Wait, A Textbook Is Teaching That We Can *actually* Make “shitposting" More Valuable And Popular Than

 Earlier today I was inventing a conspiracy theory that the whole “Parents Are Useless” trope in children’s fiction is secretly meant to prepare us for that eventuality (it eventually lost out to the Anthropic Principle of Parental Uselessness, where out of all possible fictional universes, only the ones where parents are useless produce viable children’s stories)

the trouble with parents who expect absolute obedience from their children is that even if the parent was right all the time (already laughable) there will eventually come a day when their faculties begin to fail and the children must step in; it helps to lay the groundwork for that sooner rather than later.

This is one for the OGs

Love, Death & Robots — Fish Night

if your feminism doesn’t include the rats in my sleeves it’s not feminist

Instead of the “anti-racist” hamster wheel, how about this?

From Campaign Zero.

Angry? Support state and local legislation, like a bill in New York to repeal a law that hides police misconduct records from the public. Or vote for politicians who appoint appellate judges who have reasonable interpretations of qualified immunity. Or rigorous police training that lasts more than a few short months.

But that’s booooooooring and requires compromise and working with people who disagree with you on some issues but not others, and, let’s face it, wheels-of-governance aesthetics < protest aesthetics.

But by all means “Say her name” until you’re blue in the face. Venmo your favorite grifter. Then go amplify some more voices to your friends, who are amplifying the same voices right back at you. Rinse and repeat.

It’s not about you. It’s not about madly scrubbing your horrible permanent stain on center stage like Lady Macbeth. Your “Work” means nothing.

Unless you’re a cop, judge, juror, or politician, your precious feelings and internalized whatevers are a distraction, not the source of the problem. The number of unarmed black men killed by people (police or civilian) who wouldn’t have done so had radical-pose “amplification” reached them is zero.

You. Are. Playing. A. Game. With. Your. Friends. Nothing more.

Anyone who says otherwise likely either has something to sell you or is under the influence of someone who does.

So take that guilt money and send it to the most boring swing-district state legislature candidate you can find who will sign on to reform legislation with a chance of passing in your state. Also, if you go on and on about how you are racist and will never be un-racist and vow to never get off the hamster wheel of shame but you don’t know who is running for judge where you live, fuck you and the liberal arts degree you rode in on.

Save lives, not your soul.

Here’s a post about Hard Problem of Consciousness, since @argumate​ and @foolishmeowing​ have talking about it lately:

I think it’s a mistake to view the Hard Problem as unique to materialism.  Idealism can’t answer it either, and generally doesn’t try to.  IMO, the problem is not really about matter, but about description or explanation.

(I also don’t think it’s unique to “formal” systems or approaches, except in a sense so broad that any philosophy that could ever be done is “formal,” because it involves strings of words and/or arguments.)

The Hard Problem is very similar to the problem of existence – “why is there something rather than nothing?”  Both of these are questions about what “animates” or “turns on” any given description – what makes a description (such as a formal system) more than “mere words on a page.”  This is a distinctive class of problem because any familiar kind of explanation would simply become part of the description, and thereby be subject to the exact same problem.

If you add some sort of “existence-maker” mechanism to your description of what exists, you’re still open to the objection that the entire description, existence-maker and all, could just as well be an inert logical structure, without the extra magic of existence.  This is a pretty familiar, standard point in the context of the existence question, but in discussions about consciousness, the analogous point tends to get buried under arguments about whether or not there is more of a problem for certain kinds of description – “material” or “formal” or “functional” ones, or whatever.

It seems to me that this is a problem for descriptions, period.  If you look at the various dualistic and idealistic systems that have been proposed, they tend to be, well … systems: descriptive accounts of what is supposed to exist (some or all of it mental/spiritual), along with some arguments about why we should assent to the description, but nothing inherent in them to light the flame and turn these descriptions necessarily into the realities they talk about.  These systems do claim that the flame is in fact lit, but they generally treat this as self-evident via Descartes’ cogito or similar.  At least one mind/spirit exists (by cogito), and here are some things it can conclude a priori about other existents – Leibniz’s various principles, McTaggart’s theory of determining correspondences, or whatever – and we’re off to the races.

These can be perfectly fine theories of what mind/spirit is, insofar as it exists, but they simply do not touch why/how it exists: you need the spark of a cogito to get things started, and the cogito doesn’t leave you any less in the dark about why there’s an existing mind (instead of there not being one).  It just convinces you that there is one.  And once you’ve decided to work within a frame where that is taken as given, you’ve given up on Hard Problems.  These theories only “explain” the ineluctable experiencey-ness of experience in the way that the observation “as a matter of fact, something exists” explains why there is something rather than nothing – which is to say, not at all.

