…A black gay Muslim man who transitioned to become a lesbian woman and will vote for Hillary, supports BLM, drives and electric car, feels guilty about anthropogenic global warming and thinks government should take firmer stance on bullying and oppression.
🙂
There is an interesting type of a logical error, called ad hominem. I say “interesting” because it’s frequently misunderstood. Let me demonstrate.
A: The fundamental constants of the Universe appear to be finely tuned, because any variance would preclude the existence of the kind of Universe that would make our existence possible. Since this is too unlikely to be the result of chance, the explanation that the Universe was deliberately created with those properties and with a goal of producing us, is actually the most probable one.
B: This is all religious bullshit, you believe in a talking snake and therefore nothing you say should be taken seriously.
This is argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy that attempts to refute the argument by attacking the person that makes the argument. Since credibility of the person making the argument is irrelevant (if a known criminal says that 2+2=4, this is not false), the argument stands. But let me show a different example.
A1: There can’t be a space station in orbit because the Earth is flat.
B1: You can take an amateur telescope and observe the space station in orbit. You can also use a parabolic satellite antenna to narrowly constrain the position of telecommunication satellites in orbit.
A2: That doesn’t prove anything.
B2: You’re an idiot and further discussion with you is pointless.
This is not argumentum ad hominem, because it isn’t an argument, it’s the conclusion based on the displayed properties of the other party. If instead of B1 one immediately wrote B2, it would be ad hominem. However, since A1 was refuted by B1, this essentially concludes the argumentation loop – an argument was offered and it was decisively refuted. Since A doesn’t concede this, B2 is no longer an attempt to disprove A’s argument (because none remains), it is a conclusion about the state of affairs and is perfectly legitimate. For instance, if a person desires admittance into MENSA, is rejected because his IQ is tested to be 80, and someone tells him he’s too fucking stupid to join, that’s not ad hominem. That’s a legitimate conclusion that was expressed in a way he might find unpleasant, but is valid nevertheless. When you tell someone he failed at mathematics because he spent all free time playing Call of Duty on his gaming console instead of learning maths, and he responds that you’re fat and ugly and therefore your argument is false, that is ad hominem.
And that brings us to our false dichotomy: are you an egalitarian or a racist?
Do you believe that races are irrelevant and people are basically the same, or do you believe that racial origin decisively determines one’s properties?
My position is that I don’t know. People are obviously not all the same, or you wouldn’t have qualification exams at colleges and job requirements and interviews later on. It is obvious that if there is a bar defining qualifications, some will pass and some will fail. So, believing that this is right and proper, I am obviously not an egalitarian, but a meritocrat. In my opinion, all privileges are derived from personal qualities and contributions. In my opinion, if you have a difficult entrance exam, which consists of mathematics and physics problems, and the only students who pass on merit are Koreans, Chinese and Europeans, this is not racist against the Africans. It would be racist against the Africans if you’re disqualified from even taking the test if you’re black, or if you have points deducted from the final result if black. But if the test is same for all, and one race consistently fails, this is not racist. Furthermore, making conclusions about that race based on the displayed results isn’t racist either. If it’s OK to praise the Asians for demolishing the test, it’s perfectly OK to ridicule the Africans for failing miserably. What actually is racist is to make easier admittance conditions for the Africans, because it is assumed that they are too stupid to qualify on merit. This essentially amounts to conceding that they are inferior as a race, but saying that both superior and inferior races should be equally distributed among the students because then it’s somehow not racist.
