Nevoic @ Nevoic @lemm.ee

Posts

0

Comments

138

Joined

2 yr. ago

To answer your first question, the attempted coup. Biden didn't encourage and rally his supporters to storm Congress. He doesn't have the backing of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Trying to seize power domestically via a group of fascists is more domestically fascistic than not doing that.

Also, even if Trump suddenly becomes a leftist ally and pulls out all U.S involvement in Israel, they'll still be genociding Palestinians. You can't put literally 100% of the blame of the Palestinian ethnic cleansing on the U.S, when it was actually started originally by British imperialism and is perpetuated by the terrorist state of Israel.

Voting for Trump as a vote against fascism seems wildly misinformed to me. The first Trump presidency already stacked the Supreme Court enough to overturn Roe. If he becomes President again, it's well within the realm of possibility that he pardons Jan 6th offenders, pardons himself, and they seize power permanently in the U.S.

I get your hope that while we're all being subjected to a new fascist dictatorship, that somehow his pure leftist heart changes the behavior of the imperial core and we pull out of Israel, but even if that happens Palestinians will still be genocided. We'll just also have more sociopolitical regression (gay/trans people will be outlawed, the bit of social services we have will be gutted, capitalist exploitation will reach new heights, etc.)

I don't trust that the U.S will always do the right thing with nukes. Maybe you have unwavering faith in the good heart of the imperialist core to never use nukes in conflicts, I'm not as trusting.

I don't support the U.S, and yeah I've been actively trying to move away from identifying as part of the U.S. Notice the first time I referred to it in my comment I called it "it". Just a habit, sorry if I offended you though, that wasn't my intention.

The main issue is if I say "they" instead of "we", the vast majority of the internet assumes you're from Europe. I want to convey I live in the United States without identifying as part of it.

The U.S spends more on military than the next 7 countries combined. It'd put up a good fight. Probably conquer Canada/Mexico in hours (I'd assume they would just concede the same way Paris/France conceded to the Nazis in WW2), and then we'd also have the advantage in Eurasia. We could nuke most of western Europe, and the only country that could really stop us is Russia because they also have a comparable number of nukes. If we successfully disarm them and are the sole nuclear super power in the world, I could see the U.S winning ww3 and becoming a global government.

America has always supported fascism abroad; genocide, military coups to overthrow democratic governments, invading countries to conquer land and extract resources.

The thing is though there's usually a clear separation between domestic and foreign policy. Bomb the children in the middle east, not the ones in Los Angeles. Not saying this is right, just that's been the U.S's take in general.

So Trump and domestic fascism is different in a tangible way, it introduces fascism locally, and I don't think individuals or groups that are that openly fascistic will start supporting democracy or proletarian causes overseas.

Voting for domestic fascism as a way to curb fascistic foreign policy approaches probably won't work out too well.

Normative truths are just as foundational as descriptive truths. You use the same logic to get there. I hope you're intelligent enough to be an epistemological nihilist, so hopefully you know the basis for all scientific and descriptive understanding of the universe is self-evident axioms. The same is true for moral truths. Harm is axiomatically bad in the same way that our senses are accurately able to translate information of an external universe into our brains.

If you disagree with the former, we can't have moral discussions, and if you disagree with the latter we can't have scientific discussions. This is how the whole of epistemology functions.

You're also strawmanning me. Ought implies can, so an animal without an ability to act morally obviously has no moral obligations. I hope you somehow just severely misunderstand the vegan position, and you're not intentionally spreading misinformation.

Factory farms aren't us allowing them to sort out their own problems. We spawn billions of sentient creatures into torture boxes every year just to slaughter them when they're a few months old in brutal and terrifically painful ways.

If you think that's awesome, keep buying meat, more power to you, you're just probably a psychopath (though I obviously can't give you an official diagnosis).

This is gish-galloping, to properly address your points, every paragraph would require 3ish paragraphs, so I'd have to spend the better part of 2 hours responding, which is totally unreasonable to expect in a forum like this with a stranger you have no personal attachment to.

