FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Politics is not so simplistic that there's just "red tribe" and "blue tribe".
And yet, opinion on most political and social events of significance splits into two rough clusters parsimoniously described as "Red" or "Blue", and this split and the density of the clusters grows more pronounced as the sorting of the population continues along the arc it has been travelling for at least the last decade. Or perhaps you would care to describe the evidence you see that this trend is reversing itself?
Also "person disagrees with me on topics" is not "person is in other tribe and should not be listened to and inherits the sins of the outsiders"
Of course not. If I were not listening to you, how would I be able to address the points you are raising, or to point out how they are very clearly wrong?
Both Tribes routinely coordinate meanness against things they consider socially hazardous, always have and always will. A supermajority of Americans consider hard narcotics the central example of socially-hazardous goods against which meanness should be coordinated, and have for at least the better part of a century. You argued that people don't take this attitude toward guns, so they shouldn't toward drugs. The problem is that Blues do, in fact, take exactly this attitude toward guns, to the point of successfully defying federal law in their efforts to coordinate meanness against a good that is both legal and explicitly protected by both federal law and the Constitution itself.
You argued that people don't do this in a case where they very obviously and publicly do. I have listened to your argument, and am pointing out how foolish it is.
You argued that people shouldn't do this in the case of hard narcotics and the cartels smuggling them, because it might result in the logic being applied in other areas like guns. I have listened to your argument, and am pointing out that this logic is already being applied to guns, has been for decades, and has been pushed about as hard as it's possible to do, so the concern you raise is laughable.
You appear committed to arguing that social hazard logic is ridiculous, specifically for the social hazards of your outgroup. It seems to me that this is a very silly thing to argue, but you are free to chase this dragon as far as you please. From my perspective, it is obviously true that social hazards exist and must be coordinated against, and likewise that not all arguments for social hazard are valid. Particularly, it is obvious to me that comparing tobacco and cigarettes to fentanyl, meth and heroin is laughably absurd. Cigarettes do in fact kill half a million citizens a year, and it is in fact true that there are very few legitimate uses for cigarettes. That does not change the fact that there is no cigarette equivalent to the "fentanyl zombie" or any of the other numerous, horrifying outcomes that hard narcotics reliably produce with appalling regularity. Lung cancer can kill you, but all men die sooner or later; narcotics can and frequently do destroy people on a level deeper than the physical, in addition to frequently killing them young and quite suddenly in a way that cigarettes absolutely do not.
Your argument would be slightly less absurd for alcohol, and I would more than welcome your efforts to convince Blue Tribe to revive prohibition if this is an argument you seriously wish to pursue. But as it stands, you appear to be deploying a fully-general argument against government restriction of any good; if we're not willing to drone-strike the Marlborough headquarters, we're not allowed to lay hands on agents of TdA or else you'll call us hypocrites.
This would at least be a colorable argument if you were endorsing full legalization of all narcotics, and also we abolish the ATF and legalize machine guns, cannon, rockets and high explosives, AI-generated child porn, homophobia and the N-word. Most of us have experienced the siren song of Radical Libertarianism, and I too am mildly sympathetic at least to the concept of the recreational McNuke. If this were your argument, my reply would be Is and not Ought: that the evil generated by the distribution and use of hard narcotics is sufficiently vast that it must be confronted by anything even distantly approaching a civilized society. The moral outrage thus generated has heretofore been channeled away from the users, who we have for many decades agreed to consider largely as victims, and toward the dealers, producers and cartels.
Your argument demolishes this venerable settlement, and the logical consequence is a renegotiation of our social response to addiction, for which your opening bid, in your own words, is that the users have chosen to commit suicide of their own free will. It seems to me that there are many who would be entirely content to take you at your word in this matter, write the users off completely, and finalize the end of life you claim they've consciously chosen. I would not hurry to such a conclusion, but would note it is a result I could be willing to accept.
