Random thought of the day
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 hm. do you think God could decree arbitrary different things to be good, or are there certain things God could (or would) never decree to be good?
I'm not sure whether that's a distinction we could possibly realistically make. God says some things are good because they match His character, and some things are bad because they go against His character. God would have to be completely different in order to make different things to be good than what are already good.
Besides, what would that look like? Can you imagine what sort of society, much less the whole universe, we would have if cowardice was a virtue for its own sake? Or if theft was good and generosity was evil? At their core, good and evil are static things. Simply put, evil is just tarnished good. The qualities that make an evil person able to be evil – intelligence, fortitude, cunning, even existence itself – are all good traits in themselves (or rather, in that they are derived from God's character), but they're used in an inappropriate way: they are used in a way that leaves out at least one other virtue.
One more point: people often point to the differences in the laws and practices of various cultures to try to make the differences in cultural moralities greater. But those differences nearly always tend to be differences of those cultures' beliefs about the facts. If certain groups of people really are dedicated to the destruction, moral or physical, of the society around them, then it would behoove the society around them to restrain or eliminate those people. But if what sets that group apart is simply a benign difference of biology or psychology, then destroying them would not be the proper course of action. But the difference isn't a moral one; rather, it's a difference in beliefs about what constitutes and motivates their behavior.
The example that I read was concerning witches. If there really are witches who have sold their souls to the Devil in order to gain power to hurt and kill others, then these traitors to humanity deserve burning if anyone ever did. But we don't burn witches now. Why? Not because we changed our minds about how bad that sort of behavior is, but because we don't believe that there really are witches. It may be progress of knowledge, but it's hardly progress in morality. That is, we changed our beliefs about facts, not our morals.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Good thing you're not allowed to check to make sure He is that kind of god, then.
What do you mean?
If you question whether He's a dick or not, then you've committed a most grievous sin, yes?
No, from what I understand, that itself, if it's an honest question, is not a sin. However, like I said, it's a logically inconsistent position. God created us, and so we depend on Him for everything. In His creation of us, He gave us a little share of His existence, so we live. He gave us a little share of His reasoning power, so we think. He gave us a little share of His morality, so we make moral judgments. If we question Him on these things, we act like a stream that is trying to rise above its source. We can and may try, but in doing so, we question the very foundation of our own abilities, which ends up being an attack against ourselves.
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@djls45 even if He does exist, He could be bullshitting us about all that. We only have His word for it that that's what happened.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 even if He does exist, He could be bullshitting us about all that. We only have His word for it that that's what happened.
What other option can there be, though?
Edit: I mean, you're proposing a God that is okay with lying. Why then is lying universally (AFAIK) considered an evil thing? Even "little white lies" are considered wrong. And even in cases where they are thought to be justifiable, they're treated as the lesser of two evils, which means they are still evil.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
What other option can there be, though?
All of them. Just take the reasoning behind Last-Thursdayism and run with it.
Example: He sure is obsessed with the 'I am the only one' thing, isn't He? What if there was another one, and He killed them in anger? Much like that Japanese myth. In fact, since that myth involves the dragon choosing to take the form of a human and exist down here to get some perspective, it'd certainly fit the Jesus thing.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
What other option can there be, though?
All of them. Just take the reasoning behind Last-Thursdayism and run with it.
Example: He sure is obsessed with the 'I am the only one' thing, isn't He? What if there was another one, and He killed them in anger? Much like that Japanese myth. In fact, since that myth involves the dragon choosing to take the form of a human and exist down here to get some perspective, it'd certainly fit the Jesus thing.So now murder and selfish anger are okay?
But again, that depiction puts God as existing inside the universe, not with Him outside it and having created it, so it's a completely different sort of god.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
So now murder and selfish anger are okay?
You dare to know right and wrong better than God?
Doesn't hold up so well, does it.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
So now murder and selfish anger are okay?
You dare to know right and wrong better than God?
Doesn't hold up so well, does it.No, your proposal really doesn't. If what you're offering is how things really are, then why are murder and selfish anger wrong? After all, the dragon-god approves of them.
