SoylentNews

Uuuuugh. Just a small mini-rant today. I got bounced from a social circle online elsewhere earlier today because, *apparently,* having a genital preference is transmisogyny. It's not enough that I support transwomen through their struggles and transition and suffering; no, the fact that I am a strict vagitarian and flatly refuse to date or have sex with a transwoman who still has male equipment makes me A Bad Person (TM).

This is how you get TERFs. I wish these people understood how much it reeks of male privilege--yes, MALE privilege, even though they were always women mentally and are on their way physically--to demand that a gay but cisgender women open herself, in the most literal, intimate, and deep sense, to the body parts she is not attracted to because the mind matches.

Look, I'm not going to date Buck Angel or another FtM who still has a vagina either: I'm a lesbian. I like women. I don't demand they be "womyn-born-womyn," but boy bits are verboten. What is unreasonable about this?! Isn't the entire point of someone going MtF to get a woman's exterior to match her interior?

I'm never going to become a TERF, but stuff like this is almost guaranteed to create more of them. I am having less and less sympathy for transwomen the older I get, and that worries me, because we're still all humans at the end of the day. I just wish some of them would pull their heads out of their asses about this.

A federal judge sentenced Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen to three years in prison on Wednesday following Cohen's guilty pleas to a number of political and finance crimes.

Those three years would be followed by three years of supervised release, and Cohen also is subject to forfeiture of $500,000, restitution of $1.4 million and a $50,000 fine.

...Cohen told authorities that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women ahead of Election Day in 2016 to keep them quiet about sexual relationships they said they had had with Trump — allegations Trump denies.

Federal authorities call that a violation of campaign finance law — one for which Trump also may be culpable.

Later, Cohen admitted that he and other Trump aides continued negotiations with powerful Russians about a potential real estate project in Moscow well into the 2016 presidential campaign.

Cohen had told Congress in 2017 that the talks ended in January, but his subsequent admission meant that Trump's aides had a channel open with Russia even as Trump was becoming the GOP front-runner and was denying he had any ties to Russia.

Michael Cohen Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison Following Plea That Implicated Trump

James A. Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters at a white-supremacist rally, was sentenced to life in prison by a jury Tuesday after a trial that offered an unsparing view of the physical and emotional ruin he caused in this city with a burst of vehicular rage 16 month ago.

As he had throughout his two-week trial, Fields, 21, sat impassively at the defendant’s table, clad in a powder blue sweater, as the jury delivered its verdict at 12:20 p.m. after about four hours of deliberations that began Monday: life for first-degree murder; 70 years for each of five counts of aggravated malicious wounding; 20 years for each of three counts of malicious wounding; and nine years for leaving the scene of a fatal crash.

His overall sentence: life plus 419 years and $480,000 in fines.

Fields also faces a separate federal trial for alleged hate crimes related to the incident, including one offense that carries a possible death sentence. No trial date has been set, and the Justice Department has not said whether it will seek capital punishment.

Turns out that backing up first to give yourself more room to accelerate doesn't look so great when you are claiming self defense.

James A. Fields Jr. sentenced to life in prison in Charlottesville car attack

Trump's "Fixer" Michael Cohen is going to prison for the crimes he committed at the direction of "Individual 1."

Who could Indivdual 1 be, I wonder.

On approximately June 16, 2015, Individual-1, for whom Cohen worked at the time, began an ultimately successful campaign for President of the United States.

Federal Prosecutors ‘Concluded that President of the United States Committed a Felony'

But now we’re seeing that in a court filing for the first time, which, as some legal observers have noted with varying emphasis on the fact, means federal prosecutors have concluded that Trump directed someone to commit a crime, which is a crime. Put another way, SDNY prosecutors believe the president directed and coordinated felonies.

And finally, some info about the lies Manafort told that lead to the destruction of his plea deal came out.

A second woman has come forward claiming that a Bladen County, N.C., electioneer paid her to collect absentee ballots for last month's midterm elections.

