FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Hmm, I guessed that was the girl from Deathloop.
Not Wolfenstein? Certainly not Gears.
But hasn’t she been in that series since the beginning?
Ikora Rey has been in the series since the beginning, and there was a time when I would have argued her as an example of "diversity" done right. I thought she was a pretty okay character back when I played; not nearly as interesting as Cayde-6, but then, who could be? Only, this is where her design lead. On the one hand, it didn't have to lead here; she could have been developed a million different ways. On the other hand, I think it was always going to lead here, because Bungie purged the non-Progressives, and this is what Progressives do.
Does giving her hair make that much of a difference? It’s not even blue!
I think it does make a pretty big difference, actually. Of course Destiny's story needs to loop itself and its main characters back to the 1970s; It's not enough for Ikora to be a strong black female character, she needs to be a strong black female character from this specific era and context, this specific trope, in this specific way. Of course the notable on-screen romance needs to be Osiris/Saint-14. Of course we need the Gay Pride iconography slathered over everything in-game. Of course we need Nimbus as the main NPC for the penultimate expansion; there's a hundred dollars I'll never get back.
And now it's dead.
Why? Surely they know what game they’re playing by this point.
And yet inserting black lesbian girl boss into a popular bro-shooter still happens almost every time. Many of these decisions really are ideological, and very many recent games a have failed because of it.
It's flag planting. It's always been flag planting. Taking a territory that belongs to your hated enemies and putting your mark on it.
You expressed skepticism about the prevalence of the specific cited pattern; I think I'm providing at least a reasonable amount of evidence that the pattern is real. But the pattern was asserted as an elaboration on how Flag Planting works, and it seems you're arguing pretty strongly that the flag-planting is real. You recognize the flags, and you endorse the claim of previously-shared territory they represent.
I would argue that Overwatch wasn't originally on the forefront of DEI technology, which is why it was repeatedly attacked by progressives for being insufficiently progressive, and senior staff were purged due to a moral panic, which in turn was caused by Progressive journalist culture warriors megaphoning false claims of sexual harassment and sexual impropriety. And now it is, by your own apparent framing, Progressive territory that Chuds have no standing to criticize.
Yes, Progressives see non-maximally-progressive media as territory to be captured. Yes, Progressives see it as good and necessary to plant flags on territory they capture. Yes, this has either resulted or closely correlated in significant drops in perceived quality for numerous franchises across the entertainment industry, to a degree that scarcely could have been imagined a decade or two ago. Yes, character redesigns/replacements/new main characters are a big part of how this is done, and making them a particular sort of black female is a notable example of the pattern. Progressives post video of public lectures where they lay all this out explicitly in plain language. I've observed the process in my own company. We've developed new terminology specifically to describe the resulting pathologies.
Launching new franchises with inclusion bait is not the same thing as adding inclusion bait into existing ones.
What's the difference? Why is that difference significant? Progressives view all media as their domain. They want to see that media conform to their ideals. This can be done in a variety of ways, but why are the differences in methods more significant than the nature of the change and the goals driving it? "Progressives will seek to gain control of a given media franchise and Christian Rock it into unrecognizability" is a claim with solid predictive potential, in my view.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
Pretty sure so, yes. There was a strong push from the gaming press against the popularity of souls-like games because their difficulty and the git-good attitude it fostered in their audience was exclusionary. Mix Tape and Wolverine are two recent major releases that lean heavily into minimizing difficulty and hand-holding the player; "yellow paint" design (look it up) has been a growing issue for a long time.
Sure, I haven’t been keeping up with the latest in bro-shooters, but which ones do you have in mind?
Here's an example, no scrolls, straight from the cranium: what extremely popular shooter franchise do you think this character is from?
Answer:
Bonus question: where in the popularity life-cycle of the franchise did this character design appear?
If you think Reds are "largely indifferent" to trans ideology and its integration into taxpayer-funded schools, I think you will find the real world a very surprising place going forward.
I can't actually think of a single real-world example where this pattern plays out. A similar pattern, I think, is the one where objectively-small-potatoes policies are seen as a test of control, and so have massive resources dedicated to them, because both sides understand the power of precedent and control of the default.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
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Can you name actual, historical examples of "Classical Liberals"?
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What did these people think of the French Revolution? Temperance? Communism?
...but humans revealed bible is the bigotry of small differences.
What makes the differences small? Like, I've heard this line a million times, but very rarely with an argument attached that actually demonstrated the basis for the assertion's correctness. It seems likely to me that attacking other humans' capacity for grouping into a homogeneous, stable unity is probably a super-useful predatory adaptation, and my grandmother, what long teeth you have seems like a fitting observation the home coalitions of many who have historically made this claim a centerpiece of their argumentation.
