FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
...I understand that this place is corrosive to the angels of our better nature, and I freely admit to significant corrosion myself. Is this your genuine viewpoint, or are you trolling me?
For many, perhaps most Republicans, Woke demonstrated that the present crisis is existential. It is common to see arguments that "woke is over"; rarely do people making such arguments explain their understanding of exactly how "woke" "ended". The only remotely plausible answer I can see is that Trump was re-elected.
Arguments that Woke is over and therefore it's time to move on from Trump are self-defeating if Trump is the only coordination point powerful enough to actually deliver meaningful setbacks to the woke coalition. If we had compromised and not pushed Trump in this last election, even a non-Trump Republican victory would likely have resulted in unbroken Woke advances, simply because very few of the plausible Republican candidates are willing to do what is necessary to contest the culture war, and none to the degree Trump brings to the table.
And it should be emphasized that the sauce here isn't, for the most part, Trump himself or the choices he personally makes. It's Trump as a Schelling point for war rather than surrender. Sell him out, and the people coordinating our end of the sale will absolutely, obviously sell us next. Republicans like myself stick with Trump because we see no viable alternative.
[EDIT] - an amusing note for Massie in particular is that his campaign apparently sent out an advert today, using an old endorsement given by Trump in 2022 to try to fool voters into thinking that Trump was endorsing him now, rather than his opponent. One plays the cards one has, I suppose.
You can't separate the fact that people hate the dude from the fact that he deserves to be hated.
You can note that lots of other people deserve to be hated, and for some reason the people who hate this guy often love those other people with zero reservations.
The due ran a fraudulent charity, and one of the things the fraud money bought was a self portrait! That is hallmark movie villain shit!
Wow, that sounds really bad. I assume this was one of the felonies he was convicted of, right?
Consider his peers:
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A serial rapist who burned a few dozen women and children alive on national TV in a botched propaganda stunt.
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a dry-drunk who lied the nation into multiple pointless, fruitless, ruinous wars, resulting in more than a million dead, the devastation of multiple entire countries, and the foreclosure of the nation's economic future.
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A guy who directly and intentionally armed drug cartels in a bid to more effectively undermine the constitution, resulting in numerous murders of innocent civilians.
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A senile kleptocrat who had innocent civilians murdered in an attempt to intimidate the public into surrendering their human rights.
...But those guys are just fine, because the problem is hallmark movie villainy, not multiple rapes and murders and massacres and whole nations turned into killing fields.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
to be clear, that 6,000 is for 2025, not over USAID's lifetime, correct?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr ago
If a movement existed that was running for office on re-enslaving blacks, and it looked like this movement had a good chance of winning the election, how do you think black people should respond to that? How would you respond to that, yourself?
Democracy is not a universal solution. It is entirely possible to vote your way out of having a functional country. This is not, I think, a hazard that you can "trust the experts" to assess risk on your behalf.
Blue Tribe is evidently in favor of a variety of government actions to which I believe large-scale lawless violence is a reasonable response. Maybe I am unusual in making such an assessment, but if I am not, we are well into the deep end with no clear path back to solid ground.
It may be useful to consider Trump as a coordination mechanism, rather than a solution in and of himself. What is the proper response to Blues weaponizing the IRS against Reds' ability to organize politically? If I offered you a trade where a president of your choice got to disburse 1.776 billion dollars, and in exchange I get to use the IRS to attack your tribe's ability to coordinate politically for the indefinite future, is that a trade you would accept?
Again, and again, and again, Trump is the moderate, gentle voice of piece. This is as good as it's going to be, and it's never going to be this good again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr ago
In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.
It's one program, out of many thousands of programs. I think we can agree that it's selected for how well it fits the point. Do you believe it was an unrepresentative outlier? If it was an unrepresentative outlier, how did it get approved in the first place?
USAID's 2025 budget was 34 billion dollars, a roughly 30% increase over the 2001-2024 average of 23 billion.
What's your estimate for the percentage of that .536 trillion dollars that amounted to something between conspicuous waste and taxpayer funding of Blue Tribe partisan political activity?
Why do you think this activity required a ~33% increase in 2025 specifically?
Are principles ever adaptive?
Absolutely, in a values-coherent environment.
A core part of the value of principles is that they act as a very costly signal.
Sure. What they are supposed to signal is "I am making a significant sacrifice to maintain something we both care about". But this assumes "we both" actually do care about it. Signals are for communication; you don't need signals to draw your own conclusions. If the response is "I don't care about the thing you are maintaining, and will not sacrifice to maintain it", then the question becomes whether solo maintenance is worth it (probably not), and whether solo maintenance is even possible (probably not).