Cheryl Kinlaw told WSOCTV, a local news station in Charlotte, N.C., that Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. paid her $100 to collect ballots in their district, adding that Dowless “has been doing it for years."

Kinlaw said that she never mailed the ballots she collected and that she instead handed them over to Dowless. She said she was unaware that what she was doing was illegal.

Dowless has been named twice in sworn affidavits as someone who worked for Republican candidate Mark Harris's campaign as an independent contractor and has been at the center of an investigation into the results of the election in North Carolina's 9th District.

In November, Democrat Dan McCready conceded to Harris in their House race when he was down by approximately 700 votes.

But the elections board decided not to certify the results, citing “claims of irregularities and fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail voting.”

WSOCTV reported that it has discovered what appears to be a targeted effort to illegally pick up ballots in Bladen County.

Second woman says she was paid to collect absentee ballots in North Carolina House race

UPDATE:

Over a thousand absentee ballots possibly destroyed in controversial North Carolina House race: report

In more Trump corruption news:

President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Thursday in New York to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate project that Trump and his company pursued at the same time he was running for president.

In a nine-page filing, prosecutors laid out a litany of lies that Cohen admitted he told to congressional lawmakers about the Moscow project — an attempt, Cohen said, to minimize links between the proposed development and Trump as his presidential bid was well underway.

As part of Cohen’s plea, he admitted to falsely claiming that efforts to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, when in fact discussions continued through June of that year, the filing said. Among the people Cohen briefed on the status of the project was Trump himself, on more than three occasions, according to the document.

Trump has repeatedly said that he had no business dealings in Russia, tweeting in July 2016, “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia,” and telling reporters in January 2017 that he had no deals there because he had “stayed away.”

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Moscow project

I'm about 2 months in to dating another woman.

I met her on Tinder. I was bored one day and feeling a little lonely, so I updated and reactivated my tinder profile. Tinder seems to give you a pretty big visibility boost if you have been inactive for some time, so I was able to get a match within a couple hours.

Her name is Jasmine. She's a Speech Therapist that helps people with various levels of disability communicate. I would classify her as a book worm type. We've seen each other about 10 times and so far, things seem to be going really well.

My love language is touch, and I really like how she touches and caresses me. Little things like touching my waist or a gentle touch on my cheek make me feel good.

It's been over 4 years since my wife and I opened our marriage. This is the most serious thing that I've found so far. I'm really enjoy spending time with her. I think that this has the potential to at least last for a few months. Who knows... I'm enjoying the moment though. It's taken a lot to get here.

When I was looking back to see what number this entry was in my 'Relationship Hacking' series, I see that the last Journal entry was when I wrote about having problems getting it up on an earlier date. On my first date with this woman, we had a pretty normal first date. We met at a restaurant, shared an appetizer and had a couple drinks. After a couple hours, she invited me back to her place. I, of course, said yes, and we went to her condo. I couldn't get it up for her either.

Since that first date, I haven't had any issues. Most times we can go at it twice in an evening. Apparently I physically can't do one night stands. I think i get way too nervous and that just shuts things down. I guess I need to feel comfortable with someone first, which makes sense, but it's against the stereotypical male image of always being ready for sex.

Yet another Trump Campaign staffer reports to prison today.

Most corrupt administration ever.

Papadopoulos ordered to jail Monday

Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence.

White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.

Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. She said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.

Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails about government business last year

Ethics for Soylentils: Part Second.

We left off with the objections to Utilitarianism, before we were so rudely interrupted. But before we go any further, it would be a good idea to give some more general categorization to ethical theories. The entire opposition to ethics as an attempt to impose rules of behavior is actually mis-placed, unless you actually are a sociopath, in which case none of this is addressed to you. But we will need to establish what I like to refer to as "normative force", or what exactly is the basis of an obligaton to act in a particular fashion, which is regarded as "right".

There are some that oppose any "ethics" as an attempt to force, no doubt "down their throats", of some arbitrary value system or the other, most likely based on some religion, which is probably based on a bunch of old men trying to make it with high-school girls, or run for the United States Senate. And of course we all sympathize with that. But the costs of moral relativism are having to admit that any value system is just as good as any other. And this is demonstrably false. How demonstrably? Well, here we go.