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@djls45 Definitely more of a sun-dragon-god thing - the Miracle of the Sun is pretty hard to deny. Anyway, it's God who tells you what's right and wrong, yeah? So no matter what he did, it's what he says that goes.
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@pie_flavor So now we're back to a god that lies and is inconsistent with his own nature. He says one thing and does another. What are we supposed to think of that level of fickleness?
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@djls45 Ideally, you never find out about it.
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If a TV aerial fell off, how effective an antenna would the remaining cable from the roof serve as?
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@kazitor said in Random thought of the day:
If a TV aerial fell off, how effective an antenna would the remaining cable from the roof serve as?
Considering that this is pretty much what happened to me this winter: Very uneffective. Works about as well as not having any aerial/cable plugged into the TV at all.
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@Atazhaia IME with digital signals, plugging any old garbage including a paperclip or a piece of wire works great, as long as you're above ground level and don't have too many building and things between you and the broadcasting towers.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
He says one thing and does another. What are we supposed to think of that level of fickleness?
Omnipotence.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Ideally, you never find out about it.
But we already know/suspect it, so now what?
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I don't think so, no. I've never seen anyone who's verifiably, genuinely racist say that he's just saying racist things ironically.
hi, i am a jewish person who used to hang out on neo-nazi websites because i was in a very dark place and wanted to go places where people would hate me. i have several friends who did the same thing. i think i am an expert on this topic and pretty unbiased.
it's weird to me that when someone says "i believe this totally reprehensible thing," (usually something about race, sex, or gender) bystanders say:
- well, they obviously don't truly believe that
- but if they did, it would be their right to say it
- and who are you to criticize them for it?
I think you misunderstood me there. I do acknowledge there are genuinely racist and antisemitic people. It's just that those genuinely racist and antisemitic people don't go around saying they're just joking.
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@Gąska my post is about how i've seen them doing that, why i know they're genuinely racist, and why i think they do that
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(being clear, i think the vast majority of internet racism is obviously serious, yet the vast majority of internet racists claim to be joking when in neutral spaces like twitter or subreddits that aren't about race -- to me it's obviously serious basically in all respects, except that dudes doing it claim it's not serious.
i'm gently accusing you of being tone-deaf because since you believe this doesn't happen, then from my POV you either don't notice when people refer to their previous racism as a joke, or you believe them when they say that.
esp since your other posts were about how people in this thread were wrong for thinking other internet dudes were being racist, because as far as you could tell those dudes were actually being ironic. that to me suggests that you're taking their claims at face value)
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@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
He says one thing and does another. What are we supposed to think of that level of fickleness?
Omnipotence.
That (fickle omnipotence) is absolutely horrifying – the worst sort of nightmare fuel that can be. You'd never be able to know whether you were pleasing that god or not. And FWIW, the scriptures of one of the major world religions straight up says that their God is fickle.
On a side note, I don't know of any Christian who really believes that omnipotence means the ability to do absolutely anything without any limits whatsoever. The Almighty God does have limits on what He will do, which in His case, also means they're limits on what He can do, because He can't do anything that is against His own character, which includes things that are logically inconsistent or that are evil.
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@djls45 I just hope we're in one of the good saved-games.
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
i'm gently accusing you of being tone-deaf because since you believe this doesn't happen, then from my POV you either don't notice when people refer to their previous racism as a joke, or you believe them when they say that.
I do believe them. Why wouldn't I? I do believe you that you're Jewish, and I have as much reason to believe this as I have to believe when someone says they're only joking with those racist texts.
Has any person who posts racist things on the internet then claimed it's a joke, ever done something that cannot be taken as a joke, like physically assault someone for their race/religion? Has any person who has physically assaulted someone or did something else that cannot be seen as a joke, ever claimed they're just joking?
