this is amusing. It states you must be 18 to use their service, and also states they do not discriminate on the basis of age.

Frank,

No moral compass points exactly perfectly straight. We all have some flaws. And also, we all have somewhat *different* sets of flaws.

So when you write about what you're best at, it will help a lot of your readers to improve, and straighten their moral compasses. This applies even if they don't notice, and even if you don't notice.

So know you have done and are doing good, and feel proud.

Posted on IMAO in this thread

was just in an argument with people who think the value of money in the hands of hungry people is more than the value of that money in the hands of rich people. and who think foodstamps are better than monetary charity. they seem to imagine all their charity cases as having American values and being fairly moral people. except people like that don't end up starving. the vast vast majority of starving ppl suck and use resources very badly.

Imagine a man who spends his days trying to get a chance to rape his neighbor's wife or steal something. At dinner, he serves himself first, as much as he likes. Sometimes he takes all the food. His family splits the rest. Half the time he doesn't finish what he takes, and then throws it away. If he catches anyone trying to take his food from the trash, he beats them. Even if he doesn't, he beats his family regularly anyway.

The wife is submissive, uncreative, and supports her husband. She thinks he is a great man and doesn't feel mistreated.

The children will grow up to be just like their parents.

Do you want to give this family charity?

And imagine they get some. It goes to the father buying whores and booze and maybe the odd donation to a nice charity like Hamas.

But that's why it's foodstamps not money, you say?

Well, if the foodstamps provide less or equal food to the current budget, then they just buy that much less, and preso chango the foodstamps are just like money.

What if they foodstamps provide more food than they currently buy? Well first off they stop buying their own food and get that money. Then they could sell the extra, or just throw it out if it's not very much. Or maybe, just maybe, the male kids will get to eat it. Even if they do, how did that help anything? They grow up big and strong to better beat their families and sap Western resources.

BTW it's not hard to imagine people much worse than the ones I described.

I like composing on AIM.

curi42 (1:40:05 AM): if sum1 gets angry at u (wants to hurt u) then in future interactions u spend creativity trying to avoid this happening again. this creativity doesn't go to progress. and with avg ppl in our society, for just one or two instances of anger, we're talking a large proportion of all the creativity going to the interaction.
curi42 (1:41:52 AM): but that's not the only drain! even if someone has never been mad at you, if you know of any hangups they have (that you don't know how to fix), you get to spend creativity skirting them. any sort of potential meanness or immorality too.
curi42 (1:42:31 AM): this includes things as subtle as if you mention X, person will ask followup questions probably including something about Y, which will be awkward, because either for your own reasons "nevermind" would be hard to say, or b/c person won't stop pushing there.
curi42 (1:43:07 AM): almost all of this work is done inexplicitly. it just comes out as feelings of being uncomfortable with a potential action.
curi42 (1:44:06 AM): in some cases, for example socially akward situations where speaking would be a good idea, this is even known to manifest itself as being at a total loss for words
curi42 (1:45:21 AM): for most of these issues, absolutely the last way to fix it would be to sit in a circle and reveal your most private feelings on the matter. if that was gonna happen, it would only make people far more cautious to avoid issues they aren't comfortable with coming up at all (and thus progress on them happening)
curi42 (1:46:09 AM): but aside from the honesty and caring lefty solution, this problem is barely acknowledged to exist and no solutions are proffered.

to clarify, "absolutely the last way to fix it would be to sit in a circle..." isn't just a huge understatement. doing this would not only not fix it, but would hurt things.

also to clarify, the lefty example is just one example chosen b/c i don't like circle types. the point b4 is general.

PS if the title confuses u, look at the capital letters

Take two IMAO fans. They are right-wing, hate commies, etc

One is a former socialist, the other was raised right-wing. Who understands socialism better? Probably the former socialist. He's also more likly to have commie sympathies, but that's another issue.

The point is being a former-X generally means having a pretty good understanding of X. Because actually being X usually means understanding it well.

