither is "no babies including myself should ever be born" without collapsing the basic premise of Kantianism (that oneself has value, enough to reason and draw meaningful conclusions and the capacity for right action), so the straightforward Kantian conclusion is "babies sometimes". I do not see any counter argument to this in what you have written.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    At what point have I said that Kantian ethics and deontological ethics are one and the same? — Bartricks

    Your title is "The Kantian case against procreation" then you go on to say that you don't really mean to bring Kant into it, just want to discuss a deontological argument you propose. I have no problem with this, but it seems reasonable for Kantians to point out the argument doesn't seem to follow from Kant's framework and outline the reasons why (for people interested in Kantianism who click on a thread starting with the word Kant).
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    Speaking of Neocons, what does it mean now that Mr. Bolton has gotten the axe? — Teller

    Trump is not a neocon, all evidence points to Trump being guided solely by what Trump sees as good for Trump.

    That ignorant smart (not really) ass Mr. Carlson among the other deplorables at Fox now describes Mr. Bolton as a "man of the left". I've heard many things about Mr. Bolton over the years, but a man of the left? Come on. — Teller

    Carlson is a propagandist. This particular propaganda servers several purposes. First, simply saying Bolton is to the left of Trump appeases Trump supporters that Trump is still far right; the content of the argument doesn't really matter, it sounds good.

    This is the same reason why Trump took jibes at Bolton for being "Mr. Toughguy" followed by stating that he's tougher than Bolton (lot's of tough things they're doing was too tough for Mr. Tough guy), this plays to his audiences intuitions that more wars is not what they want (what Bolton's toughness represents) but at the same plays to the "conservative are tough" virtue signalling by just saying "Bolton wasn't tough enough" (is actually a phony tough guy beside the "real toughness" of Trump). Trump supporters can thus both be comforted by not going to war, as they've learned it's painful through recent experience, but still live in the imagination land of themselves and Trump being the true warriors willing to go to war at the drop of a hat.

    The other thing this piece of propaganda accomplishes is just "left bad, Bolton out, Bolton therefore bad, Bolton therefore left". This doesn't have any of the subtleties of the above tiptoeing around loving war and the empire but seemingly backing away from war and more empire building, because Trump supporters don't require any basis in fact or plausible argument to attack the left. This is the same category as saying the Nazi's weren't fascists but socialists because socialist is right there in their title; if they were fascists they would be "the national fascist" party; those Trump supporters that know this makes not sense on any level repeat it anyway to "trigger the snowflakes" and those that genuinely have zero historical knowledge make every effort to keep it that way so that they can genuinely believe Nazi's where socialists in league with communists and trade-unionists.

    Pulling any of these threads of course reveals a completely absurd world view required to backup any of these claims, but the key to this sort of propaganda is to never play the "backup claims" game. All statements are just weapons against the opposition, to bring supporters to rally around a feels-good chant and show impenetrable solidarity by openly mocking the idea of civil discourse or then to frustrate and waste the time of the opposition in getting them to devote time to trying to explain such basic facts and logical rules that it's hard to explain to someone refusing to accept any premise no matter how basic.

    And it also serves another purpose of keeping the myth alive that republicans are for small government, by equating big government with the left. They don't want word to get out that other forms of government, like fascism and corporatism, are also for big-government insofar as it benefits the wealthy and powerful (bailouts, standing army to expand empire, large police apparatus to put down dissent, big government surveillance); the Nazi's had a big government going on: therefore Hitler was a lefty.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    ↪boethius I do not understand your point. Yes, there are consequentialist arguments against procreation. But there are also deontological ones. The one I have presented here is squarely deontological. — Bartricks

    My point is that that Kantianism is not synonymous with deontological ethics. Your title is "The Kantian case against procreation".

    If Kantians here on the forum let is slide, people may assume anti-natalism is easily derivable from Kantianism. I'm not saying it's impossible to make such an argument, but I'm pointing out you haven't provided one which you yourself admit:

    Labels ultimately do not matter. But 'Kantian ethics' and 'Kant's ethics' are not the same, the former being far broader than the latter and not held hostage to the letter of what Kant's writings. — Bartricks

    Well labels do matter, else you wouldn't try to make the distinction between 'Kantian ethics' and 'Kant's ethics' in the next sentence. And indeed all words are labels for things, be those things objects or concepts or cultural processes of some sort. "Labels" don't matter is an adage usually about labeling people and then assuming those labels constrain those people's actions, beliefs or potential for growth. A pharmacists would certainly defend correct labeling of things in their context.

    As for the content, I agree Kantian Ethics is not synonymous with Kant's ethics, which is why my response focused on core principles of Kantianism, not simply pointing out that if Kant was an anti-natalist he probably would have said so.

    Kant places fundamental value, more fundamental than the categorical imperative, on one's own value as well as society as a body politic. The direct corollary to that is that propagating society through births is also good (though not obligatory as that would turn people into the ends to the means of propagating society: i.e. it's not an obligation but it's not immoral to have babies, nor separate from circumstances).

    I don't see anyway to go from Kants core principles to anti-natalism, and since that's not even your objective I'm just clarifying to the people unfamiliar with Kant that the title of your post does not match the argument you are trying to make. It's reasonable people dropping in here maybe expecting Kantians to weigh in on your title, so I am contributing this.

    For your argument in terms of a different, not-Kantian, deolontologic argument for anti-natalism, I don't have any major contribution that other posters don't already seem to be getting at; but if I see something amiss I will contribute.