It seems intuitively clear to me that these Hard Problems are unanswerable, because they ask for something that is incompatible with what we take to constitute an “answer” to a question.  They ask for an argument that some description is necessarily animated, that there’s no mystery about how it becomes more than words on a page because there is something impossible about the merely-words version of it.  But such an argument is either:

(1) An argument for purely logical necessity, i.e. necessity within the terms of the description, in which case the necessity property is just one more fact about the description and could be as “mere” as the rest, or

(2) An argument that the description gets necessarily lit up by the animating fire of something else that already has it, in which case we need some initial spark to start things up, one that is not explained within the terms of the description. Generally this spark is supposed to be “obvious” / a priori, but the fact that we have a priori knowledge of something doesn’t constitute an explanation of why we have that knowledge, so this doesn’t get the job done.

So I’ve been reading about someone who was ideologically abused within Catholicism and it’s bringing up a lot of feelings, but one thing it’s really crystallizing in my mind is an important thing that people fail to understand about ideological abuse.

The (relatively mild) ideological abuse I have experienced was used to convince me of some bad and harmful shit. But I’m worried that the things I’ve said about it make it seem like the abuse was bad because it convinced me of untruths. That’s a very very small part of the problem.

It is possible to commit ideological abuse in the name of ideas that are 100% true. People think that ideological abuse is only done in the name of darkly comic nonsense (Xenu only makes sense to someone who’s been abused so badly they forget how to think clearly) or ideologies based on cruelty and subjugation. It’s true that abuse is more common in ideologies that cannot possibly defend themselves with actual arguments, but it’s completely possible to abuse people in the name of things which make sense.

If you’re dealing with someone who thinks two plus two is five, you can show them they are wrong with counters or numberlines or whatever. This will teach them basic arithmetic and also respect their personhood. This is what any decent person would do.

Or you can control them with fear. You can make it sure that they know that if they ever say two plus two is five, they will be physically harmed or threatened with physical harm. You can lie and belittle and mistreat them in dozens of ways and any time they complain you can tell them that they deserve it for believing that two plus two is five. You can say that they’re not allowed to make even the smallest decisions for themselves (what to eat, how to dress, who to be friends with, what to read) because a person who believes two plus two is five shouldn’t be allowed to decide anything. You can isolate them from anyone you haven’t vetted (which means no friendships with anyone who is wrong about math, but also no friendships with anyone who says “obviously two plus two is four but there’s no need to hit people over it.”) The fact you are right about math doesn’t make it not abuse. You’ve abused them into believing something, and the fact that it is true doesn’t make the abuse ethical.

You’ve also severely damaged their ability to learn math. If they have a basket with two apples and they add two pears, they won’t be able to take an honest look about how many total fruits they have. They are only going to be able to think “I must have four fruits because I don’t want to get hurt again” or “I must have five fruits because there is no way on earth that despicable piece of shit can be right about anything after what they did to me.” You’ve done lasting and possibly permanent epistemic damage to this person. For a long time, maybe for the rest of their life, they will not be able to approach arithmetic with logic; they are going to come to a calculator with so much emotional baggage that they can’t be rational. They may genuinely need to espouse wrong beliefs about numbers because the only psychologically feasible alternative is espousing the (also wrong and more dangerous) belief that they deserve to be abused.

Almost everyone who commits ideological abuse thinks they are convincing their victims of the truth, and they think that this justifies the abuse. They are usually wrong about their ideas being true, but they are always wrong about their tactics being justified. I want anyone reading this to know that if you are seriously hurting someone to get them to believe you, it doesn’t matter that you are right. You have to find another way to do that. What you are doing does horrific damage and doesn’t even succeed in making people actually believe you, just in parroting you so that you will stop hurting them. You have to treat people who are wrong like people. Abusing someone into believing the truth doesn’t become okay because it’s the truth.

More importantly, I want you to know that if someone is using violence, the threat of violence or manipulation to control your beliefs, that is abuse. You do not deserve to be treated this way. You do not have to figure out right now whether what they are trying to make you believe is actually correct. You can leave (if it’s safe) or practice harm-reduction (if leaving isn’t safe yet) before you figure out whether or not they are telling the truth. It is not okay for them to do this to you, even if they are right.

You deserve to be safe. You deserve sovereignty over your own thoughts. Good luck. I love you.

sound ON

This is the /an/ post that keeps on giving.

From the transcripts it looks like the others were trying to follow procedure but Chauvin was most definitely not. 

for what?

edinburgh, 2019