FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d ago
Divergence of language is useful in a variety of ways.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d 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
6d 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 most recent instance of Atheism ate itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
You can call the [expletive deleted] all the bad names you want in the privacy of your own skull, but when writing on here you must - and it will not be excused if you do not - adopt the persona of an early 20th century academic in an M.R. James tale. Well dear dear, I was somewhat taken aback by the proposal as set out by my good colleague KillTheScum about killing the scum, i.e. me and those of my ilk.
"Killing scum is certainly not a policy humans innately abhor, but the wide variance in definitions of 'scum' seems to me worthy of attention in discussions such as this one. It appears to me that a large plurality considers those who espouse the views you are arguing for here to be scum worth killing. If this be the case, how should we proceed?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
So bring it on! I don't care if we won't win but I'll FIGHT LIKE HELL for my people and if I die I know I'll have died a proud black man who stood for dignity instead of cowering negro who submitted to slavery. I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!
For what it's worth, this is the correct response.
But I don't know, when I see someone essentially laying out a justification for bringing back slavery, how am I supposed to respond, as a black person?
Briefly: "You appear to be advocating the unlimited oppression of, at a minimum, ~40 million of your fellow countrymen. Why should they accept this oppression, and why do you think your way of life will survive if they do not?"
Less Briefly:
"No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold."
To the extent that you believe such people are worth being concerned about, I think the proper response depends on your values.
From a practical materialist perspective, the proper response is to cultivate the coldness of heart necessary for effective long-term resistance. It seems to me that this involves not only the willingness to fight, but also the willingness to endure whatever hardships are necessary to maximize chances of winning that fight, including humiliation, misery and despair.
From a Christian perspective, one is required to love their enemies, as maddening as that requirement may be.
One is that lawfare contributes to a decline in civility.
Yes. As I and many others have pointed out an innumerable number of times over the last decade, at the time when such observations might have done some good if people were willing to listen.
Naturally, the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump, so you might say turnaround is fair.
"the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump" is an interesting phrase.
In the abstract, if party A engages in some minimal level of lawfare against party B, I think you would agree that it's possible that the correct response is for party B to object, but otherwise continue their business as before. If party A continues to unilaterally escalate the level of lawfare, do you think there is a level at which it is reasonable for Party B to engage in lawfare back?
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If you do not think there is a level at which engaging in reciprocal lawfare is justified, then lawfare must be a very bad thing indeed. What alternative consequences should be imposed on Party A for their engagement in this very bad behavior?
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If you do think there is a level at which engaging in reciprocal lawfare is justified, what is that level and why are you confident that we have not already reached it? And in this branch is why I think "The Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump" is an interesting phrase.
What is "lawfare"? Does it have a commonly-understood, rigorously-applied definition? You claim the Democrats have "done a lot of lawfare against Trump"; was this lawfare generally recognized as such at the time? If not, was it recognized at some later time preceding, to put it delicately, five minutes ago? Can you name specific incidents where the democrats used lawfare against Trump, where you yourself recognized it as lawfare at the time? Can you show how the awareness of the existence of lawfare generated sufficient internal resistance from within the blue sphere to impede further such efforts?
Suppose I object in principle to lawfare, and want to see less of it. You are telling me that "the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump". My recollection is that this is not a sentiment Blues were willing to endorse when the lawfare in question was actually happening, which leads me to suspect that the reason Blues are willing to endorse it now is because they're on the wrong end of it. If we observably get closer to consensus that lawfare is actually a problem when my side reciprocates, why should I accept an argument that my side should refrain from reciprocating?
How deep does this newfound enlightenment go? Are the journalist and academic classes, the bureaucracy and the Democratic party itself willing to admit that "the democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump", or is hearing it from pseudoAnons in an irrelevant corner of the internet supposed to be sufficient? If this is a bad response, what other response do you believe would be more productive?
But it will also be a further step of escalation. At the moment, Democrats and MAGA are not yet in a state of total war against each other.
The state of total war between the tribes is not inevitable, but it is much more likely than other outcomes. You are correct to recognize that this is an escalation spiral. Unfortunately, actually breaking out of an escalation spiral requires considerably more than the statement "we are in an escalation spiral".
My second objection is that it will likely not work particularly well against the SPLC. So Trump's move will simply further normalize wasting taxpayer money to harass political opponents in cases which will result in not guilty verdicts.
How much waste of taxpayer money to harass political opponents is currently happening, and how much has happened in the past decade?
