netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7hr ago
I responded to FtttG here before realizing why there was so little action in that thread.
Tl;dr
- Fuck this guy. I hope he gets whatever punishment the law deems fit for a violent psychopath.
- It’s good that public figures are calling for calm. That is the most important part of their jobs.
- I realize that saying 2. automatically places me in the Leftist Shill category, and I don’t like that the discourse is so poisoned.
- Twitter delenda est.
Seriously, social media is probably the worst way to learn about public opinion. Unfortunately, most of the public which is opining probably got the idea through social media.
across twitter I see various historically-enemy paramilitary sympathizers calling to set aside their differences and unite against the common enemy
This is still pretty silly. If the IRA is plotting a cooperative pogrom, they’re not doing it on Twitter.
Is it just me or have the straws been landing more heavily, lately…
Just you. Belfast has a smaller total population than LA’s black population. In the 90s. I’m not expecting to see anything remotely on the scale of the ‘92 riots.
Kulak once predicted that the flashpoint for organized European resistance
Kulak predicts a lot of things. I don’t know that he’s been right yet. I’d take the other side of this bet.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8hr ago
Damn. That’s horrific.
I’m going to, at risk of looking like said diligent but futile apologists, suggest taking the response a bit less seriously.
Think about the incentives of social media. Ingroup is allowed to do no wrong. Outgroup is not allowed to score points. Also, it’s free to say whatever shit you want, and if you get controversial-yet-brave enough, the algorithm might even reward you. Hence the Reddit hivemind.
Compare lobbying and special interest groups, which are specifically designed to spin anything and everything to their specific issue. I think it’s distasteful and against common decency, but also not particularly unique. Call it the price of free speech.
Then you’ve got the actual politicians, who in theory have skin in the game. Elected officials are incentivized to call for calm, procedural responses no matter what. The killer is in custody, the facts are out there, but Belfast still has some unburned trash cans and they’d like to keep it that way. It is rational to make milquetoast calls for public order. It is their job.
The same goes for mainstream outlets. I’m seeing articles like this which remind people, hey, burning cars is still illegal. Forming mobs is still going to get you in trouble. I think this is what I’d want from a major outlet. I would be a lot more worried if they were calling for volunteers.
I waffled on writing this because I think the crime was awful and I didn’t want to look like an apologist. Think about that dynamic. I’d like to be able to say “don’t burn buses” without also saying “this guy did nothing wrong.” I’d like to say “fuck this guy” without also saying “deport all the foreigners.” It’s hard to make that clear when the very act of calling for restraint is treated as a naked emotional appeal, a criticism of the reasonable people, an attack in the wider culture war.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
11hr ago
I feel like I’m having a stroke just reading this. Can’t imagine what it sounds like aloud.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
15hr ago
The big problem that the West has is that their elite has been focussed on how to get rich in the global economy.
That’s been true since Columbus; clearly it can coexist with a desire for local improvements. Conversely, local industry does not automatically trickle down to local quality of life. For every urban core there were a dozen company-operated mill and mining towns operating on the margin.
On the other end, if you look at the top American companies or billionaires, they all sell stuff to Westerners. After all, we have the most money. If those purchases mean anything at all, we’ve been getting something out of this massive, interconnected mess. Clothing, food, electronics—none of those markets look the same under an autarkic model. The real benefits came from extending specialization of labor.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
How so?
Like, I completely understand finding it unappealing, even immoral. I don’t think that makes it defection. What’s the common good which is getting captured in this case?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Alright. I’m interpreting your question as something like:
“If the West likes giving things to low-IQ populations, why is it so against giving things to Russia?
This, uh, may be beyond my powers; I’ll give it a try.
- Not all gifts are equivalent. Offering housing and social services is much easier than offering an entire country.
- Not all recipients are equally deserving. Offering support to poor individuals is much much easier than offering it to an entire country.
- Routines matter. There is an established procedure for refugees and such to enter Western countries. Following it led to the current situation. There are also established procedures for one country to get things from another. Russia not following such procedures led to the current situation.
It makes sense to treat these two situations differently, because basically nothing about them is the same.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
So there are a couple main groups of post.
- Regulars who want to do something different. This is welcome, even encouraged, subject to the “CW in the CW thread” rule.
- Rat-adjacent posters who want to repost their own substack, or occasionally a related essay series. Less encouraged, since there’s a real risk of engagement bait and general unsavory tactics. It’s much harder to enforce the CW and politeness rules in a one-off interaction. Still, we approve a decent number of these, especially from users with any sort of presence in the SSC community. KulakRevolt or felipec would be examples.
- Complete randos who want to post their (usually AI-heavy) manifesto. We have flirted with these before, since posters tend to appeal to the spirit of free debate. This has rarely panned out. The current policy is not to approve.