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I have as much reason to believe this as I have to believe when someone says they're only joking with those racist texts.
sorry dude, but this is basically the topic of my original reply to you. if you think my original reply is bs, feel free to comment to that effect, but when i explicitly respond to something and you just repeat it as if i hadn't, i feel unheard.
i'm guilty of acting like people just stumble into this, but it's actually a rhetorical strategy a lot of racists and neo nazis encourage their friends to adopt. since you just asked for one example, here are five paragraphs from the Daily Stormer style guide:
The tone of the site should be light.
Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred.
The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as selfdeprecating humor - I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously.
This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that's neither here nor there.
Serious articles are fine, and can be written and published with absolute seriousness.
However, articles which take a serious tone should not include racial slurs or even rude language about other races.
older and more traditional neonazi sites like stormfront don't like this rhetorical strategy, which is a pity because it works really well
related, here is a subreddit about ironic racism and organizing brigades on other subreddits. they used to have a really overt reference to the USS liberty on their homepage (an old-school nazi dogwhistle) but they've since taken it down: https://www.reddit.com/r/frenworld
it's basically a funnel to this explicitly racist subreddit moderated by the same people: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clown__World/
in this thread, a mod from that subreddit tells someone to post funny racist things instead of normal racist things: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clown__World/comments/bj51x0/my_favorite_sermon_the_jews_and_their_lies/
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska my post is about how i've seen them doing that, why i know they're genuinely racist, and why i think they do that
Do you believe that there are different–"levels" or "intensities"‡, I guess–of racism/bigotry? If so, do they have varying levels of unacceptability? Or are they all just the same thing and all equally unacceptable?
‡ E.g. a "mild" bigot might make jokes at a certain group's (blondes, Irishmen, blacks, married men, octogenarians, Catholics, etc.) expense, but wouldn't assume that any given member of the group fits the stereotype; a "medium" bigot might default to that assumption unless/until he gets to know an individual member; and a "major" bigot would refuse to accept that individual members could be different than the stereotype.
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This post is deleted!
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
it's not like people say "maybe they don't truly believe that" when someone, say, promotes the Spring framework. it seems to be limited to really awful views that are widely held in secret.
I don't know. I've been tempted to tell people who recommend NodeJS "come on, you can't be serious!"
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
I've been tempted to tell people who recommend NodeJS "come on, you can't be serious!"
Only tempted?
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As long as I don't ask them, I can cling to the belief they're kidding. It makes me feel a little better.
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@Atazhaia said in Random thought of the day:
@kazitor said in Random thought of the day:
If a TV aerial fell off, how effective an antenna would the remaining cable from the roof serve as?
Considering that this is pretty much what happened to me this winter: Very uneffective. Works about as well as not having any aerial/cable plugged into the TV at all.
Yes. Antenna cables are not supposed to act as antennas. Otherwise they'd gather/generate interference (depending on whether you're receiving or transmitting).
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
i'm guilty of acting like people just stumble into this, but it's actually a rhetorical strategy a lot of racists and neo nazis encourage their friends to adopt. since you just asked for one example, here are five paragraphs from the Daily Stormer style guide:
Now we're talking. Thanks. I stand corrected.
@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
older and more traditional neonazi sites like stormfront don't like this rhetorical strategy, which is a pity because it works really well
At making people not take racists seriously. Which might not exactly be what racists want.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Ideally, you never find out about it.
But we already know/suspect it, so now what?
Well, since everything he says is suspect, that includes whether or not you go to hell.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
older and more traditional neonazi sites like stormfront don't like this rhetorical strategy, which is a pity because it works really well
At making people not take racists seriously. Which might not exactly be what racists want.
yeah, IMHO the people who go for this stuff should be like, deeply embarrassed about it. on top of the racism, it's really juvenile and saying something is a joke while actually believing it isn't exactly a position of strength. i do think it works on people who are super compartmentalized, or just as a way of signaling to other disingenuous racists "hey, sorry, this is the maximum level of racism i can get away with showing off in this public space"
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i think i'm wrong for acting like the point of the racist jokes is to convince other people of racism. racists tend to be pretty insecure and they have weird issues, so obviously they want random people to believe them, but i don't know if it's entirely calculated around having that effect. so i think there's an emergent side of it, where the racists are doing it mostly for themselves, but they end up eventually affecting other people and building their coalition too.
