Liberals have virtue signaling, conservatives have cruelty signaling. The status hierarchy is ordered by who directly inflicts more harm or who supports more harm being inflicted.
The good news is Secretary Rubio appears to be listening to PEPFAR advocates rather than this major right-wing Twitter user.[1]
Of course, it would be better if there was no PEPFAR disruption to begin with, but the second best thing is to praise people fixing the problem and sideline the users saying it's good to end PEPFAR without sufficient reason beyond "I don't like the people getting it."
Al Capone was a gangster who ran soup kitchens. As part of his gangster life, Al Capone would go around 'asking' various shops and firms in town for money. Those who refused to give him money were violently punished.
Some of the money given to Capone, he used to open soup kitchens. These soup kitchens did indeed feed poor people soup. Without knowing the interior of Capone's mind, one can not say if he ran soup kitchens entirely for the positive press or because he genuinely wanted to help the poor. But one can observe that the feelings of gratitude given towards Capone for feeding the poor helped draw attention away from his practice of soliciting donations.
One day, Al Capone was arrested. Never again would he be able to hustle the town for money. Some people were outraged. "Think of all those poor people being fed by the soup kitchen! Poor people are DYING! This is an outrage!" They protested, demanding that someone continue to run Al Capone's soup kitchen and that people be forced to donate money to it.
Do you really think those people who were forced to give money to Al Capone were monsters at rejoicing at any opportunity they had to cease giving him money? Even if some of it went to soup kitchens?
This passage refers to those who refused aid to Jesus in person, not to donations being given to an organization that does work somewhere else. Nor am I aware of pastors who preach that salvation occurs primarily through such donations. I think it was the opposite, there was significant controversy about winning salvation through donations and 'good works', rather than faith.
When Jesus says "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."
"The least of these" means "the least of these people". I.e. when you refuse aid to the lowest of the low, it is the same as refusing aid to Christ himself.
That is the plain language of the passage, and that is how it is traditionally interpreted. Maybe some "Sola fide" types can make up some alternative reading, I'm sure somebody has, but the magisterium of tradition agrees with me that Christ was just using plain language here.
All you're showing here is that Jesus was a left wing radical who often didn't think through the consequences of his pronouncements, something that should be obvious to anyone who has studied the Bible with clear eyes.
This is a man who did things like violently disrupt ordinary market traders who were just trying to earn a living, for no better reason than a dislike of capitalism. He argued that wealth or profit of any kind was immoral, and we know how well that idea worked out in reality when it was finally tried. Because in his era there was no politics as we'd understand it he founded a cult rather than grapple with policy implications in the real world.
If those people were specifically celebrating the closing of the soup kitchens and the potential starvation of the poor, rather than just the fact that they'd no longer be extorted by Capone, yeah, I would be comfortable calling them...maybe not *monsters*, but definitely assholes.
How would you tell the difference? You're not posting on the original thread but a perverse retelling of it designed to make the posters look as nasty as possible, which is of course exactly how those celebrating the downfall of Capone were presented (by the left).
In this case, you can tell because there haven't actually been any sort of tax cuts yet and it's not certain there will be, especially for those not already wealthy. So there's no end of the extortion to celebrate yet. These people are celebrating the deaths of kids, full stop.
This is more like if the guy who managed Al Capone's soup kitchens took all the money and fled to a foreign country. You still have to pay taxes, will continue to pay taxes, and this bipartisan program will continue to have been voted on by members of the democratically elected government of the United States. You haven't been saved a single cent in tax dollars.
The only serious proposal is extending the tax cuts passed in 2017, which are due to expire. And unless you make close to half a million per year, those don't help you one bit.
A crimina organization in a city has social programs he provides from stolen money. 0.1% of the spending he does saves an estimated one million lives a year. Most of the other spending is not nearly this effective.
Reformers get the criminal to cut one thing: the 0.1% that goes to saving one million lives a year. They celebrate as they get 0.1% of their money back at cost of a million death toll.
Yes, celebrating that without having any sense of moral conflict is evil. Wanting that to be the first thing you cut is evil. And then joking about the suffering that results as you do it is evil.
so Alphonse is the government collecting taxes, but now that's Donald, so he arrested himself so he can stop running the food kitchens, but the IRS is still working. oh noes!