The simplest power-point version of ethical theory is to divide them into three categories: who, what, or why. Slightly more expanded, they may be called "character", "intentions", or "consequences": or "agent, act, outcome". Now is should be easy to see why Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethics. Actions are good or bad depending upon their consequences. Of course, what has always bothered me about this is that judging an action by its consequences just seems to be begging the question, or at least only putting it off. What makes for a good consequence? Well, utiltiarianism answers this with the utility calculus: if more are make better off, then it was a good action, "better off" being what those concerned consider to be better off. We aggregate all the "goodness" or utility of an action, and if the net is positive, countered by bad consequences, that action is good. But this leads us to the second objection to utilitarianism: can the aggregate increase in happiness offset the decrease in happiness by some?

Interesting digression: If, under utilitarianism, we want to maximize happiness, we should take into account the principle of diminishing marginal utility. As you might have come to realize by now, much of Bentham's thought is compatible with that of Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations and father of Neo-Classical economics. One slice of cake can increase your happiness level by quite a lot. A second by more, but not quite double. A third, well, more, but you almost have had enough. Four? At some point, they are shoving cake down your throat, and your pleasure levels are dropping instead of going up. Now this works for all goods? Maybe. But even if we never get to the down-side of the cure, the point remains that a poor person given any amount of a good, as opposed to a wealthy person, is going to produce a larger net gain in happiness, or utility. So, given the principle of utility, the most utility maximizing distribution of goods for any society would be communism. It just makes sense.

Of course, on the other side, some would say that allowing for less than egalitarian distribution of good could produce a situation where there was in fact more good to go around, so we can recommend a meritocracy type capitalism based on the greater social good. But in either case, there is no grounding of the system on the rights or deserts of any agents. But again, more on this later with John Rawls.

At this point I can hear our libertarian Soylentils just screaming
"Noooo!!", as they are wont to do when being reamed by the market.
But here we can sympathize with them, if only briefly. But as
Commander Spock said, "The needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the few, or the needs of the one." It
is only that we usually think this is true if the 'one' has some say in the matter. "A greater gift hath no man", etc., etc., but throwing the fat guy on the trolley tracks, well, it just seems wrong. Even if it would "save (more) lives".
And for a nice satirical explanation of "Trolley Car Ethics", see The Good Place, available on Netflix?

So, can we make an argument that conscripting people for the common good is wrong? There is no such barrier in Utilitarianism. If we think that is wrong, we need another theory. Utility is the "outcome" theory, where the ends justify the means. The "agent" theory is going to get short shrift here, mostly because I believe it is conservative propaganda. That leaves the "act" theory. This is going to get interesting. An "act" theory is going to say that actions are intrinsically good, or bad. Our Libertarian protagonist want's to say that taking from some, for the greater good, is wrong, an act of theft, no matter what good is achieved. The "act" theory is the best option for trying to rationally argue for that position.

The problem is that just asserting an action is intrisically wrong does not get us very far. In fact, it puts us right back at the level of personal preference masquerading as morality, as Jeremy Bentham rightly accuses it. To briefly recap, Utilitarianism puts this question off by not judging an act, nor its intent, but the consequences of the act, and then just accepting the judgment of the various persons involved or affects as to whether these consequences were good or bad, and then just aggregating those judgments for a final determination. One person, one vote, so to speak. But the difficulty is that if some action produces a "bad" for some, but a "greater good" on the whole, then that action, by its consequences, is good. Sacrifice of some is justified by the greater good of all. Of course, it is easier when the sacrifice sees this and acts voluntarily, but it is not necessary.

