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Posts by Lanny
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2016-07-25 at 12:38 AM UTC in I like math more than coffee.Which is why I can't tell my coffee cup apart from my doughnut.
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2016-07-24 at 10:58 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
In a normative sense? Nigga, facts are facts, they don't depend on consensus or what is considered to be normal.
Ah, "normative" here is a technical term. It doesn't refer to consensus or anything, the point was that you can mean "the fact X is wrong" in two ways, you can be saying X is not the case (like if I said "2+2=5 is wrong") or you can be saying X is the case but it ought not to be (as in "it is wrong to steal"), the latter is normative and what I was trying to say is that I meant it the ethical rather than descriptive sense.The sun is the closest star to earth; fact. It has no moral/ethical value, it's an objective fact based on observation and measurement. I don't mean to say someone's understanding of something cannot be right or wrong. All i am saying is facts have no moral/ethical value.
Sure, but there are other statements which are potentially facts which do have ethical value. For example "it is wrong to steal" is a statement of fact (although it may not be true) about what is ethical. Further some statements of undisputed facts can, if we admit a realist system of ethics, also have an "ought/ought not" value. Like if you accept that stealing is wrong then the fact that I stole in the past has moral content: it was wrong for me to steal. In short true facts can be ethically wrong (which is to say they ought not to be the case) and statements about what ought to be or not be the case have truth values.Also, you can only say rape is bad; fact. If you're not a moral relativist.
I mean I don't hold the position but I feel like I've seen people argue rape is justified, sometimes in limited cases and sometimes in general. It seems kinda dumb but it does seem to be a valid position (as in well formed, as opposed to true) at least at first blush.No a child without moral agency cannot be killed on a whim, and it feels wrong to say it' s just because they' re the property of their parents. It raises a lot of questions about the nature of parent-child relationships.
It does! There are a number of interesting problems around pre-agents (young children without moral agency, fetuses).
I've held a pro-abortion viewpoint for all my life but just a year ago or so I got into an argument about, like, delayed gratification, how we're justified in forgoing immediate reward for greater rewards later (e.g. pursuing education at any level generally represented as short-term decrease in quality of life (less play, more work, usually debt) but is justified by long term rewards (deeper understanding of the world, higher pay/quality of life, greater ability to participate in society)), but in the ethical sense so like maybe I'll allow a trivial evil today to reap a greater moral good later. Anyway, if you accept making such trades is valid (and I do) then you run into this problem where you've said future moral goods are of roughly equal value to present moral goods. So in the case of considering abortion, you can't simply say "mother's right to her body trumps everything", you have to ask what disutility a mother suffers from child rearing against the net utility of the child. And I can't help but imagine cases of affluent mothers with a strong support network to whom the present utility of raising a child, even if it amounts to 18 years of servitude, might be lesser than the net utility that child is likely to experience. I think the lives of many people are worthwhile, net positives, and thus there seem to be cases where I'm committed to saying abortion is immoral, specifically when the expected pleasure of existing a child will experience is greater than the expected burden to their caretakers.
Anyway, that seems a bit rambly, it likely doesn't have much bearing on you since you don't buy into the utilitarian premise, but the point is that there are a lot of interesting/unintuitive issues around non-adult humans.How would you answer the questions you posed to me, if you'll humor me and play the devil's advocate as it were.
I'd say there is no inherent relationship between moral considerability and moral agency. Maximization of utility (pleasure) is our only moral duty, we have this duty because we're moral agents but there are many things capable of pleasure that are not moral agents, thus there are morally considerable things (e.g. farm animals) which are not agents (killing is commonplace in nature and it would be absurd to call a cat morally culpable for killing a bird). I take it as trivially evident that lower animals are capable of suffering, but there are articulate arguments to be made there if you disagree, although I think their range of suffering/pleasure is likely less than our own (a cow is unlikely to ever experience existential dread nor the joy of an amazing work of art). As such we have a moral duty to animals, I really love a fatty ass hamburger at like 3am but even that sublime moment of meaty ecstasy I don't think is comparable years of suffering, intense physical pain, a cow needs to endure for my fast food, so fast food is impermissible. There are other cases like honey, milk, and possibly eggs where it's conceivable that you could produce an animal product without causing greater suffering to animals than humans would derive from the thing but as you look into it it's generally economically difficult to do so. -
2016-07-24 at 7 PM UTC in Alex Jones raises hell at The Young Turks set.My opinions on policy generally align with TYT but I've never liked them on an aesthetic level. It was a dumb stunt though, I guess it's not news to anyone that shillex jones has the mentality of an angry 12 year old but such a belief is this day reaffirmed.
