necrovore
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Posts posted by necrovore
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On 1/30/2023 at 12:06 PM, Easy Truth said:
If we end up arguing for accepting every opinion, no matter how you feel about it, "because you might be wrong", then it is a recipe for altruism i.e. love thy unknown neighbor without preference or judgement.
You can allow an opinion without accepting it.
You can run a bookstore, for example, without agreeing with all the books you sell, and you can also do it without agreeing with all the customers who buy from you.
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1 hour ago, Doug Morris said:
Once someone becomes irrational, the irrationality spreads.
That's an example of the kind of falsehood that underlies a dictatorship.
What it really means is that ideas spread, and the dictators don't want any ideas to spread that they don't approve of.
People have free will about what ideas they believe, but if an idea "has legs" it's usually because there's enough evidence for it that it seems plausible. The regime's disapproval of it only adds fuel to the fire.
This is why dictatorial regimes clamp down on communications, as they did in East Germany and the Soviet Union. Gotta keep that "irrationality" from "spreading."
It's also why they will demand no end of "evidence" from anybody who disagrees with them, and even if some such evidence is produced, it will never be satisfactory -- but they never have to produce any of their own. The correctness of the dictators themselves is to be regarded as an axiom. The dictators are innocent until proven guilty; the dissenters are guilty until proven innocent. Except that the standards of proof are set so that nothing can ever be proved.
This is also why dissenters are usually shot, to prevent their "irrationality" from spreading.
Unfortunately for the dictators, shooting dissenters does not work. The dissenters are only messengers, and people's beliefs aren't what matters. Reality is what matters. Reality, and not the regime, is what determines whether beliefs are right or wrong. This is why reality is the regime's greatest enemy.
You can deny evidence, you can erase history, but that doesn't make it go away. Existence has primacy over consciousness. History repeats itself because the underlying principles never change.
Once of those principles, discovered in the last century or so, is that dictatorship kills people.
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1 hour ago, Doug Morris said:
There is plenty of evidence that Trump and his supporters are very irrational.
37 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:You seem to be admitting the insurrectionists, or "rioters" as you would have it, were irrational.
That's a non sequitur because it doesn't prove that Trump or his supporters were irrational in the specific ways necessary to have tried to carry out the described "insurrection."
Even criminals and psychopaths have "patterns of behavior." This does not fit the pattern of Trump or his supporters (in general). They do not have a history of doing or even advocating this sort of thing. Quite the opposite.
(Given that there are tens of millions of Trump supporters, it may be possible to find one or two who have the required profile; these are the kinds of people who could have been tempted to participate in such an insurrection. However, they are neither typical nor influential, as people on the Left try to portray them. Just because you can find a white supremacist who supports Trump doesn't mean that all Trump supporters are white supremacists, and so forth. Stephen King has had fans who are creepy serial killers but that doesn't mean all Stephen King fans are creepy serial killers.)
However, the idea that Democrats could have staged it does fit with their pattern. They even rehearsed it, with the Governor Whitmer kidnapping thing.
53 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:2 False.
Some counties had more than 100% turnout.
53 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:3. Due to attempts to deal with the pandemic and the lock downs, not to any fraud.
The pandemic itself was a fraud, wasn't it?
53 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:4. How many?
The vote count stopped, in four states simultaneously, at 1:30 in the morning or something, and resumed hours later with a different vote count.
53 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:6. How much?
For weeks leading up to the election.
53 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:7. The result of people jumping to conclusions about things they didn't understand, because they badly wanted to believe Trump's lies.
There was video evidence (shot with cell phones) of observers being violently shut out of vote counting in some counties even though they had the legal right to be present. Those counties ended up having enough votes to flip their states to Biden. This was while counting was still in progress and before Trump could have "lied" yet. It was used (perhaps I should say offered) as evidence in court cases, along with sworn statements, only to be dismissed because overturning an election was considered too severe a remedy.
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1 minute ago, Doug Morris said:
There were no legitimate grounds for suspecting fraud.