    If you ask my own position, it would be the Kantian argument of "babies sometimes" outlined above; the consent argument (again which is not a core Kantian principle, as civil society, which Kant is for, does things people don't consent to all the time; is the defining feature of government), other posters seem to be adequately addressing.
  • The Kantian case against procreation
    So, it would seem that on these Kantian grounds - Kantian because it is something about the nature of the act, namely the fact the act is one that has not been consented to - we have reaosn to believe that procreation is wrong. — Bartricks

    I'd just like to address the argument here that anti-natalism is somehow intrinsically or then thematically Kantian.

    First, Kantianism doesn't have a monopoly on "the nature of the act", which I understand you to mean the act in itself apart from it's consequences. The reason Kant rejects only considering consequences is that it just pushes the problem over, we then have to judge if those consequences are good. For instance, utilitarians strive to find consequences that make as many people happy as possible, with various schemes of how that could be in principle or in practice calculated, but it just begs the question "is it good to be happy" and what's "true happiness" (i.e. how do we test it).

    Kant's famous passage about this kind of reasoning mistake is the idea that "someone who is pleased to accomplish a duty is only motivated by the resulting pleasure" doesn't work because the person needs some idea of the duty independent of the pleasure of accomplishing it to identify it as a duty in the first place; otherwise, anything fits the bill equally well.

    Utilitarianism has the same problem that it needs to avoid "people are happy when they see the situation is good" -- i.e. "people are happy when they live in a good society, have good friends, and good things happen and they do good deeds", if any of those statements are true then utilitarianism gets stuck in a loop, unless a definition of "good" is inputted to close the loop (which the whole point of utilitarianism is to side-step, even the question of whether utilitarianism itself is good).

    Anti-natalism is fundamentally a utilitarian argument, just trying to get around the above argument by substituting "minimizing suffering" for "maximizing happiness".

    Kant, I would wager, would object on the same grounds, that the anti-natalists have not defined what the good is and hence nor the bad. This would be the start of criticizing anty-natalism from a Kantian point of view. Unless human existence is not more nuanced than "any suffering, tested by pain signals to the brain, at all makes life worthless and not worth living" the basic argument doesn't follow, on suffering grounds at least as suffering does not immediately equate to "evil / bad" (the athlete suffers, etc.).

    However, what's clear is anti-natalism is fundamentally anti-Kantian, the basis of the categorical imperative is that others have intrinsic value which is the basis to assume one's own intrinsic value (which is a necessary assumption to assign value to anything about oneself including any philosophical conclusions). Due to this foundation of Kantianism, the argument can't be derived that people shouldn't have babies as then one is arguing oneself should not have been born and one has no value. I.e. the maxim that "no one should have babies" cannot be universalized without collapsing the foundation of Kantianism; likewise, the maxim "people should have babies all the time as much as possible" also can't be universalized as that would convert people to the means to the end of making more babies, but people are ends in themselves; in other words, 'maybe people should have babies sometimes" is the only Kantian position here.
  • Why is Ayn Rand not Accepted Academically?
    3) Ayn Rand's objectivism is a resell of older classical philosophy done in a light-weight manner. — ssu

    I have returned from my travels, and finally have the time to deliver the promised goods of why Ayn Rand is neither a rehash of classical ancient Greek philosophy nor can be somehow associated with the enlightenment, lest anyone fall upon this thread and believe there's no backing up these claims when the bill comes due.

    Though I think we have come to agree on most things, I think it's important to clarify that Rand isn't "light weight" good classical philosophy in a novel form, but completely incompatible with the positions of any classical philosopher.

    Now that I'm back home, I even have my copy of the Fountain Head to draw on, that some misguided economically irrational person left at a "take a book / leave a book" -- the worst insult I have ever seen thrown at an author's message -- which I needed to rectify by taking it without leaving anything.

    The reasons are very simple.

    The core theme of classical philosophy is the tension between the interests of the individual and the interests of the group. As society's became more complex, the link between the interests of the individual and the group became more indirect and abstract, and classical philosophers took note of this and tried to resolve the issue. The classical thinkers are unanimous that some sort of "virtue" (what we call social norms) is necessary to maintain society as they knew it, what we would call civilization.

    There are really only two sides to the debate in classical times:

    One side accepts the virtue needed to maintain society (honest trading and non-corrupted politicians, abstaining from thievery, soldiers dying in wars, general loyalty to the government and society, striving for excellence in ones domain to contribute etc.) and their differences are in how to argue for the general framework (why exactly it's reasonable to be virtuous) as well as what exactly is virtuous. All these virtue theories of one form or another are completely incompatible with Rand's thinking; they are all collectivist, differing only in how the collective is defined, why act in its interest, what is exactly the collective interest and to what extent one is morally bound to do so.

    The second group reject the framework, as does Rand, but unlike Rand they take the credible next step of completely accepting that getting rid of the rules upon which society is based gets rid of that kind of society. The best example is Diogenes who rejects all "your rules man" and on a first analysis we may see the attempt to make the Randian style ubermensch once free from social constraints. But after 2 seconds we quickly see there is no common thread between Diogenes and Rand. Diogenes lived as a beggar, and viewed civilization as basically a moral illness, whereas Rand believes rejecting society's rules can somehow deliver a better society in line with those social values she's rejecting. Diogenes does not actually reject virtue based ethics of acting in the best interest of society, just that those rules have been corrupting, and his own actions he justifies as teaching society (like Socrates) as a doctor healing wayward morals (i.e. he selflessly takes risk exposing the unjustifiable social norms and teaches real moral philosophy for the good of the collective).

    In other words, it's completely credible philosophically to reject social norms ... if one then accepts the corollary that those social norms would then radically change society if rejected on mass. Likewise, it's philosophically credible to claim one should reject social norms and take advantage of the people that keep to them (entering deals with no intention of honoring them; seeing no problem of stealing, murdering and raping when one can get away with it, and pursuing one's fancy without any reference to what most people would call "morals", whether in business or crime or government, getting ahead with unconstrained ruthless efficiency), and again accept the corollary that this only works because there are many fools to keep perpetuating the value of society. What's not credible is to reject social norms, such as selfless actions required to preserve society and perpetuate the value within, and then claim this will through some obscure convoluted process, that is never developed, result in a better version of that society: more creativity and inventions, less poverty (eventually), in short more peace and prosperity as the West understands it.