Bentham, you do a good job of arguing that these far-right conservatives are, in fact, motivated by sadism more than racism. It's possible that people are attracted to racism because it helps justify or rationalize their sadism. This accords with the idea that people are drawn to political ideas because of personality traits, because these ideas help to justify their preexisting biases. Extreme personalities generate extreme politics.
"Fighting racism" and "deradicalizing" people with rational arguments usually doesn't work, because it's hard to change people's underlying sadism. They will not suddenly become nice people who don't want to starve Africans anymore just because you show them some better evidence about the heritability of the IQ. Sadism masks itself behind political slogans.
The title of this post is a very tempting conclusion to draw when looking at the world, but I think it’s false. I think Haidt had it right in The Coddling of the American Mind when he insisted that “the world is a battle between good and and evil people” is a dangerous mistruth, and that the reality is “the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man”
One can be against fundamental attribution errors because they reduce predictive accuracy, and still be able to model relatively evils things such as antisocial psychcopathy, abusers in Why Does He Do That, and what I call “pro-plague" (e.g. belief that plagues are divine punishment) in ways that are highly predictive. Better than being naive and failing to mitigate risks, like victims of Ted Bundy or Jews who stayed in Nazi Germany & got genocided or people who've died from plagues due to pro-plague BS.
I think it's a difficult line to thread. I agree that the temptation to think of people as evil is there, both because it's just simpler on a cognitive level, and that (in politics) it's often appreciated by your in-group. On the other hand, the universe doesn't owe you nuance. There's a type of person that overcorrects the impulse to simplify into assuming every issue has two legitimate sides, and when they come across individuals who actually are actually selfish bad-faith actors, things end up badly.
Here's your avg based post Christian vitalist on the crating of pigs and trump's recent appointee.
"Oddly enough, I support life in prison for anyone who feels this is ok. No exaggeration." - 9mmSMG
Here's Scott A. on something he says we all care about, so it isn't really a big deal:
"The same way Rotherham obviously supports the Red Tribe’s narrative, Ferguson obviously supports the Blue Tribe’s narrative. A white person, in the police force, shooting an innocent (ish) black person, and then a racist system refusing to listen to righteous protests by brave activists."
---
See the difference? One ignores tribalism sometimes (not always) and seeks the eventual elimination of all that he despises. There is no doubt in his mind about what the monsters deserve. The other uses the existence of tribes, as an excuse, so that he can always functionally side with the preservation of evil. He's worse than tribal. He's an evil maximizer. He minimizes tribal hate, so that he can maximize every form of evil even ones that are technically opposed to each-other. Except of course even the DOJ admits on the basis of the same evidence Scott had available then that the shooting was justified. And their IQ is far lower than his.
So he's just evil.
---
Let's get to Africans.
Was the behaviour of European colonialists better or worse than that of African tribes towards eachother? Is it better or worse than how Africans would have treated Europeans had the roles been reversed?
The racist genuinely believes that external humanitarian tendencies basically do not exist among the African population. That even if they did, they would not be expressed in a world without European colonialism; and of what value are abstract tendencies that are never expressed. He won't wipe them out --- because he intends to be slightly better than they are. When he colonizes them, their populations dramatically increase!
But he owes them nothing else.
You are right.
The based post christian vitalist doesn't value life for it's own sake. He values it because of it's character. He's a hypocrite, sometimes, towards a small ingroup. You say you hate the hypocrisy more than the raping. So you think he should extend the same exception towards all mankind.
-And maximize evil! Everywhere.-
Drop the tribalism; and the based-post-Christian-vitalist conclusion will merely be... "you know maybe libs shouldn't get any favours just because they are white" - aren't they technically worse than Bin Laden. And then... "maybe the normie-con animal torture" lovers in the heartland should be wiped out afterwards if they don't submit. The behavior of Africans is tolerated --- precisely because they are an outgroup. Drop tribalism; and they get wiped out too. Don't even get me started on China, and it's total absence of animal cruelty laws ---
We can use baby pods to breed a few billion people anyway in this century. Total happiness will increase!
---
Is this really the direction in which you want to go?
