But wouldn’t that defeat the purpose, or am I missing something? I understood the offensiveness of the specific example to be the point.
mrglwrf
Comments that will end up being hidden by default mostly shouldn’t exist.
Then why don’t the grand-high muckity-mucks just censor the posts honestly? I do not see how that could possibly be less effective than this crowd-sourced star chamber scheme, which manages to be simultaneously opaque, unaccountable, and open to abuse by the trolls it’s supposed to be suppressing.
Historical quibble- in “The First City” section, you seem to be partially confusing Ur with Uruk. Uruk is generally regarded as the first city in Sumeria, during the eponymous Uruk period (4000-3100 BC). Also generally believed to be the center of the “Uruk phenomenon” during which cuneiform writing and a number of other features of Mesopotamian civilization were developed. Ur was the capital of the Neo-Sumerian Ur III empire c.2000 BC, which built the Great Ziggurat of Ur shown in the picture.
Assuming it is important to Norwegians’ self-image that they are a state without a death penalty, it’s not clear to me what compensatory benefits could be derived from executing Breivik. Appeasing foreign and domestic bubbas would definitely not be a plus for the typical Norwegian.
The assumption of the adversarial mode is that if the other person loses their temper, it’s because their position is weak.
Wouldn’t this reward trolling?
There probably would be people complaining if D-Day had occurred four centuries after the fall of France.
About as big as “human biodiversity” is for a leftist. I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own, or the extent to which these are moral disagreements, rather than exclusively factual.
“Accepting Breivik’s narrative” sounds even less appealing. Why give him the satisfaction? Just lock him up til he dies of old age. Whether or not the Norwegian government could legally justify his execution has little bearing on whether they’d want to execute him in the first place. I think you underestimate the amount of smug self-satisfaction derived from looking down on the “barbaric” states that still have the death penalty.
Only when it’s used at all, which is far less often than ‘guys’. Yes, it’s true that it’s a distaff counterpart to ‘guys’, but so is ‘dolls’, and would you seriously propose unironic usage of ‘dolls’?
There are alternatives to monarchy, and an example of a disappointing monarch should suggest that alternatives might be worth considering, or at the very least that appointing a monarch isn’t invariably the answer. That was my only point.
Why would you believe that something is always the solution when you already have evidence that it doesn’t always work?
How are you imagining the US government enforcing the abolition of slavery ca. 1800? Even in a much stronger relative position ca. 1865, it was extremely costly to do so. There was fair less abolitionist sentiment in earlier decades, and in relative terms, the federal government was far weaker and the southern elites far stronger. Attempting to outlaw slavery “quickly after the US started” (I’m assuming a window from about 1790-1810, please correct me if I mis-guestimated) would have been an act of suicide by the central government.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
Yes, that’s certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it’s currently being done, there’s too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.
I agree that there are downsides, they just don’t seem that terrible..
What about the never-ending meta discussions, or are you counting on those dying down soon? Because I wouldn’t, unless the new policy is either dropped, or an extensive purge of the commentariat is carried out.
I see no good reason to presume a correlation between a med school’s admissions criteria and total lives saved over a doctor’s career as tight as this reasoning requires. Or to presume that it is near certain that if he hadn’t lied, another liar wouldn’t have been accepted in his place.
In the lifetimes of Rand, Chesterton, and Orwell, socialist vs. anti-socialist was possibly the dividing line in the world of politics, so it’s not a minor difference. I think a slightly better translation might be “LW has traditionally been very sympathetic to non-religious anti-socialists”. I wouldn’t call it a wrong thing, because I don’t perceive this issue as having that much moral weight. I disagree on the facts with a particular assessment of site-wide political bias.
I think that you are selecting only a part of the story. For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion. (By the way, it happens to be associated with political right, at least today in USA.)
Definitely. But there are groups associated with the US political right that are non- or anti-religious. Objectivists are an obvious example. Unsurprisingly, these groups are overrepresented on the internet (though this is becoming less and less the case over the years). My impression is that LW has traditionally skewed toward this branch of the right.
Yet somehow, quotes from Chesterton often get many upvotes in “Rationality Quotes”. Does it mean that LW is secretly very sympathetic to religion? Or just that we are able to appreciate a decent quote even from people with whom we disagree on other topics? Could the second explanation possibly apply also to Heartiste or Moldbug?
Yes, but “possible” is a low bar. I do not believe it could entirely, or even in large part explain the frequency of references to Heartiste and Moldbug, or their reception. Chesterton is less famous and less respected than, say, George Orwell, but he is nonetheless a well-known and often quoted political writer in the English speaking world. Heartiste and Moldbug are not. They are so obscure that even having heard of them requires an unusual degree of familiarity with the fringes of the blogosphere.
Your description of political correctness makes it sound a lot like the “Politics is the Mindkiller” gag-rule. The Boogeyman version of political correctness is more like a hybrid of the Cheka and the Inquisition.
In the earlier period, Uruk was in fact substantially larger, thus the quibble. Marc Van De Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City, p.37:
But many aspects of Uruk show its special status in southern Mesopotamia. Its size greatly surpasses that of contemporary cities: around 3200 it is estimated to have been about 100 hectares in size, while in the region to its north the largest city measured only 50 hectares, and in the south the only other city, Ur, covered only 10-15 hectares. … And Uruk continued to grow: around 2800 its walls encircled an area of 494 hectares and occupation outside the walls was likely.
Maybe this is because I’m European. In Slovenia calling someone far right is usually always calling that person a dangerous nationalist or even a crypto-fascist. The implied context is that they should be suppressed or arrested since we don’t have free speech. A dope smoking libertarian isn’t called Far Right but a capitalist lap dog. ;)
Yeah, that’s a very different context from the US. I don’t have much direct experience of Slovenia, but I do have some familiarity with Serbia (my Mom’s from there), so I hope you aren’t too offended if my mental model of Slovenia is a smaller, richer, much less screwed up Serbia. In the US, capitalist lap dogs are generally lumped in with dangerous nationalists and crypto-fascists. It doesn’t work the same when you’ve got some experience with really dangerous nationalists, like in 90′s former Yugoslavia.
“Junior”, FIRE JOE MORGAN