    Discussions with Randians just go round in circles from blaming any obvious example of greed resulting in bad social outcomes for the group (e.g. the Mafia) on the greedy, lazy selfishness of politicians and bureaucrats for not implementing the "right system" (legalizing drugs) that align incentives for the social good, with the irony completely lost on them.

    Rand's thinking only seems plausible if the basic structure of society is taken for granted: that impartial courts with uncorruptible judges will determine what belongs to who with impartiality, that police will take great personal risk to enforce these court definitions of property and not take bribes, soldiers will sacrifice their lives when needed (and follow lawful orders rather that stage a coup) to protect the entire system, and politicians will honestly manage these institutions for the good of all.

    No classical philosopher had such a preposterous view that these institutions could be maintained somehow without anyone taking personal risk for the good of the group (i.e. acting not for the preservation of the self but for the preservation of the collective), nor believed that some magical alignment of incentives could be created that keeps society humming along without anyone acting outside there self interest (and even less believed the more absurd implication of Randians views that such a system could come into existing by a similar process of people only looking out for themselves). To academics, the problems are so obvious that there's simply nothing to debate.

    Comparing to the Enlightenment is largely a repetition of the above. Nietzsche is the obvious candidate to substitute for Diogenes, but again we find Nietzsche is completely aware that the rejection of social norms will result in radical changes to society, that by definition are not evaluated as good from the perspective of those collapsing social norms: that the definition of "good" will become unmoored. There's of course lot's that is up for interpretation and debate of what Nietzsche believes is "actually good" or if he is even concerned with that question but just observing what's happening; but what is clear is that Nietzsche doesn't make any completely absurd claim such as "Christian norms collapsing will result in an even better Christian society!" much less anything remotely similar to the even more absurd claims of Rand.

    Rand can claim "greed is good" but the corollary is that judges accepting this idea will be greedy, as well police, soldiers and politicians, and civilization will quickly disintegrate if this idea is adopted en masse. She can say such a process would be good and that would be a credible positions; but she doesn't, she simply denies the obvious implications of her claim. If we look at figures such as Machiavelli we find similar incompatibilities with Rand.

    Randians think that an obvious fatal flaw in a position isn't a problem, that they just don't have to explain why public servants should serve the public good (they respect the troops, and that's enough), but that's not how academic philosophy is discussed: flaws need to be mended, and if they aren't a position loses credibility; and if there's not even an attempt then the proponents of that position are identified as crankish and delusional.

    However, if there is any issue with the above, or any other classical philosopher who is proposed as pre-saging Rand, it's best to discuss that first before rehashing the above argument vis-a-vis the enlightenment.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    ↪TheMadFool
    :victory:
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    ↪TheMadFool


    Yeah, I get the pessimism. Even if war with Iran is avoided, there's a genocide in Yemen as we speak, not to mention looming global ecological catastrophe.

    However, turning pessimism into fatalism seals our fate. If it we have duty to fight for justice when the odds are good, it is no less a duty when the odds are bad; but there needs to be some odds, if the result is guaranteed then duty dissolves in it.
  • Why is so much rambling theological verbiage given space on 'The Philosophy Forum' ?
    Why is so much rambling theological verbiage given space on 'The Philosophy Forum' ? — fresco

    You dislike poor arguments ... yet you have no backup for your premise. You haven't defined "rambling theological verbiage" nor given any specific examples that fit your definition.

    If you just want to be passive aggressive against religious people, I guess points for A. not addressing religious members with your question (such as, "Religious posters, why do you think x,y,z relevant to discuss") and B. bringing a reddit quality circle jerk to the forum for atheist members to pat themselves on the back, perhaps more. Key word here is being reddit, that's where you want to be with your material.

    Now it may be that the annals of this forum would yield examples of this type, but it seems to me, not recently. — fresco

    Since you're clearly new here and haven't seen the annals pass by first hand. A little history lesson.

    It takes a long time to build a forum. This is actually the fallout of the previous forum (just "philosophyforum") that fell apart when it was sold for scrap. It had taken a really long time for the previous forum to get to high quality discussion, which depends on a threshold of high quality posters.

    When the previous forum stopped working, some members took the initiative to make this one, but in many ways it was starting from zero.

    For years I'd check in here, but quality was so low it wasn't worth my time to engage,and I didn't have time (like Baden had time) to battle against the torrent of Libertarians and Randian Objectivists who thought squatting a backwater philosophy forum lent credibility to their arguments.

    What's my point?

    If you want higher quality discussion on a topic, you need to do the painstaking work of demonstrating the low quality stuff that's being tossed around is irrelevant next to the "important questions" and meticulously placing your lowly novice opponents in their non-credible place again and again. This will attract your equal in the force to rise against you: when the ground is cleared and the air is still and the aesthetic is right for a true fight between masters. It is the way of things, one must always easily dispatch with a dozen or so novices before squaring off against the boss.

    If you don't want to do that work, well don't complain. I signedup to the new forum after the moderators and credible members who founded the present quality discussion did the work: I didn't drop into complain "Why is space made for the libertarian and Randian rambling verbiage?" because the answer is obvious "go ahead, teach them that lesson then".

