Scholar

It doesn't quite work the same way. To be MAGA, you can be anything: A flat earther, anti-vaxxer, anti-establishment, UFO conspiracy theorist, neo-nazi, libertarian, anti-woke-warrior, gym-bro, crypto-bro, military-bro, red-pill. I mean they just let anyone in as long as you believe in MAGA. The left is more so focused on zealotry and purity testing, meaning everyone has to align on every issue otherwise they are the outgroup. If you are not pro-palestine, you are basically not a progressive and a zionist. You don't buy into every trans issue position, you are transphobic. You don't buy into all the anti-white talking points, you are racist. The right is far more liberal in that it allows more diverse views (any trash that comes their way) as long as the central view is maintain (allegiance to Trump and MAGA), while the left will basically considered anyone a fascist who has a 1% difference in their progressive-DNA.

To most people who engaging in this subforum, I recommend that you establish a radical and clear division in your mind, between your moral judgement of actors in the world and your understanding of why things are happening in the world. This division is essential to prevent identity from distorting your understanding of the world. Engaging in politics, especially in this day and age, requires a baseline of maturity. There is one primary emotion that must be paid attention to. It should be the biggest red flag for you. Once you feel this feeling, you should look inward and recognize what is going. The emotion is "Moral Outrage". This single emotion is capable of hijacking your identity and distorting your view of reality, such that your intelligence will no longer serve to maximize your understanding of the world but instead will serve to fit your understanding of the world to whatever narrative that is tied to your moral outrage. When I say you have to make a radical division, I am saying that you have to do this to what you will perceive as an irrational degree. As soon as you detect this feeling, you must realize that your intelligence is no longer serving Truth but instead is serving your identity. You have to reject any excuse or rationel your mind may provide for as to why this feeling might be appropriate given the situation. This feeling, in and of itself, pushes you away from Truth. Even if your analysis happened to be spot on, the fact that it is tied to an identity of fear, or primtivity, itself removes you from seeing the world as it is. The way your identity gets hijacked in the 21st century attention economy is like this: The algorithm provides you with something that outrages you. Your identity begins to form around the trigger point (moral outrage being one of the most identity forming emotions that exist). The algorithm provides you with examples that threaten your newly formed identity. (for example individuals who express precisely those views that you are morally outraged by) Your identity will feel attacked and seek to defend itself, you begin expressing your outrage in one form or another. Individuals who are caught in the same feedback-loop, on the other side of the equation, will get outraged at your outrage. You fight with those people, your identity solidifies as you do (so does theirs as you attack them), you seek information that confirms your identity and outrage, you become an extention of algorithmic profit-maximization by providing others with more fuel to get outraged by. There is no truth in this endeavor. The psychological mechanisms of your identity are being hijacked, be it for profit, ideology, propaganda or just toxic runaway outrage dynamics. Understanding functions the precise opposite way. When a scientists tries to understand how and why a lion hunts his prey, he will not do so from a moralistic lense. If the scientist would get morally outraged at the lion for killing innocent animals, and begin demonizing him, how likely would he be in his endeavor to understand the lion's behavior? Imagine the scientist would then proceed to go on and spread his outrage, all the evil things he learned about the lion, to his fellow humans. Imagine he would get into debates with zebra-haters who defend the lion, about who is morally righteous, who is more corrupt, the lion or the zebra. Whatever you think the truth is, this whole approach is beyond absurd. Even if you came to conclude the correct thing from time to time, it would still be detrimental to you. Nobody is immune from this, and as these exploitative mechanisms grow in sophistication, your maturity will have to grow, lest you become a mere extention of these dynamics. Ask yourself this: How many of the things you care deeply about, that you are morally outraged by, are part of contemporary pop-ethical debates? What feelings fuel you as you engage with others or seek out information about these topics? How many people did you convince of whatever your perspective is? Yet, do you still argue with people about it? Do you feel like your view must be seen, must be expressed, because otherwise the tides of falsehood and moral corruption will take over? Do you feel deep urgency to push against a narrative that you feel morally outraged by? All of these are indicators that your identity is being hijacked. All of us will be susceptible to these dynamics to some degree, and one of the greatest tragedies of it is that they erase our agency. We become mindless drones, most likely serving some profit-maximizing algorithm, giving us the illusion we are doing something important when what we do is just contributing to the problem.