That is not true. Dr. Hurd's post showed a number of red flags, any of which is grounds for suspecting fraud.
Do you hold that all of those red flags are false?
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1 minute ago, Doug Morris said:
What makes you so sure Trump and his supporters would have been that rational?
The lack of evidence to the contrary (and the refusal by the Left to advance any).
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2 hours ago, Doug Morris said:3 hours ago, necrovore said:
The "insurrection" on January 6 was basically a Reichstag Fire. My evidence is that (1) the Democrats were the only ones who could have benefited from it, (2) there was never any chance that it could benefit anyone else, and (3) the question of who would benefit would have been evident to the people planning the event before it occurred.
Please explain each of these statements.
Is there any way that Trump (or his supporters) could have planned in advance to benefit from having a mob storm the Capitol? And I mean serious benefits, the kind that would have looked credible, and possibly survived the inevitable legal challenge. What could they have hoped to gain, especially since Trump and his supporters went to great lengths, after months of riots in the cities, to paint themselves as advocates of law and order? Bank robbers, by contrast, at least hope to get some money, and can also hope to disappear.
Is there any way, prior to the event, that Trump (or his supporters) could have assessed the risk and consequences of failure and decided it was worth doing anyway? Bank robbers make assessments of how secure the bank is, where the armed guards are, how much time they have before the police arrive, and so forth, and they might decide not to do a robbery if they think it's too risky.
Is there any way that Trump or his supporters could have plotted to carry out such an action but failed or refused to assess the obviously high risk and severe consequences?
On the other hand, the Democrats could have anticipated benefiting from being able to accuse Republicans of staging an "insurrection." It would also have been a great way to distract attention from election fraud and the legitimate attempts to combat it.
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There are ample grounds for saying the 2020 election was stolen, but the Democrats keep trying to sweep the evidence under the rug by saying it's "illegitimate" to consider it, and by conducting ad hominem and other attacks against people who do consider it.
The Democrats frequently object to anti-fraud measures because they equivocate between intimidating people from carrying out legitimate activities and intimidating them from carrying out illegitimate activities. Putting police in a store to prevent shoplifting is "intimidating," but if it's done properly it should only intimidate actual shoplifters, not ordinary customers. Take the police away, though, and shoplifting becomes rampant, as exemplified by Democrat-controlled cities.
The same thing happens with election fraud. The Democrats oppose any measure that would make such fraud more difficult, such as requiring voters to show ID. That is not intimidation except to people trying to get away with fraud.
Another example of equivocation is where in Arizona a law against tampering with voting machines was used by Democrats to prevent the inspection of a voting machine after the election to see if it had been tampered with. So instead of preventing fraud, the law was used to abet it.
Another example is that the reason the Constitution requires election results to be approved by Congress and the Vice President is precisely so that if there are any suspicions of fraud, there is another chance to deal with that fraud. These approvals are not supposed to be mere rubber stamps. Having these procedures (and the courts) be rubber stamps only ensures that people who do commit fraud can be sure of getting away with it.
Of course, Democrats think they have the right to commit election fraud; every now and then there's another university professor saying so. It's fairly common for Leftist professors to say that sort of thing. Why not take them at their word, at least insofar as believing they believe it?
Most of the court cases brought by Trump failed because of judges refusing to look at the evidence on the grounds that it would be "catastrophic" for them to overturn an election -- on any basis. Such a point of view also only serves to ensure that people who commit fraud can be sure of getting away with it. (It would not have been necessary to simply declare Trump the winner; there is plenty of time between early November and January 20 in which to run and tally another election. This would put any fraudsters in the position of having to repeat their crimes while being under greater scrutiny than last time.)
The "insurrection" on January 6 was basically a Reichstag Fire. My evidence is that (1) the Democrats were the only ones who could have benefited from it, (2) there was never any chance that it could benefit anyone else, and (3) the question of who would benefit would have been evident to the people planning the event before it occurred.
