Will Torbald

You haven't watched Stefan debate UPB with callers if you think that, then.

I think it's irresponsible to respond this late to things I have already said and covered. It might be an inevitable consequence of having a long thread. 1- In any case, I already said that the premises of UPB can be divided in two camps. One is the premises of an objective reality, and the other are premises of human assumptions. For a debate, we can forgive human assumptions. For a theory of science level, we can't. If you believe UPB is as good as science, you're wrong. It's as good as a religion, or an ideology. Believing things about people on a false narrative. In the case of UPB, the false narrative is "life is not different from a debate, so pretend the rules of debate are the rules of life" because in any defense of UPB, the proponent of it invokes that by debating, the accuser accepted premises. This is false because the premises only serve to contextualize a debate, but it is not by any means valid outside of it. 2- Free will is a hypothesis, believed on faith. Scientific research is actually against free will every time it is tested.

Affect and change are not the same thing. Deterministically, you are affecting the world that will lead to a future series of events motivated by your actions. That is always going to occur. For free will to happen, you would have to somehow do stuff in the present that will not affect the future in any way as you choose. Suspend the laws of nature at will, become a god basically. You can't say that you are in a deterministic universe and that you chose future A over B because the past A "made you choose" future A over B. In a free will universe, things don't happen over cause and effect, but everything would have to be motivated by itself. Do you see rocks moving on their own will here?

In a deterministic universe, it's the other way around. You are always affecting the outcome of future events. That's why it's deterministic in the first place. What you are doing now is affecting the future. What she can't do is to stop affecting the future, which sounds weird, but that's why she follows through with her memories of the future. In a way, deterministically, her knowledge of the future is what created the future since she was affected by the knowledge in the past which follows into the future. A bit of a loop there, but it's common in time travel stories to have recursive time.

1 - You can assume there is free will, but that assumption makes your theory an ideology, not a science. Science doesn't assume things about people, it proves them to the best degree it can. The experiment of assuming free will and going into an absolute moral theory has already been done, and is called Christianity. If I didn't think UPB was a bad theory, I wouldn't have opened this thread and gone against every single person in this forum including the owner. Just read the thread if you want to know why. 2 - That is not a bad idea, but UPB isn't that non arbitrary theory because the premises are not non arbitrary.

It is one thing to say "don't punch back, take the high road" and that is not what I suggest. I suggest that we come to understand what makes us different from them. Why are we better than the left? If we are not better, we are just tribals fighting for power. That is not what I want in any movement, personally speaking. Stefan, for example, never betrayed any of his principles even when he admitted he was torn about it. It was clear he was being steadfast against emotionality in his tone of voice, and his body language. He could have done what other people did which was to enter into the stages of grief of denial, anger and bargaining. What we protect as a group is first our reason to fight, and then our people, who are those who also value the same things we do. When one of those people show that they are not in it for a virtuous purpose and have shown to be less than what they say they are, it is reasonable to a degree to let go of them. Not to diminish them, but as a way of showing that this isn't about winning a game of elections, or a game of popularity, that this is about a real purpose. The left is the enemy in so far as they oppose anything that is good and moral in the world, to a degree. They are not the enemy because they fight dirty. And we cannot win if we become as savage and power hungry as they are because then we would have abandoned our reason to be on the right side in the first place. A balloon rises when it loses dead weight. If Milo isn't lifting, he is dragging us down. We can win and have principles at the same time.

Mean leftists are making me stand by the principles I believe in. How dare they! I will cast away my values just to fight on the same level as them. That will show them. Now we will win, because after we become just as lawless as they are, we will be better than them.

Wondering about the NAP in order to make up your mind on whether this subject is good or bad is peak libertarianism.

Hahaha, if you don't like Milo you're a communist! Good one, Wuzz. I will repost something I wrote elsewhere about why I don't defend Milo so that you may better understand where I'm coming from: " What inspired me to post there was seeing other internet personalities close to Milo defending him saying that he was only joking, and that the media is after him. I don't think he was joking, he said he wasn't joking, and in his press conference he didn't defend himself saying he was joking. I saw other people doing that instead, in the "alternative media" sphere and people who are friends with Stefan. My hope was that he wouldn't go down that path, and in his latest video about it he actually didn't! I was vindicated in my statements that Milo had crossed lines, and had to be called out. I don't think he's a pedophile, but he certainly enabled it to some non trivial degree in his behavior. Stefan said it better in his video, to which I agree mostly in all. The other part was that I had already abandoned the Milo bandwagon a long time ago, so I wasn't surprised. I had seen those videos and I knew about it. I wasn't outraged then, other than disgusted. It is his other behaviors that did it for me back then, and I stand by my criticism that he is a performance actor and that he is a self serving attention seeker that fills his own pockets with money and has been bleeding friendships for years. People who stood by him are constantly turning his back on him from before this scandal, always with similar stories of how awful he is personally. That is what I see in him now, and I understand that you guys are new to him since his Trump supporting stunts, but I've seen him since Gamergate, and looking back on it, he is truly a massive prick. " So I just think that you are riding the surface level positivity of "he triggers liberals lol" without realizing that being outrageous is all he does, but has nothing new to say. He is always only looking for the next group of people to hurt, as he did with gamers, then feminists, and now anti trump people. He is not on your side, only his side, and only for long as he gets enough pleasure till he gets bored and moves on to the next thing.

Only to the extent it benefits his career, his wallet, and his brand. Martyrizing him keeps playing to that strategy, yes. No one is a kamikaze without the promise of heaven, and his seemingly brave shtick is purely for personal gain.