Now, imagine someone who was a former everything. Every important tradition, he's either a former or current member.

jew

this is a draft i wrote a few hours ago. if i were to write it again, i'd change lots of stuff. i consider it flawed. however, i think most of the improvements i'd make wouldn't really make the ideas much more interesting. i'll get more right next time. *shrug*

Christians generally don't argue very well explicitly. From all their "scientific" evidence against evolution, to resorting to defending the existence of God by appeal to faith. From thinking that beatings can teach people, and often thus not being interested in coming up with arguments to use on that set of people who should be beaten, to appealing to the authority of priests, God, or holy books. From "you can't prove God doesn't exist" to "we hold these truths *self-evident*". (If you think any of these are done by, say, less than 20% of US Christians, lemme know.)

However, despite all this, these people have a lot of good, true ideas to offer, especially with regard to morality. The Christian tradition has 2,000 years of monotheism ("One God from Whom comes morality" they might say. But the key is they believe there exists is only one morality for all people.)

Now, combine good, valuable ideas with bad arguing. Who learns these ideas from them? Only people who want to. And it's not a matter of just deciding you'd like to know what they do, and reading a few books. The only known way to reliably learn these things is to identify with the tradition, and to honestly enjoy it. And then, one day, after sufficient interaction, most of their claims that they treat as manifest truth, will *feel* true to you, even though they were never *argued* persuasively to you.

Anyone who did this, who really cared about the Christian tradition, would not want to identify themselves as an atheist. (This is why it's hard to find many people who call themselves atheists in the US.) People who do call themselves atheists either oppose the Christian tradition (learned and then rejected the stuff), or are ignorant of it.

And that's why atheists are frowned on so much. Wicked or ignorant, take your pick.

You can read Samizdata and USS Clueless until your eyes fall out, but the moral content won't be there. Do they *ever* assert that we are the good guys, or that certain people are the bad guys? Nah, that's simplisme. On the other hand, if you read IMAO or Scrappleface or The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, you will find moral claims (albeit unargued) all over the place. And for members of the tradition, who understand why these claims are considered true, that the arguments aren't repeated everytime simply doesn't matter.

entry

Please don't waste your time trying to talk me out of my atheism. You won't do it. Believe me, I've heard all the arguments before.

I've always felt that it was rude and presumptuous for someone to try to convert someone else who has strong convictions unless they ask for help and guidance. (And I definitely do not want any.)

ummm, lessee. he says his atheism is immune to criticsm. he claims to know all arguments that exist against atheism.

is it presumptuous to criticise someone with strong convictions? more like the reverse. it's presumptuous to think you're so perfect that no one has any useful criticism of you.

I do understand that he gets lots of mail and it makes sense to try and get less mail on a subject where the mail tends to be really bad. But why doesn't he write, "If I don't know you, please don't send me email about atheism. I won't read it because I'm busy with other stuff."? Instead he goes off saying all sorts of crap and never even mentions this. In fact, this defense of his position may not be true. Maybe he skims all his email and doesn't mind the time -- enjoys doing it. We don't know.

Den Beste asks If I suffer amnesia, did I die?

This is a question of the form: if word 1, then does that mean word 2?

This is semantics.

I can divine what issues he's confused about from this question. But from almost everyone he'd get much better quality responses if he managed not to ask about semantics. Because a respondent needs to be |337 (elite) enough to totally ignore his explicit question (and probably explain why when Den Beste tries to insist on discussing semantics).

The issue he's actually interested in is what is important about a person. The answer is his worldview. Amnesia thus destroys the person if it's permanent. If it's potentially temporary, then the information is still there, and we could say the worldview is in stasis or something like that.

Notice i didn't mention death. Because death is strongly associated with bodies. It'd be standard to say someone who had amnesia did not die. What happened to him? Amnesia, which is equivalent to destruction of what's important about him, but not his body. Notice how this paragraph is really boring and pretty damn useless WRT his question. That's b/c it talks about semantics.

PS I criticise Den Beste in particular not because it's the dumbest thing I ran into lately. Rather, because his blog is one of the best. So the ideas ought to be more interesting to people with |337 worldviews than if I pointed out, again, why headlines like "Israel Puts An Explosive Stop To Peace By Blowing People Up" are wicked. You can always go read LGF anyway.