Ursula K. LeGuin just passed away. More than many writers in her genre, she could capture ethical issues in ways that clarified the central point. She wrote a short essay titled "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" that captures the problem with sacrifices: at some point, you have to acknowledge that your happiness is founded on the suffering of others. In the story, the happiness of an entire society is dependent upon the imprisonment and suffering of one individual child. At some point, when they are of age, each member of the society has to face the cause of their happiness, and consent to the arrangement. Some, the Ones who walk away, cannot do so. They leave. But as LeGuin writes, no one knows what happens to them. They walk away.

Deontology

So actions it is. Our question still is, how can this be a principled judgment, not just personal preference? Who is the boss of you? Or put more philosophically, whence normative force? This will be the primary focus in this Installment of Ethics for Soylentils, and I fear we may have to go to a third installment.

For a change, we are going to consider Immanuel Kant's ethical theory. It is kind of amazing that he is almost the only philosopher to lay down a theory that is based on obligation, and on the intuitive understanding that most people have about morality. So we launch into "Duty Ethics", the idea that there are actions that one must do, simpliciter.

The idea of "normative force" is essential to ethical theory. You can be nine ways to Sunday about what is right and good, but if you cannot come up with a motivation for people to practice it, well, it's just a theory. So the question is, as Bernard Williams put it, "Why Be Moral?", or as the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy calls it, "normative motivation".

Now, Kant is German. Nothing against that, in general, but German Philosophers tend to exacerbate the predelictions of the language. I have heard rumours that German philosophy students read the the great German thinkers in English translation, where they make much more sense. This is hard to imagine, to one whose native language is Samian Greek. But you are forwarned.

  Kant famously starts of by saying nothing is good in itself, but a good will. Right away we are into intentions, as opposed to results. There is something to this. Let's say you are an Propanol_fueled, charged by you masters with producing a weapon that will target Jews, genetically. But instead, your "product" cures clamydia, and about time, too. Do we think Prop is a good person, and what he did was a good thing, when what he was aiming at was genocide? Nope, still a bad person, even if the results were good. And we go the contrary, the biological researcher trying to cure cancer, but instead produces a pathogen that can be used to target left-handed people, and it is so used? Good person? Yes? Good outcome? Oops! But our point here is not to obfuscate Kant, rather it is to clarify him. He is saying that it is the antecedent aspect of actions that give them moral value, not what happens, but what you thought you were doing, that makes an action right or wrong. Now we all know that the road to Gab is paved with good intentions, so we will have to be a bit more detailed on this. And I think Kant actually pulls it off. But you will have to stick with us through a rather wild ride, conceptually speaking.

Alright, what makes a "good will"? Yes, we are faced with the identical question that plagues Utilitarianism, or for that matter any ethical theory. The question of "Ground". Now this is where the Moral Nihilists leave us, for they believe there is none, and can be none such. But Kant disagrees. And he believes the mass of humanity disagrees as well. Proving such a ground, however, is not as simple as it may seem. A "good will", by definition, is one that wills good things. Again, this just puts the question off. What makes an object of a will a good thing to will? Aristotle incorporates the same circular reasoning into his "virtue ethics", where he defines "virtue" as that what a virtuous person does. And, accordingly, a virtuous person is one who does virtuous things. Obviously. Utilitarianism, and Consequentialism generally, says that an outcome is good if some being thinks it is good. This has an advantage, as an ethical theory, that it treats all such judgments as given, and thus as equal. We ddo not say to the fan of Pro Wrassling that he does not actually think that wrestling is a good, we have to take his own judgment of his own good seriously. And we may even be able to extend the range of such judgments to non-human beings. So Utilitarianism is, or rather, can be quite egalitarian.

