FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.
Would it be useful to compare this to the Christian Genocide, for which I am confident an equivalent and much more strongly-evidenced argument could be made? I have examples of Christians who show themselves in public being beaten by uniformed thugs while the police look the other way in Blue territory. Does that sort of thing happen to Trans people in Red territory?
Would the above argument be one you likewise see both sides of?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
You don't need to save me or anyone else, we don't want you to. Just live your own life. Other people being gay does not affect you.
This argument is a good one right up until people start blaming me for the negative consequences of your personal choices.
It seems to me that Liberalism is going away and is unlikely to return for the forseeable future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Bezos went on to elaborate that the Fortune 2 company could not operate AmazonSmile without some way to kick out the extremist organizations and that SPLC was, effectively, the only reasonable option. He asked Congress for other suggested data providers. None were offered. (No, really, he did that.)
Let us pause to acknowledge that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, considers these two four-letter organizations as peers. One of them is created by statute, operates within constitutional and administrative-law constraints, and answers to Congress, the courts, and ultimately the people of the United States of America. It could jail Bezos, personally, for willful non-compliance. And the other is …some people in Montgomery with a very specific interest, whose decisions are subject to review by no court, and whose only power appears to be moral suasion.
Bezos was equally and entirely committed to satisfying both.
If we assume that the situation is as the author describes it, do you consider this an acceptable state of affairs?
Nothing, obviously. Blue Tribe takes a week to hit consensus on who "owns" the list, and Bob's your uncle. Not to mention that anyone who claims that the SPLC itself will in fact be got here is out over their skis. Obviously, they have broken the law and so they should be prosecuted and convicted. But that's not actually how things work, is it? Procedural outcomes are not deterministic, but rather are manipulated.
A more relevant question is whether the political system he describes is one we should be upholding and maintaining. To a first approximation, it seems to me that everything works this way, and the novel development is that things are happening fast enough that the nature of the system is weakly perceptible. Obviously, the SPLC and every other organization that cooperated with them in their regulatory push should be nuked to ash. Equally obviously, that almost certainly isn't going to happen, and if it did it would not solve the actual problem, which is that Blues fundamentally do not believe that rules constrain their desires or behavior, and do not recognize a need to share society or its mechanisms with those who disagree with them. It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.
To the extent I personally have policy preferences, I prefer the orderly administration of law. Any law we would not be willing to enforce against a sympathetic lawbreaker, a friend, or an ally is a bad law. Until a bad law is changed, it is the law. I reject a legal realism, or legal cynicism, that says that power is the only law.
The Declaration of Independence and D.C. billboards agree: No one is above the rules. We have no kings in this country.
Okay, but power is observably the only law, and anyone who doesn't recognize it at this point is either a fool or a liar. Many people observably are above the rules, and exist in this pleasant state for long periods of time. We do have kings in this country, have and very likely will. Now what?
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
Does Max Schaler claim to personally suffer from "Ressentiment"? Speaking generally, does anyone using the term "Ressentiment" use it to describe their own thoughts and feelings, or is this a label generally understood to be used on the thoughts and feelings of others?
Are new words exclusively intended to describe why other people are bad useful? I would argue that they usually are not.
Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values.
impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?
You say the right is far more impotent than the left, but this seems straightforwardly wrong to me, because the question isn't how much power a person or group has, it's how much power they have relative to their valued end-state. If your values demand shrimp welfare or the abolition of poverty or a classless utopia giving rise to incorruptible humans who will not know greed or envy or malice, you are going to be living with "an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values", no? And in fact, can we not see abundant examples of how such frustrated values lead to "rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from."
But what does the special word and its attendant pseudo-medicalization add to the discussion?
My understanding of the narrative was that God doesn't want the Israelites to think that it's their strength that gives them victory. There's a bunch of stories where this point is made explicitly; the entire conquest of Canaan is full of such incidents, but Gideon's army being whittled down to a fraction of its original size (and, depending on interpretation, actively selected for the worst soldiers available) is entirely about this. "The battle belongs to the Lord," and it doesn't matter how large an army Israel can muster, it's God who decides if they're going to win or lose.
It's easy for a Protestant, especially an evangelical or someone descended from the Radical Reformation, to read this and say, "Aha! Idolatry! Rome!" For that matter one might be tempted to link it to the Temple in Jerusalem, perhaps echoing Jesus' criticisms of the Temple hierarchy. (Or one might take it in a more anti-semitic direction, but I see no need to encourage people like that.)