To attempt to model what sort of moral instincts he might have (always a shaky proposition):
I think he might view the British grooming gangs as something that victimizes, and that is by the lawless against an ordered society.
Whereas, he might view the HIV things as something upon their own heads (due to promiscuity) by agents of disorder, and so in some way earned and warranted—they're not victims, but reaping their just desserts—or something like that.
At least, that's my guess as to what's driving that. It's clearly not a simple maximize-pleasure framework, and his assumptions (assuming I present them rightly) are of course questionable. There is of course also a decent portion of "own the libs" going on.
I'm saying this as someone with moral instincts that are probably somewhat closer to the online right than most of the people here, but also as someone who would agree here with Matthew that people are often pretty willing to be cruel, which is bad.
You don't have to "model" him though, you can just go read his tweets where he explains his position clearly.
He asks:
1. Why are Africans engaging in super risky practices like dry sex with sand, which causes legions that make HIV more transmissable?
2. Why are women having sex and getting pregnant when they know they are HIV+?
So yes he does indeed see them as not so much victims, more as people who brought it on themselves, and wonders why he's being forced to pay to help people who aren't helping themselves.
How many “Africans” are even having risky sexual practices? How many African mothers knowingly (and by knowingly here i mean knowing full well what HIV/AIDS is and what it entails, not just ‘knowing’ about their AIDS diagnosis) have kids while being Positive? Is every single one of them doing that? Is enough of them doing that that it is justified to assign moral blame on them?
I really doubt so. These are all sensational stories about what are fundamentally structural problems, aimed at moralizing and individualizing it and thus excusing neglect on it. But like all attempt to moralize structural problems it either ends up having to exaggerate the problem or just depict the victims as ontologically evil. It is no different than saying, for example, that Millenials should stop buying overpriced avocado toasts if they want to accumulate enough money to buy a house
You don't need to have full knowledge of something to be blameworthy.
I definitely think it's more reasonable than your example, to say "don't sleep around if you don't want HIV" when you're in a region with high rates of HIV. That doesn't mean that they should be refused treatment necessarily, of course.
"Like all attempt to moralize structural problems"
Why do you assume that there's no morality present here?
The connecting tissue between wanting people is Africa to die and wanting raping Pakistanis to die is that dysgenic third world trash should die.
This is really the only correct “effective altruist/utilitarian” response. If your philosophy is “turn the entire world into a low iq third world shithole” then you’re doing utilitarianism wrong!
“But I’m a RULES based utilitarian!”
Ok, what are your rules?
The closest I might sign onto is “don’t actively kill people to bring about eugenics.”
Not that the above isn’t even something most of the left will sign on to, they are all pro-choice so the no killing thing is pretty subjective to them.
But I’m certainly not signing on to:
1) you must provide foreign aid to countries whose populations would collapse without it because they are incapable of building self sustaining societies
2) you are obligated to allow dysgenic violent foreigners into your countries no matter how terrible an effect they have
It is "cruel" to not redistribute your wealth to third worlders and fund their artificial existence created by artificial conditions.
"Yeah we fucked up Africa and bred like a billion people there, now it's your responsibility to keep them alive, whitey!"
They want to harm Whites and take their resources at gunpoint when we don't want to subsidize infinity nigcattle.
Westerners have no duty to fund nig biomass in Africa who will inevitably be used by bad actors as bioweapons to flood their nations and rape/torture/kill their women.
This is the absolute state of the social contract for Whites:
-Fund infinity brown reproduction
-Let them move into the West
-Give them free welfare/jobs/security
-Make them equal or even privileged to the native population (they are mostly privileged)
-Don't punish them for crime
Basically White people are under obligation to die.
And thus we have it from the horse's mouth: the far-right obsesses with Pakistani grooming gangs (but not similar gangs made up of white English people, or indeed child-abusing Catholic priests) because they seeking not to protect children but to gin up a pretext to ethnically cleanse Britain.
The reason why grooming gangs were the ideal criminals to exploit to foment racism, is because their crimes are both extremely emotive and extremely difficult to prosecute: they took place behind closed doors (so there were no witnesses other than the perpetrators and victims themselves) and few of the victims would make credible witnesses in court: they were (by definition) children when the crime was committed, they would be testifying years after the crime took place, and they would usually be suffering from mental illness and/or misusing drugs as a result of their abuse.