Is-Ought distinction, or why ethics is not psychology.
          But here is where the problem comes up. The problem, famously formulated by David hume as the Is-Ought Problem. Simply stated, Hume's observation was that we cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", Or to put it bluntly in the case of Utilitarianism, just because Bluto prefers watching WWE (World Wresting Entertainment) to watching opera, this does not means that he should prefer thusly. I can't believe I just typed "thusly". One should never do that, sorry. You see what I mean? But this does point up a very serious distinction: a separation of science and ethics. No facts about the world, be it human biology, historical sociology, or hylomorphism, can produce an obligation for anything to act in accordance with such facts. A dog wearing clothes and walking on its hind legs may be "un-doglike" behavior, but we cannot say that it should not do so. And of course, why does it do so, against its dog-nature? Here we have a significant point: Science can explain why organisms behave the way they do, but they cannot demand that they should behave in any particular way. So your dear author here, having been conditioned to write in certain ways, including the occasional egregious use of "thusly", no doubt does so on occassion, but that is no argument that he should not, or that he should. Alright, what we are after here is the idea that morality must have an entirely different ground than the facutal, empirical, scientifically studiable world. This is where Kant takes us. Now for you "spiritualists" among us, chill your jets. Supernatural is not what you think it is, and isn't it funny that your god hates all the same things that your hate! What are the odds? But the point remains, explanation is not the same a moral justification. Remember that.

Transcendental Method

Kant circumvents the entire issue. This is why he is hard to follow, he is not putting forth a theory of value, but instead a theory of obligation. Thus the ground is not the ground you might have thought it was, and in fact, as the Philosopher Barack Obama said, the ground may have shifted under your feet. The ground, in fact, is not what is, or is considered good; it is what can command you. We launch off into Kant's Transcendental Method. Okay, here it is: for everything that is, there are certain necessary conditions for the existence of that thing. We are in danger of committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent, but we will let that slip for now.

Kant's famous Critique of Pure Reason utilizes the same argument. This always reminds me of what a fellow philosopher once said to me: "every philosopher really has only one idea." I guess that was his! But Kant applied his transcendental method to reality, or, what is in fact, phenomena. In order for something to appear to a consciousness as an object, certain conditions are necessary. Three of these, to cut the argument ridiculously short, are a subject, space, and time. No subject, no object. No space, no distinguishing of subject from oject. No time, well now, where were we? You should get the point.

Now we move on to ethics. In order for there to be a right or wrong, there must be something that is a prior, or that is a priori in Latin, that makes it right, and this has to be a necessary precondition for something to be "good". Kant undertakes to produce a "metaphysic of morals", or that is, the formal or logically necessary structure of any system of morality whatsoever. This means that consequences, or even things like desires, cannot be the basis for morality, since they are all matters of a posteriori knowledge. Now this will strike almost all empiricists (from the Greek, ἐμπειρία,"to try") as completely insane, but not surprisingly, most empiricists are Utilitarian, or at least sceptics or Buddhists.

What follows from the consequentional nature of most other ethical systems is that we can never know what we should do until we know what it is we want. And more importantly, if we do not like what is entailed in achieving the end we desire, there is always the simple solution, "Stop desiring". And, well that is the Buddhist solution in a nutshell, but also famously addressed by Janis Joplin, who sang. "Oh Lord, won't ya buy me, a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends." The "Lack of Mercedes Problem" has several solutions, of which prayer is only one. One could make money, even though that did not seem to work for Janis. "Worked hard all my like, not a penny did I save;". Or credit, fradulent credit, car-jacking, all of which entangle one in further potential difficulties. The simplest solution is, "just stop wanting a Mercedes." Problem solved. So the real question is not what you should do, but how badly do you want the outcome? (We are going to leave aside the question of efficacy of any particular course of action.)

Kant distinguished between hypothetical imperatives, which are like the "How to own a Mercedes today!" scenario above, and obligations, what he calls "categorical imperatives", moral commands that you have an obligation to do, no matter what you want, so you cannot just decide not to want to do what it is that you must do. The existence of such commands is the question here, and perhaps it is better to reverse Kant's own explication of it. So we pose the question, not what duty is, but what is it that is the necessary pre-condition for duty, what would it take for an imperative, a command, to be binding upon you? Back to the "You're not the boss of me!" retort. Okay, then, who is?

