alicemaz

the idea that the state is purely a construct of laws enforced by threat of violence is closer to legalism and not something xunzi favors. he sees law and punishment as a last resort for eliminating the minority of people who can't be handled any other way, but trying to rule principally on the basis of coercion is doomed to failure. one of his essays is an extended lecture on why the qin state (to become the qin dynasty) will be overthrown unless they stop trying to govern this way

for xunzi the main tool to run the state is that nebulous word "ritual." roughly this means the government should behave virtuously to inspire civic duty and pride, encourage people to cultivate themselves and behave properly in the context of their personal relationships, and use the tools of civic religion (in his time sacrifical rites, sumptuary laws, military ceremonies) to impress people with majesty rather than instill fear. on the mundane end it should make punishments light, lower taxes, handle natural disasters, and maintain a military that mostly fights defensive or just wars. through this he believes people will mostly act virtuously through a felt sense of obligation to and appreciation for each other, ie social trust and social responsibility

there are legitimate points of criticism though, I think the main ones from a western individualist democratic perspective would be that he considers a hierarchical (albeit strictly meritocratic) social structure to be absolutely essential, and that the confucian social network style behavior regulation may depend inherently on social shame, which tends to be smothering

xunzi's dim view of human nature is superficially similar to hobbes (and both came from similar times of brutal civil war) but while hobbes says "and the people have to agree to give absolute power to a dictator" xunzi says "and the people need a model for how to be better"

any confucian system is necessarily grounded in virtue, so you still have the classic problem of "what if the ruler isn't virtuous." I do think this is fundamentally unsolvable though. at the end of the day no clever government structure can work around the fact that whoever holds the final say is ultimately sovereign. checks and balances evaporate in times of crisis and we've just been lucky most of the presidents so far who got that supreme authority (lincoln and fdr being the most notable) were relatively virtuous

I actually have been going to church lately. I think the orthodox take on holy tradition comes very close to what xunzi means by ritual, but xunzi applies it to running a state as well

for me, the value of the xunzi isn't that it's old or that it's eastern, but that it's a sophisticated text which describes a system of morality, statecraft, and international relations which I largely (but don't entirely) agree with

the period he came from was extremely intellectually fertile, and you can find advocates for everything from rational totalitarianism to postmodern anarchism, ethical egoism, hippie utilitarianism, and jeffersonian pastoralism. I think an "east vs west" lens doesn't really capture it well, because the codification of what we would consider "eastern" took place long after this period, over the course of many centuries

there are things xunzi gets wrong, and after I finish writing commentaries on the essays by him I think are most important, I'll probably write a critique on that. I think of him more as a starting point than an ending point

I don't think this is a good comparison because there's so much about language that's subjective or dependent on context. if you could translate something with perfect denotation, you still need a human touch for connotation. the nuances of word choice and sentence structure that give something a flavor of emotionality, or cool logic, or confidence, or aloofness, etc. to say nothing of localization, how to handle meter, all the various tradeoffs a translator has to make because translation is inherently lossy. games don't have any of these problems, you either win or you don't

I think ai will prove "good enough" for most applications in the near future, but this won't eliminate human translation (or journalism, or copywriting, or whatever you might want to apply similar technology/techniques to). but it may well eliminate the bottom 80%

so many comments arguing about what everyone in aggregate is morally obligated to abstain from or morally permitted to partake in. meanwhile the article itself is just about what people end up doing. "the government closed the gyms. lots of people want to exercise together and/or with expensive bulky equipment so they make illegal gyms." no amount of ethics lawyering is going to change this

honestly I think the phased reopenings are partly to blame, once you say "this is important enough, that isn't" everyone wants to do their things and disparage other people's things. if they closed the gyms here again, I'd find an illegal one. if they closed the restaurants, or the churches, or the schools, I wouldn't care. but for the people who derive existential fulfillment from their religion, or can't tolerate taking care of their children 24/7, or [insert reason why people care about restaurants, I honestly don't understand the upside anymore], my desire to go to my gym is selfish and wrong but their need for their thing is inherently good and right

not to mention the fact that most of the country isn't locked down, and there's no internal borders, and most people didn't take lockdowns seriously after the first month or two of kumbaya we're all in this together stuff anyway. so your individual actions wouldn't even move the needle. there's a continuum between the hypervigilent closed societies where one person gets it and they shut down the city, and the endemic countries where it's already everywhere anyway so the best you can do is mitigate risk to a tolerable level and go on with your life. new zealand, south korea, taiwan vs. mexico, india, brazil. we're with india and brazil

and I don't think it could have gone any other way. americans are suspicious and callous toward their countrymen and deathly allergic to being told what to do. for better or worse, it's just in our blood. gotta make the best of it

same reason it's hard to steer an ocean liner. death rates dominated the way people thought and talked about this for months. now it's clearer death rates are obviously not so bad, but permanent damage and months-long recoveries and unclear immunity profile are massive unknowns, but the inertia of the previous narrative still overwhelms the minority trying to course correct. "we're all going to die" "no we're going to be fine" is much easier to latch onto than "it's more complicated than that and we don't really know." especially since most people got sick of lockdown and many are in grave economic danger because of it. people are doing a mental calculus of "well I'll probably be fine so I think we should open back up" and change their arguments to suit the conclusion they've decided on

yea my gyms here (texas) have been really good about this, either mandatory masks or open air, mandatory distancing, wipe everything down (my muay thai gym got like a metal exterminators tank for disinfectant they just spray everything with), etc etc. the article makes the point well, that if you close everything down, people will just do it anyway, so it's better to just have it in the open and under control and punish bad actors when they crop up

local gyms (as opposed to chain/bigbox) tend to be extremely tight-knit communities, which means people want to keep each other safe and will go out of their way to do it, within reason. most people don't care about everyone in their city in abstract, but they do care about members of groups they derive camaraderie from. hell of a lot safer than reopening restaurants, imo

people who act like joggers are the real threat mostly don't exercise, just as people who say things like "I don't understand why people need to get together" mostly are introverts, people who think the anti-lockdown protestors are lunatics generally don't own brick and mortor businesses, etc. people are scared and want someone to blame, ideally someone who isn't like them. and it's naturally much easier to see the things you do as essential, but the things you don't do as nonessential

it's an extremely poor attempt at a joke about consciousness

could call it the death sea

this has been a contentious argument for at least half a decade that I've seen, and I won't rehash it here, but the magic words to google if you want to read more are "truscum" and "theyfab"

when it comes to this topic, "sex" "gender" "male" "female" "man" "woman" etc etc are overloaded with contradictory meanings by people trying to make sneaky ontological arguments. unless I'm specifically talking about the signifier itself, I don't really care about these kinds of games, so I just try to say unambiguous things

anyway aside from language legerdemain, the word "sex" is also used to refer to what sex you're legally designated as, which is only loosely coupled to biology by now

I presume this is a consequence of the datasets they had to work off but it is really frustrating that they have one catchall "transgender and gender-diverse" category, segmenting by birth sex or particular gender identified with would be interesting/valuable