    Second point, don't be passive aggressive, it's unbecoming of a aspiring philosopher, just be plain ol aggressive to the limits allowed if something irks you, it's more honest, and I think you'll find honesty is appreciated here.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    What isn't true? Your post is filled with political events. — TheMadFool

    I directly quoted you:

    Politics, no matter where it starts, whether in Iran or the US, always ends in war. — TheMadFool

    Your statement here is not "politics is filled with events", but "politics always ends in war".

    The history of politics so far is building larger and larger political units where wars between internal members (cities in Italy, or countries in the EU) becomes increasingly unlikely.

    Now, I'm not saying here all wars will eventually go away, just that "politics always ends in war" we can observe not to be true: lot's of political relations don't end in war; some countries, not to speak of cities within those countries, have not had a war in a very, very long time and yet have been doing politics with many other countries all this time.

    Now, if your point is that as a general rule "if we wait long enough there will eventually be a war somewhere", ok sure, probably, but that doesn't inform us whether war between Iran and US is likely or unlikely any time soon, which is the subject here.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    Politics, no matter where it starts, whether in Iran or the US, always ends in war. I just hope to live somewhere in the middle between these two points. — TheMadFool

    This is simply not true. Politics usually ends with larger political units; granted, often the direct consequence of wars along the way (but not always), but politics then continues after that point. City states in Europe would fight with their city state neighbors all the time, now nobody conceives of politics between Venice and Milan being settled by fisty cuffs.

    As for Iran, the Neocons have been painting war with Iran as essentially fait accomplie for decades, just a question of when not if, but the reality may simply be that there's no reasonable war plan with Iran, and signing the Iran deal makes it an order of magnitude harder as no ally would come along for the ride and the US would be mocked at home and abroad for going to war to enforce a deal that was torn up for no good reason and no reasonable alternative plan. The meme template would be "US: sign this deal; Iran: ok; US: haha no deal! Iran: ok; US: This means war! now we're gonna make you live by the deal whether you like it not; Iran: ok, come at me bro (smacks down drone)".

    This is exactly why the Neocons complained and moaned (and writhed on the floor) so much and so loudly when Obama negotiated the deal; it does effectively tie the hands of future administrations, regardless of staying in the deal or not; even putting the most Neocons of Neocons in charge of war policy was not able to reverse it.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    [...] Trump will throw Bolton and Pompeo under the bus for failing to defeat Iran, and brought in the most extreme neocons knowing in advance a war with Iran was foolish (because one of their general predecessors managed to at least explain this to him before leaving). Stay tuned for further confirmation at the next rally or so. — boethius

    Have been pretty busy with work travels ... but can't let it slide that as I predicted 3 months ago, Trump threw Bolton under the bus.

    Followup prediction, this is the process of normalizing relations; i.e. abandoning the Bolton policy of maximum pressure on EU to not trade with Iran, (in other words, stop trying to prevent EU fulfilling the Iran deal). That Iran is mostly out of the news cycle for a while was just warm up to quietly reversing policy. Firing Bolton is the signal the policy is in fact reversing now.

    Of course, prediction that Trump will explain Bolton's failure at one of his rallies still stands; Iran will come up again as a hot topic in the election cycle, and Trump will burn Bolton for failure in that moment (that he gave Bolton some leeway on his crazy ideas, and Bolton couldn't deliver).
  • Brexit
    A quick questions for the UK members.

    I haven't seen any good explanations of why Boris can kick people out of the conservative party. I'm pretty sure it's not a power prime ministers (or the leader of the party) have in most other party systems; more people would be involved to kick someone out (if it's possible at all, considering citizen party members voted for them). Or am I missing some detail such as Boris controlling the "kick out committee" or that the MP's in question technically quit? In other countries, kicking a single person out of the party would be a pretty complicated process and a scandal if it's for "just voting against the PM", but it seems to have passed as a completely normal event kicking 20 MP's out. Or is there just too much other chaos to dwell on this detail? Am genuinely confused. Drop a link if there's a good article about it.
  • American education vs. European Education
    Income has nothing to do with a child's success. I've known many Asians who lived in the same low-income neighborhood as a black child and had no problem getting A's. Because that Asian parent would beat the crap out of the kid if he got anything less. — halo

    See my point above about:

    Ah yes, the time tested rule of using micro-level exceptions as the basis to infer macro-level trends. — boethius

    And discussion that followed from it.

    I guess what I was wondering was not to what degree the differences are, if any, but is there something inherently different? — halo

    As others have mentioned, there can be a lot of differences from country to country.

    The Finnish system is usually what people have in mind in discussing Europe vs US education.

    It is very different philosophy in Finland; the architects of the "Finnish way" changed their purpose from academic achievement, however you want to measure it, to mental health of students. Basically, they said "Finland has become fairly wealthy since WWII (when it was very poor), but what's the purpose in creating wealth and being economically competitive if kids aren't happy?".

    So they went about at first largely focusing on mental health issues, which quickly reduces mostly to stress. So what's stressful? Turns out competitive-based-learning is extremely stressful, as well as other things like bullying, not enough time in nature, too long classes / school days, etc.

    But in terms of pedagogical philosophy the one thing that created the most changes, is moving from competitive to collaborative based learning. What this means is that there are not "smart streams" and "dumb streams" and you need to compete to get into a smart stream, likewise there are very few tests especially at younger ages and viewing these as competitive "to see who's best" is de-emphasized as much as possible (tests are still needed to see how a student is doing, but they can be done in a way that avoids the perception of competition between students), for that matter "first grade" is at seven which is when structured learning involving classes and tests starts (because earlier is too stressful on small children, so they stay with parents and daycare), lot's of working together in a non-competitive way, and even at 7 it is half the day (the afternoon is with parents or at a "play club", which will usually have a theme like sports or dance, but will be mostly playing).