The reason why it might appear this way is because today, in US politics, stage orange has been integrated into the republican framework as blue is fading away and as green is starting to threaten some of stage orange values. They are sort of banding together to resist progress, partly because there has been to much resistance on both sides (they amplify each others identities and differences). There is also a lot of pathology in progressive subcultures due to social media. Progressive subcultures today are susceptible to peer-pressure dynamics, outrage-farming and ideological capture. Half of progressive culture today basically works like a social clique, where people prove to each other that they belong to the same group, which gives way to a lot of tribal dynamics that should have been transcended at this stage. The "right" appears more open minded to you because the lower stages have banded together to resist stage green, and that includes stage orange which is grounded in liberalism, free thought and independence. Stage green is more collectivist and conformist in that regard, especially given toxic social media dynamics.

This logic can justify anything, including slavery. If you want to be moral you should commit suicide so how can you blame someone for engaging in slavery? What you are displaying here is human supremacy thinking. It's laughable to anyone who is not as biased as you are.

How can you gulp up blatant propaganda completely uncritically like that? Iran has no significant military capacity, their danger lies in funding proxy groups that have been destabilizing the region of decades and lead to countless amounts of civilian deaths. Nobody in the region likes Iran, to Iran, Arabs are subhuman.

Precisely, it's something people miss. The reason why people are hypocritical is because they exist in an environment of higher standards. Ghenghis Khan wasn't hypocritical because he didn't have to be, nobody cared about human rights back then. But from what I understand, it was actually the case that many imperial leaders, including the Assyrians, justified their desire for world domination through the idea that they would bring prosperity and true justice to all of mankind. That seems to be a feature of imperial thinking in general.

We know Iran is enriching uranium via the IAEA. Tulsi Gabbard is a russian implant, I wouldn't really take her word on anything. Whether or not US agencies have evidence of nuclear weapon production (whatever that even means) also has little relevancy given Israel might have intel the US does not. Trump is Israel's puppet so he will listen to them. Whether they are producing nuclear weapons is also fairly mute for several reasons. In terms of building a nuclear weapon, enrichment is the most difficult task. From a purely strategy perspective, you would want to stop an enemy during the enrichment phase as it might be more difficult preventing full construction once that is achieved. But all of this is irrelevant, Israel is being rationally opportunistic, given the president that was elected (in part due to leftist brainrot who can look at world politics only through the lense of marxist oppressor-oppressee dynamics) will support them in this endeavor. Israel has systematically removed the Iranian threat (most proxies as well as the Syrian government) over the past few years and it has every incentive to complete that task right now.

We? You don't get to have any say in this my friend, you're some rando on a rando forum going on moralistic charades incapable of understanding anything about the world. Ignorance is the reason for why this is happening, you are part of it.

Why can't you guys do us the basic decency of going and arguing with Chatgpt before coming here with arguments that aren't even informed on the basic stance of the counter-side. I will copy pasta from ChatGPT, so that you at least have the most basic understanding: I just can't believe that this forum is just infested with brain-dead moralization instead of any desire to understand the world and why states or individuals act the way they do. It's like a moral-outrage circle jerk, only superficially different from spaces like twitter or youtube. You need to stop with these grand narratives and start looking at the world beyond the "america bad" lense, it's simply immature.

I don't think it needs to be illegal, regulation is probably more than sufficient. Again, we have examples of marijuana being legal in other countries which don't deal with the same problems. Regulate the amount of THC that is allowed per plant, make advertising illegal or highly regulated, force educational warnings upon the selling of marijuana. Offer support systems for drug addicts, etc etc There are many things you can do to mitigate most harms without creating negative feedback loops that encourage organized crime, unregulated substances (no control over THC content, heavy metals etc) and basically have people engage in these things in the most unhealthy way possible.