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2016-07-24 at 6:46 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
No. However, if i value steak, it is in my interest to keep the race of cows alive, if i like honey, i should make sure bees are around to make it. It's a symbiotic relation.
It's only symbiosis if you think additional animal lives spent in preparation for being made into food is a good thing from the perspective of the subjugated species. I don't think that's the case, I think it would be better not to exist at all than to be a cow or chicken in a large scale farming operation in 21st century america. I think these sorts of animals are a special case, an antinatalist would accept that statement holds true for any sort of animal and thus approve of veganism on an ethical level.Well it is unfortunate children are the object of desire for pedophiles, but this is simply a fact. Facts aren't inherently right or wrong.
Why can't facts be right or wrong? What is the difference between saying "It's wrong to rape children" and "the fact that children are raped is wrong (in a normative sense)"? In any case the point I was getting at is that the same logic that would justify participating in animal suffering because "sucks to be a non-human animal but them's the breaks" can be used to justify participation in rape of children unless you can articulate why humans are a special class to which different rules apply.I suppose they do but it doesn't make it right to rape them.
Totally, I agree, so likewise the mere fact that we have an interest in consuming animal products does not justify doing so. Some other condition has to be satisfied.Humans are afforded special privileges because we have moral agency. Animals do not. As such they're not afforded it's protections. And you can't argue it would therefore be morally OK to kill my cat, because my cat is my property, and don't get me started on property rights.
OK, so now we're on the right track. So I have two questions here:
1. Why is moral agency necessary for moral considerability? To deontologists the distinction may not be clear: moral agency is the property that allows a thing to be accountable for its actions, moral considerability is the independent property that simply means we have some duty to a thing. For utilitarians it's generally assumed animal suffering is commensurable: any species that can experience pleasure and suffering, even if to different degrees, are morally considerable up to the extent they can do so (so if, for example, a sort of animal as such a rudimentary nervous system that we can find no evidence they are capable of pleasure or suffering then it stops being morally considerable, the suffering of lower animals might be less considerable than human suffering). A case for examination by duty theorists: children are capable of, at minimum, manslaughter. It would probably be trivial to find cases of parents or strangers killed by the actions of, say, infants. In such case we don't hold the children responsible, we say things like "they didn't know any better" or "they couldn't have done differently". So we don't assign moral agency to children under a certain age, and yet we do seem to assign them moral considerability, surely you don't think a child absent moral agency may be killed on a whim, of it they can't be, it's merely by their status as property of their parents.
2. Why are humans the only animals that have moral agency? What property is unique in us to bring it about? If name some human property like "self referential intelligence" or something (and assuming this property truly is unique to humans) then the obvious followup is why is moral agency contingent on that property as opposed to some other. -
2016-07-24 at 9:07 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first editionOh damn, 10/10
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2016-07-24 at 12:06 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition​
I don't do drugs to get high. I do do drugs so I can function without crippling chronic pain. What I take, it works and I can function. I don't like to lose control, hence why I very rarely drink at all. My reasons for using drugs are much different than most of the drug use that goes on here- Malice and I don't have a lot in common, but I'd say at least for why we use drugs, we share common ground- we do it to improve the quality of our lives and be able to function.
Funny how so many opiate addicts have totally legitimate pain issues that just have to be managed, I swear on me mum, it's the truth, let me tell you. I guess for some of them it's true but you can imagine why it would be hard for someone to take you at your word on that. It's something that's basically impossible for people to verify and a very convenient justification for addiction.Translation: He's a total fag. Fuck the bees and the cows and the fish, they exist to make my tea sweet, give me a cold glass of milk in the morning a nice steak at dinner or sushi should i desire it. How is this fair? It isn't but life sucks and then you die. The cosmic die cast me to be a human, too bad lesser animals. Except for cats, cause i get value other than nutrition from them. They are lucky like that.
Do you really believe that? You seem to have some notion of ethics beyond troglodytic might-makes-right, I've seen you repeatedly rebuke child rapists to establish yourself as a better class of pedophile (an argument I'm partially amenable to), so presumably you consider children to have some right to security beyond their personal ability to maintain it. But isn't the abused child just equally maligned by the cosmic die and such is life? Don't they exist, from the perspective of a rapist, merely as a means to sexual gratification in the same way animals live, on your view, to satisfy your desires?
