DAPL: coward pipe defeats water protectors

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > DAPL: coward pipe defeats water protectors

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

This sudden demand for a universal morality derived from first principles that is applicable regardless of context is baffling because the entire legalistic case for the US government having a moral right to dispose of the land is based on which army won some battles 150 years ago which is as contextual as you can get.

E: actually I think this is just DR's schtick to shut down debate, you can look at the vaccine thread and find him demanding everyone create a complete morality from first principles with no ambiguity or edge cases before we can vaccinate kids for polio

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Dec 16, 2016

# ? Dec 16, 2016 05:22

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 06:00

Tias: May 25, 2008; Pictured: the patron saint of internet political arguments (probably)

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Anyone knows the current status of the camp? I can't find anything right now :confused:

Recoome posted:

It's almost like the pro-authoritarian posters have this weird dialectical thinking going on.

It's against the ~law~ so the protesters are ~bad~

That would at least be consistent, but they don't give a poo poo when the corporations do something that's against the law.

# ? Dec 16, 2016 08:03

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

VitalSigns posted:

E: actually I think this is just DR's schtick to shut down debate, you can look at the vaccine thread and find him demanding everyone create a complete morality from first principles with no ambiguity or edge cases before we can vaccinate kids for polio

He does that in literally every thread I've ever seen him in, he also magically always come down on the side of the law, however obviously unfair the law is. I have to deal with poo poo like this in my job, it's annoying to see it on the internet as well.

# ? Dec 16, 2016 10:53

wateroverfire: Jul 3, 2010

Tias posted:

Anyone knows the current status of the camp? I can't find anything right now

That would at least be consistent, but they don't give a poo poo when the corporations do something that's against the law.

Who has posted that they don't care when corporations break the law?

Speaking for myself, it is fine and good to hold corps to the law. But not fine and good to, for instance, scrap a pipeline because of a paperwork error that resulted in no harm.

# ? Dec 16, 2016 10:54

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

botany posted:

Christ. The point is that there's a difference between principles ("Racism is bad. Comedy should punch up, not down. No, Pepsi is not okay.") and proper philosophical first principles which have to be both broadly universally applicable and expressive enough to cover subtleties. Having principles is just another way of saying you have moral convictions. Those are going to vary with context an awful lot. ("I think stealing is wrong, but if I'm starving it might be okay to steal food. I'm also dying of thirst, so maybe Pepsi is okay this once.") The search for first principles leads you to look at an argument like "that other pipeline just leaked massively, this is relevant for the discussion about this pipeline" and discard it because there's no goddamn Euclidean deduction of a value judgment from appropriate first principles to the underlying metaphysical commonality that connects both cases, which is what DR is doing.

That's really just saying that you're going to endorse contradictory principles and then decide which one takes precedence depending on how you feel about the situation, or indulge in special pleading, exactly as blowfish described. "Stealing is wrong... unless I approve of the stealing." OK, so a hungry man is entitled to steal bread from someone who has it. Can he steal from anyone with bread, like his neighbor, or only certain valid targets? Can he break into a bakery? Can he rob someone at gunpoint to get the money to pay the baker for bread? Is everyone who feels that their needs are not being met entitled to take what they think they need by force? You insistence that every situation has to be looked at without reference to universally applicable principles is functionally no different from not having principles, because it means yours are flexible enough to endorse whatever outcome you've decided you want. I'm not egotistical enough to think that my gut reaction to a situation is going to select the most just course of action.

Take the discussion I've been having with Skeet Decorator. I would think that the following is pretty uncontroversial:

quote:

War is terrible. Therefore, waging a war must only be done in order to achieve a just end. If a just end cannot be realistically achieved, or cannot be achieved without resorting to unjust means, then it is not just to wage a war in the first place.

The only response he gave to that was, "but if we follow that principle, then we can't achieve the outcome I want." That's it. That's the basic issue of all these discussions. Everyone thinks their opinion is the most correct, their cause is the most righteous, so we have to have universal rules. EDIT: He's been trying to pretend that this is some sort of "might makes right" argument, because that sounds better, but it's not. If you want to impose right at the point of a sword, might is a precondition for that. That isn't even a moral judgment at that point, it's a straight up fact.

I reject the "that other pipeline just leaked massively, this is relevant for the discussion about this pipeline" argument because it's a stupid as gently caress argument-via-anecdote and the people making it should be ashamed of themselves, because they'd call out anyone arguing against something they were in favor of if their opponent did the same thing. "Fukushima Daiichi suffered a catastrophic failure, so I think any new nuclear power plants are unsafe." "But that was a different kind of plant, and the safety studies of this one are..." "Oh, you want an Euclidean deduction of a value judgment from appropriate first principles to the underlying metaphysical commonality that connects both cases?"

botany posted:

It's unhelpful, completely removed from normal modes of communication and a very easy way to feel superior towards people who have a strong moral conviction but lack the proper training to trace that conviction back to a consistent set of principles that can serve as an explanatory ethical base. It also seems to be connected to an over-reliance on legal arguments, presumably because at least there you have explicit principles. This is admittedly anecdotal and my personal gut feeling, but every time I listen to people like DR I get the feeling they're just looking for any explicit strong rule set and if in doubt prefer it to context-dependent moral arguments, because at least it's something that they can hang on to, regardless of the imperfections.