Do you have stats to back that up: my understanding is that while Pakistanis are more prone to involvement in such gangs they still aren't an outright majority of the perpetrators.
When you see yourself as fighting on the good side of a manichean struggle, it's easy to feel justified in cruelty towards the enemy, which is basically anything and anyone affiliated with the outgroup in your struggle. Politics-obsessed people on both wings do this a lot.
Usually the Manichean struggle is an illusion created by filter bubbles and confirmation bias, and both sides have some good points. But even in a real real Manichean struggle, you should be civil. A capacity to feel schadenfreude is a vice.
I vehemently disagree with the notion that compassionate conservatism is the norm. The entire conservative political project is the opposite of compassionate.
Thanks to the ban on the slave trade, not much. American slaves ate 150 pounds of meat a yr; compared to Nigeria's 16 - So you can imagine how horrible it would've been had it continued.
These programs are not free. I’m tired of being taxed to oblivion to give condoms to random people in the third world while American QOL declines yearly and we saddle our children with unpayable debts
You people will feel morally superior right until the collapse that kills a quarter of the world’s population. Feeling morally superior is not a moral good, and taking from your fellow countrymen to give to foreigners is not charity.
> Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth
- 1 John 3:18
I'm not going to make any kind of claim about the object-level issue of PEPFAR, but more about the meta-level issue you bring up here of (alleged) conservative sadism.
I do not think this behavior can be viewed in isolation, but rather as a response to virtue signaling, weaponized empathy, and emotional blackmail. At some point, when people try to manipulate you, the only rational response is to stop DEERing (Defend, Excuse, Explain, and Rationalize) ignore their manipulations and simply make whatever choice your principles lead you to make.
While moralistic manipulation is a human universal, you cannot look at recent political history and not see a pressure cooker of such manipulation from the left, which has produced some very refined forms of reactance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)).
Quite frankly, too many people have been inoculated against indignation for your accusations of sadism (even when applicable) to have any emotive force.
Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!
Seriously, I always thought sadism was underappreciated as a motivator because it's so politically incorrect and embarrassing to admit to. But hey, you rationalist guys are all from San Francisco, I'm sure you've heard of the Folsom Street Fair.
OK, now *really* seriously, yeah, I think there really are a lot of people who enjoy hurting other people for real and who support vindictive policies and so on, and it doesn't get described enough by liberals and rationalists who think we can all just agree to get along. It's particularly effective when dealing with an ethnic outgroup because we evolved to get into battles with other ethnicities. Somewhat separately, I think there are other aspects to the populist wave sweeping the rich world, but definitely there is a preference for ethnic homogeneity in many people, and liberals pretending this was inherently evil and no accommodation had to be made to it for this reason was a big factor in its rise.
Liberals have virtue signaling, conservatives have cruelty signaling. The status hierarchy is ordered by who directly inflicts more harm or who supports more harm being inflicted.
My money is on the virtue signaler being the more actually dangerous person
The good news is Secretary Rubio appears to be listening to PEPFAR advocates rather than this major right-wing Twitter user.[1]
Of course, it would be better if there was no PEPFAR disruption to begin with, but the second best thing is to praise people fixing the problem and sideline the users saying it's good to end PEPFAR without sufficient reason beyond "I don't like the people getting it."
[1] https://www.bushcenter.org/publications/rubios-emergency-humanitarian-waiver-was-the-right-thing-to-do
Al Capone was a gangster who ran soup kitchens. As part of his gangster life, Al Capone would go around 'asking' various shops and firms in town for money. Those who refused to give him money were violently punished.
Some of the money given to Capone, he used to open soup kitchens. These soup kitchens did indeed feed poor people soup. Without knowing the interior of Capone's mind, one can not say if he ran soup kitchens entirely for the positive press or because he genuinely wanted to help the poor. But one can observe that the feelings of gratitude given towards Capone for feeding the poor helped draw attention away from his practice of soliciting donations.
One day, Al Capone was arrested. Never again would he be able to hustle the town for money. Some people were outraged. "Think of all those poor people being fed by the soup kitchen! Poor people are DYING! This is an outrage!" They protested, demanding that someone continue to run Al Capone's soup kitchen and that people be forced to donate money to it.