Now you might say "apples and oranges, human children are of the same kind as me and are thus afforded special privileges", which OK, maybe there's an argument there but you have to actually make it. You can't handwave with "that's just how things are" on the subject of animal welfare but suddenly pull normative claims out of your pocket when we start talking about humans unless you articulate why humans belong to a special class where such claims apply and why animals are not part of that class. -
2016-07-21 at 3:32 AM UTC in I FUBARD now kkkkkmacintoshplusvaporwave is so 2011 man
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2016-07-21 at 3:31 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Hahaha, fuck Camus, I knew there were critical flaws when I first read The Myth of Sysyphus. Well, I definitely don't hate or even dislike Camus, I just disagree with him. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good overview of this: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/
Glad you read it. Most SEP articles are pretty great, I think a lot of people kinda try to treat them as wikipedia articles: self contained rather than supplementary to the texts they treat, and are disappointed but there's some really excellent commentary in many (most?) of them.
Did you read handful of much shorter essays at the end of the book? I really liked Summer in Algiers. There's nothing philosophically profound about it but I really fell in love with the prose (at least as rendered in the O'Brien translation). Just on a pure enjoyment level I think it's one of the most enjoyable pieces of writing I've ever read, like a really striking painting or something.I also believe the author of the comic didn't fully grasp Camus' arguments and fixates on mortality as the critical factor.
I agree with this. Camus certainly had ideas about ethics but that was never his philosophical project.We're immortal. Now what do we do for the rest of eternity? Is existence still absurd? Are we truly immortal, or has the average life expectancy simply radically increased to the point where it gives the illusion to the common man, that it's only in practical sense? ("On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.")
Yes, of course existence is still absurd. It's not death that makes us absurd, although perhaps it adds a point to the existential question, it's our impulse to ask for a justification for our existence, nature's structure in such a way as to compel us to ask, and the total inability of every means within our reach to provide an answer. That doesn't change with immortality, perhaps it let's us avoid the question for longer but I think an eternal existence would be even more absurd: to defy a fundamentally mutable, dynamic universe, and have to way to explain why, that seems like a more severe contrast.Also came across an interesting, but simple line of argumentation to advocate anti-natalism (Of course I don't think it would be effective and even a mass attempt would have highly dysgenic effects).
A: "Do you think it is wrong to do anything that leads to the needless death of a person?"
B: "Yes."
A: "Does having a child lead to the death of person?"
B: "Yes."
I don't think you could get most people to commit to the idea that all action that leads to the death of a person is impermissible, besides like Kant or divine command theorists (so basically assholes). Almost everyone has a "shoot hitler" clause. You might call up the "needless" I imagine most people wouldn't consider every death to be needless or meaningless.Also, thinking about women and childbirth, particularly Hydro's actions, her posts about breast milk, all the grotesqueness that comes with pregnancy and childbirth, along with the neurological/physiological effects gave me the following thought. Aristotle viewed women as being akin to imperfect men, and similar views prevailed until relatively recently (and not for positive reasons, imo). Motherhood is the descent into animalism.
To whatever degree motherhood is a descent into animalism so is sex from the perspective of both sexes, even masturbation reduces to gaming a biological system, admission to our biological realities. Not that I think that's reason to disagree with the former thesis, but I don't think women have any particular claim to baser natures. I can't really think of a person who's intellect isn't a slave to their passions, their biology, although for each to a greater or lesser extent. -
2016-07-20 at 2:53 PM UTC in Health, Diet and Wellness. Ancient Oriental Weight loss secrets!.Also I read somewhere that Hitler IV'd meth, so there's that
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2016-07-20 at 2:53 PM UTC in Health, Diet and Wellness. Ancient Oriental Weight loss secrets!.I could smell the meth on this thread from a mile away
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2016-07-18 at 3:13 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
BTW Lan check your PMs.
I don't have any PMs.
Is this a setup to "that's right, fix the fucking PMs"? -
2016-07-18 at 4:19 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first editionOh man, anti-natalist mercy killing. That's some romantic shit right there blood.