The original Reichstag Fire was staged by Nazis; the Nazis blamed it on their opposition and used it to consolidate their power. The Democrats have done the same thing with theirs.
A few gullible Trump supporters were apparently among the participants in January 6th, but although much attention has been drawn to these participants, there has never been any clarity concerning who organized and directed the whole thing, and I think this has been for a reason. I think it's clear that Trump did not organize it. Trump had good reasons for believing he had been cheated out of the election, he didn't know how to prove it, and even if he could get proof, there wasn't a court he could take it to. Still, it wouldn't make sense for him to have asked small groups such as the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys to overthrow the government for him. They are too small; there are not enough of them. (And most of the people who went into the Capitol on January 6th were not members of these groups, and were unarmed and were let in by police, who by the way were under the command, not of the President, but of Nancy Pelosi, since she was Speaker of the House.) Nor did his speech on January 6th constitute a call to the general public to overthrow the government. He just asked people to exercise their First Amendment rights.
1 hour ago, Doug Morris said:Whoever wins this contest, having used force to get power, will probably use force to keep it, and we will have a dictatorship.
The Democrats have already won the contest, and we do have a nascent dictatorship. That is the problem.
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2 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
It would be closer to the point to say that anyone who thinks the 2020 election was actually stolen is either paranoid and/or emotion-guided to the point of becoming gullible and of failing to practice respect for reason or standards of evidence and/or a conspiracy theorist and/or a white supremacist
This is an ad hominem and/or an argument from intimidation and/or guilt by alleged association.
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4 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
There is no evidence that this altered the outcome of the election.
Well sure; that's because in the rush to "make sure everyone can vote," the usual ways of detecting fraud were bypassed.
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I saw a post by Dr. Michael Hurd on his web page which summarizes the issues with the 2020 election.
The post itself is here: https://drhurd.com/2023/04/26/john-roberts-temporary-lapse-of-understanding-the-constitution/
I'll duplicate the whole thing; it's worth reading.
QuoteSpeaking of election fraud …
The latest ruminations of DANIEL JUPP:
“Amazing to see alleged Republicans still claiming that Biden got 81 million real votes. I suppose this acceptance will increase among the gullible following the Dominion settlement. So it’s time for a reminder.
“There were a historic number of red flag fraud indicators for 2020, whilst at the same time the alleged result breaks just about every results indicator used by pollsters.
“Commonly accepted red flag indicators of fraud are: 1. Statistically highly unlikely results 2. Statistically highly unlikely turnouts 3. Changes to procedures in the run up to the election 4. Sudden counting suspensions or delays 5. Statistically contradictory results 6. Extended or lengthy voting 7. Eyewitness accounts of fraudulent behaviour. 8. Violence or force to prevent voting or disguise fraud.
“2020 had every single one of these. It matched a BBC report checklist on red flag indicators on disputed elections in African dictatorships. That’s how bad it was.
“But there’s also very reliable indicators of how an election will go. These indicators have a track record of successfully predicting results going back a century, yet they are shattered by the 2020 result (not one indicator, but EVERY indicator). Prediction by primary performance--shattered. Prediction by share of belweather counties--shattered. Prediction by the winner of three key states--shattered. Prediction by support polling--shattered. All of these normally line up with who has legitimately won.
“The only other modern election with these patterns being broken was 1960, now widely acknowledged by many historians as having been determined by fraud (interestingly since 2020 sites like Wikipedia have adjusted descriptions of 1960 to minimise fraud claims. I wonder why?). 1960 only broke some of the indicators, 2020 breaks EVERY established pattern for determining the winner.
“Any rational person knows that if an incumbent President adds 12 million votes he wins and that an unpopular candidate does not add 15 million votes over a previous popular candidate of the same party. Obama won his second term having LOST millions of votes. This is fairly normal for second term victories. What has NEVER happened before is a record breaking increase in vote leading to a defeat for the incumbent.
