zurew

Yeah I can agree with that. I guess we can get into the nuance of how one can lie even if one exclusively use facts (by manipulating the context), but I think thats very different from what the right is doing most of the time. I don't have a well thought out process for how good rhetoric should look like, but right now all I would say is that in practice, it would be something like an information reduction rather than sharing actual falsehoods. So basically providing talking points to a targeted audience, where the audience wouldn't necessarily know all the underlying facts about a given argument, but they could still use the talking points as a justification and if they want to - they can still dive deeper into the facts and the arguments, but the truth value of the talkingpoints would still stay the same.

Of course there is such a thing as empty or misleading rhetoric, but I don't think that good rhetoric is necessarily mutually exclusive with truth or with facts.

These things are not in the same ballpark. In one you actually care about consent, in the second, you not just don't care about consent , you actually care about there being no real consent.

But thats not the same, because there they do consent to it and you know that they do consent to it. If you have a fetish where you get hard from an actual lack of consent, then thats going to be different and you aren't going to enjoy it if the other person will roleplay for you. These are different things. You can have a fetish where you do get joy from your partner roleplaying as a rapist and where you two discuss in detail beforehand exactly what kind of dynamics you want to engage in and talk about safe words when to and how to stop vs getting joy from a lack of consent in a way, where you can rape someone knowing that the other person isn't faking the lack of consent part at all.

If you are twisted enough you can get hard from completely overpowering someone.

Of course it does. Its one of the most efficient ways to completely psychologically destroy someone or to showcase how someone is completely under your control and he/she cannot do anything about it. This is probably the deepest/last boundary people have, and when this is crossed, there is literally nothing off the table from here (in terms of what the rapist is willing to do with you). For example, in prison not all people who rape are actually sexually attracted to the person they rape- its mostly about the power move to make someone your "bitch".

Both of them are highly skilled debaters.

I don't have a strong position on preference formation, because it is an empirical question that I haven't investigated at all - all I would say about it is that you can't have a preference for something that you cant conceive of (thats my way to roughly say, what you mentioned about biological ,cultural and tech context) To be clear though, I am willing to grant that the vast majority of our preferences can be explained by the context that you said, im just not 100% sure whether we can have a preference for something that is removed from that (thats why I used 'to conceive of' ) Btw, appreciate the good faith engagement and appreciate that you were willing to lay down your semantics.

Joshua Rasmussen is pretty cool.

Sure we can use that semantics for the purpose of this discussion about moral talk. I think even under your semantics it would be subjective and I will lay out why (and you can obviously correct me if i am strawmanning) . If you can say that your morality is not completely subjective , under the same semantics I don't see how your stance on beauty would be different (how beauty would be purely subjective), because your sense of beauty can probably be explained or at the very least it is informed by biological mechanism and evolution and by even cultural factors as well, so the same things are applicable there (as far as I see it). Lets talk about moral statements, that includes moral language like should. For example: "I think we should maximize human flourishing". Just because that moral statement has an element in it that is basically connected to or informed by outside factors namely by 'human flourishing' which is grounded in biology, culture ,spiritual practices etc, that does not make that moral statement not subjective. The way you check for subjectivity and objectivity in the context of morals is by checking what a given moral statement's truth value is depended on. So given the same statement of "I think we should maximize human flourishing" , this statement's truth value isn't depended on outside factors, it is depended on your own preferences and values and those values and preferences exist in your mind (using your semantics,of subjectivity - it is depeneded on your preferences). Even if there would be no other human that would have the same kind of morals as you, that statement could still be true given your preferences. Just as a sidenote for language kind of problems: I don't have strong views on it, this is why im perfectly okay with using your semantics. I am not a language realist or whatever it would be called (I am not even sure what objective definition would even mean).I only have two main goals in mind with language. 1) I want to make myself to be clear enough for my conversational partner so that he/she can understand what im saying 2) I want to understand what my conversational partner is trying to communicate.

Okay gotcha. Now I understand your semantics a little better on this, but I personally wouldn't use morality in this case, because to me morality cannot not be prescriptive, this is why science alone cant "solve" moral questions . If we are talking about a purely descriptive statement, then thats just gonna be a scientific question. So for example, if we create a descriptive statement about what we mean by human flourishing, then thats not gonna be a moral statement yet, unless we add moral language to it like (should). We can answer the question of what can bring higher and lower human flourishing without any need for morality there. But, if we make a statement like "we should care about human flourishing", now we are in moral territory and now we can use human flourishing as a moral axiom to work towards. Under my semantics - all of this is compatible with moral subjectivism. Subjective just means mind dependent. The fact that we can give a description about how our moral preferences or intuitions developed or from where they came from or the fact that it can be influenced by outside factors doesn't negate the fact that these preferences are still mind dependent . A good way to recognize this, is if we switch moral preferences with taste preferences. So going with taste preferences - We would probably never say that just because there is a cultural or evolutionary explanation for why I have this preference, that my preference for vanilla over chocolate isn't subjective. To be clear, under your semantics (the way you use subjective, it might make sense to use terms like "not fully subjective", but under those semantics im not even sure if you would categorize anything as purely subjective) When you bring comparative statements in the picture, then its should be trivial for everyone that not all moral systems will be equally fit/good for that given thing. So for instance, if by healthy you mean something like "being good for survival" then yeah, it should be trivially easy to recognize for everyone that certain moral systems that don't care or that care less about survival, those will be less healthy compared to others under this definition of healthy , but under my semantics this still wouldn't make one moral system better compared to another. This is just picking a metric you care about and then checking which moral system can maximize it.