The interpretation that seems obvious to me is that Tolkien wrote his fantasy as though it were the ancient history of our world, and being a Christian, he wrote it to be spiritually compatible with the Christian understanding of the spiritual history of our world. The Numenoreans don't build temples because in the early chronology of the Bible, God very explicitly doesn't want a temple, and they don't have churches or hierarchical religion because there's no Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) basis for it at that point in the chronology. Sure, you can make something up, but then if you're actually describing it to the reader, you're implicitly saying "this form of worship/church/Temple/institution that I made up out of whole cloth is totally theologically valid." Tolkien can't roll his own temple or church because he doesn't perceive himself to have the authority to describe such an institution and say, by authorial fiat, that this is a proper form of worship that God finds pleasing; doing that sort of thing is generally perceived to be deeply unchristian by Christians. None of this applies to paganism; it's fine to describe all sorts of fantastical methods of being wrong about God, because from a Christian perspective there's an infinity of false theologies but only one true one.
But in the midst of the land was a mountain tall and steep, and it was named the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, and upon it was a high place that was hallowed to Eru Ilúvatar, and it was open and unroofed, and no other temple or fane was there in the land of the Númenóreans.
Here, he's directly copying biblical descriptions of religious practice in era that ends with Abraham and the Patriarchs, which is roughly where these stories would presumably happen. Simple altars in a high place are an apparently-acceptable method of communion with God prior to the Abrahamic Covenant, so it's what he uses as well. The obvious corollaries for the temples of Morgoth and Sauron are Dagon and Baal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
I am not fine with this, and I do not think that Aboriginal people are so congenitally incompetent that they cannot find some role, even a very humble role, in a modern economy.
Could you sketch out what a plan for an improved state of affairs looks like, then?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
You left out the part where they designed it with this massive steel-chunk of a turret containing a giant gun, and then neglected to procure an electric motor for rotating said turret. Some poor communist conscript fuck has to winch the thing around with a hand crank! And the turret's size and armament makes its balance worse, so if the tank is on a slope that hand crank is not only rotating the turret, but now lifting a giant off-center load uphill! Sometimes they turn out to be physically unable to work the turret around capitalist wreckers, but hey, the armor means they usually get plenty of time to work the problem.
Also, the 152mm gun is fairly low-velocity with non-fantastic performance against armor, but it turns out this doesn't matter if the HE shells are so powerful that the blast alone is sufficient to rip a German tank's turret clean off.
It's a thing of beauty!
So what you're saying is that the cities should just start threatening their supreme economic and technological superiority back. Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.
But in your view, this would make the Urbanites the bad guys, would it not?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It's all good, got it figured out last night. Now, if I could just get the kiddos to sleep through the night so I could script in peace...
Are you out of unity for good then?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
...have you tried asking AI?
I've been thinking for the last year or two that I needed to start engaging with AI more, but wasn't really sure how to get stuck in. I was attempting to google a blocking issue on one of my unity projects, and accidentally clicked on the AI summary result at the top... and the AI summary was extremely helpful, and got me past the problem in short order. Since then, I've been turning to it faster and faster when hitting weird blocker issues, and it has one- or two-shotted them every time so far, usually just by providing context to highlight the issue I'm blind to.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I would certainly argue that it's better for the judges to uphold a law against slavery. Judges not upholding the law fixes nothing and breaks much; the win is temporary, the costs are lasting.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Precisely. And of course the only acceptably neutral, arms-length body of experts from non-political backgrounds and isn't subject to the executive is the one that I personally select.
It's amazing how many things turn out to work this way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
This brings me back up to the very first question. If a society democratically, representative or otherwise, legalize slavery, do you expect judges in that society to uphold such a law? Is this what you expect? Is this what you want?
If the Judges do not uphold the law, then power does not flow through the law. If the law does not channel power then it is pointless. People wish for power. To the extent that you tell them that power is channeled by law, when it is not in fact channeled by law, you are lying to them. When they figure out that you have lied to them in this way, you will lose the power to persuade them about anything ever again; if you will lie in this way, you will lie in any way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Still working on learning Unity's new behavior system. Currently trying to figure out why it doesn't want to add new enum variables to the blackboard.