Do you really think those people who were forced to give money to Al Capone were monsters at rejoicing at any opportunity they had to cease giving him money? Even if some of it went to soup kitchens?
I think the people specifically agitating to stop helping the kids with AIDS are hellbound, yes.
I can't think of a major religion where one would potentially be placed in hell for that.
Matthew 25:41-46. Specifically mentions not caring for the ill as being worthy of eternal punishment.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025%3A41-46&version=NIV
This passage refers to those who refused aid to Jesus in person, not to donations being given to an organization that does work somewhere else. Nor am I aware of pastors who preach that salvation occurs primarily through such donations. I think it was the opposite, there was significant controversy about winning salvation through donations and 'good works', rather than faith.
What? No. This is completely wrong.
When Jesus says "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."
"The least of these" means "the least of these people". I.e. when you refuse aid to the lowest of the low, it is the same as refusing aid to Christ himself.
That is the plain language of the passage, and that is how it is traditionally interpreted. Maybe some "Sola fide" types can make up some alternative reading, I'm sure somebody has, but the magisterium of tradition agrees with me that Christ was just using plain language here.
All you're showing here is that Jesus was a left wing radical who often didn't think through the consequences of his pronouncements, something that should be obvious to anyone who has studied the Bible with clear eyes.
This is a man who did things like violently disrupt ordinary market traders who were just trying to earn a living, for no better reason than a dislike of capitalism. He argued that wealth or profit of any kind was immoral, and we know how well that idea worked out in reality when it was finally tried. Because in his era there was no politics as we'd understand it he founded a cult rather than grapple with policy implications in the real world.
The aid he was referring to would be given in person.
If those people were specifically celebrating the closing of the soup kitchens and the potential starvation of the poor, rather than just the fact that they'd no longer be extorted by Capone, yeah, I would be comfortable calling them...maybe not *monsters*, but definitely assholes.
How would you tell the difference? You're not posting on the original thread but a perverse retelling of it designed to make the posters look as nasty as possible, which is of course exactly how those celebrating the downfall of Capone were presented (by the left).
In this case, you can tell because there haven't actually been any sort of tax cuts yet and it's not certain there will be, especially for those not already wealthy. So there's no end of the extortion to celebrate yet. These people are celebrating the deaths of kids, full stop.
This is more like if the guy who managed Al Capone's soup kitchens took all the money and fled to a foreign country. You still have to pay taxes, will continue to pay taxes, and this bipartisan program will continue to have been voted on by members of the democratically elected government of the United States. You haven't been saved a single cent in tax dollars.
Trump is talking about taking the fight to income taxes. I believe that this time, he actually means it.
The only serious proposal is extending the tax cuts passed in 2017, which are due to expire. And unless you make close to half a million per year, those don't help you one bit.
It did much more than help high earners. Even at the low end the 15% bracket was lowered to 12%, and the standard deduction was higher.
A crimina organization in a city has social programs he provides from stolen money. 0.1% of the spending he does saves an estimated one million lives a year. Most of the other spending is not nearly this effective.
Reformers get the criminal to cut one thing: the 0.1% that goes to saving one million lives a year. They celebrate as they get 0.1% of their money back at cost of a million death toll.
Yes, celebrating that without having any sense of moral conflict is evil. Wanting that to be the first thing you cut is evil. And then joking about the suffering that results as you do it is evil.
PEPFAR was one of many things being cut under the general group of foreign aid.
The people being criticized in this post make no distinctions like the one you are. The opener is someone relishing in the disruption of PEPFAR.
so Alphonse is the government collecting taxes, but now that's Donald, so he arrested himself so he can stop running the food kitchens, but the IRS is still working. oh noes!
After watching the Marco Rubio confirmation hearing today's Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr Day 2 hearings are going to make me kill myself.
This is morally desirable, as it means that you won’t be killing any animals.
Bentham, you do a good job of arguing that these far-right conservatives are, in fact, motivated by sadism more than racism. It's possible that people are attracted to racism because it helps justify or rationalize their sadism. This accords with the idea that people are drawn to political ideas because of personality traits, because these ideas help to justify their preexisting biases. Extreme personalities generate extreme politics.