I'm curious though, do you consider that an accurate analysis or are you just going for what you think I would least want people to hear about me? Specifically the gay/gender confused thing is something easy to pin on me but doesn't seem like something you could get out of an honest assessment. Also "drowning out negative thoughts" or rather sublimating them into productive behaviors is almost the hallmark of mental health in some models. I think Freud has a lot of problems but one thing I think he should be commended for is the acknowledgement of natural but unacceptable impulses and our agency in assenting to them.
P.S. I've seen a lot of pretty sentiment generated around western interpretations of buddhism but I can't help but feel like, at very best, it's like taking Aquinas and using him as a representative of Christianity, and at worst really bad revisionism. The lived buddhist tradition isn't half so amenable to these intellectual fettishisations. I was in Japan recently, went to see Senso-ji, famous buddhist temple. As you approach the temple from any direction there are like a solid two blocks of shops selling souvenirs, everything you could think of, some of it vaguely branded with something buddhist but most of it not. The temple itself collects donations and is sprawling for something built in Tokyo, frankly opulent in its size. I contrast between the mercantile, opportunistic attitude embodied by the buddhism there and the pretty ascetic vaguely phenomenological tradition that's presented is like night and day. -
2016-07-17 at 9:28 PM UTC in what do you want to know?Are there problems in NP but which are not in P?
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2016-07-17 at 9:10 PM UTC in What are you reading?Huh, well that's cool. $25 an hour seems pretty great for a writing/editing gig for someone your age (or what I assume your age is). You couldn't do that and work on your own stuff nights and weekends or something? And it seems like you'd have to replace that income somehow, does a day job not get in the way or are you unemployed when you're working on your own stuff?
In any case, you're not fucking Kafka and your very sloppy personal life is already strewn all over these forums. You have an audience already invested in the book before reading a page, at least one of which is willing to pay. Whatever the quality of the writing is we want to read it, there's nothing to lose by posting it.
P.S. Has hydro read the book? -
2016-07-17 at 9:28 AM UTC in What a bleak horrible future we live in.The reason to vote for Clinton is the same reason to vote for anyone: she has policy and it's better, corrected for uncertainty, than Trump's. Like does anyone really think we've had a president since LBJ that hasn't committed whatever crimes, had a similar moral composition, than those of Hillary?
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2016-07-17 at 9:21 AM UTC in What do you buy along with condoms so you don't look like a dork?It's rare that I buy condoms from a corner store but for whatever reason the times that I have I've thrown in an extra item or two, just seemed awkward not to. I think one time it was cheetos and another time it was some soft drink. I know know why it's awkward but it is, you would think it would be like some kind of badge of honor if anything but not, just blankly looking across the counter at the aging black woman and sensation of her seeing in to your soul, her eyes boring into you such that every insecurity becomes clear. Shit's dark man, buying condoms is some shit.
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2016-07-14 at 7:01 AM UTC in Got beat up by the copsNo, I have never experienced a fugue state wherein I tried to fight the cops. That sounds like severe neuro degenerative disease or some shit right there blood, just like, fyi
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2016-07-13 at 4:32 PM UTC in That would be funny if some Top A list celebrity committed suicide.I didn't realize boxxy had an acting career
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2016-07-13 at 5:50 AM UTC in What are you reading?
How do his other fiction books compare to the gods themselves? I really had a hard time choking down a lot of it. Like *insert scientists name here* trying to stop the electron pumps, not so much for the story but GODDAMNED THE DIALOGUE jesus christ. Beg this guy, reason with that guy, hey maybe this GUY will get it. I get the feels he was trying to add, but I think he took way too long in doing it. It was like reading the same shit for 20 pages. I'm sure you know what I mean. I liked hearing about moon food, or their moon sports, about the soft ones and their weird contour line emotional signs.
The Gods Themselves definitely leaned more "literary" (or maybe some imitation thereof) than his other work, much of which is characterized by pretty utilitarian prose, if that's what you mean. Have you read any of his collections of short stories? I, Robot is probably the most famous although it has no real relation to the film. The Foundation series is probably considered his largest project in world building and is again more A to B writing, which surprisingly doesn't really increase the pace of things.Also, fuck off m8. I've made more from my writing than 20 dollars.
You said the the only copy of Hitchhiked into Conception you sold was to some English dude, as I recall it was selling for $4. I'm actually curious, have you sold some other piece of writing more successfully? -
2016-07-13 at 5:35 AM UTC in That would be funny if some Top A list celebrity committed suicide.Why? So we can watch people once again make a public spectacle of mourning a celebrity they never even met?
Hard pass.