In case I haven't made it clear from my posting, I don't give a single gently caress about people who have a strong moral conviction about an issue, but are unable to connect it to rational, categorical principles. Boo hoo, you have strong feelings about an issue. People have strong feelings about gays getting married and women having abortions, but I don't accord their feelings any prescriptive value either. And yes, explicit rules are always better than asking ourselves how we feel in any particular moment, because humans are bad at making snap logical judgements.

VitalSigns posted:

This sudden demand for a universal morality derived from first principles that is applicable regardless of context is baffling because the entire legalistic case for the US government having a moral right to dispose of the land is based on which army won some battles 150 years ago which is as contextual as you can get.

E: actually I think this is just DR's schtick to shut down debate, you can look at the vaccine thread and find him demanding everyone create a complete morality from first principles with no ambiguity or edge cases before we can vaccinate kids for polio

This is really stupid, because my argument has never been that the U.S. Government is right because it's the U.S. Government and not the Sovereign Navajo Nation from some alt history where they control most of North America.

I think adhering to the principle that people have the right to bodily integrity and to reject unwanted medical interventions is pretty simple and good. You're the one who wanted to violate that when you think their reason for exercising their right isn't good enough. You tried to weasel out of that by claiming that there was a balancing test of harms vs benefits, but then you refused to be consistent about even that point by saying you wouldn't endorse every intervention that passed the balancing test you yourself created to justify what you wanted to do.
But I suppose you can bump the vaccine thread if you really want to discuss this again.

botany posted:

He does that in literally every thread I've ever seen him in, he also magically always come down on the side of the law, however obviously unfair the law is. I have to deal with poo poo like this in my job, it's annoying to see it on the internet as well.

I tend to end up arguing for the side of extant law in this country, because extant law wasn't created in a vacuum, and in many cases there are actually good reasons for it. 90% of these discussions end up circling around "the law is bad because following it allowed [bad outcome from a news story]". I end up explaining that we should follow the law anyway, because if no one did, the result would be [worse outcome], and that unless we can come up with a law that prevents [bad outcome] without allowing [worse outcome], we have to just accept that the law allows [bad outcome] as the price of preventing [worse outcome]. For some reason, people refuse to engage with that, instead resorting to either special pleading as seen here, or insistence that their inability to come up with a law that prevents [bad outcome] without allowing [worse outcome] is irrelevant to the discussion, because we have to do something.

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Dec 16, 2016

# ? Dec 16, 2016 22:17

drilldo squirt: Aug 18, 2006; a beautiful, soft meat sack; Clapping Larry

So what's going on with the coward pipe besides a lot of words about philosophical theory that I'm not going to read?

# ? Dec 17, 2016 04:59

Condiv: May 7, 2008; Sorry to undo the effort of paying a domestic abuser $10 to own this poster, but I am going to lose my dang mind if I keep seeing multiple posters who appear to be Baloogan.

With love,
a mod

drilldo squirt posted:

So what's going on with the coward pipe besides a lot of words about philosophical theory that I'm not going to read?

not much. a pipe near it leaked near 200k gallons before an unrelated citizen noticed the leak and reported it to the pipeline company and now the pipe lovers are arguing about how this one will never leak ever unlike all the others

# ? Dec 17, 2016 05:07

Stickarts: Dec 21, 2003; literally

How large is the site at present? Are people leaving or what?

# ? Dec 17, 2016 05:10

LanceHunter: Nov 12, 2016; Beautiful People Club

It's currently around -5 degrees F, and supposed to be on a downward slide to around -25 by Sunday. The hippies at SoulPad had some weird Black Friday thing where they were telling people that for every one of their overpriced canvas tents they purchased, they would send one to Standing Rock. I don't know if they actually made good on that, but I'm kinda hoping not, because those tents will be worthless in the cold (unless you can buy one of the $400 tent stoves to go with it, something they weren't giving away in their promotion).

# ? Dec 17, 2016 05:29

Liquid Communism: Mar 9, 2004; коммунизм хранится в яичках

Dead Reckoning posted:

I reject the "that other pipeline just leaked massively, this is relevant for the discussion about this pipeline" argument because it's a stupid as gently caress argument-via-anecdote and the people making it should be ashamed of themselves, because they'd call out anyone arguing against something they were in favor of if their opponent did the same thing. "Fukushima Daiichi suffered a catastrophic failure, so I think any new nuclear power plants are unsafe." "But that was a different kind of plant, and the safety studies of this one are..." "Oh, you want an Euclidean deduction of a value judgment from appropriate first principles to the underlying metaphysical commonality that connects both cases?"

You are so far up your own rear end you have to be smelling breakfast by now.

You're seriously trying to pitch the Fukushima Daiichi failure as an example here. A failure that was the result of unprecedented disaster conditions well beyond what the plant was specified to withstand, and in a coincidental location where an unexpected worst case scenario could occur. This, as compared to every other nuclear plant ever is your idea of a reasonable comparison?

We're talking about another pipeline in close geographic proximity to the DAPL run, presumably kept repaired and monitored to industry standards, suffering a failure in normal operation that results in contamination of local land and potentially water resources. With no major regional or local disaster as a cause.

Only in your backwards philosophical world of quasi-objectivist ethical arguments are these things remotely comparable situations.

# ? Dec 17, 2016 05:49

Recoome: Nov 9, 2013; Matter of fact, I'm salty now.

Dead Reckoning has never heard of the Heinz Dilemma, apparently

# ? Dec 17, 2016 06:11

Condiv: May 7, 2008; Sorry to undo the effort of paying a domestic abuser $10 to own this poster, but I am going to lose my dang mind if I keep seeing multiple posters who appear to be Baloogan.

With love,
a mod