a lot of pro-racist social media posting obviously invokes racist tropes but it's not even clear what it means -- so it's kind of deniable that way.
giant history sinkhole: disco demolition night was a giant publicity stunt organized by a DJ who hated disco music -- the premise was that they were going to bring a bunch of disco records to the center of a baseball stadium and blow them up with fireworks. there was a problem: the music the participants brought largely wasn't disco -- it was blues, funk and soul music made by black artists. like, there was BB king in there.
the event turned into a race riot.
it's not as if a bunch of people colluded in advance to decide to turn it into a race thing. there's a really chilling interview with a security guard who attended the event, who was black, where he describes all the signs that a race riot was about to take place. he hung out at the gate taking people's records and he kept having the same ambiguously racist conversation with person after person.
the people who ultimately started the race riot did not appear to know it was going to turn into a race riot, but they were coming in with all these racist feelings that they were already starting to discharge. they probably each thought they were somewhat alone.
it's hard to say why a ton of racists attended the event. it probably comes from tiny things in media resonating with lots of random people all in the same way, and from historical circumstances that go basically unrecorded. example: disco was a giant thing for gay people, and that was part of the problem, but at the time it wasn't really well-documented that disco was a giant thing for gay people. probably a lot of the participants hadn't even put it together. they just knew that they didn't like disco. do gayness and blackness have a lot to do with each other? not really -- but hating one is at least correlated with hating the other.
in the historical cases i can think of that are like this, the perpetrators all figure it out eventually. the mythology may form in people's subconscious minds, then coalesce, so they don't know that they're coming to the same conclusion as thousands of other shitty people. but it seems like the victims know immediately, because they get targeted as people amp themselves up. bystanders not only don't know at the time, but continue to deny anyone ever had the chance to know.
i kind of think that the racists are half-aware that they're participating in a thing that's bigger than themselves that has the effects they want: making racial minorities feel uncomfortable, and getting away with it. i also feel like the fact that it's infantile and not fully-formed means that people are kind of discharged from the responsibility for saying what they're saying. maybe they don't even know what it means -- maybe it's just visceral for them.
it's very easy to walk back from this stuff when it's treated as a joke. but when you hear the same joke made from a lot of directions by people who seem to be on the verge of hating you, and who are willing to defend that unexpressed/facetious hate? it feels like the precursor to something that's not a joke any more.
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(for a historical example I included in the original draft of the post but ditched, look into the NSDAP's Degenerate Art exhibition. i ultimately chose not to include it because it was engineered, but it was sort of a cringe compilation of bad+experimental Jewish art designed to play on prejudices everyone kind of had, but hadn't really named.
also sorry i swear i'm a real programmer i'm just really into liberal arts stuff)
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@zekka said in Random thought of the day:
giant history sinkhole: disco demolition night was a giant publicity stunt organized by a DJ who hated disco music -- the premise was that they were going to bring a bunch of disco records to the center of a baseball stadium and blow them up with fireworks. there was a problem: the music the participants brought largely wasn't disco -- it was blues, funk and soul music made by black artists. like, there was BB king in there.
It was sinkholed very well. So well that I can't find any sources on that (I mean, the event happened, that's easy to confirm, but I couldn't find anything about B.B. King's records being burned as well). For an outside observer, it's impossible to tell whether it was covered up or whether it's just a conspiracy theory.
Do you have any links to share on this? I'd love to read more about it (especially the racist part).