From what I gather, your main issues are social ostracization and false equivalencies. Using social norms to drive your moral decisions is obviously problematic, you can think of a ton of atrocities committed by humans when those atrocities were socially normalized. People aren't born evil, with an intent to cause harm. They're taught to be ambivalent, and can perpetuate atrocities through apathy.

As for the idea that there's some false equivalence, you're misunderstanding the thought experiment. Yes, eating humans is more dangerous than eating chickens or dogs, but that's a happenstance of nature. It's possible we could figure out a way to eliminate prion diseases and other harmful effects of cannibalism, and then farming disabled humans who process information at the same level of a cow would be morally permissible to a logically consistent non-vegan.

Of course, essentially no carnists are logically consistent. They use emotion and preference towards certain species to guide their decision instead of rationally considering when it's okay to harm something (taste pleasure isn't a high enough bar to inflict pain and death, obviously).

Autonomy and choice is important, do you think less intelligent humans also deserve a right to autonomy? What about less intelligent animals? If you answered differently to these two questions, why?

Humans generally understand restricting choice is a good thing if the choice in question is committing harm. We don't let people choose to rape, murder, etc. We don't let people farm mentally disabled humans for their skin and meat. We don't let people farm dogs and cats for their skin and meat. We do let people farm cows and pigs for their skin and meat.

Vegans have rectified this inconsistency, non-vegans haven't. If you told me that you were fine with farming disabled humans, dogs, cats, etc. I'd at least applaud your consistency, but I have yet to meet a single non-vegan who is this consistent.

I don't know if your second to last paragraph is a meme, but all humans reject immoral behaviors that occur in the wild, not just vegans. Lions also commit infanticide so their genetics carry on and competing male lions don't, it makes sense biologically. Yet humans don't commit this behavior because we know it's wrong. Dolphins rape other dolphins, which again for the furthering of your own genetics makes sense. You should implant your seed in as many helpless victims as you can, and yet again, humans don't do this because we know it's wrong.

Pretending like vegans are the weird ones because we're simply consistent about our morality is wild. Non-vegans even get upset at the idea of eating dogs or cats, so it's not even like they're universally in favor of torturing and slaughtering helpless animals, only the ones that have been objectified by whatever culture they live in.

I was part of the vegan cult for years until I read this comment, thank you for saving me.

I was a wimp. I didn't enjoy the idea of harming and killing animals, I had watched videos of animals being gutted alive and having their throats cut and squirming for literal minutes afterwards. This was uncomfortable, but only because I was a wimp.

After reading your comment I manned up and took my dog and 2 cats, strung them up while they were whimpering (which was hilarious), and slit their throats, cooked their delicious innards, and am finally able to walk again (I was only able to crawl because I had been nutrient deficient for so long despite what my libtard doctors told me).

I'm happy to live in a free country where I can do whatever I want with my property. In China I bet you can't cook a dog because the government is just a bunch of moralizing leftists. God gave us domain over animals, and so I get to choose what I want to do with the animals I purchase.

They send different signals. If Trump wins 55% of the vote, and Biden wins 45% of the vote, Democrats realize they need to compromise on contentious issues (maybe ban abortions federally or let insane people buy more guns etc.)

If Trump wins 46% of the vote, Biden wins 42% of the vote, and a super-left party wins 12% of the vote, Democrats realize they need to comrpomise less on contentious issues and become more radical to capture that 12%, while not scaring off the 42% of the vote they have. That 42% probably isn't in favor of genociding Palestinians for example, so that's something Democrats could concede to the far-left to just gain votes.

I get the arguments that for that 4 year period fascists won because of the split between Democrats and actual leftists, but to pretend that the two situations I outlined are literally identical is obviously foolish as hell.

Yes I know what you mean now, I didn't know what you meant when you fabricated your own definition and didn't inform me of your special definition that nobody else uses.

In the future, when talking to people, it's best to either use widely accepted definitions or make it clear that you're using your own for god-knows what reason.