Any kind of quota for employment or admittance into any kind of institution, based on criteria such as race, sex, sexual orientation or similar things, is racism (or sexism or whatever-ism). There is no difference between preferential quotas for blacks and “no niggers allowed here” rule. If you think blacks are equal, make equal rules for all. If you advocate preferential rules for blacks, it means you think they are inferior as a race but you happen to have a pet race and you want it to succeed. This just happened to be Hitler’s motive for committing all sorts of crimes – he had a pet race, aryan, and wanted it to succeed. Since it seemed to fail compared to the Jews, he decided to clear the way for the aryans by introducing the rules that closed the doors for Jews and opened them for aryans. The way to solve this is not to hate Hitler, it is to abandon the idea of trying to help some failing group by introducing special rules. Instead, we should make sure that the rules are just, and if someone consistently fails, allow him to. Don’t make rulings that define if races are equal or different. Make fair rules and allow people to either win or lose. You don’t even have to introduce preferential criteria for the particularly capable or talented individuals – if they are capable, they’ll manage just fine on their own. But certainly don’t try to prevent those on the bottom from failing, because that’s the worst thing you can possibly do. That’s the kind of thing that destroys societies, states and civilizations. In fact, if there’s anything we can learn from nature, it’s that a species thrives if a predator consistently kills the least fit specimen. You don’t actually have to reward the most capable ones – just kill the worst ones, and the species will thrive. Capitalism is actually the opposite – it has special rewards for being the most capable specimen, and that seems to work better for human societies. If a society allows the poor to simply die off, it creates a great incentive to not be poor, which creates incentive to master marketable skills, which then creates competition for the top places in everything, resulting in general improvement of the society. If there’s any lesson to be learned from history, it’s that providing free bread for the poor creates an attitude that it’s a perfectly acceptable option to be poor, and then the society dies. So yeah, if introduction of meritocracy shows that race and gender are irrelevant, great. If they show that races and genders are good at different things, great. If it shows that some group is consistently inferior, let it die off.
I have no problem with Jews ruling in finances, Africans ruling in basketball, Whites ruling in science, or Asians ruling in engineering. It’s not some racist conspiracy, it’s what happens when you allow people to succeed on merit – you learn that there actually may be a difference between the races, or you learn that there isn’t any. If there happens to be a master race that will consistently outcompete others, so what? I don’t see anyone objecting to our species out-competing the Neanderthals. I don’t see anyone objecting to the fact that those who were able to digest grains and milk survived better in the early Holocene than those who weren’t. So suck it up.
The next false dichotomy is abortion, with “pro-life” and “pro-choice” options, and I will now show why I think it’s deceptive.
The pro-choice argument says that it’s woman’s body, she gets to choose what happens with it, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant and give birth, she can have an abortion.
The pro-life argument says that a fetus is a human being from conception, it has human rights, and you can’t kill a human being legally, so its right to life takes precedence over any other consideration.
So basically the false dichotomy is whether you believe the fetus is a human being or not. If it is, the concept of human rights applies. If it is not, when does it become one? At the time of birth? When is that, considering all the premature births that survive in an incubator? The pro-choice option really has a problem there. The pro-life option has a problem of trying to ban abortion outright, and most people intuitively agree that this might not be the best idea, although it’s difficult for them to argue why exactly without sounding like monsters.
So here’s my take on this. A fetus is a human being since conception. However, humans don’t have any intrinsic rights, whatsoever. There are only duties and privileges. Privileges are derived from contributions; since the mother contributes her body for a parasitic entity to use for its growth and to deform her in the process, and demand her resources and sacrifices for decades to come, any privileges of the fetus, including its privilege of life, are realized at her expense. This gives her the right to simply refuse to donate her body as a host for the fetus. The father, too, has rights, or should I say privileges, considering how he provides for the woman with his resources. Since having a baby is also realized at his expense, and might pose a serious burden on him, he also has a voice in the matter. So, what exactly is the position of the fetus in all this? The fetus is a guest, who was invited into the family by the act of them having sex. It’s a soul that started the process of incarnation based on that invitation. The invitation can be rescinded, but that is done at the soul’s great inconvenience, is very traumatic to all sides and they better have a valid reason for that, because it’s definitely an action that goes against both nature and common decency, because if you tell someone that he’s so unwelcome and such a burden that you’d rather kill him than suffer his presence, that’s a really serious message. So, nobody has rights, but there are other things that are actually much more binding than the concept of rights. One of those things is basic decency and goodness, out of which you simply don’t kill your child unless your life is threatened, or its body is diagnosed to be deformed, in which case you destroy the body in order not to force the soul to endure life in the trap of a deformed body. So yes, in theory the mother has almost unlimited rights to do whatever she wants with the fetus, because all its rights are derived from her personal contributions and sacrifices, and it is her option to decline. The father, too, has rights, because it is expected of him to support the family. The child, in theory, merely consumes resources and is an inconvenience, and has no rights whatsoever. In practice, the child is a guest, who came into the mother’s body by invitation, and if that is so, its protection is a great ethical priority and an obligation. If the child was conceived by carelessness, the mother can rescind invitation, but it always comes at great spiritual cost, because she basically not only made a mistake, she also forced someone completely innocent to suffer for her mistake. If the pregnancy is the result of rape, she is perfectly justified in doing whatever she wants with it. She can have an abortion at no moral or spiritual expense, or she can shrug and decide that she wanted a baby anyway and simply keep it, taking ownership of the situation.