To be clear here, this is no actual recorded statement like this. There is a claim by the defense attorney that they were told this by the judge, but there is nothing to support it but his word and his word alone. Maybe it happened, but "defense lawyer claimed something" is not that much without anything else to support it. Even then, even if it did happen, a judge of a criminal court is a very low level position with multiple appeals courts above them. Their word is not final.
We have multiple circuits where the courts have never, not once, struck a law down for violating the Second Amendment, and as it happens this court is in one of them, and as it happens these circuits are also home to the most draconian restrictions on the keeping and bearing of arms. IIRC, most (all?) of the other circuits have only found a small handful of laws to violate the Second Amendment, and that only very recently.
This state of affairs can be explained in two ways, it seems to me. One explanation is that the Second Amendment has been routinely ignored and violated in its substance, with only the most marginal protection afforded, and that quite recently. The other explanation is that none of the many, many, many laws restricting firearms use or ownership enacted and enforced in the history of our legal system have ever violated the protections afforded by the Second Amendment in any way that demanded formal response except very recently and in the most marginal sense. If this is your argument, then my response is that the Constitution appears worthless to me, and I am opposed both to appealing to its protection and to assenting to such appeals by others from this point on. As it happens, this latter point is my actual position.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
If you were living in almost any other country, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. You would simply not have a gun, and you would not be able to make meaningful legal appeal otherwise.
There has been no meaningful legal appeal available for much of the nation's history, and there is no observable meaningful legal appeal in large portions of the country even now. Point to the examples of "meaningful legal appeals" to the Second Amendment, compared to, say, the First Amendment.
The second Amendment does not protect my right to keep and bear arms. My arms protect my right to keep and bear arms. I have guns because I and many others have made it clear that if Blues attempt to disarm us, we are plausibly willing to coordinate meanness against them on a level they would prefer not to risk. Amusingly, it appears that this reality is probably easier to export to other countries than the amendment itself, and I both hope it happens and am dedicated to assisting in the process.
You and "your tribe" is benefiting from this just the same. Trump gets to fuck around with the economic wellbeing of companies all around the country at his whim because of this presumption.
Yes. Once one realizes that procedural outcomes can be manipulated, one is free to manipulate them. This is not evidence that procedure is even weakly deterministic. It is possible to create a system where the Law is a whore, and it is good to recognize when one is, as we are, living within such a system.
That it takes time to sort out many wrongdoings is not a great criticism, no system can have immediate and perfect rectification.
Are you familiar with the phrase "the check is in the mail"? How would you describe its meaning?
Your statement is compatible with any level of rectification all the way down to none at all. In reality, the slower rectification comes, the less confident we should be that it is coming at all, and the less trust we should place in the systems that purport to provide it. If the efficacy of rectification mechanisms are in doubt, the proper course of action is not to assume everything is fine, it is to begin poking and jostling the machine with increasing fervor until it delivers meaningful results.
On the other hand, if one derives direct benefit from the breakdown of the rectification machine, the obvious course of action is to build a fence around the machine to prevent anyone from inspecting it too closely, to play soothing music for those waiting in line, to put a curtain up around the output so that those in line can't observe what the individuals being served actually receive, and generally to make loud statements that everything is working totally fine and anyone who says differently is a scammer or a troublemaker.
Come up with one that does first before whining that one of the most consistently successful and free country in the world can't do the impossible.
This is a laughable statement. You appear to be claiming that the freest country at any point in time is the maximum level of freedom one can reasonably ask for. I do not think you actually believe this in any consistent way. I do not believe you would apply this logic to, say, England when it debated banning slavery.
My freedom is not granted to me by the state, but rather is innate to me as a human. There is no objective measure of my freedom, only my own reason and prudence. I do not need your permission to conclude that the level of freedom you and your tribe are willing to grant me is unacceptably low, nor to coordinate meanness with my tribe in an effort to secure the level of freedom you seek to deny us. To the extent that many millions of my fellow tribals are persuaded to see things my way and not yours, the question becomes whether you would prefer to grant us the freedom we demand, or accept increasingly severe levels of conflict to preserve your preferred status quo.
Again, I stand by this statement:
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
My offer to sell you a bridge is complicated by the fact that I do not own the bridge in question, but that doesn't make my offer "not real" either. I really am offering you a piece of paper with ink on it, and I really do expect you to give me your money in exchange for it. Probably I can find other people who will assure you that I do own the bridge; doubtless there is some coherent framing in which accomplices form a "schelling point" for "society" to focus on.