People would adopt them for the adaptability.
Yes, and the result is that rule-following becomes normal and expected, and rule-breaking becomes unusual and disturbing.
The value of having principles is that it communicates that people can trust you, and depend on you. Regardless of the shifting tides of the sociopolitical currents.
Many people claim a principle of following the law. Few people will actually follow a law that demands they docilly allow a subset of their neighbors to murder them and their family with machetes. Most curious! How can we explain this inconsistency? Assuming such a law were passed legally, it would in fact be a law, so shouldn't they follow it? Don't they have principles? Well, no. Humans are human. They are not going to cooperate in upholding a system that they perceive to be ruinously hostile to their interests. Society depends on a supermajority perceiving it to be strongly positive-sum. If you want to continue to have a society, you need to maintain that perception. If you fail to maintain that perception, appeals to rules or norms or principles will not save you.
Very, very few principles are actually worth unlimited commitment. If you want a society based on principles which receive unlimited commitment, it is going to look very different than our current arrangement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
A more accurate way to phrase this would be "principles are clearly not adaptive in the current sociopolitical enviornment."
This is not a mistake blues or reds are making. Principles are not, in fact, adaptive, and fixing that is not something individuals or even individual tribes can accomplish, and probably is not something that can be accomplished at all in a values-incoherent environment.
Whatever it is religious people are doing, they don't believe in God in the same way that I believe in the existence of the sun.
Pretty clearly not, since you can see the sun and do engineering off its presence.
What's your understanding of traditional marriage vows?
"to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part"
Does such a vow make sense to you?
Would you take such a vow, and if you did, would you really mean it?
Would you agree that such a vow is best modelled as a bet, which resolves only on death? But what is the point of a bet that you can only "win" when you die?
What I'm trying to gesture at here is that there exists a class of decisions which humans make based on incomplete information, and about which one might uncharitably claim they are resistant to evidence-based assessment, but which nonetheless are meaningful and at least plausibly positive-sum. Belief in God, and prayer and other elements that go along with it, appear to me to be a member of this class.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Not "before", "outside".
Suppose we are living in a simulation. A lot of simulation theory bootstraps itself into plausibility by assuming that there are going to be many layers of simulation, and thus we are unlikely to be in baseline reality. The part people don't seem to pay much attention to is that, presuming we are in a simulation, our observation of our own simulations demonstrates that there is no necessary relation between a given simulation's rules and the nature of baseline reality. That is to say, if you do not have direct access to baseline reality (and entropy and consciousness are two strong empirical indicators within the materialist frame that we do not have such access), then you have no valid claim to insist that baseline reality conforms to your observations of the simulation's rules. It might or it might not, and other than observing it directly, you simply don't know.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"
Politics runs on hope. "Hope" was the theme that won Obama the White House. People organize politically because they hope to secure better outcomes; having so organized, if those better outcomes are not secured, obviously the previous political organization didn't work and you need to try something else. Blues expected things to improve significantly when Obama replaced Bush in 2008. Six years later in 2014, it was pretty obvious that the current set of Progressive policies weren't delivering sufficient progress, and so Blues collectively pushed for more radical policies.
Feminism and race were two of the most prominent drivers of Social Justice as an ascendant ideology, and both seem like strong examples of policy starvation. There was a really good article I would dearly like to relocate that talked about the detente established around the turn of the century between blacks and whites, wherein Whites would help improve conditions for Blacks, and Blacks would stop calling Whites racist. Well, what do you do when, after a decade or more of this, conditions for Blacks haven't measurably improved? Likewise for women: previous waves of feminism rewrote the social contract between the sexes on a purely consent-based framework, and yet lots and lots of women still feel like they're being violated. The only category for violation their model recognizes is of consent, and so they model the problem as a rape epidemic, and frame their new policies to match.
In both cases, Social Justice went the way it did because people found that their current policies couldn't sustain hope in a better future, and so turned to more radical alternatives. I guess I'd say that this bolsters rather than replaces the stories you listed.
- The Academy probably was not aiming for 2014 Social Justice specifically, but policy starvation forced them to abandon left-neoliberalism in favor of something more radical.
- Anti-discrimination law didn't work. Outcomes for Blacks remained quite bad. Therefore, it became a floor rather than a ceiling, and policy starvation forced those concerned to aim for something more radical.