    It turns out, to the surprise of the architects of this system, that reducing stress levels allows students to excel better, learn more, be more creative, and when international testing became a thing, Finland was on top. This wasn't expected, as bringing up the average isn't very visible, especially internally for people comparing to the internal average.

    Also, a little note, students call teachers by their first name and are encouraged to question the teacher's authority in the sense of spotting a mistake or needing justification for what the teacher is saying. Is it really true? Is seen as an educational opportunity.
  • American education vs. European Education
    I disagree that school segregation Is anything less than directly relevant to economic segregation. — Bitter Crank

    I should have been more clear. By "directly related" I meant "a primary factor of inter-generational poverty transmission".

    If racial segregation, in itself, was a factor in inter-generational poverty, then a black community would be more likely to stay poor because they are black.

    I think we are in agreement, but it is a pet peeve of mine for racist premises to "slip in by the window", which is what happens when we accept the premise that a "poor kid will likely remain poor for being born to a black family in a black community".

    When "a black community" is used as shorthand for a whole range of policies over many generations aimed at keeping blacks poor, then it's perfectly sensible. But this is a dangerous short-hand, as it reinforces the racist premise that blacks are poor because they are black or because they live with blacks.

    So it is not racial segregation that is a cause of poverty, but rather all sort of policies, many targeted specifically at blacks and many just targeted at the poor in general, that are the cause of both poverty and lack of social mobility (the poverty trap).

    Though the above is just a question of emphasis and don't think we have any fundamental disagreement.

    Where we disagree is that, what the Nordic model has shown is that the correlation between parents and child income can be significantly lowered; that there is a set of policies under-which poor children relatively easily make much more money than their parents.

    From a US perspective, this is of course not the case, and so whatever inequality there was 30, 50, 100 years ago is highly correlated to the income inequality now.

    However, the Nordic model demonstrates that this correlation can be broken, social mobility, fairly significantly within a single generation: parents to children.

    So, it is true that:

    Poor people tend to stay poor because they lack social capital. One needs to have parents that are competent climbers; one's family needs a reasonable amount of cash to successfully launch children into social advancement. — Bitter Crank

    Because of US policies that make social mobility unlikely. But the Nordic model demonstrates that parent's income need not be the main determining factor. Which is why I said "under other policy conditions" those poor communities could now be economically vibrant.

    I.e. if the Nordic model was brought to these communities, the child income would start to decouple statistically from parent income.

    I would argue education is the most important element of the Nordic model. And to repeat, education in Nordic countries is the same investment per child wherever they are in the country, and the investment is high:

    In primary and secondary education, facilities are excellent, teachers need a masters degree in addition to pedagogical training, class size is relatively small, teachers generally have an assistant, lot's of extra support available, play/structured learning balance. In higher education, tuition is free and students receive housing and a stipend in order to focus on learning.

    Other things also benefit social mobility, such as universal health-care, rehabilitation based justice system, city planning, tax policy, welfare for unemployed periods, grants to start a business, free retraining to change careers, and so on.

    Why I would argue equal opportunity in education (which includes non-economically segregated schooling to have the opportunity to make friends of kids other social-classes) is the most important is because it leads to a generally educated population where perspectives and arguments are shared more broadly, and so people vote more effectively for all these other policies (changing and improving them as what-works and what-doesn't-work is discovered, both domestically and abroad).
  • American education vs. European Education
    The government set out to increase home ownership among the white population (racial preference was explicit, not implicit), and at the same time to upgrade the quality and expand the supply of housing stock. The result was the massive expansion of suburban development on otherwise unoccupied (agricultural) land. — Bitter Crank

    Yes, I'm aware this history, though it is not directly relevant to economic segregation; you could have rich largely black communities due to this history if inter-generational social mobility was high. But social mobility is low for poor people of all colours in the US.

    In other words, higher investments in education, free higher education, universal healthcare, more aggressive progressive taxation, and other social welfare policies, under the thesis that the Nordic model increases social mobility, would benefit also these communities of which the "die was cast" as you say. If a community has close to average education of the general population, then you can setup businesses in that community without a competitive disadvantage. So, under other policy conditions, these racially segregated districts can decouple from economic segregation, and some time later you may find architect, engineering and law firms, media studios, art galleries and other signs of economic vibrancy that the zoning permits, and perhaps whites moving to these historically black districts for good work (and vice-versa).

    The die was cast that they would be black, the die was not and is not cast that they would remain poor.
  • American education vs. European Education
    Jesus you're a moron. — Terrapin Station

    Thanks for identifying me as the saviour of mankind, but I think it's a bit over-exaggerated compliment even for your usual dedication of precision.

    However, was Jesus, who you purport is me, a moron to care about mankind? It would be off topic here, but I recommend this new theistic theory in the philosophy of religion. It would be an interesting discussion, as well as your thesis that I am Jesus; like, we haven't proved otherwise as far as I know.


    If education is worthwhile for its own sake, (the "life of the mind" and all that) then it is always worthwhile. As a ticket to upward mobility, it has less utility. Less utility because family background is a critical factor. — Bitter Crank

    Though I agree education is worthwhile for it's own sake as well as important for democracy, for the Nordic welfare state model, of which high investments in education and very equal educational quality (as @ssu notes) is a key part, also have the lowest correlation between poor parents income and their children's income.

    Intergenerational_mobility_graph-1.jpg

    Though other social policies also play a roll (and roll of parents isn't removed), I would argue high-quality and free education is the largest.
  • American education vs. European Education
    ↪Terrapin Station


    He who hath ability to type things into search engines, let him type things into search engines.

    He who hath not, let boethius doeth foreth him and pasteth the firstest resultith.


    [...]