1- In the first part I am holding UPB accountable to its own standards. In the second part I tell you why those standards don't really matter when you step outside of UPB into the world. It's not a contradiction, it's a narrative, and the story is that bad theories lead you to strange places that make you forget about real life. 2- True, but that's not about morality. If it really were about not crashing your car, moral philosophers would have had their work cut out for them a hundred years ago. You didn't get what I was trying to get at with that comment at all. Stef says how he wants to make a moral theory without God, but he goes out and keeps the exact same theory and changes the words. But it works exactly the same way. If secular morality has any purpose, is to not be the same as Christian morality with different terms. Otherwise you've wasted everyone's time. The U in Universally means that it always applies. If you can say that UPB is avoidable, it's not universal, so it falls apart. For example, Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation is called Universal because it is a theory that should apply to the entire world at all times. In the introduction, Stef says that is what he wants to prove for morality. That there is something in the world that makes morality apply at all times at all places. Every objection that says "but you can choose not to UPB" has already debunked it.

I hope Stefan's hatred of the media won't cloud his judgement into defending Milo, since it was indefensible by itself. He apologized for once in his life because he knew he had no way of redeeming them. Yeah, it was a coordinated effort to damage him. Yet many people knew about it since it had been public for a year. I stopped supporting Milo a long time ago after I realized he was nothing else but an attention seeker masquerading as a free speech advocate. He really doesn't care, and I know you think he does, but I can't believe he does after everything I've seen him do ever since GamerGate and during it.

1- Better, as I argued later in the thread, is a contextual situation. This a skeptical view of what it means for something to be better when someone tries to say it is universally better. How do you know, who says, is your evidence absolute? No evidence is absolute. No statement of improvement is universal. One man's treasure is another's garbage. This is why I made the example of someone who tells children that Santa isn't real, or an atheist that goes to church to tell them god doesn't exist. If you truly believed correction is a universal moral value, then you must do these things. But no one does, or at least only lunatics do that because we understand context. The whole point of my objection to UPB and its premises is that it takes itself out of its valid context. 2- I think you should have read more than the opening post. I have been saying how this is a conflation of two kinds of responsibilities into one, and how in the end it doesn't matter because the moral consequences apply equally regardless of agency. Read back for more. I will add however that this line of thinking is rooted in religious ideology and a desire to punish people for their sins. All these secular philosophies have done is change the words. Soul is now agency. Ego is now God. Immorality is sin. What have we learned? I say nothing. This is modern day theosophy.

If you follow this idea all the way through, no one should obey UPB because it's only a concept that doesn't exist. If you want people to behave according to things that don't exist, we're back to religion. Stop being so Socratic. My words are based on the standard definition that everyone with any level of intelligence to be here should know. Demanding ultra high definition words is pedantic, and you look stupid doing so. "What is ego?" "What is state of nature?" Man, if you don't know any of this don't even try to argue. But I know you're just being socratic. "Isn't that just saying that the subject of morality is the action or interaction of moral actors. So no moral actors (no society) -> no need for morality. How is UPB missing that?" -Two people in a room is not a society. "What is a state of nature? How does it encourage aggression? Do you mean anarchy?? How is an anarchic society not a society? Have you read any books on the practical application of anarchy? Saying following UPB would destroy civilization is an argument from effect. I would prefer to stay on the argument of morality. I hope you do as well." -It's not an argument from effect, it's a prediction of the effect. My argument against it is based on pointing out the flaws in the premise phase of the theory. Saying "haven't you read a book" doesn't mean anything. "Truth is better than falsehood for you, when you want to use morality." -There is no "when you want to use morality" in a supposed deontological moral theory. If morality is universal, you can't choose to use it as it is always supposed to be "on" and inescapable. You can't define morality as a choice to use, and as a universal theory at the same time. "A shark attacking a surfer is not a moral agent. Do you disagree? Is the real issue free will vs. determinism?" -You use the term "moral agent" as if it was a real thing. You haven't proven that a human predator is somehow different from an animal predator. You project "agency" on certain people as if that gave you authority to judge them. If UPB wants to be scientific, it has to detect, measure, discover the "agency" and show it through evidence. Not project it onto perpetrators. I mean, you could just do that - but it wouldn't be objective, nor would it meet scientific standards. It would be an ideology, not a science. And the book desperately wants to be taken as something as good as science, so I am holding it to that standard yet I can't say it reaches it. The "real issue" is irrelevant because either way society deals with morality in the same way regardless. "So my point was, that using morality requires the acceptance of these premises and that you use morality all the time, when you are part of a society. I now realize that I should actually put it another way, since you already accepted the 8 premises for debating. Unfortunately, I'm running a bit out of time now and I will not have much time to write again in the near future. So this is my final question/remark for now: Using morality is the exact same thing as debating. If not what would be the difference between the two?" This is circular reasoning. I argued against this line of thought previously in the last page. I can't say I blame you for not reading everything, but the courtesy would have been nice. You define morality and premises for debate as the same thing, which isn't rational. Those premises are contextual and valid only for the purposes of debate. Not for the context or purposes of life and society, which is where morality has any cogent validity at all. It is a religious trick, the same that is always used to guilt people into a church. You define sin according to your religion, and tell somebody that unless they follow your path to salvation, they will remain sinful and condemned. You have the same disease the other people have: they can't tell the difference between a debate and the real world. Is this a mild form of autism? Have I stumbled into a parade of unreality where ideology is indistinguishable from nature? You're now wondering to yourself "what is nature?".

The way my views on this subject have matured during the course of this thread makes me glad that I held off from calling sooner. I'll write in after I can't squeeze more juice out of this. The rest is up to Mike, I guess. I have a long post replying to the previous ones, but that got sent to the mods for review.