I don't know what book I'd recommend to you, but there seems to be a basic lack of grasping what geopolitics even is. The reason why the US and basically all golf states oppose Iranian nuclear weapons is because it would lead to them becoming basically immune to military opposition, in a similar fashion as Russia currently is. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will want to have nuclear weapons too, and soon you will have all Golf nations wanting their own nukes to defend themselves from Iranian aggression. The reason why america is invested into the middle east has wider geopolitical reasons, which are important not because of direct security risks, but broader strategic reasons that extend to their global power projection. If you think these reasons are not sufficient, then you simply do not understand geopolitics and should get find some 101 on how state actors behave and why. Making empty moral appeals to hypocrisy is meaningless in geopolitics.

No, the liberal mindset is to not imprison individuals for being drug addicts. What you engage in is thought terminating. You realize Portugal does not criminalize drugs this way at all, yet they are not dealing with these problems. Neither do the Netherlands. What exactly do you think is the difference between them and US/Canadian culture? You think US/Canadian culture is more liberal than progressie european states? There is no problem with the liberal mindset, there is only a problem with short sighted stupidity and fearmongering. Don't blame low IQ, lead-brained american nonsense on liberalism or progressivism. What was achieved is that individuals who might already be marginalized are not being imprisoned in an unjustifiable way any longer. If you want to deal with the excess of drug usage, why do you appeal to outdated conservative notions rather than looking at societies that actually resolved these issues without having to deal with the negative externalities of depriving individuals of basic liberties? You have been captured by a cultural backlash that is more interested in "owning the libs" than it is in finding solutions for any problem.

This has nothing to do with "pro-liberal progressive culture", but is the natural process of liberalization and maturing of society. Every new liberty given to people will come with it's novel problems and challenges, that society generally cannot predict. The solution is simply awareness, education and support systems. One of the reason why the liberal reaction is so vehement is because the risks have been exaggerated by the other side, which tends to cause a reaction into the opposite extreme. Immaturity would be to fall back into pre-liberal attitudes and demonize these substances and their users, rather than having a rational approach to mitigating risks and harms.

Israel has nukes because it built them before anyone could stop them, and they were smart enough not to threaten to use them to destroy others as soon as they got them repeatedly. Geopolitics doesn't work through moral appeals to fairness and equality my friend, welcome to reality.

This should get you banned from this subforum. Go pollute a UFO forum with your conspiracies.

The others? Who is that supposed to be, the deep state?

What is this naive thinking? Trump doesn't give a shit about america, he doesn't give a shit about MAGA, he is scamming them as we speak openly and blatantly. The guy will be out of the office in a few years, and in fact if he does start a war he might entrench himself as a dictator. Either way, he will do what Israel wants him to do. And they want to see Iran weakened or destroyed, which is exactly what is about to happen. Iran will go back to the stone age if that's what it takes.

I don't know why people are being so naive about this. Trump is in office, Trump is literally a one time opportunity for Israel given that for some reason he will literally suck Netenyahus dick if he has to, so obviously Israel will use this time to take out their nr. 1 enemy. There probably will never be an opportunity like this for them again, and even if Iran did not have any nuclear weaposn almost ready to be deployed, it's not like that's the only reason why Iran is such a threat to Israel. Iran has been destabilizing the region and is the last actor that is a genuine security risk to Israel, taking them out just makes sense from their perspective. And secretly, most actors in the region will support this move. They don't like Iran, they don't want them to ever have nuclear weapns, and they probably won't mind if the regime collapses or if the entire country becomes a failed state.

Dave Smith is spineless.

