| HN Mirror

I looked back on that and yeah, I went in a little hard there and made some assumptions. I think I'm on edge because I've been dealing with some family members who are getting taken in pretty deep by this conspiracy stuff, and it's been difficult, both because it tends to turn them against anyone who isn't in it, and because it really is for them a gateway into some pretty life-ruining scams I can't help them avoid because they think I'm an enemy agent or something

Paranoia and edginess begets more paranoia and edginess it seems. I projected stuff onto you that wasn't fair. I sincerely apologize for that

With that said, you're still dead wrong on universal rights. I evoked outcomes because my claims of better outcomes are in vogue as an epistemic path currently, but it's far from the only one that favors it. As I said before no government has existed that fully respects human autonomy (And this isn't that surprising honestly. A government is at the end of the day fundamentally the winner of a contest to see who has power over people, and people who want power tend to want to use it), but as we have asymptotically approached these perhaps unachievable ideals from numerous directions, we can study the trends empirically and say that freer societies on balance tend to do better over time. Sure, there's no single definition of "better" in the world, but quite a few correlated ones. If you permit degrees in your model, the information landscape's structure becomes a lot more apparent. Periods of more freedom for individuals (whether in life, love, commerce, whatever) produce better outcomes across numerous dimensions (more active economies, more great art is made, more scientific discoveries, more people who want to fuck off and have a simple life with people they care about can have it without as much fear of being targeted by powermad states as their will becomes more predictable - predicated on strong meta-principles - and less arbitrary and based essentially their taste, as you have tried to claim all morality is). Obviously there are points in every tradeoff space where other factors may outweigh this correlation. But for individual autonomy this is pretty rare. Feel free to cite a counterexample if you think it's so apparent they're there.

But there are lots of tools for examining complex systems instead of just resorting to the solipsism of "Well some people disagree so there's clearly no way to know." Game theory is an attempt from the realm of logical models rather than empirical ones, and the equilibria of oppression always tend toward cycles of dystopian contraction and bloody revolution, not just because that's littered throughout history, but because when we purport that we can better society by intruding in people's ability to self-determine, there will always be a subset of people for whom rebellion and if possible destruction of the order imposing tyranny will be the only viable course of action. And killing or jailing all those people is already getting pretty dicey for this whole "This world is better for everyone on balance" propositon, but doing that is also a feedback loop. It's pretty apparent why seeing the atrocities of power, even from a wholly selfish perspective, the "what if I'm next someday, or someone I care about is, etc" could lead many to become opposition themselves.

Every time people say "Well my tyranny will make society better", they always mean "For me and mine", an in-group, which may be as small as close friends and family, and may be as large as "people who don't get ground to dust by the tyranny directly and will fall in line instead of rebel". Like the American neotraditionalists point to some (usually at least partially imaginary) time in the distant past when no, really, everyone was a christian, and everyone was super happy and prosperous! Nonsense. Even if my rose colored glasses come from the fact that my ancestor I'm thinking of was literally the king of a christian nation, and thus are probably pretty correct in saying that guy had it quite good back in the day, every king has the blood of the conquered on his hands, and every tyranny made life worse for a lot of people. Anti-semitic pogroms pervaded medieval Europe. Lots of women who didn't accept the life of a second-class citizen were and still are directly harmed by the mechanisms that enforce that choice on them in societies where we do not have equal rights. And to be clear, this does permit degrees and improvement in equality is good even if it's not perfect. Degrees matter everywhere.

So let's say you're renaissance Britain or, hell, modern Iran or Uganda, and you put your gays to death. Those gays hella didn't have a better life, and by saying "well we consider it immoral so it's justified", you just said "Those are bad people anyway, because I said so. Their happiness and prosperity doesn't count." Same for people who worship a different god or do the wrong dances about it or whatever. It's circular reasoning.

You have said that my position that human rights are of value is an arbitrary dogma, but I think the kids these days have it right when they say the thing about accusations and confessions. When our crimes as a society have victims, we can straightforwardly say "No, it's good we lock up the murderers, the harm they do to others outweighs the harm we do them by not allowing that behavior, and sometimes even preventing it by harming them directly, by quite a lot". Your principles may be arbitrary preferences, but that does not mean it's impossible to have principles that aren't

When you can have crimes with no victims, you have to invoke either literal imaginary beings or deeply complicated abstractions ("Monocultures are good because something something social cohesion so it's totally a net good to kill the heathens, trust") to make the morality make sense. I can tell utilitarianism is in vogue because of how often these people grasp at some complicated sociological theory when trying to justify their weird vendettas. Maybe in the giant pile of bullshit that every super complicated economic or sociological model there's One Neat Trick Free People Hate that will Be Good Tyranny Actually, or maybe one of these unfalsifiable literal angry demiurges will end up being real, but I doubt it, and it doesn't seem worth trying every charlatan's rationalization to let them oppress people they hold responsible for some nebulous harm like "social decay" that you supposedly need three advanced degrees to even talk about to find out

The project of modern democracies has always been trying to find the way to grasp the dove's wings and be responsive to the will of the people without just going and burning a witch every time someone popular and charismatic enough drums up a big enough mob. The fact that this is falling apart in an age of unprecedented wealth disparity and unprecedented power to disseminate propaganda is not uncorrelated with the fact that people feel worse off and angrier. Occam's razor likes the argument that that's what's happening a lot better than my aunt's argument that the rainbow rays that come off her gay landscaper neighbors are somehow doing this. When the argument that pagans or queers or weirdos of some other kind aren't objectively batshit, they sound more like arguments that not having to deal with people they don't like would optimize the last sharp corners of the world for people who are already not really suffering, not like this urgent and existential threat they tend to sell it as when trying to open a can of "will of the people" on some people they basically just don't like the aesthetics of