netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
An Attempt at Following Up on the User Viewpoint Focus Series
Thanks to @hydroacetylene for 1) the nomination and 2) reminding me to get on it. I followed his excellent template here.
Self-description in Motte Terms
I'm a classical liberal with a keen awareness that the American dream was made for me. In my personal life, I'm a well-paid Texan engineer with an appreciation for firearms. I love America and the American ideal even though I feel it's currently struggling with (what I see as) a particular failure mode of populism.
We enjoy unparalleled material prosperity thanks to strong societal values combined with good initial conditions. That carried us through two centuries of struggle to the top of the world, and now it gives us opportunities to shape the future of mankind. It also reminds us of an obligation not merely to perpetuate the system which got us here, but to spread the benefits to others who are less fortunate.
Yes, this almost certainly makes me one of the most progressive posters still on the site.
I absolutely despise the fascism of pure aesthetics which is so adaptive on social media. Contrarian countersignaling that you'll make the world a worse place because bad things are good, actually. "Tear it all down," "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"... That's the lowest form of demagoguery.
My girlfriend, whom I love and trust more than anyone, once asked "why do you hang out with these people?" Why am I spending my time on this Earth arguing with people who hate my guts and sneer at the things I value? It's because I believe in the project. I believe that when classical liberalism gets to compete with the fascists and the communards, it comes out looking great. I believe that our model of debate club is a valiant attempt at implementing the liberal ethos of free exchange of ideas. I believe I can win friends and influence people via the political equivalent of betting them that nothing ever happens.
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
Recommended Reading
I'm not going to give a list of published books. Y'all probably know what goes in the classic Western philosophical canon. Plus, and I might not be supposed to mention this, but the vast majority of my model overlaps with what they teach to reasonably smart high schoolers. Perks of subscribing to what's basically our civic religion.
Allow me instead to share a few standout motte posts.
I still think about this post by, I believe, @AshLael. The idea that certain flavors of argument are advantaged against others helps to explain large swathes of the political landscape. It's also part of the reason I'm so invested in maintaining a Debate-heavy space like this one.
Here's a classic bit of Hlynka for those who missed it. While I deeply, deeply disagree with him on lots of things, he was grasping at something that most other users don't quite get.
But I've always had a special place for the strange and wonderful digressions of the Motte. /u/mcjunker's stories, @Dean's policy analysis, all sorts of stuff. One of the best examples has to be this monstrous essay on the aesthetics of jazz. Amazing stuff.
If you have any affinity whatsoever for text-heavy, mechanics-light video games, you should play Disco Elysium. Its Moralintern is a bizarre but excellent commentary on our rules-based international order. Also, it's generally hilarious and poignant.
While I am tempted to namedrop countless other works of fiction, it'd probably be more of a distraction. Ask me on a Friday thread.
Brief Manifesto
Assume your model is not going to work.
Doesn't matter if you're theorizing about politics or international relations or the state of the youth. The very fact that you've taken the time to present it in a forum post is a comorbidity for any number of critical flaws. Maybe it's wildly overcomplicated; maybe it overlooks some basic fact of human psychology. As soon as you introduce your theory, the fine commentariat of the Motte will show up and explain how it's actually stupid.
This is a good thing, because picking holes in ideas is how you get better ideas. (Okay, yes, it's also quality entertainment.) But it might not be fun, and there will be some psychological pressure to insist that nothing is wrong. No. The critics are right, and your grand psychoanalysis is probably bunk. So why not try to get ahead of the curve and figure out what went wrong? What's the first objection someone is going to make when you hit "post"?
This is the difference between arguing to understand vs. arguing to win.
If you want to have a constructive discussion, the single most useful thing you can do is to think about how you might be wrong. It's not easy, I sure don't live up to it as much as I ought to, but I promise. It's worth it.
Ping Me On...
Voting systems. Electoral reform along the lines of single transferable vote is literally my single issue, because I think it's actually a credible path to a more functional government. Seriously, if you know about a way I can act against FPTP, let me know.
Science fiction. Fantasy. Weird hybrids that defy or define genres. I'd like to say I'm pretty well-read in this sense. I certainly enjoy the subject.
Historical trivia of all sorts. Perhaps it's stereotypical for a board like this, but yes, that includes military history and hardware. And while my own collection is still amateurish, I'm always happy to talk about firearms as a hobby, too.
Posts I'm Proud Of
I don't generate a lot of AAQCs, and when I do, I tend to look back with a little embarassment. Something of a tendency towards melodrama. Still, I'm convinced that I was on to something here.
I also feel strongly about my comments on the state of fiction. Media is the first thing to get the 'ol "back in my day" treatment, and especially with modern storage methods, it's so easy to put on rose-tinted glasses. But all sorts of bizarre fiction is out there. Perks of a bigger, faster, more interconnected world. I encourage everyone who thinks modern media sucks and/or is captured by their ideological enemies to go out and find stuff that's just too weird to capture.