By the actual definition of bourgeoise, which is what I was talking about, I'm obviously correct. If we adopt your definition where you're just using it as a synonym for "ruler", I won't claim to know the future. Maybe AI will be a benevolent dictator, or maybe we'll have a proper dictatorship of the proletariat, or maybe we'll have a proper free society. Who knows. But capitalist realism is still an absurd and stupid position considering it's only been a thing for 200 years (unless you're also redefining capitalism in your world where you just make up your own definitions of everything).

I'm talking directly about data that has been released, and about the potential of AI. It's wild that you have an inability to imagine more than 3 days into the future. Yes, AI doesn't currently exceed human intelligence. I don't know why you think 2023 is the end-all for technological progress.

I also didn't realize I was talking to someone who didn't know what the bourgeoise was. Nobles and lords were not bourgeoise, they had fundamentally different relationships to capital. If you want to redefine the word and use it in a way nobody ever has, go for it, but it makes conversations with other humans unnecessarily complicated.

In the future, only use words that you understand the definition of, or if you insist on making up your own definition, make that clear from the start.

The bourgeoise have only existed for 200 years. Capitalist realism is the ridiculous position unsupported by almost the entirety of humanity's existence. Even if you think utopia is a dream and there will always be rulers, claiming those rulers always have to be bourgeoise is obviously ridiculous.

I understand some people think human intelligence is some special product of the soul or biology, something that can't be captured by silicon. Like there's something special to carbon that allows for sophisticated processing that'll never be matched by technology. I've never seen any evidence of this, and so I don't believe in a soul or whatever magical fairy dust you think makes carbon special.

AI will match (and most likely far exceed) human capabilities in intelligence. Maybe you think the bourgeoise class will hire humans out of the goodness of their hearts, and I'd say you're foolish for believing that. Once AI can match and exceed human capabilities, humans won't be hired. It's not that hard to reason out.

If you're at all in the field of AI, you'd see how much faster this is all coming than experts originally thought. AGI was estimated by the industry to be about 25 years out, 2 years ago. Now it's estimated to be 10 years out. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential curves. Unless we get massive regulation in the AI industry to slow it down, in 1 or 2 iterations we'll hit AGI.

Sure, philosophers (myself included) will continue having debates about whether it's sentient or conscious, but the bourgeoise aren't interested in that, they just need raw performance. GPT4 already exceeds 50-99% of college students in all fields in performance scores (bar exam, AP exams, biology olympiad, etc.). Yes, college students are far from experts, but not as far as you might want to believe when it comes to scaling in information technology.

It's not an inherent truth of the universe that the future will always require more work than the present. On the contrary, automation has the obvious potential to do the opposite. Imagine a future (that as I see it is incredibly likely) that all levels of human intellect are achieved by AI (that is, we reach general level intelligence in AI). This means all non-physical labor will be automated away. There will be no way to "improve yourself" mentally to keep up, we will all have to do physical work.

Now consider that physical work can also be automated, and the same is true of those industries. Lastly, consider that this doesn't happen all at once, but over time. There will be stages where unemployment isn't 100%, but rather 40 or 50% of humans can't find work because that level of work is no longer needed.

Capitalism doesn't have a natural tendency to fix these problems. There's actually an entire class of people (the bourgeoise) who benefit from exploiting this growing pain in the working class. They benefit from reduced labor costs, they benefit from increased automation.

In an ideal society, we'd all benefit from these tools. That's not how capitalism is setup, and for as long as capitalism exists there will be a class who is actively trying to gatekeep those benefits to just their class. They've done an incredibly impressive job at regressing social progress in the last 40 years, and capitalism is built to exist exactly in the sweet spot it's been in for the past 150 years. Humans see its failures, and we'll continue to swing back and forth within the bounds of what our overton window clearly allows, desperately looking for a solution somewhere within the bounds of capitalism to a problem inherently tied to the system.

We fundamentally don't need a class of people with social interests directly opposed to 99% of the population. The bourgeoise doesn't need to exist, despite liberal attempts to try to band-aid capitalism endlessly to make them behave. They're not a group of people to be tamed, it's not like they're some source of infinite wealth and prosperity that also happens to yearn for evil, they're just a sociopolitical class that steals/extracts wealth and value out of the economy for their own benefit.