- The establishment center-left couldn't hold the line because their credibility was already burned; they'd been ruling for at least the last six years; you can't promise hope and change when your government and its consequences are why people are hoping for change.
- Social Media offered what appeared to be new (and more radical!) methods for solving problems: national-level mob action, for one obvious one. These methods hadn't yet been discredited, so people could hope in them.
Of these, it seems to me that Social Media is the closest to being a genuinely novel development rather than an incremental evolution of what came before. Smartphones and related technology radically reshaped the media ecosystem in a very short period of time, and in a way that heavily favored upstarts and rabble-rousers and heavily disadvantaged the establishment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.
The original Marathon had great writing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.
To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project. And sure, it goes both ways, to the point that Europeans pick up American memes that on a first analysis make no sense in their context.
Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European. In my view, the Enlightenment was from the start a European project, and Anglo-American participation is an outlier, albeit a significant one, but the distinction arguably elides more than it reveals. Organs like the WEF are part of a distinct, cohesive, long term socio-political construct, and that construct observably transcends national boundaries.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
SCOTUS recognizes that the equilibrium where the public and elected representatives and elected governments in many of the richest and most populous (blue) states are prevented from legislating their own domestic in-state firearms policy (which does not relate to core federal government spheres like defense, border control, foreign policy, interstate commerce or central banking) against their will is unstable and will, at some point, result in the court being packed and the US’ brief experiment in comparatively greater freedoms reverting to the current European/Canadian/Australian model, not just when it comes to gun ownership but in every other case too.
When you boil it down, the question is over where the power is kept and how one accesses it.
Your claim is that Blue States can't be bound by the Constitution if they disagree with those restrictions, because otherwise they'll overthrow the system. If this is an accurate description, then to the extent that Reds wish to have their own access to power, the key to accessing it is to present a similar threat of disastrous consequences unless their preferred carve-outs are granted.
One notes that establishing sufficient threats probably results in less stability for the system overall, not more, but human collectives have never been all that good at math.
The same motivation to accommodate local political sentiment, for example, is what struck down mandatory gerrymandering of black-majority districts in some southern states that was forced upon them, and what struck down Roe.
As has been pointed out many times before, Black-Majority districts and overturning Roe are examples of ending blue impositions on red areas. We still have never had Red constitutional impositions on Blue areas, while we've had the reverse for many decades running, and still have many active. "We'll consider gradually ramp down our abuses of your autonomy, on the understanding that you will never, ever get to abuse our autonomy in any way" is not an attractive pitch for the side that has been relentlessly abused for many decades.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
apologies, my phrasing was ambiguous; obviously there's a human victim, but also a human perpetrator. A human raped another human, using a dog as a tool.
Your distinction seems reasonable, but the dolphins thing I've heard before and still is a bit horrifying. I think you're right that it's assigning far more moral agency than a dolphin can actually support, but on the other hand the idea that dolphins are approaching human-smart is endemic in most contexts, and I've heard rumors of them getting nonconsensually amorous with humans. There's an element of "it doesn't matter if they don't understand why this is wrong, I do".
I guess that's just another reason to stay clear of deep water.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Actual communist countries also didn't allow people to shoplift freely, consume narcotics in the street, walk into their countries by the millions and demand welfare. Lots of things become possible when you have full immunity from Progressive social critique.
Speaking plainly, the problem isn't figuring out that the calculus kid and the illiterate kid shouldn't be in the same classroom. The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom, and is almost entirely insulated from any form of consequences for the bad outcomes their desires produce. It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
In this context, there would pretty clearly be a human involved, so the term seems appropriate.
There's a lot going on in this conversation, sadly much more than I have time to engage with. One note, though, from what I hope is well-outside the trajectory of expected apologetics, and thus might be of interest.
the God of the Bible is a vengeful Bronze age deity who talks about doing Bronze age god shit to His enemies in the Old Testament, and then comes in with forgiveness and mercy for his enemies in the New Testament, and you have to go through a lot of mental gymnastics to convince yourself they are the same god.
In World War 2, we burned whole cities to ash. This is a thing that I think most educated people are aware exists, but also have avoided internalizing: we burned those cities and everyone and everything in them, and near as I can tell we, collectively, didn't feel particularly bad about it, and still don't. There's some people who clearly do, and sometimes they make some half-hearted gesture at getting the rest of us to feel bad about it too, but it doesn't really stick.