    The trends we documented in this paper indicate an increasingly polarised pattern of school enrolment. US schools – both public and private – are increasingly segregated by income. High-income families increasingly live either in suburbs with expensive housing or enrol their children in private schools. The private schools their children attend are more likely to be expensive non-sectarian schools than was the case four decades ago. Meanwhile, low-income students remain disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty public schools, and even those low-income students in private schools are generally not in expensive, non-sectarian private schools.

    Given how difficult it is to build and sustain high quality educational programs in schools serving high concentrations of children from low-income families (Duncan and Murnane 2014), the increasing income segregation of US schools is likely to strengthen the intergenerational transmission of economic inequality, and reduce the potential for upward economic mobility.

    References
    Cooper, B S (1984), “The changing demography of private schools: Trends and implications”, Education and Urban Society 16(4): 429-442.

    Duncan, G J and R J Murnane (2014), Restoring opportunity: The crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.

    Murnane, R J and S F Reardon (2017), “Long-term trends in private school enrollments by family income”, NBER Working Paper No. 23571.

    Owens, A (2016), “Inequality in children's contexts: Trends and correlations of economic segregation between school districts, 1990 to 2010”, American Sociological Review 81(3): 549-574.

    Owens, A, S F Reardon and C Jencks (2016), “Income segregation between schools and school districts”, American Educational Research Journal 53(4): 1159-1197.

    Phi Delta Kappa (1992), "Gallup/phi delta kappa poll # 1992-PDK92: 24th annual survey of the public's attitudes toward the public schools", Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University.

    Stone, C, D Trisi, A Sherman and E Horton (2016), A guide to statistics on historical trends in income inequality, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.     — Researchers of this topic

    Please show your evidence about buses impacting these large trends.
  • American education vs. European Education
    ↪Terrapin Station


    I took some effort to indicate effects are on the aggregate and to not phrase my points in a way that opens up to "micro exception criticism" such as "aha, some people get scholarships" or "what about buses" or "one poor kid was at a rich school, riddle me that!".

    Was busing effective at avoiding economic segregation at the time in the aggregate? If you don't have any evidence of that, why would it matter if busing is still a thing now? It's pure deflection.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    I certainly hope the Russians sold S-400's to the Iranians. — Wallows

    Iran purchased the S-400, but then the West complained and Russia apparently "down-graded the system". We don't know how much, but Russia is highly motivated to deter a US war on Iran and highly motivated to demonstrate their technology works if there is a war.

    However, on the effectiveness of the S-400 system, other interesting facts in the news today.

    Washington and its allies have urged fellow NATO member Ankara not to install the S-400 system, saying that would let the technology learn how to recognize the F-35s, which are built to avoid tracking by enemy radars and heat sensors. — Reuters

    And also from the same article:

    So many of us have tried to dissuade Turkey — Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. ambassador to NATO

    Though I have no doubt Turkey flying around F-35's around a S-400 system is going to vastly improve the S-400's ability to track the F-35, what's left out is the obvious implication that S-400 has the technical capacity to track F-35s already; it's just a question of signal processing which we can be pretty sure Russia has been doing it's best at already with data and numerical models it already has. And therefore, we can basically conclude from NATO's own statements that F-35 is vulnerable to the S-300/400 system.

    We can also make the obvious conclusion that in any engagement with the F-35, the S-400 system is also going to be doing this "learning" (it's more difficult than cross checking an F-35 known flight path with S-400 signal data, but doable).

    Why this is so significant is that the F-35 is both very early in it's life-cycle but also too late to change or replace and also "dope" expensive (dope in the sense of being the largest acquisition in the history of acquisitions). The F-35 makes significant sacrifices in essentially everything -- cruise-speed, top-speed, turn speed, climb speed, range, fuel efficiency, ordinance capacity, jamming capacity, maintenance complexity -- in order to have a "cheap" multi-roll stealthy plane. If you're in a stealth plane that's being tracked and targeted ... well, you're gonna want all these other characteristics planes are capable of having. (It's very different to the F-22, which has stealth "on-top" of being an arguably very good plane; maybe it was very expensive to have this stealth "on-top" ... and so not enough were built ... but of the ones that were built, you still have good equipment even in situations where stealth is not so useful).

    Now, all these arguments against the F-35 have been made since the program was public, and criticism of the program did lead to some changes -- like no longer consistently awarding 85% of the "success fees" based on "likeability of the sales-rep" rather than parameters involving success -- what I'm arguing in this thread is that these latest Iran-US "tensions" are strong indications that all these arguments against the F-35 have come to pass.
  • American education vs. European Education
    It's been a long time since I was in grade school/jr high/high school, but at the time, busing was big in the name of integration. — Terrapin Station

    Ah yes, the time tested rule of using micro-level exceptions as the basis to infer macro-level trends.
  • American education vs. European Education
    I read somewhere that American public education is municipally funded-which means obviously, that poorer/under privileged communities will have less resources, organization, and whole mass of issues. — Grre

    Yes, this is the case. If you live in a poor neighborhood, you go to a poor school.

    Just as important, this creates a massive selection bias of where people live, as anyone planning a family will move to a neighborhood with as good a school as possible (and people with more money use private schools to avoid interactions with the "exceptions"; i.e., poor kids that happened to get into a better school for whatever reason).

    What this means is that the poor are (much more likely than in Europe) to be segregated from wealthier people right from birth. Your family (again, more likely than in Europe) is poor and uneducated and has poor and uneducated friends.

    Having richer and educated friends is not simply a big advantage in life, it also has a large effect on your world view, as a poor person, but also a large effect on the world view of the rich person.

    If classes mix, you get learning both ways. A poor person with rich friends is going to learn what habits and strategies the rich use to get richer and what the world looks like from a manager / executive / bureaucrat perspective; maybe they implement those learnings, maybe not, but on average it's a big benefit to the poor.