So, in theory I advocate a purely pro-choice position, but in practice, I am almost as extreme in the anti-abortion stance as the most ardent pro-life advocates. That is because I don’t base my moral stance on the concept of human rights or liberties, but on the concept of having God, who is the absolute goodness, as a role model, and not wanting to live my life in a way God would find objectionable. This is the crux of the pro-choice position: you choose not only what to do, but what you will become as you do it, and not all outcomes are equally desirable.
I dislike the fact that the public intellectual space and discourse is defined by the false dichotomies.
You are either for global warming (they call it climate change now because there was no warming) or against it. You are either pro choice or pro life. You are either an antifascist or a fascist. You are either an atheist or you believe in one of the middle-Eastern bronze-age theologies. You either believe that all people are the same or you are a racist.
I think the cause of this is the fact that people are not very good at thinking and having coherent opinions, but they are far better at forming groups around simplistic concepts. If you can reduce an issue to being for or against something, then you can politically exploit idiots who are unable to think in more complex terms.
Let me explain what I think, using issues of global warming, abortion, fascism and religion as an example. Let’s start with global warming in this article, and go on from there.
I see Earth as a complex thermodynamic system; it seems to be the only place in the Solar system other than the Sun, that derives a significant portion of its warmth from nuclear energy. I shit you not – more than 80% of the energy that keeps the Earth’s core in a molten state is derived from either nuclear fission or radioactive decay. This is the reason why we have such a powerful electromagnetic field, unlike Venus and Mars. Earth has a magnetic field on par with the gas giants. This is because the Theia impact, some 4.31 BY ago, gave Earth enough heavy elements for two planets, while expelling the light elements into what later became the Moon. As a result, Earth has its own nuclear furnace that keeps the inner core spinning within the outer core and the mantle, producing a strong magnetic field. This heat emanates from the core and eventually into space.
The second source of Earth’s energy is the Sun, which, obviously, heats up the atmosphere, the oceans and the crust during the day, and this energy radiates into space during the night. The speed of this release of energy can be moderated by the buffers, also called the glasshouse gasses. Also, since the equatorial areas absorb more solar energy than the poles, there is a thermal gradient between those. Depending on the amount of buffers in the atmosphere and the layout of the continents and the oceans, there is a certain variability to this thermal gradient between the equator and the poles; if the oceans can’t bring the energy from the equator to the poles quickly enough, the Earth starts warming up.
As it warms up, the oceans release carbon dioxide, one of the important buffers, into the atmosphere, because it is more easily soluble in cold water (which is easy to demonstrate by warming up carbonated soda). This then contributes to the moderation of the equatorial-polar thermal gradient, essentially smoothing the seasonal transitions and increasing the habitable area of the Earth’s crust. If it goes too far, it can make the equatorial areas very hot, but habitability of those areas is already questionable today, because they aren’t actually a pleasant place for humans. On the other hand, thawing of the polar regions would more than make up for the loss of equatorial habitability by opening up the currently inaccessible areas for human habitation. Another issue are the coastal areas, that would be flooded by the melt-water resulting from the polar ice. This would result in the gradual loss of the very densely populated coastal areas, but I see no cause for panic, since the gradual increase of the water levels would force people to simply migrate to a safer area. Of course, you can never eliminate the possibility of a sudden event, something of a Dansgaard-Oeschger variety, that would seriously threaten mankind, but those occur with some regularity in any case.