Now, possibly the people who do feel bad about it are correct, and possibly the people who don't feel bad about it (and I am one of them) are wrong. but if the people who don't feel bad about it aren't wrong, I think you should at least consider the idea that humans have not actually changed much in recorded human history, and consider whether the "bronze age" token actually belongs in that sentence, and how the sentence is changed by removing it.
My impression is that "Bronze age" is expressing the idea that the sorts of actions so-described are things we have moved beyond, evolved past, some embarrassing element of our mythic past. But in fact, our last century was defined by numerous such large-scale "bronze-age" attrocities, and I am not at all confident that the next century will escape being defined by them as well. Far from being an embarrassment that we've moved past, it is an inescapable part of who and what we are, that we will never, ever be rid of. And if that is the case, it seems that the stories you refer to go from alienating and thus useless, to familiar and thus at least potentially enlightening, even if we continue to classify them as myth, even if their only relevance is as a mirror to human nature.
Could you perhaps explain some of the technically impressive or interesting elements used?
@gattsuru
@muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
@Primaprimaprima
Sure. It's the strong linework, and specifically what I guess might be called Economy/Confluence of line.
Strong Linework
Are you familiar with Blind Contour drawing? Take a piece of paper and a pencil, pick something you want to draw, look directly at it, and while keeping your eyes fixed on it, start drawing the outlines ("contours") of your subject without looking at your paper or pencil. This will result in a really bad drawing but surprisingly good linework, because it focuses all your attention on the exact nature of the contours, going from eye > line without the usual perceptual filters that kick in when you go eye > memory > line. With no spatial points of reference, the lines get all scrambled on top of each other, but with a bit of practice the individual lines themselves get smooth, strong, confident, and the skill gained carries over to non-blind contour drawing.
I want to stress that "smooth, strong confident" aren't just arbitrary labels being deployed for glazing purposes. Compare this drawing to this drawing; to my eye the former drawing is much, much more interesting than the latter, despite the latter being far more detailed/rendered. Look at that former drawing, and try to figure out how many actual lines there are. Is that just one line?
This, incidentally, is why a lot of "fine art" linework, including angelus novus, look "childlike". When kids first grab a pencil, they have very strong linework, but no form at all. As they learn, usually they chase form, and lose the linework strength in the struggle to get control of where the lines go, and you end up with something like the daredevil drawing above, where the lines are all sorta-kinda in the right place but overall they just feel blah. To get good, they need strong lines and good control. Fine artists who focus on very simple, very strong lines with less emphasis on being in the right place feel very childlike. think of it as a game to get the most impression out of the least amount of lines. It's a game you can play yourself, and it's both a lot of fun and does a good job teaching art technique.
Here's another example, and another; you don't need a lot of lines/rendering, you need the right lines in the right places, and less can be much, much more. Any snapshot of reality includes infinite detail; one of the basic things art can be is to boil that infinity down to the minimum number of details needed to capture as much of the original image as possible, ideally triggering the viewer's own imagination to fill in the rest better than any artist ever could.
Economy/Confluence of Line
Okay, so less can be more. How much less, and how much more? Consider this stained glass piece. See how the characters' contours break them up into a relatively small number of simple shapes? Note especially how countours flow into each other; the contour lines framing the right edge of the priest's beard continue to frame the edges of his hand. there's a line running up Mary's back, up and over her head along the back of her shawl, and then down to her arm. There's another line that starts with her jaw, down her neck, and then down the whole front of her body, demarcating her cloak. Real contour lines can line up like this, but usually don't... but simplifying a bit, nudge them a bit, and you get this really pleasing confluence where one shape flows into the next. Our eyes naturally follow contour lines, and so when the contours flow into each other, the eye naturally flows around and around with them, and picks up much more of a cohesive impression of the whole of the image, rather than only focusing on one part.
Take this idea and push it a bit, and you get the art style of the animated film The Secret of Kells, where the whole point is to imitate stained glass in the character designs.
As mentioned, Mike Mignola is one of my favorite artists. If you look at his sketches, you'll see his characters often have this weird, lumpy nature, but they still feel weirdly evocative, expressive, alive. His style leans hard on economy/confluence of line. The shapes are simple, but still organic, details are strongly subordinate to the basic forms: on the Inger von Klempt sketch, note how none of the detail on her shoulder breaks the shoulder's contour, how the contour of her far arm bridges breast to hip and thigh. Note the minimal linework used to render the faces and hands. The lines aren't cleanly straight, and they're not cleanly curved; there's lots of little kinks and wiggles in them, and yet the total effect is significantly more pleasing to me than other artists dedicating themselves to the style but with more precision and detail. I think it's because the cruder linework gives an impression of detail without compromising the actual simplicity, giving the best of both worlds.