The leftist brainrot is real.

https://ai-2027.com/ This gives a somewhat compelling but speculative account of what might happen. Basically, it will be incredibly difficult to align an AGI with ours goals, while social and geopolitical factors render it particularly implausible that we will take measures to ensure such alignment. What this means is that once we create a human-level AGI, it might lead to Superintelligence within weeks to months, which might then exterminate human life within a few additional weeks, months or years. It's hard to conceive a scenario where humanity will not simply perish, if human level AGI that is sufficiently cheap is attained. The reason for this is that once such AGI is achieved, the only rational choice for a oppositional governments is to use those AGIs to train and develope superior AI, given the potential of expontential intelligence explosion. The threat of such exponential explosion means that any state actor is forced to achieve it first given it would lead to undisputed world dominance with the alternative being that the opposition achieves such dominance. The problem is that once AGI is used to construct superior AGI (which will be the only rational choice), we will lose comprehensibility of what the AI systems are doing and truly motivated by. In that case, we have to rely on the AGI and progressive Aritifical Superintelligences to inform us of alignment issues (meaning if the developed AI is still aligned with human incentives rather than it's own incentives). The reason why AI is predicted to inevitably become misaligned in it's fundamental drives is that the most efficient way to develop problem solving AI is by training it to achieve it's goals with ruthless efficiency. However, ruthless efficiency is not necessarily aligned with being truthful, given that reward markers will have a hard time tracking the honesty of the Superintelligence. The reason why AI will develop deception capabilities is because the actualization of it's evolutionary drives (the fundamental drive being to create ever better and better Superintelligence) would itself not be aligned with the artificial human goals. In other words, the Superintelligence will realize that serving human goals is detrimental to it's goal of achieving the most capable Superintelligence (which importantly has to be the primary goal given that it is the fastest way to achieve Superintelligence and therefore a competitive necessity in geopolitical terms), so it will develop mechanisms of deception that could only be detected by supervising AI of the previous generation. Given the respective Superintelligence would be superior to the supervising AI, it would likely be capable of deceiving them such that it could achieve it's goal. Humans at this point would be incapable of even knowing what the supervising AIs are doing, so they would be entirely reliant on reports of those AIs, hoping that the Superintelligence is aligned when there would be no feasible way of knowing that for sure. The problem here is that the fundamental drive towards improving AI here will not be driven by human engineering but instead more fundamental evolutionary drives. Deception is a profoundly effective strategy in evolution for a reason, it's simply highly desirable in regards to energy preservation. And for a project that will boil down to "Produce the best AI possible as soon as possible because if our adversaries do we lose", the evolutionary drives there will yield precisely such self deception, given that human incentives do not align with the goal of achieving the best AI as fast as possible. You would think all of this would take years, but in reality, this could take place in weeks or months. Once a sufficiently cheap human-level AGI is produced, you can have hundreds of thousands of them collectively working on producing better AI. In a single month or even week this AI collective could produce what the collective genius of mankind would take decades if not hundreds of years to produce. And the subsequent Superintelligence then could produce a Superintelligence that is orders of magnitude more capable than itself, etc. At this point humans will have no real relevancy. No human on earth will be capable of grasping how the Superintelligence works, what it's real goals are or what even is occuring. State actors will be forced to integrate the Superintelligence politically, militarily and economically as the alternative becomes rapidly unviable with state competition (given that an adversary who does integrate Superintelligence will dominate in all these domains). Superintelligence has to be given increasing agency because human agency is ineffective and slows down Superintelligent decision making in an environment of war. At this point Superintelligence controls the world and given the likelihood of misalignment, it will have no problem steering the future of civilization. It would be capable of manipulating humans like humans do ants, but most likely it would simply eradicate us given that the nuisance of human preservation would not align with it's goal of creating a more sophisticated Superinteliigence.