So, what is my long-term prognosis? First of all, I take my data from a vastly longer time-span than is the case with most climatologists; I work with the last billion years of climate. This includes several pre-Cambrian global glaciations, the Cambrian melt, warm period that started subsiding some 65 MY ago, entering a drier, cooler climate, increasing the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles, starting the formation of polar ice, and gradually absorbing the carbon dioxide gas in increasingly colder water, reducing the amount of atmospheric buffers. The polar ice on the other hand increased the Earth’s albedo, thus contributing to the situation by reflecting more sunlight into space. Eventually, this reached extremes somewhere in the late Pliocene, early Pleistocene, some 2.6MY ago, when the amount of atmospheric buffers declined to dangerous levels, where even the minor orbital and axial variations started throwing the climate out of whack. These are called the Milankovitch cycles, and the interesting thing about them is that they exist only in the Pleistocene; I heard about that once and it made me wonder so I looked into it and now I know why that happens. Basically, if the CO2 levels fall below the Pliocene levels, the Earth starts to balance on a very precarious edge of a runaway glaciation, where due to the lack of buffers in the atmosphere it becomes possible for more ice to accumulate on the polar areas than can be removed in the summer. Due to the albedo effect of the ice, this increases the problem in the next season, and so on. If left unhindered, this process will eventually and quite certainly result in a full global glaciation, poetically known as the snowball Earth, and that is game over for most forms of life on land, including humans. That’s the tricky part – the thermal curve of the last 65 MY has a clear downwards-pointing trend, and it’s because of the ring of seawater that formed around Antarctica, enabling the Coriolis force powered sea currents to quickly dissipate energy, de facto working like an air conditioner or a fridge, powered by Earth’s rotation and convection.
What humans did here with their industrial revolution and combustion of fossil fuels is to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration to either early Pleistocene or even early Pliocene levels; the data isn’t clear enough. But what does that mean, exactly? Is it a bad thing, in a sense that the climate will undergo a dramatic change, destructive to human civilization, before it re-establishes itself on the Pliocene levels? Is it a good thing, in a sense that it either delayed or completely prevented the onset of the next glacial maximum, and possibly even brought us out of Pleistocene ice age altogether? I don’t know. Earth is such a complex thermodynamic system, I’m simply unable to make a precise enough simulation in my head to account for all the factors and variables. What I do know, with absolute certainty that comes from looking at the last billion years of climate data, is that without this increase of CO2 levels this glacial minimum that we call Holocene would ultimately come to an end, and we would sink into a glacial maximum, colloquially known as the ice age. Also, since the circumantarctic air conditioner keeps on pumping heat out into space, one glacial maximum will eventually cross the threshold of runaway glaciation where even the equator would freeze over, and that will last until the continental drift eventually breaks the heat pump of sea currents, some hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the future. Basically, this means it’s game over for life on Earth as we know it, and since the Pleistocene itself with its climatic instability means the process has already started, it is unlikely to take more than a few millions of years before the Earth cools down so much that Milankovitch cycles will no longer be able to bring it into a glacial minimum. So, without that evil beast of global warming, we are not safe in the bosom of Mother Earth with its perfect balance of climate and whatever bullshit the tree-huggers want you to believe. On the contrary, we live in a climate that is so viciously unstable, it forced animals to evolve hibernation and seasonal migration in order to survive the seasonal extremes. Earth is in its death throes, and it’s called Pleistocene. It’s only because our lifespan is so insignificant that we don’t perceive it as a terrible train wreck that it is. The only event in the last 65 MY that went contrary to the trend of gradual cooling and the eventual death in ice is our industrial carbon dioxide release.
But if you expect my prognosis to be bright, you’re wrong. I actually think our CO2 release is merely a “blip”. The circumantarctic current is a vast, unstoppable global force. With our pumping CO2 into the atmosphere we might actually trigger a Dansgaard-Oeschger event by melting too much polar ice at once, breaking the thermohaline circulation and resulting in some violent climatic extreme that might cool the planet down in one instant to simply sink all our CO2 into the oceans and resume the cooling trend, maybe even accelerating it. That’s what you have when you work with complex thermodynamic systems – it’s always chaos, and in chaos the scale can tip both ways in unpredictable ways. So yes, our CO2 release is the best news that life on Earth got since the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s the only thing that could possibly delay or even prevent the runaway glaciation. It could also wreck the climate enough to wipe us out. But our prognosis was never bright, to begin with. We have our extinction event sometime in the future, in a runaway glaciation. It’s a certainty. What we did with our industrial civilization might delay it or prevent it altogether. It could also kill us more quickly. The thing is, I don’t know what will happen, because the thermodynamics of it all is too complex for me to simulate, and from what you’ve read so far you can see that I’m actually quite a bit ahead of the general trends in climate science.