On the other hand, the actual, compact that our society has long settled on is that the Cartels and their agents down the distribution chain receive full responsibility both for their own crimes and for the evils generated by the addicts' victimization, and as a consequence they have essentially forfeited their membership in the human race. Consequently, what restraint exists in our treatment of them arises only from practical, utilitarian concerns of the second-order sort. Perhaps this compact really is wrong; again, I can think of few political developments I would welcome more heartily than a Blue Tribe commitment to publicly argue for and defend the poor, maligned drug dealers and Cartels. Here, though, I'm going to point out that your arguments appear to be to be poorly thought out, low-effort, and motivated by partisan ideological commitments. If you perceived principles that you cared dearly for at stake here, you might demonstrate that by engaging with any of the context above yourself, thus showing that you actually cared enough to give the matter a bit more thought. Instead, this exchange is necessary.
Most citizens are not in some cultural war obsessed "burn everything down, fuck the constitution, we're at war" mindset.
Many citizens are not, surely. Most, perhaps. Many are distracted or detached from politics. Then too, many are mistaken, even badly mistaken, about what has happened and the realities of our situation. For example, I'm given to understand that some people actually vote for Liz Cheney.
And yet, half the country backed nation-wide riots, partisan suspension of law enforcement, arson, brutal assaults and murders based on Blue-tribe lies. Half the country backed the various partisan abuses and lies of the Covid years. You are correct that many millions are still deceived or deceiving themselves that the Culture War is a distraction from matters of true import, that our systems are in fine form, and that everything will continue in the future as it has in the past. That does not make the Constitution any less of a joke, or make our society any more viable in anything but the shortest of terms. Many millions of Americans of both tribes continue to publicly salivate at the thought of their political enemies being harmed, jailed, even murdered, and this number does not appear to be decreasing. Political norms and the concept of rule of law continue to erode, and at a steadily increasing pace. At some point in the not-so-distant future, Blues will regain the reins of formal power, and then we will see how things go.
This black and white thinking helps to underline how your argumentation here is backed by emotion. You push your grievances with others onto me.
Actually, no. I've read a number of your comments that seemed notable for what I perceive as, to put it charitably, argumentation that really ought to be given a detailed response. It has merely taken a while for recency and free time to converge, but I've got your "Nazi Republican" posts and your analysis of the jan 6th events in particular saved to revisit when time permits.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
There was plenty of consensus that he was "bad" in some nebulous way, but when I asked repeatedly what was wrong I was only ever given vague runarounds and examples of posts that proved my point like this one, where I disagree with Darwin's political point, but in terms of debate etiquette and rule-following his detractors are massively worse than he ever was.
Darwin was very good at violating the spirit of the rules as badly as possible while staying at least plausibly within the letter. His notable technique was to write so as to strongly imply an argument while not technically actually endorsing that argument himself, and then abuse the charity of those attempting to engage with the apparent meaning of his statements. To those who saw through this technique and deployed sufficient effort to actually nail the conversation down into something concrete, he retreated to abstractions and then ghosted the conversation. Throughout, he was insufferably smug and responded to most disagreements as though they were a vast, unreasonable imposition on his precious time, and was utterly incapable of meaningful charity, self-reflection, or admitting that he might be wrong.
If you would like specific, detailed examples, this thread, is my best attempt to provide. Notably, it contained a very amusing argument about how great Darwin was, and how comparisons to another poster who was posting terribly at the time in a distinctly Darwin-like manner were totally unfair, a week or two before that poster confirmed that they were a Darwin alt.
Darwin was banned for rulebreaking, but as others have noted, that ban ended. He has at least two known alts here, @guesswho and @cartman, but he doesn't comment much any more, likely because enough people understand his technique that it doesn't really work any more, and I and others will happily expend effort to point out the games he likes to play and the context behind them in sufficient detail that his efforts no longer bear much fruit.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I consider this a serious argument, and have praised and defended Biden regarding the Afghanistan pullout debacle for precisely this reason. The weightiest counter-argument, in my opinion, would be his administration's handling of the Ukraine conflict, and his administration's continuity with the Obama administration. I would not consider these counter-arguments decisive by any means. I am very frustrated with the first Trump administration's inability to end the war in Afghanistan, and appalled by the degree to which the senior brass lied to and disobeyed his orders to keep their pocket wars going.