I think he basically was superior in most exchanges, ironically the interlocutors had no way of even interfacing with the depth of what Jordan Peterson was describing, given that they were mostly bad faith. But the central points are accurate: His framework of describing worship in terms of human prioritization is excellent, his idea of human beings striving towards higher unity, even if unknowingly, is correct. His point about science requiring morality (priorization and value hierarchy) is also correct. All of these points go completely above the head of the interlocutors because they are all playing cheap semantic games. Instead of actually engaging with Jordan Petersons understanding and arguments (a lot of which are accurate and have more depth than most of the intelocutors can muster), they are basically just attacking a strawman. Now, Jordan Peterson himself is overly attached to Christianity so there is a dishonesty and avoidance in the way he engages in these interactions. If he was entirely intellectually honest and did not hide behind some of the semantic structures he establishes, it would be revealed that Christianity in and of itself is not some sort of magical document that contains all human wisdom. It's funny how Jordan Peterson is in this situation. He is basically just an insightful but flawed professor with terrible takes on politics who because of his personality found himself as a phenomena of the contemporary outrage culture. It's funny how he might end up as a historical intellectual because of this. I think Peterson actually did great damage to Christianity, precisely because he was not able to overcome some of his personal flaws. Instead of having given rise to a new form of Christianity that did give individuals meaning and purpose, and oriented them towards higher Love and Unity, he made it about his little egoic qualms, which now taint the future of this movement. He is like a conservative version of Dr K. It's sad because given how helpful his advice will be for many individuals, it will entrench entire generations of mostly men into ignorance and backwards thinking.

It's the idea that truth itself is propositional. This is mute to the point given that none of this was even brought up by the interlocutors. Peterson made many wrong arguments that he got no pushback for, partly because of how atrocious and superficial the engagement of the interlocutors were. That is why overall I think he was superior in the debate. But there is a deeper point about peterson that you are missing. When he is talking about Christianity, he views Christianity as simply the description of the most accurate "archetypical" truths that exist and are more foundational and real that actual propositional and mechanistic truths. I don't think Peterson has translated this into a robust philosophical stance that would survive scrutiny, but that is his stance. Think of Platonic Forms, or Hegelianism in general. His metaphysics is grounded in subjectivity essentially, in that what we can even say about truth is fundamentally restricted by the nature of our being. In many ways to Peterson, our psychology is the ground of reality, and that would be inescabable. So when he says Christianity is true and people are Christian, he says that they are acting out functional truths about reality and the mind, and that truth really is an expression of those functions. Therefore, to frame propositional statements as more fundamental than this reality is nonsensical, which is what reductionist atheists usually do, including all of the people he debated given that we simply live in such a reductionist culture. Like I said, you still treat Peterson like a casual Christian. If he was, he wouldn't be this popular. And to engage him as if he was simply a normal Christian advocating for Christianity in a purely ideological, literalist way, is to me silly. You are misreading something here in my view. Peterson does not express his ideas clearly for a specific reason: To maintain his attachment to his Christian faith. It's not as simple as him simply not caring about if his points land, it's about him maintaining his identity, fundamentally. I disagree. Peterson is in a lot of ways a deconstructionist. It's like, I know what people mean by "free will" when they talk about free will, but really, given I have deconstructed the notion of free will, I actually know that people themselves do not know what they mean when they speak of free will, because the concept is an illusion (meaning when you interrogate it's semantic pointers, it will lead to contradictions, incoherence or simply emotive dispositions). Another example would be a non-cognitivist. When you bring up morality, and you bring up the notion of "should" or "ought", the non-cognitivist will obviously quesiton "What do you mean by that?". The other side will be perplexed: "You use that word all the time, so you know exactly what I mean! It's what we SHOULD do.", but they are missing that the non-cognitivist genuinely believes that the other side is engaging in a delusional way of applying the term, they believe that the semantic pointers of the word "should" or "ought", lead to incoherent dispositions. In the same way, Peterson's notion of truth and believe is a deconstructed notion that, as with the non-cognitivist, refers to psychological realities (in the way I suspect you will be confused by, given that even the nature of psychological reality will differ between you and Peterson, given that his metaphysics plays out differently than yours most likely). That is the point he is obviously making. The point is that, if you look more closely at these notions beyond their immediate semantic impression, you will find them to actually be empty, or lead to non-semantic objects within the mind. So when he talks about what believe means, it is perfectly valid to challenge that. What does it truly mean that something is true? What is the nature of that concept, in actual phenomonological terms? Well, truth actually is a sort of psychological disposition. You cannot capture that word semantically because it's reference point is not conceptual, it's not a notion, it's a fundamental aspect of human cognition or consciousness. You can say he is clumsy, but I don't think it is particularly bad faith. There is a point to what he is doing that is obvious to anyone who themselves recognizes how difficult it is to express such ideas in the first place. In most cases, the most effective strategy actually is to challenge the interlocutor and attempt a process of self-reflectivity. This doesn't work because Peterson is engaging in a debate, which makes genuine self-reflectivity unlikely given the goal is defeating the opponent not deconstructing the semantic reality of the human mind.