There are two aspects to Kant's Categorical Imperative, universalization, and the "end-in-itself". The universalization might cause some objections. But think, if something is right for you to do, does that not mean that it is also right for anyone else to do, as well? We might refer to this as the "Golden Rule", with some provisions. The end-in-itself is the more interesting part, however. I have often be perturbed by fundie Christians, with their insistence that atheists cannot be moral. I finally realized that what they were saying was a version of Plato's "Great Chain of Being". In order for there to be, let's say, "blue", there would have to be, according to Plato, a perfect exemplar of "blueness", something so blue that anything blue would have to be included under it as a lesser blue. Now for Plato, and for Kant, and for the Xian Fundies, if there is no perfect being, there can be no lesser beings. Pause. Think about this. Perfect blue. That means that Peacock Blue is blue, but it is not "Perfect Blue",and is only a sort of blue by participation in the idea of "perfect blue". Perhaps this actually makes more sense in terms of morality.

If there is no ultimate, final, good, then nothing can be an instrumental good. Aristotle recognized this, and thought that there has to be some good that is only a good-in-itself, and not a means to some other good. He took a survey, and determined that this is happiness. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,Book I, chapter 1.) Kant disagrees, for the reason that happiness is only valuable because someone values it. This is our crux, the question we have for Soylentils: is something valuable simply because someone values it? But if this is the case, value is,well, subjective, and worse, random! Now Kant avoids all this by starting off by saying that the only thing good in itself is a good will, and that a good will is one that can will, rationally, only good, because it is not determined by any interest or bias. But then he does the switch: A good will is one that does what it does out of respect for the law. We are iffy on what exactly Universal Moral Law is, but evenso, we can respect any being that could, whether it does or not, respect the law, as a law, as a categorical imperative. Thus Kant's Third Formulation of the Categorical Imperative is:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section.

Now the consequences of this, if I may use the term, are quite extraordinary. Respecting another means recognizing them as a rational being, and respecting them as a rational being means, if nothing else, respecting their judgment, their freedom of judgment. Thus, messing with their judgement, by for example, lying to them, on the one hand is quite definitely using them as a means to our ends. But more importantly, it is interfering with their own free judgment, by getting them to rely on our own averred opinion, rather than objective facts. In other words, using them as a means by disrespecting their right to the truth.

Now I am going to cut to the chase, since no doubt we might have exceeded the mental ability of some Soylentils, and that is no reason to dispararge them, but we will keep it short. Kant insists on universal moral laws, not subjective laws, not "different view or values", absolute commanding moral laws. But the interesting part is that Kant realizes that the only way such laws could have purchase on a rational being, as opposed to one, for example, that might have interests that could be affected by breaking the law, is if that particular rational being make the universal law a universal law for it self. The law is not the law because any other being declares it to be the law. It is law, and binding upon you law, because you legislate law for your self, as a free being. No way out, bro!

Now the kicker: You legislate universal moral law, and so that law is obligatory for YOU. Respecting any other rational being means you have to respect their legislation of universal moral law for their own self, as well. So, obvious question, what about when our "universal moral laws" diverge? Well, obviously, we cannot both be right. As it was laid out in the movie "Highlander",

There can only be one!

However, and here is our point, lusty Soylentils, respecting the other rational being means you cannot coerce, or decieve, or canoodle or cajole, this person that is so wrong about what is right and wrong. But what you can do, is seek to persuade?

A rational being makes their own determinations based on reason,and the facts of the case. If you think they are in error, as a matter of respect you owe it to them to correct them. But here is the point: The only way to respect another is to offer them a rational argument. If the argument succeeds, it is not you that are forcing your opinion on another, it is they themselves that force the conclusion of a well argued argument upon themselves. Jurgen Habermas calls this "the forceless force of reason". But this does suggest how silly all the attempts at "culture wars" are, as if just managing to get a bare majority to agree with you, or that a capture of the state to enforce your ideas, amounts to a hill of beans. Give me an argument, leave me free to make up my own mind, but do not attempt to force your values onto me. If you do, we will have a whole 'nother level of intercourse, if you know what I mean!

(Side Note: I have tried this on TMB, to no avail. How many rational arguments do you have to offer before you can say you tried, at least?)