Keeping true to the direction that I recently proposed, I am going to issue you a request: Make at least one claim in the comments section, and we will work together to understand whether it's logically sturdy. The claim can be about any facet of the world in which we live.
The only rule is that each claim can only be one sentence in length. Of course, with this rule in mind, you are allowed to post as many claims as you want.
Go!
Give it up. All the non-sycophant readers of your blog have either gotten bored or scared off. But hey, Logic willing, maybe the entire world will one day be as braindead, lifeless, empty and mechanical as your blog! No bad memes in a lifeless world! No bad spirits, vampires, and unicorns either, which are equally real.
ReplyDeleteAre you not able to deduce the correctness of assertions on your own? Simply start from axiomatics and then work your way towards the desired conclusions. Your ability to resolve any issue is limited only by your ability to make logical deductions.
ReplyDeleteHe's trying to desperately hold onto the delusion that he has readers other than the occasional fellow anti-natalist idly reading a few entries and then getting bored.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to that, it seems as though he also has a small contingent of trolls following his blog. The rationale behind such trolling is, however, a mystery even unto me.
ReplyDeleteI found his website, and for a time, I lived in his world.
ReplyDeleteAnd it. Is. HELL
You feel bad because of all the suffering in life so you try to feel better by talking to your mother. BUT WAIT! You're selfishly and illogically preferring your mother over all other sentient life! You irrational cockroach! And don't try taking a walk outside and enjoying nature, because mother nature is a bitch! All your individualism, entertainment, friendship, love, preferences, and compassion are BAD because you're following EMOTION instead of living in the cold steel cage created by LOGIC. You STUPID STUPID PERSON.
Not that I would believe anything he said if I didn't have a natural lack of a mental immune system. With all his condescending tone and his infuriatingly smug little rhetorical questions and his way of drawing too much mileage from trivial and obvious observations that he thinks are novel and insightful.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I used to think that civilization needed improvement, but now? Fuck it. Once you reduce all human beings down to terribly impermanent shifting aggregates of various drives, ideas, and processes, I no longer have any reason to care about their suffering. Sorry I mean their NEGATIVE SENSATION which is such a wimpy, unemotional term that I can't bring myself to give a fuck about it. No amount of circular logic and calling me stupid is going to make me care about preventing negative sensation outside of my own little monkeysphere.
Reason is, and only ever ought to be, a slave of emotion.
So all this trolling constitutes a rejection. I am driven by absolute emotional need to reject all this pseudo-logical cold machinery from my mind. If reforming society means being torn apart from the inside by his insidious little ideas and spending every day fretting over whether I'm doing enough to benefit mankind as a whole and not being able to believe in either myself or my loved ones, it is not fucking worth it. Which is why his little island utopia is doomed to failure.
ReplyDeleteHey, Leaving Society, do you know why barely anyone comments on your blog? It's because you're a cunt. You offer nothing, and you take everything. You suck at rhetoric, logic, philosophy, psychology, and life. You constantly call people stupid, disgusting, irrational, and selfish just for making their own life less of a living hell.
ReplyDeleteTend your own goddamn garden and let others tend theirs. Delete this stupid blog. I cannot count all the hours of terrible, terrible suffering you caused me during the awful period where I believed what you were saying.
Fuck you.
No idea what just happened here, but if it's in any way a microcosm of what the world's thinkers are like, then there is no hope. Destructiveness is a trait strong in most people, due to their faulty upbringing; take away their religions and governments and this whole thing would descend into turbulent retardation. Thanks, Anonymous (James?), for taking a big dump all over everything for absolutely no reason at all and proving that, even during a game, and especially where anonymity as an ideal is held in high esteem, people are unable to cooperate or be civil.
ReplyDelete"Give it up. All the non-sycophant readers of your blog have either gotten bored or scared off. But hey, Logic willing, maybe the entire world will one day be as braindead, lifeless, empty and mechanical as your blog! No bad memes in a lifeless world! No bad spirits, vampires, and unicorns either, which are equally real."
ReplyDeleteI won't "give it up," because I was never investing very much energy into this project to begin with. I have no delusions regarding the number of readers that I have, and am well aware that almost no one comes here. As I do not lose anything or suffer any consequences for posting on this blog, though, the only rational reason for me to discontinue it would be boredom. I find this fun to do, and while doing it in my head would be almost as fun, both giving up and continuing would in all probability generate the same result -- no positive change in the world -- so these two options are qualitatively neutral.
"Are you not able to deduce the correctness of assertions on your own? Simply start from axiomatics and then work your way towards the desired conclusions. Your ability to resolve any issue is limited only by your ability to make logical deductions."
ReplyDeleteI'm perfectly capable of doing the above, but that's not the point. What I'm interested in, here, is what kinds of responses I will get. Will they be troll comments? Will they be extreme anger and unfounded accusations? Will they be viewpoints that I've encountered hundreds of times in the past? Will they be new but flimsy viewpoints? Will they be new but sturdy viewpoints? Further, once this has been established, can the posters of the responses be influenced? Can they influence me? Can we influence each other in mutually beneficial ways? In a nutshell, the purpose of this blog is to survey its frequenters and engage them in order to ascertain how they process information as it is presented to them. I do not care about what anyone believes, but I do care about what mental tools, tricks, and "equipment" they use to arrive at their beliefs. I know what I think about everything. What I don't know, and what I find entertaining to discover, is what others think about everything.