Less, given that they are hors de combat
The terrorist in the Afghan village is not engaged in combat at all. He is not engaged in terrorist activities by attending a wedding, there is no reasonable standard by which his immediate actions constitute combat. Yet we bomb him and those around him anyway. If this is acceptable, which it evidently has been for decades now, then it must be because his allegiance is sufficient to justify striking him, regardless of his present actions. And if that be the case, how does similar logic not apply to narcos in boats?
By what moral logic is it acceptable to bomb a crowded wedding to kill one of the guests, but bombing narcos engaged in smuggling becomes a serious crime only when the second bomb drops? What do you suppose the first one was for?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
LCIAA was passed in 2005. Gun control has been a political fault line at least since the Clinton administration and its attempted gun control policies, notably the Assault Weapons Ban and the Waco raid a decade and a half prior. The 90s also saw numerous attempts to use spurious lawsuits to bankrupt the firearms industry. LCIAA was supposed to forestall those efforts once and for all. That it did not is seriously damaging to the standard narrative of how our system of laws operates.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
There was a rather more pointed example of this, IIRC, where deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military. The story I heard is that US forces contacted the Russians demanding that their forces cease fire and withdraw, were told that no Russian forces were involved, tee hee, and responded by annihilating the Russian troops with a sustained, overwhelming bombardment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?
I continue to believe that Trump is the real anti-war president, as I did when he bombed an Iranian general, and indeed as I did when he bombed Iran. I will freely agree that he is not as anti-war as I would prefer, but he has in fact been more anti-war than any other president in my lifetime.
I "square the circle" by noting the fact that he has, to date, not initiated any large-scale wars, even in circumstances that it seems likely other presidents would have. A good example would be his bombing of Iran, followed promptly by him announcing that there was no need for further engagement, and actually declining to engage further, following which the ongoing and escalating war actually petered out.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Connecticut for one of the more prominent examples, Massachusetts for another. The lawsuit against Remington was eventually settled for $73 million, the lawsuit by Mexico was eventually struck down by the supreme court after being upheld by some lower courts.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Are they more or less of a threat to me than a terror suspect attending a wedding in some Afghan village?
Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well.
WE implemented laws perfectly well to preclude such lawsuits. Blues found those laws inconvenient and chose to ignore them, and have successfully done so. Perhaps you might have argued that doing so was a bad idea, and would undermine necessary norms, but if so it appears your arguments did not carry the day. Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.
Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!
I reiterate that all evidence indicates that such detente does not exist and never will. Blues will do and have done what they want to do. Neither law nor custom nor social norms restrain them. Trading off my tribe's values in pursuit of some mythical compromise is evidently unworkable; such compromises last until Blues find them inconvenient, and then they are swept aside.
The way my tribe will keep our guns is by systematically undermining and removing the legal and social mechanisms that might be used to take them, which we are currently well on our way to doing, and by making it abundantly clear that we will burn the country to ashes before we allow Blues to disarm us, which we are also well on our way to doing. At no point is any degree of cooperation with Blues required for this process. At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.
Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves.
"Bad way" and "hurt others" are terms of no fixed meaning, and I have no reason to believe that you and I share a common understanding of them sufficient to draw comparisons in this way. More generally, there does not appear to be an objective measure of social harm, and Blues have already demonstrated that they are willing to abruptly and drastically redefine what is and is not actionable social harm overnight.
Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold.
I do not agree that this is a valid chain of causality, and I do not believe that you would accept chains of causality much, much less ambiguous if they cut against your tribal interests. For example, Judges frequently release prisoners convicted of multiple violent felonies who then commit additional violent felonies. Would you agree that the judge more directly causes such violent felonies than the employees of the gun shop in your example? Do you support the recent push to hold judges accountable for the crimes of convicts they release? If not, why not? Such releases are absolutely not victimless, and the judge has far better evidence of the nature of the convict they release than the gun store owner does of a random customer.
Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!
It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."
There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex.
Assessing the values and motives of others based on what they say and do is not a victim complex. Your rhetorical strategies do not appear to me to be particularly complex. You pick an issue and frame it in whatever way is maximally-convenient to the argument you wish to make at this particular moment, with no apparent regard to arguments you've made before or will make in the future. You do not appear to have principles deeper than "Who, Whom". And I disagree, there is much discussion to be had: see above. I appreciate that this may not be the discussion you particularly wish to have, but that is your business, not mine.