And now we come to the conclusion: why the question “do you believe in global warming” makes me facepalm and despair to the point of tears. It’s because I know the level of superficiality and ignorance that lies beneath that question. It’s because I know I’d have to write this article in order to explain what I really think about it, and because I rarely think in yes/no dichotomies, that so rarely function beyond the level of elementary mathematics, where you have simple questions such as “is n, an element of N, an odd or an even number”, and all elements of the set result in unequivocal Boolean answers. The real world is more like the R set, in which such a question would apply only to an insignificantly small subset, making no sense whatsoever outside that range.
I was watching some YouTube videos made by people who rescue and refurbish old computers from the junkyard and return them to function. Basically, they take an old Core2Duo computer, fix some tiny thing that was wrong and turn it into a, well, Geekbench 3000 slug, so that one doesn’t have to buy a new i5 or i7 machine that would fly and work great, but instead extend the life cycle of an old, obsolete machine that will continue working below modern standards and annoy people for another 5 years.
Which made me think about analogies. You see, the leftist Western ideology, as formulated after WW2, wants to make us believe that all humans share the same hardware, all you need is install the right operating system of leftism and human rights, basically the right fundamental ideology, and run the right software, basically indoctrination, education and political correctness, and you get a good, emancipated human being. Then, if something doesn’t work, you blame pre-existing societal conditions, basically the software that interferes with the leftist ideological perfection, but you never actually consider the possibility that your premises might be faulty, that some types of hardware might be actually inferior and unfit for purpose (in translation, that some people might be simply to stupid to function in a modern environment, like trying to install Windows 10 on a Pentium IV computer; it might limp along, but it will work like shit).
Since the modern OS defines “good” as “opposite from Hitler”, let’s see how Hitler viewed those things. First of all, he didn’t see people as individuals, just as we don’t see computers as individuals. He would see humans as specific cases of some hardware type running a certain ideology and intellectual content. His rationale for getting rid of inferior races would be that they can’t function on the level that modern civilization demands, they basically can’t run the current OS and modern software, and keeping such obsolete or faulty hardware in function just drains the resources from the rest of humanity, it doesn’t actually add anything useful and takes resources away from the places where they could be desperately needed. Essentially, by killing a retarded child you free up resources that can be used for assisting 10 talented children; a computer analogy would be that by throwing away an old Core2Duo machine you allow yourself the option to actually put resources into buying a new i7 beast that will raise your overall functionality and productivity by a level that more than simply justifies the expense, so that getting rid of the old bucket actually isn’t a loss, it’s a gain. Keeping something shitty alive actually isn’t a net positive.
Also, there’s a matter of ideology. If some people’s heads are filled with an ideology that makes them want to kill you, you can either attempt to dissuade them, which is ineffective and costly, or you can simply kill them and produce new bodies with a non-hostile and useful OS to take the empty space. A computer analogy would be that you can take a box that runs Windows XP, and you can either install Windows 10 on it and thus refurbish it to work in a modern environment, or you can concede that it isn’t worth the trouble and simply throw it away and buy a new box that runs a modern OS quickly. Essentially, the concept would be that trying to teach inferior nations how to work on a German level isn’t worth the effort; it’s better to simply kill them all and expand the already high-functioning Germans to fill the empty space.
So, what we have here is akin to one of those philosophy seminar questions, such as “should we eat babies?”. If you react emotionally, you’re obviously too stupid to be there in the first place. If there’s something wrong with it, there should be a coherent rational response. In the case of eating babies, the rational response is that you don’t want to become a baby-eating monster, regardless of the fact that there is often an excess of babies and lack of food and the babies are nutritious. You don’t do certain things because the very choice of some options opens ethical floodgates that can destroy the connective tissue of human society. Growing decerebrated fetuses in order to harvest them for organs can make all the intellectual sense in the world, but it is such an ethically monstrous act, it opens the society to increasing horrors if practiced. Essentially, if you dehumanize other beings, if you lower the threshold of outrage over certain acts, it normalizes evil and society turns into a horror show.