"You feel bad because of all the suffering in life so you try to feel better by talking to your mother. BUT WAIT! You're selfishly and illogically preferring your mother over all other sentient life! You irrational cockroach! And don't try taking a walk outside and enjoying nature, because mother nature is a bitch! All your individualism, entertainment, friendship, love, preferences, and compassion are BAD because you're following EMOTION instead of living in the cold steel cage created by LOGIC. You STUPID STUPID PERSON."
ReplyDeleteThere is a huge difference between:
I love my son. Don't you dare accuse him of being a thief! He's MY son.
...and:
I love my son. No, he's no more important than any other sentient creature to have ever existed, but this is how evolution has programmed me, and there's not much that I can do about it. It sucks, but as I cannot escape it and loving my son gives me joy (i.e., it ends suffering), then that's what I'm going to do.
We're all "guilty" of the latter, and there's nothing wrong with that. Can you please show me where've I've stated otherwise?
I'm probably the most emotionally intense person I've ever known. So what? I live, love, lust, hunger, and have trivial passions and hobbies just like everybody else. I can do nothing to make them go away, and I quite enjoy them, subjectively. That doesn't mean that I should construct a philosophy out of those things, or in any way endorse their perpetuation into the future onto non-consenting individuals, given the existence of risk.
"Once you reduce all human beings down to terribly impermanent shifting aggregates of various drives, ideas, and processes, I no longer have any reason to care about their suffering."
ReplyDeleteI don't understand. What you're saying is very much the same as saying that granting all sentient creatures the superficial appearance of personal computers or lifeless robots would justify their unending torture at your hands. The sensations are what matter -- not how you've been raised to feel a living thing should be treated. Your above statement is rather disgusting, and no different in substance from stating that "reducing" all humans to their humanity would force you to stop caring about the enslavement of particular races and ethnicities. Hey, if we ignore all of the things that subjectively make American blacks so culturally interesting by declaring that their humanity is what's important (not their race), then why not enslave them, right? If none of the nuances matter, then why care about them at all? Slavery it is!
"...circular logic and calling me stupid"
I have made statements in the past such as "Love is stupid." Can you explain to me how pointing out the stupidity of a phenomenon or point of view in any way connotes something about the living thing who endorses it? I know plenty of good people who have stupid ideas; that doesn't mean that I think they're stupid or worthless.
Incidentally, this is just a general observation. I can't call any of your ideas stupid, for I haven't heard a single one of them yet.
"Hey, Leaving Society, do you know why barely anyone comments on your blog? It's because you're a cunt. You offer nothing, and you take everything. You suck at rhetoric, logic, philosophy, psychology, and life."
ReplyDeleteBarely anyone comments on my blog because I do not possess enormous sums of money, am not friends with corporate advertisers, have not been the beneficiary of some fortuitous event, and started it from the ground up, without the backing of any preexisting foundation or organization. Let's not be so childishly hyperbolic.
"You constantly call people stupid, disgusting, irrational, and selfish just for making their own life less of a living hell."
As I stated on Jim Crawford's blog:
"If the world is not against you for now, and you can avoid suffocation, tumors, and financial instability, then by all means, find ways to cultivate your happiness; distract yourself and become a master of that art. No one ever said that being happy is bad; just the opposite is the case, in fact."
This VERY clearly is in opposition to your obfuscation of my stance. If you have any contrary evidence, then please present it or stop making baseless assertions. You cannot get away with it in any professional environment, so why should you be allowed to get away with it under the Internet's encouragement of lack of responsibility? I am convinced that you are either purposely misconstruing my arguments for the sake of letting off steam or are completely unable to understand them. Given that the latter possibility does not necessitate profane hostility and bizarre tirades, I am inclined toward the former. If this is all that you have to offer, then kindly go away.
"Tend your own goddamn garden and let others tend theirs. Delete this stupid blog. I cannot count all the hours of terrible, terrible suffering you caused me during the awful period where I believed what you were saying."
I have no idea what this means. All that I can say is that I would much rather suffer tremendously while saving others than drown in my misery and worry exclusively about it at the expense of everyone else. I will never change the world with this blog, and am plainly aware of this. However, wherever I can prevent someone from experiencing something against their consent -- even if it means I have to suffer in order to not impose myself on them -- I will do so. This does not entail that my life be miserable, of course; I enjoy life as much as the next person, and if you are somehow unable to separate your philosophy from your practical life (remember: we cannot help much of what we feel, and are better off enjoying life's pleasures than being nihilistic ascetics), then you will fail in this regard.
I can prevent the suffering of others where it would have otherwise been imposed on them by myself. I cannot, however, prevent the suffering of others where it is imposed on them by themselves. I am not forcing you to read my words. Dare you try to censor me? Why the knee-jerking, authoritarian rhetoric?