Home ownership isn't a guarantee, even for people who work 80 hours a week. Maybe you think the people who work 80 hours a week aren't smart enough to deserve a home, they're just doing "unskilled" labor and that on its own isn't enough. An issue with that is it's not skill that determines wage, it's market value (we could also get into why liberals think a skilled individual deserves housing while an unskilled individual deserves to be destitute). I make $150,000 a year as a 26 year old who didn't go to college because I have a particularly strong interest in programming that I've been cultivating for the last 14 years.

I know people who have similar interests in art, have put in similar amounts of time and effort, and can't make more than 60k a year. In the next decade that'll be me too, I'm in my mid 20s and I realize these are my peak earning years because AI is going to destroy the labor market for programmers. I'll be lucky if I can make over 50k a year by the time I'm 40 doing this kind of work. I'll likely be working at Walmart or a similar retail outlet if I'm lucky.

This is all good and well for capitalism. My labor serves the interest of capital as long as I'm not being outperformed by some automated system. My value as a human goes down as technology improves, so I'll eventually be making less and less until I get pushed out of this market entirely.

The alternative world where everyone has access to a home regardless of their social status is better. People shouldn't lose access to their homes when technology improves and pushes people out of work, but that's what will happen.

Unemployment will skyrocket, housing scalpers will continue to demand rents, and the reserve army of labor will grow as the needs of capital get increasingly served by automation.

Capitalism will continue to serve the interests of capital until it literally collapses society. If enough of the economy is automated away at that point, the bourgeois class will have a utopia, and the rest of us will waste away by slowly starving to death or being outright killed if we attempt a revolution to seize the means of automated production.

GPT 4 says:

That quote is from Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience". Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher known for his writings on nature and his advocacy for civil disobedience against unjust laws. In "Civil Disobedience", he discusses the individual's responsibility to prioritize conscience over the dictates of laws and the role of the state in relation to the individual. The quote reflects his belief in the rights of the individual and his skepticism about the finality of democratic governance as we know it.

Using the term "personal freedom" in a liberal environment is deceiving, because often "personal freedom" also entails rights to property and other methods the bourgeoise use to oppress the working class.

Liberals have successfully merged ideas of personal freedom and capitalist freedom. It's important that people have access to homes (which liberals call private property). It's bad to have a leech class scalp homes (which liberals also call private property) and use their excess supply of that necessity to make a profit off working class people.

Conflating ideas is an important rhetorical strategy for capitalists that allows people to easily stomach exploitation in the name of basic personal freedoms.

If you're not a vegan this is a super weird take. Hell, as a vegan myself, I don't have a massive issue with trading pig lives for human lives. Yes it'd be ideal if we did it in other ways, but there's an actually decent argument that it's permissible and even good to save humans by killing animals.

Killing pigs because "mmm bacon" though? Yeah that's a bad reason. Pleasure doesn't permit suffering, most humans understand that unlees it's their own pleasure they're talking about.

What you're describing in your last paragraph is virtue signaling, e.g publicly expressing some moral position to gain approval without actually following through on that moral position. That's not something to appreciate.

It is extremely commonplace in meat eater circles to virtue signal about ethical meat and then completely ignore that for the vast majority of consumption. This is a huge difference between vegans and meat eaters.

Vegans aren't virtue signaling, we actually have an understanding of what we believe to be a moral truth; it's wrong to kill and harm things for your own pleasure, whether that be taste pleasure, sexual pleasure, whatever, and we extend that as far as we're able to. We actively avoid food that purposefully necessitates killing and suffering.

Meat eaters advocate for some local maximum, like "I can't give up meat because it's too tasty, but I can at least avoid factory farming", and then they'll go to McDonalds 3 times a week once they're outside of a discussion with a vegan.

I'm much less frustrated with people who both advocate for and commit to some moral position. If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they've known from birth, that's better. It's still wrong to kill something without it's consent, but at the very least if they're not virtue signaling they're at least not trying to deceive others.