Despite the numerous attacks on our constitutional rights since our founding, would be oppressors have still been consistently forced to chip away at the margins rather than do away with the concepts itself.
I flatly disagree that infringements on constitutional rights have, since the founding, consisted of "chipping away at the margins", but I fully agree that all actions my tribe has taken in the past or will take in the future that might be considered unconstitutional should be framed in this way. Obviously, any action my tribe engages in should be considered as, at the worst, only "chipping away at the margins", not based on the details of what we do, but purely on appeals to vague historical generalities.
Even the most anti free speech/anti gun/anti whatever idealogues are stuck having to try to find something to reach for.
"Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.". Likewise the suspension of Habeas Corpus under Lincoln.
Obviously "even the most anti-whatever ideologues" are not stuck trying to find something to reach for in any substantive sense. Examples overflow of officials and other power-wielders simply ignoring whatever rules inconvenience them without even a fig-leaf of legal justification. But let us be charitable, and recognize that the sorts of fig leaves you appeal to are in fact useful to would-be abusers; after all, even conmen understand the utility of cooling the mark out. Even under this charitable interpretation, it seems to me that you would need to argue that these fig leaves were sufficiently substantive so as to provide meaningful protection to those being abused. Otherwise, all that you are claiming is that the people abusing their power find it more convenient to whitewash their abuses than to let them stand naked, and the pejorative implications of the term "whitewash" should be all the argument necessary for why this is not a reasonable response to the grievances of the abused.
Previous discussion:
As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?
Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.
Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?
I used to argue that the Constitution was whatever five Justices said it was, but now it is not even that. We won multiple Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment over the past few decades. Blue states and their circuit courts ignored the rulings, and then we got to observe how unified defiance from "subordinate" legislatures and courts shapes Supreme Court jurisprudence, as the Justices refuse to take cases or deliver decisions that would spark further defiance. And it's not as though Federal law worked any better. We decided that Tribal interests should be protected by law. We won elections, drafted laws, and passed them by the legitimate process. Then Blue Tribe simply ignored them, and the courts have let them do it.
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
often it's that they don't allow FMJ ammo in rifles, and that is usually because it's hard to distinguish standard FMJ from some of the more exotic rounds with greatly-increased penetration, like rounds with a steel core or bronze solids. stronger backstops are more expensive, and shooting through the backstop would generally be a very bad thing for everyone involved.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Divergence of language is useful in a variety of ways.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I ran a bachelor party for an old friend in Texas, and among the activities was a group machine gun rental. I got the whole party of five trigger time on a H&K MP-5k, a G3 rifle, and a MG-42 light machine gun for a couple hundred bucks. The MG-42 ended up malfunctioning, so they swapped us to a M240-B medium machine gun as well, which in my view was pure bonus. Pricing for an individual would have been around a hundred bucks if memory serves, and significantly less for only one gun. The range had a "full-auto Fridays" special where specific guns could be rented for even cheaper.
If you're ever in the states, ding me and let me know where. I'd be happy to take you to the range if you're in my area, and get you some experience with handgun, shotgun and rifle.
Atheism was coalescing into an actual social movement through the 90s and 2000s. This was based on an ideology that promoted skepticism, rationality and hard-nosed truth-telling, with little regard for other peoples' sacred cows. That social movement destroyed itself over Social Justice ideology in ~2014. The way it came down, and what happened afterward, discredited the movement's claims for a lot of people, whether or not they continued not believing in God. Briefly, it turned out that for a lot of Atheists, skepticism and rationality do not appear to be maintainable at anything approaching a population level, and possibly not even at an individual level either. For a lot of Atheists, the hard-nosed truth telling was just outgroup bias, and was decommissioned when it came time to be hard-nosed against claims or groups considered the in-group. Enough Atheists did care about these principles to fight over the changes, and the community was destroyed both in terms of social cohesion and in terms of ideological plausibility. When you are informed one day that an Atheist must "Listen and Believe" and that it's unacceptable to draw a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, either you can make that jump or you can't, and enough could make the jump that those who couldn't were forced to reassess some of their basic assumptions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
It's entirely possible that de-listing silencers from the NFA has already happened, depending on how the cases over the tax being reduced to zero go, and in any case we're close enough on that one that I for one would not consider it a valid bargaining chip. Don't trade to gain things you already have, or will have shortly in any case.
The method by which we enjoy what prosperity remains despite absolute values-incoherence.
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