“No single honest election sees the greatest ever performance by an incumbent topped by the greatest ever performance by a challenger. Logically, a great performance comes at the cost of a poor performance from the other candidate. Not both being massively record breaking. The numbers for 2020 are both astronomical and ludicrous. Millions of new voters popped into existence overnight, ‘coincidentally’ with the innovations of extensive mail in ballots and lengthy extended voting and lengthy extended vote counting. Biden ‘won’ with the lowest ever share of counties, Trump ‘lost’ with the greatest ever increase of votes. That combination alone is so statistically unlikely as to be in the same order of plausibility as a man successfully balancing an elephant on his nose.
“To give another analogy. A thrashing in a sporting contest is unlikely. Two competitors BOTH breaking every existing record there is in the same match is virtually impossible. Imagine a tennis match where both players get more aces than ever seen in a match before, and one has a 100% success rate with their serves but is beaten by a guy who somehow has a 124% success rate with their serves, a statistical impossibility. Trump thrashed all prior records, and Biden thrashed that?
“That can only be achieved by fraud.
“Anyone who doesn’t have the wit to notice this stuff, the logic to recognise it, or the integrity to admit it, is worthless.”
- Jon Letendre and tadmjones
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Oil has done a great deal to improve human lives. The oil industry has been a net positive for mankind in spite of occasional oil spills and the costs of cleaning them up.
There are nevertheless ecologically-motivated people who think that oil spills are so bad that we should prevent them at any cost, even possibly at the cost of giving up oil altogether. (And they say the same thing about nuclear power, and agriculture, and just about anything humans do.)
The oil industry loses money from oil spills, and therefore the industry has an incentive to prevent them, and they will welcome cost-effective technologies to reduce the frequency and/or severity of oil spills -- but this incentive only goes so far, because the industry only loses so much money from oil spills, and so there is a limit to how much they are willing to spend, and there is also a requirement that when they do spend money it has to be "worth it" by actually reducing oil spills, and all this can be quantified.
Some ecologists, however, consider it a moral failure to think in monetary or quantitative terms; they prefer to go by emotions alone, and make "whatever sacrifice is necessary."
I think the emotionalism is the main thing Ayn Rand objected to.
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There should be a separation of state and schools. Then a variety of school-businesses would pop up and the best ones would win in the long term.
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7 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:
And non-religious-based objections to the left's agenda of corrupting children at younger and younger ages is also real. People from all walks of life and all ideological persuasions are noticing it and objecting to it.
There's a difference between whether you're talking about five-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds. The younger kids are more easily fooled because they have less experience and less conceptual knowledge.
But there's also a difference between mere speech and coercion (including fraud). The whole public school system is based around coercing the child -- compulsory attendance, compulsory learning. That's why it can do a lot of harm. (It seems to be based on the false notion that a child would never want to learn anything voluntarily.)
I don't think a child can be objectively harmed by mere speech, and if they are misled without any coercion, it's because the parents are negligent -- not in the sense of "failing to ban those horrible books from their kids" but in the sense of "not warning their kids about the bullshit out there and giving them tools to detect it and avoid falling for it." Even young kids can be given bullshit-detection tools that work at their level of understanding.
I don't remember if it was Bosch Fawstin or someone else, but someone once analyzed the reason why "moderate Muslims" can't really object to terrorism. They can't, because their principles really do lead to justification of terrorism. They just don't want to admit it, and they want to have it both ways. I think the same thing is why "moderate Christians" can't really object to censorship. The mainstream Christians won't be as vociferous about it as the fundamentalists; they'll say censorship is only justified in "egregious" cases, but then the bar for "egregious" has a way of gradually dropping lower and lower -- and it has.
Kids are pretty resilient if they are taught how to tell truth from bullshit. But that's precisely what Christians cannot teach, because it would implicate Christianity. Christians end up teaching only the argument from authority, which is open to having their authority usurped, which is the deep reason why they are afraid of all this.