In any case, it does not seem to me that pointing to clear examples that contradict your statements constitutes "emotional argument" or a "victim complex". You are arguing that my side should stop doing bad things. I am disagreeing with you that what we are doing is bad, and further that your side does worse than what you accuse us of, much less what we have actually done.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
You left off the part where that legislation has been pointedly ignored and that the lawsuits it banned have continued.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for
"Don't resist our lawbreaking, interfere with our operations or inform on us to the authorities."
what are the violent acts
and what civilian population do they instill fear in?
Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights;
I fundamentally disagree with this characterization. The middle-east wars were sold with pseudo-white-man's-burden arguments, and opposed over concerns of their harmful effects on the locals. Neither represents a lack of concern for the human rights of middle-easterners.
If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.
To the extent that we tolerate supermarket theives, we do so from the belief that they are only occasional theives and might yet amend their ways and rejoin productive society. Those who make victimizing others a fundamental part of their identity and way of life are not productive targets for this type of forebearance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.
If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.
Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime. Drug Cartels are a very close aproximate to classical examples of Hostis Humani Generis. But more damningly, even if these facts were not the case, even if the equivalency you are drawing were not entirely spurious, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great.
...I would like to think that I am not inclined to take a rosy view of the crimes of communist regimes, but I generally adhered to the narrative that the CCP "let millions of people starve" until a recent conversation here resulted in another commenter quoting details. Paraphrasing: "Mr So-and-so and his wife were accused of hoarding. Their fellow villagers beat them to death. Their children were turned out and denied food and shelter by the rest of the community until they starvced to death", repeated over and over again, leaving the distinct impression that this fate was routine for unfortunates in the period in question. In my view, that's pretty clearly murder.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
It seems to me that you and @faceh are framing this as though law and public sentiment are two distinct things, and are wondering why Trump is making appeals to public sentiment when he could simply use the law. But it is evident that the law is much weaker than legible public sentiment, even disregarding the legal mechanisms by which law emerges from public sentiment in the first place.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Coordinating public sentiment is the most effective method possible for reducing the amount of trouble one gets in when hurting the outgroup. The law is a whore, and public sentiment is the coin she trades in; if public sentiment is on-side, paper rules are no impediment at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
What does the math look like when you include suicides?
Let me make the question a bit more explicit.
Within the existing system, what is the proper way to respond to Blue Tribe weaponizing the justice system to partisan ends? Because if the answer is "there isn't one", it behooves us to find alternatives outside the existing system.
People accuse me of being an accelerationist, but what's the alternative? We've seen recently that rifles and rooftops are certianly an option on the sociopolitical conflict menu, with the understanding of course that such actions cannot reasonably be attributed to the tribes from which they might emerge because stochastic terrorism abruptly stopped being a coherent concept. What other options are plausibly available?
This does indeed seem to be a plausible description of the thought process of these prosecutors.
If I, as a citizen, believe that this is in fact the calculus being performed by members of the executive branch, what conclusions should I draw?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
This sort of post is obviously against the rules here, as you appear to be aware. You have no mod history, positive or negative. This is not a great way to start things off. You don't have to agree with people, or even like them. You may even believe that they are enemies who should be fought to the death. But here we do not fight over words, but meet the arguments of others with arguments of our own.
Normally we start with a warning, but again, you seem to understand the rules and are choosing to egregiously ignore them. Banned for three days, and if you continue to communicate in this way, the bans will escalate rapidly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Best orcs are Project Long Stairs orcs. Wattsian P-Zombies that breed explosively and instantly learn and integrate any tactical behavior they observe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
I heard of them back in the day, and have no memory of how they ended up. Definately interested in the effortpost.
I don't care much about Covid. I care a lot about what people did during Covid, to the point that I think people who claim they don't are lying to themselves and/or to others. Covid measures were too draconian, too partisan, and too clearly divorced from anything approaching neutral process or objective standards to be handwaved with an appeal to unspecified "systems" or generic "society". The pandemic response and related events permanently altered my relationship to my government and my nation.
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