Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I have so many questions, stuff like, do you know what laws of nature are? (also, see the weak link between supply and demand and capitalism, various non capitalist systems also have supply and demand curves. "im not economically illiterate, just ideologically"). And 13? Wtf is wrong with your parents that they allowed that? At least my earlier 'wtf why is he hanging out with neo-nazis' has been answered.
E: also note the dead plant in the tattoo in progress pics. (An orchid I think).
I don't know what it is with capitalists and needing to prove to themselves they're aligned with the natural order. I'm a marxist but I can't imagine calling the TRPF a "law of nature". It would be embarrassing!
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(I know there are, like, dozens of "scientific communist" diamat weirdos, but for the most part they have rightfully been tied to a tree and left in the 20th century.)I think it comes down to a deflection of the inherent cruelty of the system. Part of the structure of capitalism is that some people are going to suffer unjustly because your ability to get the resources you need to survive is gated behind your ability to either hold capital or provide value to capitalists. You don't have to look far to find examples of people who are either physically unable to do so or who find that their proverbial cheese has been moved by economic forces beyond their control or understanding, and now the terms of their economic and social existence are wildly different and less favorable.
By comparison, evolution by natural selection relies on having more children than the environment can support and having a significant number of those children die before they can reproduce. This also creates a lot of suffering, but since it's a natural process rather than a social construct it's impossible to call any part of it out for cruelty. There is no exploiter, and so there can be no exploitation. We can feel bad for the slowest gazelle but we don't morally condemn the lion because the suffering it creates is part of the natural world.
Of course, free market capitalism is not a natural process, there are things that we could do to mitigate or eliminate the suffering it creates, and trying to prevent that from happening is morally reprehensible. This is particularly true if you're in a relatively privileged position like, say, a finance capitalist in a major startup hub or working in an industry that for various reasons has been given a significantly better deal than most working people. At that point you're either doing the exploiting or siding with the exploiters and actively perpetuating unnecessary suffering. But if that suffering was natural then it wouldn't be unnecessary and you wouldn't be doing anything inarguably wrong.
It's just Jordan Peterson and his goddamn lobsters again.
Yeah it fits a pattern, half of starship troopers is about how other societies had ideals not based on mathematical truths but theirs is (no proof is ever shown). Another reason why I think the book reads so much better as a parody. The Eternal Science of Marxism, but now for Warrior Libertarians (who cannot even fight a proper war, see the whole technodogs thing).
Good point.
Heinlein is a bit tricky because on one hand he clearly has a Point of View, but on the other he tends to reuse material, which includes prodding at earlier systems until they get sufficiently dystopian to demand a strong Individualist Man to step up. Don't know if he set that up on purpose or if it was a consequence and set up things, or just the need to churn out new books. Sometimes I got the feeling that he tried ideas on for size.
This connection hadn't occured to me before, but the Starship Troopers scenes (in the book) where they claim to have mathematically rigorous proofs about various moral statements or actions or societal constructs reminds me of how Eliezer has a decision theory in mind with all sorts of counter intuitive claims (it's mathematically valid to never ever give into any blackmail or threats or anything adjacent to them), but hasn't actually written out his decision theory in rigorous well defined terms that can pass peer review or be used to figure out anything beyond some pre-selected toy problems.