I also think the left is provoking the Christians on purpose -- forcing them to come out of the woodwork and making the Republican party less attractive as an alternative to the Democrats. If the Republicans fall for it, as they seem to be doing, they will lose many independent voters.
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6 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:
They chalk it all up to prudish christian minorities hellbent on "book bans."
Such people do exist, and the Republican party does pander to them. I grew up with such people.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that religious fundamentalism isn't real or that it's a fringe thing. It's real.
Both political parties have "fundamentalists," and each party's fundamentalists say that freedom leads to the other political party's fundamentalism, and therefore should be blocked. Fundamentalists can't understand why a government should allow someone to make a "wrong" choice; they understand only dictatorship, and the way they see it, it's either their dictatorship, or someone else's, and they'd rather it be theirs.
Both kinds of fundamentalists want to ban "sins," whether they be abortions or gas stoves.
Even Ayn Rand observed that the two political parties only grant freedom in areas they don't care about. But when they realize that everything is interconnected, they reject freedom.
1 hour ago, tadmjones said:I do wonder about those who produce fiction to facilitate the exposure.
That's like saying that the purpose of ARI's essay contest for The Fountainhead is to facilitate the exposure of high school students to the "rape scene."
There's a lot more in The Fountainhead than that, but for religious people, if they see one thing they object to, nothing else in the work exists. (And, yes, there are plenty of religious people who don't want their kids exposed to The Fountainhead, even if those kids are 16 or 17... or 18...)
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4 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:
The big issue with corporations is that bad actors get into power, boards of directors CEOs etc. and pursue causes which lose money or dilute shareholder value. So called woke corporations chasing ESG are directly stealing from public shareholders through weird voting proxy procedures… enabling those with pull to populate the boards, officers, and benefit themselves and their causes at the price of the shareholders and if it comes to it the taxpayers.
Actually, the government is the cause of this one, both because it has control of various pension funds, which it can preferentially invest in ESG companies regardless of whether the investments make money or not -- and because it has control of the banks, which it can require to treat ESG companies favorably when considering loans and so forth, again regardless of whether it makes money or not.
So companies compete to be ESG, because if they don't, they find themselves less able to get investors and loans.
If we had sound money, such as gold, it would be impossible to keep this sort of scam up, because the ESG companies would still have to compete to provide returns on these investments and loans. But when the government prints money, it can decide who gets it, and returns are a lot less important.
p.s. we are a long way from the original topic of the Kennedy assassination...
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36 minutes ago, dream_weaver said:
This brings to my thoughts a parallel to a mind/body dichotomy. The individuals as the minds that bring about the corporate body actions.
By extension, the spirit (mind) is willing, but the body (corporation) is weak - the body is considered stronger than the will, and the corporation, thus, is viewed as a strong 'evil'.
Not that the above excuses the actors actions, although the intentions may play a consideration in some verdicts.
It can raise further issues. Like, if I privately think that Alice and Bob are frauds, and I refuse to deal with them, that's fine, I'm within my rights. But what does it mean for the XYZ corporation to "think" that Alice and Bob are frauds and refuse to deal with them? A corporation cannot "think," it cannot "know" things except by keeping records in a database and having policies and procedures that cause those records to be honored by the employees. So one wonders, what if Alice and Bob aren't really frauds? I can't commit slander or libel by privately thinking that they are, or by refusing to do business with them. Alice and Bob can't sue me merely for having false beliefs and acting on them. They could sue me if I told anyone else that they were frauds, if they weren't, because that would be slander. But wouldn't it also be libel for a corporation to store in its databases the "fact" that Alice and Bob are frauds, if they really aren't, and thus cause their employees and associates to refuse to do business with Alice and Bob, on a false basis? A database is, after all, a form of written communication, and a corporation is a group of people, not a person.
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On 4/6/2023 at 10:28 PM, Doug Morris said:
If the Democrats are inventing phony charges just to influence the election, why didn't they do this 4 or 8 years ago?
They did, with all that phony Russian collusion hoax stuff...