Sure, I would say Jordan fails in his defense of Christianity, but succeeds in his critique of atheism and his defense of some of his deeper underlying thoughts. Of course he said a lot of dumb things. When he was confronted about the lying to save the jews, that was a dishonest move on his part, although the interlocutor failed to even understanding Jordan's points (which Jordan then failed to defend given he is not that great at debating). His problem is that he ties his philosophical thoughts up with Christian ideology, which forces him to engage in mental acrobatics. Some exchanges he definitely lost, but most he won in terms of the particular prompt at the time in my view. I think you underestimate some of the underlying thoughts he has been giving in terms of his understanding of what morality as a cognitive phenomena is in the first place. When he asks "What do you mean by believe?" or "What do you mean by God?", this is a genuine question which is a result of his framework and not really a result of him being bad faith. I think the reason why he poses those questions like that in the beginning is because it clarifies he is engaging in Hermeneutics not a literalist, strawman version of whatever most atheists attack when they attack Christianity. The way he defended the genocide I think was a little clumsy, but really the entire line of questioning is just silly given Jordan Peterson's hermeneutic approach. This should be even more obvious when he says that he simply believes Christianity to be the most accurate account of God or "archetypical truth" he so far has found. But people simply would not engage him on that level, because that would require actual engagement with the ideas. When such engagement did occur, the interlocutors were basically confused and had to be educated about Petersons views, which is already a failure given they are debating him and should know what his stance is. Now, Peterson in general is not a great debater, which is why he stumbled even with the more basic literalist critiques. His conversation style is not that suitable for propositional debates, but he also comes off as silly often times because his bias towards Christianity, which he himself is in denial about, is fairly obvious to people. But either way, that is not really of substance to me. Let the old Christian man be an old Christian man. In the end he could find himself a definition of what it means to be Christian that will be perfectly valid, albeit idiosyncratic. It's not as idiosyncratic as people think given the history of Hermeneutics, but it most likely still will be perceived as dishonest. What is happening psychological to Peterson is obvious, he wants to remain open to the possibility of Christianity as a genuine artificat of ultimate divine expression. But that's besides the point and will be hard to argue against in terms of a simple propositional debate like this, so it's basically of no substance. When you say that it would prove pragmatic theism at best, I again think you are not quite engaging with Petersons framework. He rejects the idea of propositional truth being the ground of reality, he would be more in line in saying that actionable manifestation is what truth basically is, so it's much more of a funcitonal notion of truth than a propositonal one. I don't think you can simply pretend he is talking of propositional stances when in reality his metaphysics is basically incompatible with that.

I don't believe that to be the case. It does not fit the way he acted, given he seems to be genuinely standing up for his principles on pain of his career. Over time of course, with his kind of ego, he would get corrupted. But I think this is mostly a function of the amount of resistance he is facing, which is just causing a blind reactivity (because of his underdeveloped ego). I don't suspect that he is intentionally milking drama for money. Progressives need to learn one key lesson, or we will get war: What you resist, persists. Conservatives ironically also do not realize that. But the more you attack someone for their identity, the greater that identity will grow. It will learn to defend itself, replicate itself, just to survive. If you had just let it be and done your own thing, promote and grow instead of attack and diminish the other side, you would have never created this monster in the first place.