"Fighting racism" and "deradicalizing" people with rational arguments usually doesn't work, because it's hard to change people's underlying sadism. They will not suddenly become nice people who don't want to starve Africans anymore just because you show them some better evidence about the heritability of the IQ. Sadism masks itself behind political slogans.
The title of this post is a very tempting conclusion to draw when looking at the world, but I think it’s false. I think Haidt had it right in The Coddling of the American Mind when he insisted that “the world is a battle between good and and evil people” is a dangerous mistruth, and that the reality is “the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man”
It can be both! Evil can be a constant temptation and some people may have completely given in to their most vicious instincts.
I agree with that. We just need to resist the temptation to start thinking of the people themselves as fundamentally and irredeemably evil
One can be against fundamental attribution errors because they reduce predictive accuracy, and still be able to model relatively evils things such as antisocial psychcopathy, abusers in Why Does He Do That, and what I call “pro-plague" (e.g. belief that plagues are divine punishment) in ways that are highly predictive. Better than being naive and failing to mitigate risks, like victims of Ted Bundy or Jews who stayed in Nazi Germany & got genocided or people who've died from plagues due to pro-plague BS.
I think it's a difficult line to thread. I agree that the temptation to think of people as evil is there, both because it's just simpler on a cognitive level, and that (in politics) it's often appreciated by your in-group. On the other hand, the universe doesn't owe you nuance. There's a type of person that overcorrects the impulse to simplify into assuming every issue has two legitimate sides, and when they come across individuals who actually are actually selfish bad-faith actors, things end up badly.
Maximally offensive "based-post-Christian-vitalism":
Here's your avg based post Christian vitalist on the crating of pigs and trump's recent appointee.
"Oddly enough, I support life in prison for anyone who feels this is ok. No exaggeration." - 9mmSMG
Here's Scott A. on something he says we all care about, so it isn't really a big deal:
"The same way Rotherham obviously supports the Red Tribe’s narrative, Ferguson obviously supports the Blue Tribe’s narrative. A white person, in the police force, shooting an innocent (ish) black person, and then a racist system refusing to listen to righteous protests by brave activists."
---
See the difference? One ignores tribalism sometimes (not always) and seeks the eventual elimination of all that he despises. There is no doubt in his mind about what the monsters deserve. The other uses the existence of tribes, as an excuse, so that he can always functionally side with the preservation of evil. He's worse than tribal. He's an evil maximizer. He minimizes tribal hate, so that he can maximize every form of evil even ones that are technically opposed to each-other. Except of course even the DOJ admits on the basis of the same evidence Scott had available then that the shooting was justified. And their IQ is far lower than his.
So he's just evil.
---
Let's get to Africans.
Was the behaviour of European colonialists better or worse than that of African tribes towards eachother? Is it better or worse than how Africans would have treated Europeans had the roles been reversed?
The racist genuinely believes that external humanitarian tendencies basically do not exist among the African population. That even if they did, they would not be expressed in a world without European colonialism; and of what value are abstract tendencies that are never expressed. He won't wipe them out --- because he intends to be slightly better than they are. When he colonizes them, their populations dramatically increase!
But he owes them nothing else.
You are right.
The based post christian vitalist doesn't value life for it's own sake. He values it because of it's character. He's a hypocrite, sometimes, towards a small ingroup. You say you hate the hypocrisy more than the raping. So you think he should extend the same exception towards all mankind.
-And maximize evil! Everywhere.-
Drop the tribalism; and the based-post-Christian-vitalist conclusion will merely be... "you know maybe libs shouldn't get any favours just because they are white" - aren't they technically worse than Bin Laden. And then... "maybe the normie-con animal torture" lovers in the heartland should be wiped out afterwards if they don't submit. The behavior of Africans is tolerated --- precisely because they are an outgroup. Drop tribalism; and they get wiped out too. Don't even get me started on China, and it's total absence of animal cruelty laws ---
We can use baby pods to breed a few billion people anyway in this century. Total happiness will increase!
---
Is this really the direction in which you want to go?
To attempt to model what sort of moral instincts he might have (always a shaky proposition):
I think he might view the British grooming gangs as something that victimizes, and that is by the lawless against an ordered society.