Even if by some miracle Trump secures a victory against the SPLC and a few leaders go to prison for donation fraud, this will not be a major victory. The SJ left will not shrug and say "they destroyed the SPLC, too bad that nobody is keeping tabs on the far right now". They will simply found a new organization, and hire the former employees with all their informer contacts.
Of course they will. The win here isn't jailing SPLC leadership or shutting down the org. It's probably better for me if they continue exactly as they have indefinitely!
It is better to consider the SPLC not as an organization, but as a particular instantiation of a cluster of political tactics. The proper goal here is not to maximally-suppress this particular cluster, but rather to suppress the tactic in general. When the SPLC's set of tactics is deployed in the future, I and hopefully others will point out how such tactics have been proven to work in the past, and argue that they should not be allowed to operate in the future. I will argue that the SPLC was for decades running awarded extreme levels of deference and influence while operating as a socially-corrosive grift, and as a consequence neither it nor its replacements should be given the benefit of the doubt. To arguments that it's different this time because it's a new organization, I will simply respond as you have here: it's a new coat of paint on the same old machine; it was a grift that Blues were willfully blind to before, and it will still be a grift that Blues are willfully blind to in the future.
This works better the more harm can be inflicted on the SPLC now; as we've seen with Trump's 34 felony convictions, the point is at the end of the day to generate legible, mimetically-fit tokens. Power flows from such things, and power is necessary.
The more fruitful discussion, it seems to me, is whether the viewpoint underpinning the above is wrong. One could argue that the SPLC was not a grift, that they were performing socially-useful work, that their tactics and policies were effective and necessary, that they and the money donated to them made the world a better place.
I note that no one seems all that interested in making such a case. It seems to me that this is because most here, even the Blues, understand that such an argument would not be sustainable, given the facts, but perhaps that assessment is wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups?
I think they correctly assessed that the various white supremacist orgs posed little to no actual threat, but that their activity directly benefited SPLC through driving donations and strengthened political advocacy for the policies SPLC preferred.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
A friend built his own MMORPG about twenty years ago; it's a very lo-fi thing, a real artifact of the year 2000, but it is in fact an RPG and it does in fact have massive multiplayer capability. He's recently started reworking it, using AI to assist in development, and I've been playtesting, suggesting improvements, and working on improving the art. It's a lot of fun, and the AI's contribution to the pace of development is staggering.
My other current project is trying to figure out Unity's Behavior system for setting up npc and enemy AI, with the goal of getting functional enemies into one of my old projects.
I don't recall whether you've laid out your political history in the past. Were you a blue, once upon a time? Did you have the experience of getting in a fight with other blues, and reaching for common ground and solidarity, only to have those appeals rejected out of hand because your refusal to get in line was considered proof that you were an ist or a phobe of some description? If you did, how did it incline you toward the people who treated you so?
Back in the day, before I made the decision to no longer have opinions on the subject, I lost count of the times I was called a nazi and an antisemite for arguing in favor of what appeared to me to be basic, foundational moral and legal values when it came to Israel's policies and the behavior of its agents. I stopped having those arguments, and indeed stopped consuming news about Israel or its various conflicts, because I realized I was becoming legitimately antisemitic through frustration and disgust with the behavior of my opposites and their coalition. And for what it's worth, with some years of remove, I can recognize that I bought into extremely foolish underdog narratives of the other side, and gave them a pass for their own crimes and atrocities because they were committed against the side I saw as more in the wrong. This was stupid, but it didn't spring from congenital hatred of Jews, it came from the observation of entrenched and fattened callousness and injustice. You might say I believed I was judging them by the content of their character.
Now, I no longer have an opinion on the subject. This statement is not a pose or a linguistic strategy; I do not want and will not allow myself to have an opinion, to root for a side. I have done my best to cauterize the portion of my brain previously dedicated to such concerns, and this is a policy I intend to maintain for the rest of my life. My conclusion is that the land is cursed, and people generally would be well-advised to live elsewhere.
That being said, as someone who has been through this from the opposite side and is watching the shifting sands of ideology, I think the sort of reflexive dismissal you and many others have deployed on this topic doesn't seem like it's working well long-term.
When considering the culture war as a whole, would you say that accusations of racism or sexism have generally been false?
And certainly there are a lot of American Jews who don't like Netanyahu or don't like various actions Israel has taken. There are very few who want Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state.
Yes. This is my point. There are significant differences between "I don't like this" and "I think something should be done about this" and "I am willing to fight to see something done about this". With regard to the general Jewish population, negative attitudes toward Israel cluster around the first of these, and the last of these are very, very rare.
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