Yeah I pretty much agree with this approach as well. To me, these are words that we use to categorize things, and they are useful for that and thats it (not necessarily claims about metaphysics). What do you mean by moral constructivism? how is that meaningfully different from saying that you have your own personal goals and preferences and that is what grounds what you ought to do?

I can agree with this, just from the fact, that I find context independent (or in other words absolute) truth to be pretty much gibberish, the same goes for moral realism. Decision theory is grounded in morality and I think that you are a moral antirealist as well, so these things are either grounded in our subjective preferences/values or we can decide these things in an intersubjective manner (once proper context is provided, what the actual goal is).

By theoretical virtue I mean things that can help us differentiate and rank theories. It basically gives meaning to the word "better" in the context of choosing between theories. So for instance, if there is a set of facts (call it X), and there are 3 different theories put forth to explain X, theoretical virtues can helps us to non-randomly choose between those theories. So things like simplicity (all else being equal, a theory that assumes less is better) , explainability ( all else being equal, a theory that can explain more facts is better) , predictability ( all else being equal , a theory that can predict future events or behaviour and isn't just an explanation for an existing dataset is better) and there are more virtues , but generally speaking those are the ones that are brought up.

@DocWatts Regarding specifically the "what would make an argument better compared to another" do you have a take on theoretical virtues? Also do you have a stance on theories of truth? (I am referring to correspondence, pragmatist , coherence and others)

Naaah, Jordan is way too invested in maintaining his christian and non-new agey image. Your stuff will be categorized as new age and he will definitely debate you on solipsism and won't just let you to lay it out without any pushback. You will be debated and your ideas will be hardcore scrutinized on the go and I don't think you have a good skillset to deal with that.

@questionreality Whats your take on jan6?

Go ahead, lay those things out.

Why wouldn't they need to worry about voting next time? As long as there will be elections in the future, that statement doesn't make any sense. Think that statement through. Lets go with Trump actually fixing giant problems and after 4 years the next election comes. Why would Trump give room to democrats and to the deepstate to win the next election and potentially destroy everything that he fixed? it wasn't an accident and it wasn't a slip. Trump is probably aware that his followers will get charged by this rhetoric and he knows that they would be okay with him being a king with all the power in the world . You can literally see posts with like 60k+ likes on twitter where people say I would rather choose a dictator(Trump) than Joe Biden. What you need understand is that the MAGA crowd has certain beliefs that necessarily leads to this direction. In their eyes, everything is corrupt and rigged againts them and everything is controlled by the deepstate (including democrats) and only Trump can help. Given those beliefs and given Trump's rhetoric - of course you end up supporting dictatorship , where the dictator is the good guy, who needs to have power to actually have the ability to fight against the worst and most dangerous group of people in human history. There are almost no real centrists , all of them are right wing, they just don't have the spine to admit, because this way they can collect social credit for appearing less biased.

I completely agree. I am becoming more and more obsessed with clarity (regardless what kind of domain we are talking about). Identifying all the relevant things and being able to know what things you should ignore in a given domain and in a given moment or time period is absolutely essential. Regarding LP, the more clarity you have and the better you can spell out exactly the thing that you want to do or achieve , the better you will be able to attack it and the better you will be able to find and focus on the relevant things. I think in a lot of cases, the reason why we don't know what to do is because our goal is not specified enough so its unclear how we could approach it. A good example for how important clarity is the XY problem. The other important thing after you have clarity is laser focus on the relevant things (obviously without clarity you don't even know whats relevant). Casually doing certain beneficial habits (like going to the gym, meditation etc) can be good, but purposefully doing those things and knowing exactly why you do those things and what you want to achieve exactly with those things will help to actually get results. Imagine being able to spell out the exact purpose behind 90% of your daily actions (including micro actions). An Insane amount of time and energy is wasted because of the lack of goal orientedness behind our micro actions. The other really underrated thing that everyone knows about ,but almost no one takes it seriously enough is tracking your progress and consciously creating an environment where you can periodically get feedback.

None of this make any sense in the context of democracy. What kind of possible issues being fixed could make it so , that republicans won't need the votes of christians in the future ? There is no reason for republicans to discourage potiential voters from voting for them in the future. Thats like saying "You won't need to vote for me in the future, so that democrats will have more chance to win future elections and completely destroy what I built up and what I achieved as a president" From the MAGA's pov, thats like saying "give more power to the deepstate in future elections"

More like almost half of the population thinks that a noble king is better than the corrupt and evil deepstate . Imagine having all the beliefs MAGA has about the deepstate about vaccines, about rigged election about sacrificing kids for ritual about raping people and kids, about poisioning the food , the air, the water, about hiding technology that could cure cancer etc and having Trump the savior who can single handedly go against and fix all of that.

I have seen some big cope from republicans saying that what Trump truly meant was: "If he wins a second term, he can’t run again." (because that would be his last term). If they truly think thats what Trump meant, they shouldn't vote for Trump ever again, because he is too mentally declined and he can't communicate his thoughts at all.

Insane statements to make. Conservatives pissing their pants when Biden says some soft ass things and they read into his statements 20 layer deep, but they will make excuses for Trump when Trump's statements are pretty clear and straightforward. They won't ever call out or say a word when their daddy Trump using insane rhetoric like this and they cry when people call Trump a fascist. Just imagine if Biden would have made those statements, how conservatives would have reacted to it.

Musk and his freedom of speech It seems, there are protected users (all rightwingers) who have special priviledge in using racial slurs Some of the users are: Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Endwokeness, Clownworld, bunch of users with "Trump" in their name , Libs of tiktok etc. https://x.com/brndxix/status/1816231803973521728 Just as a sidenote: I haven't seen any articles written on this and it is from twitter so it is possible that it is fake or a misunderstanding , but on its face right now, this looks really bad.