Whereas, he might view the HIV things as something upon their own heads (due to promiscuity) by agents of disorder, and so in some way earned and warranted—they're not victims, but reaping their just desserts—or something like that.
At least, that's my guess as to what's driving that. It's clearly not a simple maximize-pleasure framework, and his assumptions (assuming I present them rightly) are of course questionable. There is of course also a decent portion of "own the libs" going on.
I'm saying this as someone with moral instincts that are probably somewhat closer to the online right than most of the people here, but also as someone who would agree here with Matthew that people are often pretty willing to be cruel, which is bad.
You don't have to "model" him though, you can just go read his tweets where he explains his position clearly.
He asks:
1. Why are Africans engaging in super risky practices like dry sex with sand, which causes legions that make HIV more transmissable?
2. Why are women having sex and getting pregnant when they know they are HIV+?
So yes he does indeed see them as not so much victims, more as people who brought it on themselves, and wonders why he's being forced to pay to help people who aren't helping themselves.
How many “Africans” are even having risky sexual practices? How many African mothers knowingly (and by knowingly here i mean knowing full well what HIV/AIDS is and what it entails, not just ‘knowing’ about their AIDS diagnosis) have kids while being Positive? Is every single one of them doing that? Is enough of them doing that that it is justified to assign moral blame on them?
I really doubt so. These are all sensational stories about what are fundamentally structural problems, aimed at moralizing and individualizing it and thus excusing neglect on it. But like all attempt to moralize structural problems it either ends up having to exaggerate the problem or just depict the victims as ontologically evil. It is no different than saying, for example, that Millenials should stop buying overpriced avocado toasts if they want to accumulate enough money to buy a house
You don't need to have full knowledge of something to be blameworthy.
I definitely think it's more reasonable than your example, to say "don't sleep around if you don't want HIV" when you're in a region with high rates of HIV. That doesn't mean that they should be refused treatment necessarily, of course.
"Like all attempt to moralize structural problems"
Why do you assume that there's no morality present here?
The connecting tissue between wanting people is Africa to die and wanting raping Pakistanis to die is that dysgenic third world trash should die.
This is really the only correct “effective altruist/utilitarian” response. If your philosophy is “turn the entire world into a low iq third world shithole” then you’re doing utilitarianism wrong!
“But I’m a RULES based utilitarian!”
Ok, what are your rules?
The closest I might sign onto is “don’t actively kill people to bring about eugenics.”
Not that the above isn’t even something most of the left will sign on to, they are all pro-choice so the no killing thing is pretty subjective to them.
But I’m certainly not signing on to:
1) you must provide foreign aid to countries whose populations would collapse without it because they are incapable of building self sustaining societies
2) you are obligated to allow dysgenic violent foreigners into your countries no matter how terrible an effect they have
why don't you go to a good mental health doctor or a psychiatrist? They can help reduce some hate and racism in you.
To me they seem like not merely a racist but an out-and-out Nazi who thinks that genocidal race war is a positive moral good.
It is "cruel" to not redistribute your wealth to third worlders and fund their artificial existence created by artificial conditions.
"Yeah we fucked up Africa and bred like a billion people there, now it's your responsibility to keep them alive, whitey!"
They want to harm Whites and take their resources at gunpoint when we don't want to subsidize infinity nigcattle.
Westerners have no duty to fund nig biomass in Africa who will inevitably be used by bad actors as bioweapons to flood their nations and rape/torture/kill their women.
This is the absolute state of the social contract for Whites:
-Fund infinity brown reproduction
-Let them move into the West
-Give them free welfare/jobs/security
-Make them equal or even privileged to the native population (they are mostly privileged)
-Don't punish them for crime
Basically White people are under obligation to die.
And thus we have it from the horse's mouth: the far-right obsesses with Pakistani grooming gangs (but not similar gangs made up of white English people, or indeed child-abusing Catholic priests) because they seeking not to protect children but to gin up a pretext to ethnically cleanse Britain.
The reason why grooming gangs were the ideal criminals to exploit to foment racism, is because their crimes are both extremely emotive and extremely difficult to prosecute: they took place behind closed doors (so there were no witnesses other than the perpetrators and victims themselves) and few of the victims would make credible witnesses in court: they were (by definition) children when the crime was committed, they would be testifying years after the crime took place, and they would usually be suffering from mental illness and/or misusing drugs as a result of their abuse.