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@Gąska i don't really think it's a conspiracy theory.
i first heard about this in school and later heard about it while talking with some friends about the history of gay rights. (PS, another interesting event that spontaneously became "about" something different from what it was nominally about was the Stonewall Riots)
it's been a while since i read up on this, so you're welcome to check my accuracy. as far as I know, it's not as if people were looking particularly closely at the records as they were submitted, so I don't think you'll be able to find an authoritative source on whether BB King's record was burned, specifically. your best shot would be hearing from primary sources who were at the event.
i don't think it's so important whether bb king was in the mix because there were thousands of records, but i think if i want you to believe my theory, i think i have to convince you that:
- the riot was about race
- the promotional material was not (explicitly) racist
- disco was kind of a black/gay thing
i think 2 and 3 are true and the story is really well-told in secondary sources. i think you have to look at eye-witness reports to establish 1, but there aren't really any sources that disagree.
i have not relistened to this to confirm, but i think the interview i'm citing is here: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/undone/39h27b/disco-demolition-night . the person in this interview is vince lawrence, who spoke about the event several other places, like here: https://www.foundationsofhouse.com/blog/these-things-inside-my-soul-in-conversation-with-vince-lawrence-foh2017 .
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oh uh, being clear, by "sinkhole" I mean "i'm going to get trapped in one spot for a very long time," not "the thing i'm talking about was buried somewhere and no one will find it." i don't think the event was truly covered up, although I think the press of the time covered it as a generic riot rather than as a race riot.
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I think this is getting rather garagey.
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@pie_flavor can you paraphrase? sorry, i don't know what that means!
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@zekka politics and other things liable to create flamewars (such as race relations) generally go in the Trolleybus Garage category for explicitly allowing flaming, or the Civilized Salon category for explicitly banning anything of the sort. You have to join this group to see the Garage.
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@pie_flavor awesome! i don't think we are flamewarring yet, although i feel weird because i'm being asked to prove fairly uncontroversial stuff while my wild-ass claims are mostly going unquestioned! i'll join soon. thanks!
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@zekka The Trollybus Garage is a category for discussing topics that tend to become flame wars, such as race and politics.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
If our sense of fairness, justice, and goodness is ultimately based in and on God's (and I believe it is), then trying to say that God is unjust or unfair (and implying by that that He is bad) is a logically untenable position to hold
If an idea of God is unjust or unfair (which I believe yours is) then trying to say our sense of fairness, justice, and goodness is ultimately based in and on it is a logically untenable position to hold
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 even if He does exist, He could be bullshitting us about all that. We only have His word for it that that's what happened.
He might be ironically being a dick
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
@Atazhaia said in Random thought of the day:
@kazitor said in Random thought of the day:
If a TV aerial fell off, how effective an antenna would the remaining cable from the roof serve as?
Considering that this is pretty much what happened to me this winter: Very uneffective. Works about as well as not having any aerial/cable plugged into the TV at all.
Yes. Antenna cables are not supposed to act as antennas. Otherwise they'd gather/generate interference (depending on whether you're emitting or receiving).
So if you strip the insulation off the antenna cable, would it then become an antenna itself?
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Ideally, you never find out about it.
But we already know/suspect it, so now what?
Well, since everything he says is suspect, that includes whether or not you go to hell.
And so equally any chance of you going to heaven. Or staying there.
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@djls45 Indeed.
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@Jaloopa said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
If our sense of fairness, justice, and goodness is ultimately based in and on God's (and I believe it is), then trying to say that God is unjust or unfair (and implying by that that He is bad) is a logically untenable position to hold
If an idea of God is unjust or unfair (which I believe yours is) then trying to say our sense of fairness, justice, and goodness is ultimately based in and on it is a logically untenable position to hold
What do you mean by unjust or unfair? What standard are you using to make that judgment?
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Indeed.
So it's more realistic, more tenable, and more desirable to hold that God is consistent.
To restate and expound my argument from earlier, if we suppose that God can lie, then He must be inconsistent. If He is inconsistent, then He must be illogical. If He is illogical, then by extension, our thoughts – being derived from His – are also illogical. And if our thoughts are illogical, then any conclusion we make is logically suspect. Such conclusions would include statements like "God can lie" or "we can make logical deductions." We have thus determined by reasoning that reasoning cannot work as it claims. And that destroys any possibility of scientific inquiry, communication, or knowledge of any type but direct personal experience.
But we do know that we can think logically, and we do know that we can communicate meaningfully, and we do know that we can learn and know things outside our own experiences. Thus, by the law of non-contradiction, we must assume that the initial assumption of that argument is false — God cannot lie.