The catch is that there are an order of magnitude more #3 posters. Excluding outright commercial spam, 90+% of what we get for top-levels are people asking to debate their earth-shattering new theory of everything. When we see someone known and respected like @FtttG in the queue, we’re a bit surprised. “Wait, people actually use this thing?” Then we check for CW, etc., and most likely approve.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
How do you feel about professional wrestling?
I don’t have stats on the OF talent base, other than knowing it has pretty extreme earnings disparities. It is possible that the bulk of content is small-scale amateur film by couples even while the bulk of the cash goes to a smaller pool of celebrities. Can’t say I find it likely compared to the alternative where almost everyone is shooting solo videos.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
I guess I’m not convinced of the throughline between all four options, there.
“Leeching off the government” is the only one which involves claiming benefits that were intended for someone else. Some NGOs fall in this category. Everything else sounds like a central example of a job: someone paying you for your labor. If you’re honest and they’re satisfied with your work, how are you defecting?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Worse…they’re weird escorts!
Such is the burden of tabloid news.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
I’m pretty sure that covers “camp follower” too, mind you.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
I suppose this cements “the grass is always greener…” as the world’s oldest fallacy.
Measuring one’s life against the most lurid possible comparison is a proud tradition. The difference between your reaction and a kid wanting to be a big rock star is that you don’t actually like the prospect of being in that position. Probably. I’m not gonna judge.
as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand
Note that these are VERY different options. Unlike prostitution, you could almost certainly work your way into any one of them depending on your risk tolerance. But, like, why should you? Is the expected value of any of those options actually higher? Does it outweigh the added risk?
Point is, that tweet is engagement bait. I can’t endorse forming economic opinions based on a platform that hates you rewards style over substance. Twitter delenda est.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Buddy, I can’t even tell what you’re asking, but I find it vaguely insulting.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
C’mon.
This has none of the hallmarks of whitewashing a vigilante. The perpetrator didn’t make that argument. The state certainly didn’t.
A society doesn't normally prosecute soldiers for murder,
Yes, it does. Sometimes even when they have explicit orders and state support, which this guy emphatically did not. Contrary to popular belief, killing enemy combatants is surprisingly regulated.
Why else do you think only that group is de facto allowed to go around armed?
Western countries have a reasonably long history with something called “freedom of religion.” The British version was usually more concerned with Papists, but it has adopted the usual suite of protections for sincere religious beliefs.
English society
Who, exactly, do you think is calling the shots here? Have you actually seen people calling him a soldier, or are you overfitting your own model?
to kill its enemies for their crime of existing, or "racism" for short
An absurd sleight of hand. I think you’re assigning a whole package of beliefs to a nebulous group of your political enemies, none of which are particularly coherent. Would it be reasonable to call that “stupidity”?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
I’ll say I didn’t have any real reason for that; hence the approval. But we’ve always been vaguely bemused when people want to do top-level posts. Odds are you’ll get better visibility this way, at least?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
It's not against the rules.
Though I suppose I would have preferred it go in the SSQ thread.
You're the human control group. I feel like we're lucky to have you.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
It hasn’t even been a month since we told you not to flip out in this exact situation.
Three days this time.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
Upsetting people doesn't make something unethical, though.
I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the most ethical billionaires would have to be those who did the most good* without trampling any particular rights. Given how hard business can incentivize one or another form of such trampling, then, it would be really hard to find a billionaire with clean hands. At some point they'd have signed off on a sketchy deal, or exploited labor laws, or just hired people who did. How much of that responsibility should transfer?
You could probably get a pretty good proxy of political affiliation by asking a series of comparison questions. Ask whether a person is culpable for X, Y, Z, with decreasing levels of personal involvement. Someone who believes in holding a CEO responsible for his bottom-level managers' hiring decisions is much, much more likely to subscribe to various left-wing policy planks. Collectivism is not limited to redistribution.
Assuming OP and his buddy could agree on a standard, they could in theory go down the Forbes list and rule people out accordingly.
*Yes, yes, we also probably disagree on some key points of the "good". Not going there right now.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
You’ve done a lot of venting in the past couple days. More in the past couple years. You keep showing up to bitch about the minority du jour and you demonstrate zero interest in the intended purpose of this community. We should have banned you the last few times.
Goodbye and good riddance.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Sarcasm is unbecoming.
It’s possible to build a good post around a rhetorical turn, but when the rest of your comment consists of quotes, you need to speak plainly.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
how rude is it to ask
I figured we were talking about the gap between curiosity and need-to-know. I’m not going to begrudge anyone the former.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Lots of things have followed us around for just as long. Doesn’t mean asking about them is reasonable.
“Hey, is your daughter a virgin?”
“How do you feel about your foreskin?”
“But can you prove you were born a free man?”
I’m saying that if the LA riots didn’t represent a breaking point, the Belfast riots won’t, either. There’s not gonna be a kulak-approved Helter Skelter.
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