White people don't engage in mass grooming gangs all that much, probably 100x or more less then Pakis.
I am indeed against Catholic boy diddling. I think gays should be banned from the priesthood which is the main cause of the problem.
Do you have stats to back that up: my understanding is that while Pakistanis are more prone to involvement in such gangs they still aren't an outright majority of the perpetrators.
When you see yourself as fighting on the good side of a manichean struggle, it's easy to feel justified in cruelty towards the enemy, which is basically anything and anyone affiliated with the outgroup in your struggle. Politics-obsessed people on both wings do this a lot.
Usually the Manichean struggle is an illusion created by filter bubbles and confirmation bias, and both sides have some good points. But even in a real real Manichean struggle, you should be civil. A capacity to feel schadenfreude is a vice.
I watched this interaction unfold in real time, and think there’s more to his position: there’s something to be said of whether you’re enabling countries to be dependent on your aid and what not, and facilitating harmful practices (such as dry sex https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0038-23532009000100024#:~:text=In%20South%20Africa%2C%20where%20the,practice%20of%20'dry%20sex'.&text=It%20has%20been%20reported%20that,dry%20sex%20over%20lubricated%20sex. ) It’s good to be prudent with how were doing foreign aid and whether it’s facilitating dependent or harmful behavior, and whether our believed responsibility to these people is harmful
I vehemently disagree with the notion that compassionate conservatism is the norm. The entire conservative political project is the opposite of compassionate.
You're a communist
Do these African children grow up to eat meat?
Thanks to the ban on the slave trade, not much. American slaves ate 150 pounds of meat a yr; compared to Nigeria's 16 - So you can imagine how horrible it would've been had it continued.
These programs are not free. I’m tired of being taxed to oblivion to give condoms to random people in the third world while American QOL declines yearly and we saddle our children with unpayable debts
You people will feel morally superior right until the collapse that kills a quarter of the world’s population. Feeling morally superior is not a moral good, and taking from your fellow countrymen to give to foreigners is not charity.
> Whoever hates disguises himself with his lips,
> and harbors deceit in his heart;
> when he speaks graciously, believe him not,
> for there are seven abominations in his heart;
- Proverbs 26:25
> Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth
- 1 John 3:18
I'm not going to make any kind of claim about the object-level issue of PEPFAR, but more about the meta-level issue you bring up here of (alleged) conservative sadism.
I do not think this behavior can be viewed in isolation, but rather as a response to virtue signaling, weaponized empathy, and emotional blackmail. At some point, when people try to manipulate you, the only rational response is to stop DEERing (Defend, Excuse, Explain, and Rationalize) ignore their manipulations and simply make whatever choice your principles lead you to make.
I mean this not just politically, but interpersonally as well. Consider Edwin Friedman's parable of The Bridge (https://dobetterwork.com/notes/the-bridge/).
Moreover, the best way to disempower people who use moralistic manipulation is to agree and amplify (https://www.forums.red/p/TheRedPill/94436/yes_virginia_you_do_have_to_be_an_asshole) and, quite frankly, you were probably going to be called all these names anyway.
While moralistic manipulation is a human universal, you cannot look at recent political history and not see a pressure cooker of such manipulation from the left, which has produced some very refined forms of reactance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)).
Quite frankly, too many people have been inoculated against indignation for your accusations of sadism (even when applicable) to have any emotive force.
Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!
Seriously, I always thought sadism was underappreciated as a motivator because it's so politically incorrect and embarrassing to admit to. But hey, you rationalist guys are all from San Francisco, I'm sure you've heard of the Folsom Street Fair.
OK, now *really* seriously, yeah, I think there really are a lot of people who enjoy hurting other people for real and who support vindictive policies and so on, and it doesn't get described enough by liberals and rationalists who think we can all just agree to get along. It's particularly effective when dealing with an ethnic outgroup because we evolved to get into battles with other ethnicities. Somewhat separately, I think there are other aspects to the populist wave sweeping the rich world, but definitely there is a preference for ethnic homogeneity in many people, and liberals pretending this was inherently evil and no accommodation had to be made to it for this reason was a big factor in its rise.