This was easier to write and harder to do than I expected.
I'll nominate @Rov_Scam for the next entry.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Ha. Right.
I’ve got a text document open. I’ve had it open for the last week. The actual contents are still…well, nonexistent. It’s always, always easier to browse the thread or clear out the mod queue than to actually draft the thing.
Let’s see if I can get it together for Monday. If not, I’ll officially relinquish my spot in shame. Sound good?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I wish I could bet money against anything happening on this front. I guess that’s just normal investing.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Sorry, I'm not trying to speak for you, specifically.
I am assuming that maiq, who thinks the people in charge of crappy media got their jobs "without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals," would view such volunteering as a stunt.
if it's significantly less common
Sure. But is it? Do you have any reason to believe that the modal screenwriter used to be more in touch? Because I keep running into examples that look pretty similar to today's.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
How am I supposed to interpret this, then?
These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films)
I think there’s a no-true-Scotsman where each of these boring, normal careers gets recast as something exciting and meaningful. Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.
High-schoolers can volunteer in foreign countries and people will wave it off as PMC strivers padding their resumes. But when a rich kid stumbles into film school he must have collected some valuable experience. It’s a double standard in service of the age-old complaint. Those darn kids just don’t respect their elders.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
While I have a soft spot for Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m not really going to disagree. I got Anderson by randomly sampling 90s films. Here’s a few more:
- Jumanji (1995). Written by Jonathan Hensleigh, a lawyer who got his start writing TV episodes. Directed by Joe Johnston, who studied special effects in college.
- Men in Black (1997). Written by Ed Solomon, who studied economics but dabbled as a stand-up comedian. The jokes write themselves. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. I think the worldliness of his brief career in porn is counteracted by the fact it was photography.
- Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Director James Foley, studied psychology and film. Writer David Mamet despite winning numerous awards, appears to have had a normal if liberal childhood in Chicago.
While I tried to pick a different movies, these were literally the first three I clicked.
I stand by my theory that getting a liberal arts degree, plus a film masters, has been pretty normal for decades. The view of writer or director as Romantic auteur is what the kids call “cope.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars)
Right, I think this is a big part of it, but…
and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had.
No! Not with any consistency, at least. Maybe I’m just skeptical of the evergreen argument that the current generation is coddled and sheltered, but it just doesn’t add up. George had exactly the kind of wealthy educated youth that Maiq was complaining about. It even fits the theory about not understanding dialogue! But because he was successful, his life must have been interesting, must have been in some way better than those miserable PMCs.
I think that’s pretty silly. I think you could sample veteran directors at random and find plenty that had boring, upper-middle-class upbringings. Or pick a young one and find something at least as irresponsible as George’s hobby. Not do I think it would correlate very well with critical or audience success, because I think your other factors are carrying all the weight.
Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too.
This is really important. We have unprecedented access to the preserved corpses of existing projects. For the unimaginative, that’s a license to play it safe. Reboot the continuity and deploy a new line of toys. For the visionaries, though, having a rich world in which to play has its own advantages. We get commentary, metafiction, callbacks and fanservice. It’s opportunity. But it absolutely warps the market for intellectual property.
Entertainment is a commodity. You can’t sell Star Wars today because that spot is taken. You have to do something legally and perhaps even creatively distinct. Shot for shot remakes are a bizarre attempt to clear that bar. So are reboots. So are pivots to streaming, or AI, or whatever economic models promise market share without mining for good ideas.
The millennials barely even come into it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Welcome back.
be as polite as possible without being insincere
I like this a lot. Politeness is a good proxy for a bunch of our ideals. I might even argue that it’s implicit in our rules about kindness, charity, and especially antagonism. It signals willingness to play the classical-liberal game, and it makes it significantly harder to get that cheap thrill of tribalism.
Not impossible, of course. You’re also almost certainly correct about the subset of this board which wants, at most, a French-style controlled opposition. That contingent is not in charge.
The moderation remains opposed to the capture of innocent leftists for our nature preserve. We only collect injured specimens who are at risk in the wild. Upon making a full recovery, they are released to Substack.
But I digress.
We moderate on tone because hostility invites tribalism. Closing ranks. Soldier mindset, whatever you want to call it. Maybe the audience feels vulnerable: “they hated Jesus because He told the truth!” Other times they just suspect bad faith. What matters is that any chance of a decent conversation goes down the toilet.
Politeness is one of our best signs that someone is willing to play along and avoid these failure modes.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
But that is literally what Lucas did. Screwed around getting into car accidents in high school. Ended up in a fancy college for exactly what he wanted. Made a shitload of money. If at any point he had some enriching experiences in third-world countries, he’s not advertising them.
How many of our greatest writers actually fit your Renaissance man archetype?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
That’s obviously wrong.