    Likewise, a manager / executive / bureaucrat that actually knows poor people in their network of family and friends, is going have better insight into what the world looks like to a poor person, and is going to be able to much better discern what are actually helpful policies to society (that when a poor person complains that something is simply not fair -- like secondary education or healthcare costs or lack of maternity leave and childcare services or too small vacation time are all things the rich can simply afford but are major obstacles to being poor -- maybe it really is simply not fair and should be changed).

    And of course, the US proves the alternative hypothesis, that if the classes don't mix, not only is it easy for the rich to just assign blame for being poor to the poor, the poor are so clueless that they will happily internalize this blame. There's a really interesting studies, I think recently a good article in the Guardian about them, that shows that after Reaganomics in the US and UK, the perception that "it's primarily hard work and talent that results in wealth" actually increased significantly while social mobility decreased significantly. The explanation for this is that when conditions get much harder to deal with (and one can only rely on oneself), it's an important coping strategy to believe this is fair to stay motivated.

    The municipality funded education in combination with largely private higher education is a double whammy in terms of social segregation, which we should predict (just as many did) will result in a dysfunctional democracy as general knowledge and critical thinking falls below what even Bernays style social engineering by well meaning media talking heads are able to corral into a somewhat coherent direction.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    ↪Baden


    Yes, it almost seems obvious now, though my first post was before the drone hit and this launching/cancelling op, so that events unfolded according to the theory (there would be no bombing) in real time is pretty strong evidence.

    Of course, Trump didn't need to tell us about the launchy-cancelly event ... and, I actually thought I was exaggerating (a bit) that "Trump would just tell us as early as next week" but it turns out I undersold myself as he started confirming the theory essentially the very next morning.

    What's amazing is that no amount of harm to the empire has or likely could -- nor do we even thinks warrants discussion anymore -- result in Republicans impeaching Trump.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    The Red Sea, The Persian Gulf and the Straight of Hormuz aren't wide spaces. An Aircraft carrier on the Red Sea is like in a bathtub. — ssu

    Yes, certainly the straight of Hormuz can be mined but also be covered by anti-ship missiles, so the mine problem would be more an post-war-hazard/nuisance, after a land invasion has already succeeded (in taking the coast at least). Doesn't really stop a bombing campaign is my main point about mines.

    Modern torpedoes slice a cruiser or a destroyer into two parts, hence a hit to bigger ship would Still be very damaging. And aircraft carriers are built for speed, they aren't armoured like old battleships. Again some issues have changed from WW2. — ssu

    Yes, the best and biggest torpedoes might have a good chance at sinking a carrier with one hit. However, smaller nations with smaller and less accurate torpedoes; it could take a bunch just to disable it. A too small torpedo exploding under the carrier may do no damage at all. Presumably, the carriers are structurally optimized to take torpedo hits as best as they can.

    My basic point is that even with the bust sub out there and the best crew, there's room for failure and high probability of being sunk after firing said torpedoes. As the quality of the sub, torpedoes and crew decreases, I'd wager chance of success evaporates quickly.

    There's also the usual operational problem of using subs, in that if they really are perfectly positioned and totally silent and hidden, they could be right next to the carrier and not realize the war has started.

    But the submarine example exemplifies this geopolitical shit in terms of hard power; assuming my theory is correct that the US cancelled the attack due to unacceptable expected losses, which is the US military is excellent at finding and destroying large assets like a submarine or an airfield. If to be competitive in the air you need an airfield, well it's hard to compete if your airfield and all you planes have been blown up. If to be competitive in the sea you need submarines, the cost is very high and the learning curve to operate submarines is likewise incredibly high.

    Crucially, for this discussion, if you can't see stealth aircraft, your planes and your AA missiles won't be very useful.

    A modular antimissile system that is a threat to stealth, that can be easily deployed effectively (easy compared to submarines), and can be acquired now that the Russins are selling it, changes the geopolitics of the American "stick".

    And this is the reason that once you are deemed by the neocons or the Washington "Blob", the Foreign Policy Apparatus, to be a rogue state, it's indeed totally rational to procure a nuclear deterrent. With a functioning nuclear deterrent the US will likely not attack you. Hence Iran is on the firing line because it hasn't got what Pakistan and North Korea have. — ssu

    Yes, this has been the case, but we may have seen a major change during the course of this thread.

    With effective anti-air available, it becomes possible for states targeted by the US to accomplish a second way of the "Finnish strategy" vis-a-vis the USSR, which was to have a credible enough conventional defense that the cost of invasion (or being bombed into a failed state, transposing to the US) continually outweighs the benefits.

    Without effective anti-air, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya invasion/bombings demonstrated that there's essentially zero competition, as you say, only nuclear weapons would have been a deterrent. What we have seen over the past couple of days is potentially the first conventional deterrent to a US desire to bomb something.

    The most recent news also fits with my theory here, as apparently there was a cyber attack on anti-air computer systems. If stealth simply works great and allows penetration of enemy air-defense systems and blowing up said systems with relative ease, then there would simply be no reason to burn cyber assets.

    Presumably, these cyber weapons were used because they were needed to minimize risk to the fighter/bombers, and so again, if the hacking failed to shut down these systems (or enough of them), then the mission would presumably be much more likely to be canceled due to higher expected casualties to avenge a drone -- so this new information fits the theory that "expected US casualties was the cause of canceling the strike" rather than suddenly glancing up from an angry birds session and asking if it's occurred to anyone to find out if Iranians could die in this whole warry-fighty thing that seems to be going on. (it also fits Trump's bully personality to claim that the cyber attack in itself was some sort of retaliation, which is just preposterous; classic bully delusionalism of backing away from a fight as soon as there's any risk and then repeating "totally showed that idiot who's boss" based on some delusional reconstruction of events)
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    I think the real threat is more likely the age old enemy that simply is forgotten: mines and the diesel submarine. — ssu

    Mines are not a big threat in the middle of the ocean. For instance, Iran would place a lot of mines around potential landing sites, but this wouldn't threaten a carrier.