My favorite example is the cover illustration from Mignola's Art of Hellboy book. Zoom in on hellboy's face, and study the shading. Note the sort of checkerboard pattern between the shadowed blacks and the lit reds? See how that checkerboard is built out of confluence of line, and how few lines there are to build up a strong, contrasting expressive face? See how the contours flow into each other? It's amazing to me how he does so much with so little.
Now back to Angelus Novus. The painting looks like a terrible mess on first impression, but dig in and you'll see that that the whole thing is built out of strong linework and economy/confluence of line. Actually trace the lines and try to figure out how and in what order they were drawn, and you'll get a sense that the whole mess is actually built out of very simple components and rules compounding on each other. He's trading more strength for less precision than Mignola, and he's using a lot more abstraction. Some of his other pieces are more restrained and precise, some more abstract, but this idea seems like a major part of his style.
And it IS a style, and quite an effective technique. Mignola shows what one can do with it if they latch on to it and never let go; The difference between Klee and Mignola being, it seems to me, that Klee was obsessed with developing and exploring new techniques, and Mignola is obsessed with using the best of those techniques to express his ideas. Think of it like the symbiosis between science and engineering.
I don't actually like Angelus Novus much as a painting; like I said, it's a mess. I definitely don't think it's beautiful, quite the opposite in fact. The expression reminds me of the Dungeon Soup barbarian. The fingers and toes look like dicks. The overall effect is not great, IMO. But the technique it's built out of can do some absolutely amazing things, and the people who've done amazing those amazing things got it either from this painting or from similarly-goofy paintings. Even if I don't appreciate it much, it's undeniable that others did appreciate it greatly, and used it to make things that I do appreciate greatly, so I'm pretty confident there's something of actual substance there, even if I can't really grok it.
Finally, I think a lot of this discussion works a lot better if you shear away all the connotations of "Fine Art" as this grand pinnacle capstone of civilization that typifies "True Culture". This dude figured out a neat way to go about constructing a drawing. Other people built on it and made lots of neat drawings. That's how I tend to look at it; I understand that Academics would generally foam at the mouth at the idea of thinking Klee is okay but Mignola is the real shit. I'm even a bit leery of that conclusion myself, given that Mignola seems to depend on Klee. But at the end of the day, I only care about Klee at all because I love Mignola, and the Academy has too little influence on me to make me ashamed of that fact.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
"To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall for the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he – forgot.)
I would say that Game recognizes Game. Or does Neitzche "forget" the Last Men or the Tarantulas, in your view? Certainly he doesn't seem to mind making his own appeals to Justice, does he? Or am I reading him wrong?
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I wouldn't think you'd deny it. I guess I'm trying to communicate why I think the problem is systemic, rather than anecdotal. It's one thing for there to be "a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering". Humans will inevitably human. But what the art world has done, what they are going to keep doing, is anti-human, and I will happily spend the rest of my life working to dismay them.
What do you think NASA has been doing since the shuttle was discontinued? I promise you, it wasn’t feminist glaciology.
This account is not encouraging, and coincides with other highly-plausible critiques of NASA culture and procedures. "Feminist glaciology" isn't a perfect description, but "paying people to spin their wheels and produce nothing useful ever while actively abusing those who try to do better" seems like an analogue too close for comfort.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Why should anyone else's reaction be more meaningful than mine? They're just saying "Yum!" with more words.
...And to be clear, I'm at least provisionally willing to give a "Yum!" for this specific work, and my reasons for doing so appear to align with yours: technical details of the process. On the other hand, it seems you share my skepticism of the work in the broader context outside the technical.
"That claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed" seems like a reasonable statement, and one that I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
in case you're wondering, this is what it looks like to roll a nat-1 on your knowledge check.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
I think Angelus Novus is "kitsch".
As an artist, I would disagree. I could spend a week studying the painting, by which I mean attempting to redraw it accurately, drawing variations on it, etc, and I am confident I would be a better artist at the end of that week, and art I made drawing on the lessons I learned from it would be better drawings than what I would have produced before.
The linework is very definitely not naivestic scribble. You can do really neat things with the techniques he's using there, whether you agree that he's done neat things with them or not.
It's referring to the Malinowski and Deschler shootings, among others.
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