6 hours ago, Doug Morris said:Why should any immigration be illegal?
I can think of a few reasons:
(1) They objectively have a highly contagious disease which could make our own people severely sick or dead.
(2) They are murderers escaped from prison and we think they actually got a fair trial and are guilty.
(3) They are being brought here against their will to be used as slaves or human sacrifices or the like.
(4) They openly proclaim that they want to come here to rob banks or kill people or do other illegal things.
If I missed anything, it would have to be just as serious. Maybe some of these things might not count as "immigration" in much the same way that extortion isn't "economic activity."
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5 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
As long as Trump gets due process and fair trials, these prosecutions do not threaten the rule of law.
When people are treated unequally under the law, e.g., because of their political views, that threatens the rule of law.
When laws are "open to interpretation," or when they are prosecuted selectively, that threatens the rule of law.
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20 minutes ago, Boydstun said:
I should add, nec, that not all violent attacks on the existing system of law are out of concern for protecting individual rights.
I agree. I'll go further and say that even a legitimate grievance doesn't per se make violence the right thing to do.
A legitimate legal system does not regard itself as infallible, and therefore has built-in protections so that its mistakes can be corrected without having to discard the legal system as such. When these legal mechanisms are available, they should be used.
However, when a legal system comes to regard itself as infallible and discards those protections (or renders them useless), when it becomes unaccountable, then it is a dictatorship, and there is no way to get rid of a dictatorship while complying with the dictatorship's own laws. That is when force becomes necessary.
Even then, one has to look at what is proposed to come after it. Changing from one dictatorship to another is not helpful.
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The law is not an end in itself. The only valid reason for laws to exist is to protect individual rights. This is why the Declaration of Independence was valid even though it was almost certainly illegal when it was written.
Some people are fond of saying that "no one is above the law," and if the law is just, that's just another way of saying that nobody has the right to sacrifice others to himself.
However, if the law is unjust, the phrase "no one is above the law" is more sinister: it begins to suggest that no principle is above the law, that the law does not exist to advance human life or civilization, but rather exists for its own sake, and must be obeyed out of a Kantian sort of duty, no matter how much sacrifice is involved.
This of course would mean that the people who write and enforce the law can use it for any purpose, whether it protects individual rights, or infringes them.
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On 3/8/2023 at 1:03 AM, KyaryPamyu said:
In short, the 'movement' would benefit from marketing the philosophy to non-fans, i.e., to people who dislike Ayn Rand as a person, or find her writing style to be obnoxious. As a parallel, we all benefit from studying term logic, but only a small portion of the population is interested in Aristotle as a person or writer. Focus more on making a cultural impact, less on Rand as a personality.
I still think one of the best ways to make a cultural impact is to produce literature or other dramatic works. Then you can appeal to the American sense of life while also providing the intellectual basis for that feeling. This is what Ayn Rand herself was doing when she wrote Atlas Shrugged -- but there is plenty of room for other works, in a variety of genres and styles, and with a variety of subjects and themes.
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2 hours ago, Boydstun said:
Nothing I've said implies or insinuates that a rock rolling down a hill could have errors in its action.
True. I'm just saying that the operation of the senses is deterministic, just like a rock rolling down a hill, so the operation of the senses cannot "err" any more than the rock can.
What matters is how we interpret what the senses are telling us. In many cases the naïve interpretation is actually fine, which is why our species is still around, but there are some cases (such as illusions) where the actual situation is not what it looks like.
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On 2/18/2023 at 8:59 AM, Boydstun said:
The idea of Kant and of the Objectivists writers that percepts do not err and should should not be ascribed truth or falsity is mistaken.
I disagree: can a rock err while it rolls down a hill?
Our senses, whatever their limitations, are deterministic. The possibility of error does not arise until you get the information from your senses, and then the error, if any, is yours.
2020 election
in Domestic United States Politics
Posted
But that is not correct, either; there are a lot of people such as Christians who maintain the same inconsistencies throughout their lives, without the irrationality "spreading."