I'm sorry, I'm mentally ill, this was stupid of me, just delete my comments and get on with your blog.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't deserve this kind of unprovoked attack. No one does. Just try to remember that the internet is a very public place and sometimes you influence people in ways you don't expect. You'll probably never encounter someone as fucked-up as me again, but it's something to keep in mind.
ReplyDeleteWe are all mentally ill. You're not alone. There is no such thing as a mental disorder, because that would imply that there is an order from which select "deviants" have, well, deviated. No such order exists.
ReplyDeleteI won't delete your comments. There is no practical benefit in doing so; as you pointed out, there aren't a lot of readers, here. I will, however, advise you to do whatever it is that you like to do in life and stop reading this blog so often. I will not advise you to ignore its content, but I think that you've gleaned all that you can from it already.
Another thought: We should all be one another's psychiatrists. Let's promote social transparency and downgrade the role that secrets play in our lives.
ReplyDeleteLong time reader, first time commenter on this blog.
ReplyDeleteI love reading your insight into the human condition and opinions on everything.
Unfortunately, english is not my native language so i don't have much to contribute to the conversation.
Just want to say thank you and please keep on blogging.
You're welcome. There isn't a single grammatical flaw in your comment, so I think your English is fine.
ReplyDeleteI do intend to keep blogging, though I'm not a fan of unproductive redundancy, so I will probably only make a post every few months or so, now. Thanks for reading.
>I'm perfectly capable of doing the above [...]
ReplyDeleteYou could use the axiomatic method to deduce everything that other people could think; there's no need to actually ask them, unless, as you suggested, for entertainment. Do you see life as a game? If any of the words you've written on this blog have any ultimate value to you, wouldn't you do whatever you could to implement those ideas in reality to the greatest extent possible?
It's for entertainment, yes. I don't pretend that I will substantively influence planet Earth -- that, and the Socratic method could prove useful for recruitment purposes, if ever there really were some tangible social initiative worth pursuing.
ReplyDeleteFor example, you could theoretically deduce all that any potential interviewer for a corporate position could say or do during an actual interview, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't conduct job interviews; obviously, without conducting them, you'd never bring anyone on board.
I do see merit in implementing ideals to the greatest extent possible, but at the same time, I'm a big fan of probability math and risk versus reward simulations, so I'm never too gung ho about activism or the like.
Another thing to note: The point of this kind of back-and-forth, question-and-answer process is not so much to change my positions on any particular topics; it's to check the overall approach used by the claim-makers.
ReplyDeleteIf we both agree that no one should have children, that doesn't mean anything to me until I've figured out how your brain arrived at that position. Conversely, if you think that a particular race should be exterminated from the Earth, as unlikely as it is that you're right, if your methodology is sound, then I'll see how you arrived at that position and change mine.
This is important, because while your agreeing with me may be beneficial to me right now, what really matters is whether we'll be able to spontaneously and independently come to hold similar positions in the future regarding new concepts. I may be able to teach a dog a particular trick, but will that dog be capable of spontaneously creating his own tricks for the purpose of getting treats in the future?
Note: I'm not the treat-giver in that metaphor! I promise that that wasn't condescending. We're all the dogs, and the natural world is the treat-giver that we have to master while we remain here.
ReplyDeleteI have actually recently gone through something very similar to what the Anonymous former troll describes. Trying really hard to make things better can be counterproductive. I was too hard on myself for several months, and I had to take it down a notch. Still, I've been able to rid myself of some nasty habits during that time, so I consider it a net win. Now, I'm taking it easier again. As with everything, I will probably be going back and forth between being too hard on myself and being too easy on myself until I die.
ReplyDeleteThis comment thread may be useful for other lurkers as well.
James, if you don't mind, could you explain what, specifically, you take issue with in the fragments of my current worldview that I have periodically presented on this blog? So far, all that I've gleaned from your comments is that you think that I am promoting asceticism, or some kind of cold, lifeless world wherein we must suppress our emotions, or something of the like. Do you really think that this is my solution to the world's problem(s)? You can't change my mind if you don't address specific quotes of mine with specific counterarguments.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, you seem to gloss over any post on this blog that has to do with something other than negative utilitarianism and the nature of sentience. Please keep in mind that this blog is called No Bad Memes for a reason: It's about refining our collective worldview via well-defined mental algorithms and lines of questioning -- not any particular idea, comfy or uncomfy. Analogously, favoring one website's content over another is well and good, but it's more important to discuss the search engine that generated both websites as search results. Can it be improved so that we can find a third site better than the current two? If we need a site on a completely separate topic in the future, regardless of the fact that the search engine got us a good site this time, will it be capable of getting us a good site next time?
Remember: I can never disagree with you; I can only disagree with information patterns presented to me by you, their local purveyor. No one owns any idea, no one should ever grow attached to any idea, and no one should reject or embrace any idea merely because of the illusion of a particularly reputable person being its progenitor.