    As for subs and torpedoes, the US has very significant anti-submarine technologies. That carriers are sunk in war games isn't really insightful if we can't compare to how many times they aren't sunk in such games as well as how good the submarines were.

    However, in terms of geopolitics, anti-air is also very different than sinking the carrier. For, there are many cases where the US is "punishing" a country, like blowing up a pharmaceutical factory or something; in such disputes, sinking a carrier is simply far outside the realm of reason even if you could do it.

    It's also important to keep in mind, short of nuclear torpedoes, you'd need to hit the carrier a lot of times to actually sink it. So on the chance your sub avoids detection, and fires some torpedoes, and on the chance these torpedoes avoid whatever counter measures the carrier group has, and on the chance your German supplied torpedoes actually explode (instead of not exploding as the Argentinians experienced), you may still not do major damage to the carrier much less sink it. It will disrupted, potentially disabled, but will be replaced by another carrier. However, your submarine is definitely sunk at this point.

    Which brings up an important difference, that it's possible to re-supply anti-air, whereas you can't effectively resupply whole submarines, much less train new crews. This goes for pretty much all navy assets.

    And, in these altercations, it's the US that decides to bomb or not, and exactly when to bomb. So even if there was some non-zero probability an Iranian sub could sneak up to and launch torpedoes at a carrier ... well the US can just put in some extra effort beforehand to make sure they find the Iranian subs first and sink them. Diesel subs need to surface; maybe the US loses track of them sometimes, but I would bet they can reacquire them, especially if they plan to bomb the country the sub belongs to.

    Effective anti-air on the other hand, more-so when resupply is feasible, incurs an unavoidable cost to air assets. So the question becomes how much of a cost to achieve the objective, and if the cost involves lives then the US population is forced to think of whether the imperial goal at play is worth these lives; US population invariably figures out the answer is no, because the average American sees no benefit from these imperial skirmishes (they don't live in a world where of course the vast scope of the Empire is required to afford lavish luxuries like health care for everyone).
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    Does Iran have the S-400? — ssu

    We don't know exactly what the Russians have supplied neither what the extent of their help is. As you've pointed out, optimizing the network of existing radars, command and control, and missiles goes a long way as well.

    My comments about the 400km range were meant to be more general comment about these systems; just that the larger the missile the further it can be from harm as well as performing rolls adjacent to defending incoming attacks. Russia may not have supplied the largest missiles to Iran, but is selling the whole S-400 package to China, India, and even Turkey (also of geopolitical import).

    Anyway, what's more interesting is the capability that Iran has in the offensive realm. I think they do want to think asymmetrically and have some quite surprising concepts for littoral warfare. Call it thinking out of the box. Just take the example of these Bavar-2 ship/aeroplanes! — ssu

    Yes, if an pure air war would be too costly to the Americans (how many losses would be "too costly" is of course up for debate) and / or not accomplish the goal of pushing Iran into a failed state or at least giving them a good spanking, then ground invasion solves the air-war-of-attrition problem.

    If you don't want Iran covering the straight with anti-ship missiles then you need to take the whole coast. Iran has been doing what it can to prepare, how effective these tactics will be is anyone's guess but I think it's difficult to expect zero losses in taking the coast. Then there's a lot of mountains.

    Take all this together, and I feel the opinion of the chairman of the joint's chief echoes the theory I'm defending here: "If you want to really stop Iran’s nuclear program, that immediately gets you to regime change, which is an enormous undertaking." There's no mention of the potential of just bombing them like in Libya. Of course, it might not be mentioned precisely because they want Iran and Russia to think that they think Iran's Russian anti-air is more effective than it is to hide their real capacity and all out air-war plan.

    Nope, That's what the Chinese sell. Or at least the Iranians brag that they do have similar technology as the Chinese. — ssu

    Here I think the US really can be confident that China, much less Iran, if far behind Russia in the rocket technology required to penetrate the carrier group missile-defense systems.

    What Russia is doing is moving towards a world where "sure, you have carriers no one will touch, but they're filled with planes you can't use (without large losses)".

    The problem this creates for the neocons is that "dominating the air" part of the galactic spectrum is supposed to allow bombing wars to be fought with basically zero causalities and land-wars fought with a lot less casualties. If the US starts experiencing a lot of air (human) losses, American public will probably lose taste for these sorts of wars too.

    Well, they've predicted that happening and the solution is drones, but it's unclear at the moment if you can field a fully drone army in the air, much less land. To attack a sophisticated enemy with only predator drones and the like, they need to be essentially fully autonomous due to the need for radio silence and facing jamming anyways. At the moment it maybe very easy to get these systems to fire at decoys for instance; ok, so you send more, but how many more is acceptable.

    The purpose of the F-35 is to continue to be able to pummel small naughty states from the air while drone warfare is perfected, then the F-35 transitions to the roll of some sort of drone shepherd (this is my reading of the neocons anyway). If my theory is correct, the US now has a tool missing in the ol' pummeling belt.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    ‘If it was up to [John Bolton], he'd take on the whole world’ — Trump

    Maybe the first indication of a prediction (I made a couple of days ago) that Trump will throw Bolton and Pompeo under the bus for failing to defeat Iran, and brought in the most extreme neocons knowing in advance a war with Iran was foolish (because one of their general predecessors managed to at least explain this to him before leaving). Stay tuned for further confirmation at the next rally or so.
  • Is a major conflict imminent in the Middle East?
    "Let's make Iran great again" — BBC citing Trump
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