High-Profile Sexual Abuse Epidemic

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by jammies

It's innate to human nature.

And the project of civilization is the struggle to rise above human nature. This project isn't helped when the values that have underpinned our progress - including the liberal value of judging people by their individual actions, not their group identities - are cast aside whenever they conflict with more primitive impulses.

On the subject of liberalism, the Economist is publishing an excellent series of articles on the subject. Worth reading for anyone interested in the heritage and current state of one of our society's core principals.

https://www.economist.com/open-futur...-of-liberalism

[PepsiFree]

It is literally impossible to “rise above” human nature, as humans. What you’re talking about is evolution, which may or may not happen, and if it does, will be realised long long after any memory of anything our society has done has been forgotten, and probably honestly won’t happen before our planet blows up.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen

If the genders were reversed it would be It's comparable to what happen to McGowan and many other woman with Weinstein.

(Pretty sure you said about the opposite of what you meant.)

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

It is literally impossible to “rise above” human nature, as humans.

The fact you or I would consider it a nightmare to go back in a time even 200 years (let alone 2000) says otherwise.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

200 years?

Hell, I'd consider it a nightmare to go back 20 years. Young guns era, no HD, slow internet, no CP.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger

200 years?

Hell, I'd consider it a nightmare to go back 20 years. Young guns era, no HD, slow internet, no CP.

No Trump president though. Imagine asking yourself 20 years ago if you would time travel to now, but be warned, Trump is in charge.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

No Trump president though. Imagine asking yourself 20 years ago if you would time travel to now, but be warned, Trump is in charge.

And you could bet on World Series Winners, know when to get out on Bre-X and invest in Microsoft, Apple and Disney and live a life of luxury!

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

No Trump president though. Imagine asking yourself 20 years ago if you would time travel to now, but be warned, Trump is in charge.

20 years ago? We'd be thinking a Trump-Oprah Democratic victory somehow happened. Hardly anything to be concerned about.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...oprah-winfrey/

[jammies]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

The fact you or I would consider it a nightmare to go back in a time even 200 years (let alone 2000) says otherwise.

Non sequitur. You're conflating the innate with the learned, nobody is claiming that ideas, institutions and culture cannot change, just that self-deception and hypocrisy are none of these, but rather are universal to the human animal.

It's an illiberal notion that humans are plastic and unaffected by their natural qualities, by the way. The perfectibility of humans via social institutions is more of a Marxist thing. The best a classic liberal can hope for is to repress our emotional and physical selves under a dictatorship of the clear mind.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by jammies

Non sequitur. You're conflating the innate with the learned, nobody is claiming that ideas, institutions and culture cannot change, just that self-deception and hypocrisy are none of these, but rather are universal to the human animal.

His point is that liberal institutions are one way to overcome those things that are innate. Tribalism is also innate, for example. Take another cultural artifact - the scientific method - which is designed to overcome the innate human characteristic of motivated reasoning.

The issue might be that you're taking the meaning of "overcome" in this case to mean "eliminate". I believe he's saying that you can "overcome" those tendencies in the sense that while they're still a part of you, they don't your dictate behaviour (or dictate it as little as possible). Clearly that sort of "overcoming" is possible, as demonstrated by the fact that you're not killing your neighbour for his stuff... presumably.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

His point is that liberal institutions are one way to overcome those things that are innate.

Yeah, my point is that the specific thing he's saying is becoming more prevalent due to liberalism's supposed decline has nothing to do with liberalism at all. I understand his point entirely, and disagree with it.

Liberalism is like a reverse McCarthyist view on communism for Cliff - if it's good, it must derive from liberal ideology, and conversely all our ills can be traced to a worrying lack of Vitamin L. I'm surprised he hasn't decried global warming as a product of declining liberal values yet.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by jammies

Yeah, my point is that the specific thing he's saying is becoming more prevalent due to liberalism's supposed decline has nothing to do with liberalism at all. I understand his point entirely, and disagree with it.

Okay, that's fine, but I don't understand how your statement works as a counterargument to his point, which is why it wasn't clear to me that you had understood it. How does your position that hypocrisy is innate to human nature contradict his view that this is about liberal principles? Wouldn't the retort be that group identity isn't relevant to the way people are behaving in this particular instance, or that consistency in application of a principle isn't itself an aspect of the principle, or something along those lines?

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

His point is that liberal institutions are one way to overcome those things that are innate. Tribalism is also innate, for example. Take another cultural artifact - the scientific method - which is designed to overcome the innate human characteristic of motivated reasoning.

The issue might be that you're taking the meaning of "overcome" in this case to mean "eliminate". I believe he's saying that you can "overcome" those tendencies in the sense that while they're still a part of you, they don't your dictate behaviour (or dictate it as little as possible). Clearly that sort of "overcoming" is possible, as demonstrated by the fact that you're not killing your neighbour for his stuff... presumably.