This is an easy argument to make, but it’s faulty. In fact, evolution functions exactly along the lines of eliminating sub-par animals so that they don’t consume resources and contribute inferior genes to the gene pool. If you have wolves that have speed and strength sufficient for killing a sick or malformed deer, but can’t harm an average or superior deer, this will actually cleanse the deer gene pool and improve their population, primarily by freeing up the resources that would otherwise be wasted on something that either wouldn’t get the chance to reproduce at all due to sexual selection, or would reproduce with inferior offspring, or would be a nuisance in other ways. So, Hitler’s essential evolutionary argument is correct. His problem was that he had no faith in the power of free market of labor, goods and resources, among other things because his precious Germans were losing in the free market to Jews, who are arguably better. So, instead of letting the free market place resources in the hands of winners and let the losers wither away, he decided to replace that process with ideology and arbitrary assessments of superiority and inferiority. The result, of course, was a disaster and injustice of enormous proportions. I don’t, however, see a problem with the basic concept. Let people compete. Make just rules. The winners will accumulate most resources, and losers will starve. That’s actually perfectly fine and is recommended by Jesus – give more to those who already have the most, take away from those who are incompetent. That’s how you introduce healthy criteria of virtue into a society, instead of breeding whiners and victims who all demand someone to intervene in their favor in order to “redress social injustices”. The only social injustice takes place when you take resources from the successful ones in order to feed the unsuccessful ones. It’s like killing healthy deer in order to help the lame and sickly ones.
But our society went the other way – it decided that by existing, you have rights, and if reality doesn’t match that expectation, you call it injustice and whine until someone, either society or the state, punishes someone for success and compensates for your failure. This is not all that different from Hitler’s position – since his Germans can’t compete with the Jews on equal and fair terms, he will change terms and use the Germans’ advantage in physical power in order to simply kill the Jews and thus clear out the space for Germans. So, the problem with Hitler wasn’t that his philosophy and practice were pro-evolutionary and social-Darwinist, it’s the exact opposite: he didn’t have faith in social Darwinism because his chosen subset of mankind didn’t fare all that great in those conditions, so he decided to be a socialist and “redress injustices”.
A consistent believer in evolution would never adopt social interventionism. He would have faith that better will prevail, regardless of what he thought “better” to be. In order for better to prevail, it suffices to not rescue obsolete trash from the garbage heap and attempt to refurbish it, and not to play Robin Hood by taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots. Rather, buy that which is great, and avoid buying trash.
That works for humans, too. Give to those who inspire you. Don’t give to beggars who try to guilt you into giving them resources. Don’t feel guilty if worthless people are poor. Feel guilty if worthy people are poor, because that means that you didn’t support that which you deem worthy.
Your social responsibility is simply to support that which you deem worthy and great. Applied throughout society, that will make humans who are of no value to anyone fall to the garbage heap and die, all by themselves, without any need for some Hitler to act like an artificial evolutionary agent and kill them. Don’t feed that which is worthless, and it will die. Feed that which is worthy, and it will grow. Don’t have sex with something that is pitiful, and don’t feed that which is pitiful. As a result, you have instant eugenics of the best kind, without needing to resort to horrors in order to artificially implement something against the natural order.
So what is the conclusion about Hitler? What’s the problem with him? Basically, his problem is that he was a nationalist and a socialist. Because he was a nationalist, he tried to assure supremacy of his nation, against evolutionary free-market criteria. Because he was a socialist, he believed in state intervention with the goal of “redressing injustices”. The combination of those two was a nightmare of the worst kind. The problem wasn’t the eugenics, nor the concept of survival of the fittest, nor the concept of superior and inferior races. The problem was in the enforcement of arbitrary criteria. If you believe in evolution and survival of the fittest, laissez-faire. Hands off and let the successful ones succeed, and the unsuccessful ones fail. If your gardening demands weeding, it means you’re growing the wrong plants. Try growing nettles instead of spinach.