You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway. His whole cohort of Coppola and Spielberg and so on have similar stories.
Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films. Or branch out to weirdos like Hideo Kojima. It’s not like he had an exotic childhood. He just thought movies were cool, so he started writing something resembling screenplays.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Oh, they probably do. Maybe even in these specific cases!
That doesn’t make a series of anecdotes into evidence.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Hmm, what can “we” learn by summing your entire outgroup up as one monolithic movement, then gaming out an elaborate social strategy?
Probably not much. Definitely nothing “optimal.” I think you’re overfitting a model, and in a way that just happens to bait agreement from a certain sort of ambiguously-autistic Internet commenter.
I suppose I also think you’re assuming the conclusion. Perhaps, for bait, that goes without saying?
Point is, your model kind of sucks.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Yes, sure. I am absolutely willing to believe that the government covered up one or more of these things. But not on the basis of one guy listing his favorite coincidences. If the only reason you encounter a data point is because someone picked it for you, it’s not evidence. It’s trivia. It’s an excuse to repeat whatever you already believe, maybe feel a bit clever about it.
What’s the expected fatality rate for training? Is there historical data? Previous spikes whenever a U.S. ally fights some terrorists? Who knows? Who the fuck cares? Some guy on the Internet said special forces “tend to” do this, so it must be real.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Maybe you don’t know about them because they’re not actually reasonable?
Like, the same reasoning applies here as to underwater pyramids. Or moon landing skeptics. Or celebrity gossip. It’s bad epistemics.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Bastards? No, I’m saying ugly couples are willing to have plenty of kids in wedlock. A guy whose farm feeds 10 is liable to end up with 10 kids whether he pairs off with the prettiest girl in the village or an absolute goblin.
Also I guess I doubt the bastard survivability claim.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
First I’ve heard of it.
You know what I have seen, recently? Broccoli.
If you search “kids hate broccoli,” you can find countless articles parroting this un-American talking point. Some even suggest that “science” has solved this classic mystery. They’re citing the same study from 2021 which something something enzymes something sulfur.
Is this a psy-op? Maybe a ploy by those regulators over in Brussels?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
That doesn’t make a ton of sense.
You’d only get a selection pressure if love matches offered a competitive advantage to attractive/attractive couples over attractive/ugly or ugly/ugly ones. My understanding of male sexuality suggests that partner hotness was not actually the limiting factor. Ugly/ugly couples were and are definitely willing to pop out as many kids as they can afford.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
Miles, Mutants and Microbes, a Miles Vorkosigan anthology. It’s got a very different voice than either the stereotypical or reactionary flavors of modern sci-fi. More to say on this once I’ve finished it.
I’m reading it as a palate cleanser from those John McPhee geology essays. The last one was about California fault lines, which are simultaneously awe-inspiringly massive and, uh, kind of dull. Not my favorite. Plus, I was too young to remember the 1989 World Series earthquake which kind of inspired the piece, so that was lost on me.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9d ago
There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10d ago
Normally I like reading your legal dispatches, but I don’t see how these are fun at all!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
Sure they are. Some more than others.
You’re treating “cruelty-free” like it’s “vegan,” which has an obvious single condition to meet. But it’s more like “pescatarian,” an awkward wastebasket taxon that doesn’t quite match the literal name. It’s just that most people don’t bother distinguishing oysters from lobsters from tuna even though they are happy to draw the line at whales. We could add prefixes until we partitioned out the 12 principled pescatarians, but it is not generally considered relevant.
The partition for “Cruelty-free” means not complicit in a subset of acts which are considered cruel. It’s not exhaustive, and you can catch practitioners in weird edge cases. But 99% of the time you can get them to agree, hey, that thing they do to male chickens is in the “cruel” category, right? Then they’re supposed to avoid it.
How is this different from asking pescatarians if whales are fish?
Yes, actually.
I took APUSH only slightly more recently than you. Pre-Hamilton and too dry for that style of pop history. Very definitely pre-1619. Lots of time spent on westward expansion before and after the Civil War. Not particularly apologetic, either, if I recall correctly.
The one that really struck me as institutionally liberal was AP Gov. It was 75% Bill of Rights court cases with a clear admiration for the Marshall Court.
Macroeconomics was incredibly Keynesian in a matter-of-fact way. Here’s the money multiplier, here’s an equation for aggregate demand, don’t worry about it too much. What a strange class.
I would absolutely love to shoot a pattern 1917. I adore my No. 4 Lee-Enfield, which was my first historic gun. I’m working towards a collection of the major service rifles, but somehow let myself get sidetracked by a gorgeous Swiss K31. So it’ll be a while before I let myself fill out the set with a Mauser and an Arisaka.
I also have a real soft spot for the M1 carbine. But mine is a real pain and doesn’t like to feed properly. Haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.
Jealous of your steel range. Some day!
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