Murder isn’t human nature, that’s behaviour. Behaviour is changeable, nature is not.

The same nature that put us in staunch political groups is no different than the one that makes us a fan of a sports team, or protect our friends.

The same nature that causes one to kill is the one that causes you to want to win, at anything.

How we express our nature, and in what venues, is fluid. But our nature itself is not. To overcome human nature is to live in some messed up Brave New World fiction. It’s pie in the sky stuff, and not something anyone, anywhere, who is a human being, should actually want.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Murder isn’t human nature, that’s behaviour. Behaviour is changeable, nature is not.

Acting hypocritically is also a behaviour. You're missing the point, which is to support principles that would generally lead to us not acting in ways that we are innately predisposed to do, but which are deleterious to the project of building the society we want to live in.

The same nature that put us in staunch political groups is no different than the one that makes us a fan of a sports team, or protect our friends.

This is accurate. As a result, norms and principles that allow us to overcome that element of our nature in contexts where it's particularly harmful are, one might argue, good norms and principles to foster.

The same nature that causes one to kill is the one that causes you to want to win, at anything.

This isn't, as far as I'm aware, but maybe you have some scientific basis for saying it. Either way, it's beside the point. I don't think you actually disagree with what Cliff is saying, which is essentially, to stick with the murder example,

1. Murder is a result of inherent aspects of human psychology that are innate in all of us;
2. Our mutual societal commitment to principles like "murder is wrong" are the main reason we don't murder each other, thereby repressing those innate aspects of human psychology in answering the question "should I kill that guy who just angered me";
3. This process of suppression of innate human psychology in the context of murder is a good thing; and
4. At least some of those principles that allow society to function best (Cliff might say most of the important ones) are rooted in classical liberalism (in this "murder" example, the harm principle).

[Senator Clay Davis]

So anyway, getting back to perverts and degenerates instead of semantics...

[jammies]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

How does your position that hypocrisy is innate to human nature contradict his view that this is about liberal principles?

How doesn't it? This is his original, direct quote: "But it isn't just victims who are selective in their outrage. It's people defending those who they worked with, or who share their political identities, while attacking others for doing the same thing. It's about tribal politics relentlessly chipping away at universal, liberal values." (emphasis added)

The bolded is where Cliff correctly frames the core issue as hypocrisy, not tribalism. Take out that clause, and it entirely changes the meaning of what he is arguing. Ah, but regardless of this moment of nuance, the shibboleth of collapsing liberalism makes its appearance for the umpteenth time, grafted on to make a cogent point deform its cogency in favour of obsession.

It could have been argued that this outbreak of hypocrisy is in the service of tribalism, yes, but the last sentence doesn't say "it's about hypocrisy in the service of tribal politics", it instead makes an assertion that it is about tribal politics chipping away at liberalism- as though the prime motivation of these nefarious finger-pointers is calculated ideological war, not self-righteous self-delusion, and as if those holding liberal values are never hypocrites.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

So anyway, getting back to perverts and degenerates instead of semantics...

Sorry. I was hoping we could, through reason alone, avoid future derailments of tangentially-related topics into discussions of the death of liberalism. I know now that this was, ironically, completely unreasonable.

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

So anyway, getting back to perverts and degenerates instead of semantics...

The correct term is miscreants.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Acting hypocritically is also a behaviour.

Disagree. Hypocrisy is not an action, it’s a mindset that inspire an action. Show me one human devoid of hypocrisy, ever, and i’ll show you a unicorn.

This and more on the Corsi and Pepsi Semantics Podcast, Available on iTunes

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Disagree. Hypocrisy is not an action, it’s a mindset that inspire an action. Show me one human devoid of hypocrisy, ever, and i’ll show you a unicorn.

This and more on the Corsi and Pepsi Semantics Podcast, Available on iTunes

I think I disagree with both of you - hypocrisy is neither action, nor behaviour (collection of actions), nor mindset...I think it is an outcome of the combination of the three

Hypocrisy requires:

1.a previously established mindset (typically expressed through action, including statement)
2. a new action that does not conform to the mindset expressed in #1

but those two points alone do not yet equal hypocrisy
3a. hypocrisy is avoided by an additional action that renounces the beliefs established in #1, or sufficiently and demonstrably alters the mindset held in #1 (I would suggest that some level of contrition/acknowledgment of error/mea culpa is necessary, and probably the element most often missing when hypocrites attempt to distinguish their way out of )
3b. hypocrisy is confirmed through inaction, or continuation of #1


#1 and 2 are so commonplace in any learning process that the word hypocrisy could be applied so ubiquitously that it would lose all meaning