We'd much prefer to shank our neighbor for praying to the same deus in a slightly different way.
Yeah, see, stuff like this. Assuming peace is easy and so failure to achieve it is a moral failing. Assuming all religions or even all branches of a particular religion are basically the same, and so conflict is de facto unreasoning. Crystal defects are one of those features of the natural world that seem to have a lot of salience at all levels of scale, and the idea that human conflict is a "simple mistake" is both very recent and possessing both remarkably poor predictive accuracy and a strong correlation with other beliefs notable for their remarkably poor predictive accuracy.
Maybe the Son-of-God needed to preach about the need for forbearance, humility and compassion because humans find these ideas so difficult to maintain and generalize.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
But then the question becomes "what the hell is home?"
It's at least plausible that "home" is "not being ruled by people who hate you." That's it, and if so, that's at least arguably enough.
Imagine a world where ~1/3rd of all value weren't being burned actively making things worse.
This just reads like all the woke whinging about how the republicans were going to strip women of the rights to vote and establish a fascist dictatorship.
In other words the sort of thing that a large enough segment of a tribe believes utterly that it sets long-term political outcomes? Or are you going to argue that the beliefs you describe are rare among blues, or have not significantly shaped Blue politics over the last decade-and-change?
No, no one is in favor of broad spectrum debanking.
As @gattsuru notes, enough people have been in favor of it that it has already happened at considerable scale.
Amnesty isn't popular(dreamers is semi-but they'd be giving up a lot of political capital to get it because dems weakest issue in polling is immigration)
...Polling the current voting pool, right? What do the numbers look like for the post-amnesty voting pool?
and wouldn't ensure them permanent majorities because unless you start stupid wars in the middle east or send goons into Hispanic communities they're a pretty conservative constituency and would happily vote for a red tribe without the MAGA tendencies.
I'm MAGA. I'm not interested in a "Red Tribe" without the MAGA tendencies. Those are my tendencies. I intend to keep them, and to coordinate meanness against anyone who would deny them to me. I'm not interested in asking Blues permission to live in pursuit of my values. Why would I be?
We can observe the voting pattern of immigrants who can legally vote, and we can poll the ones who can't legally vote currently. My understanding is that they lean overwhelmingly democrat/progressive/blue. "you can always change your policies to appeal to the new voters who prefer to vote for policies like ours" does not seem to me to fit the definition of a compromise; Red Tribe has already compromised as much and possibly significantly more than it can afford to, to the point that we are now employing lifelong democrats as our champions.
But in the end, arguing over whether the Dems might perform an amnesty and whether they might secure political closure thereby seems less interesting to me than the question of what the response should be should these events transpire. What should Red Tribe do, in your opinion, if the Democrats were to win an election, legalize all the immigrants, and then win the next election in a landslide? What is the prudent, reasonable, responsible action we should coordinate behind?
Suppose further that Elections Have Consequences, and Blue Tribe takes this victory and begins doing very Blue things to Reds nation-wide, in ways that we consider profoundly harmful and unjust? What is the peaceful, orderly, political solution in that eventuality, unlikely as you consider it to be?
The first amendment still rules in this land and enjoys broad support, the banning of tik tok didn't even stick and it's a foreign agitprop tool.
I disagree. The First Amendment cannot protect me in any meaningful way from the coordinated meanness of Blues. The last decade has provided numerous and pointed examples as to why and how this is so. I do not care about your explanations that the coordinated ruin of my life for daring to speak my mind publicly actually isn't what the First Amendment was designed to prevent, so it's totally okay. I care that I cannot speak freely without disastrous consequences, that Blue Tribe has expended vast resources to make things this way, and that neither you nor any other moderate or blue, individually or collectively, has ever or will ever do anything to change that.
This is you, this is your project, you are preaching this message on this site most days.
My project is to point out that faith in the American sociopolitical system is disastrously misplaced. I am not the person who made that true. I merely insist on pointing out that it is true, and what the obvious consequences of it being true are. Things that have happened have happened, even when them happening is highly incompatible with faith in our present system of governance. This was why it was actually very important to keep them from happening, and failing that, to suitably punish those responsible and set a hard precedent that they wouldn't be tolerated in the future. Sadly, this didn't happen, and it didn't happen enough times that it's not really arguable that it's ever going to happen in any meaningful way under Blue or even moderate rule.
The only pushback Woke ever had was coordinated through Trump or through MAGA. Blues cheered it on, moderates kept their heads down, Reds suffered what they must, far, far, far past the point where conscience should have spoken. You can argue if you like that Woke had a point, or wasn't really that big a deal, or was blown out of proportion. The things I have seen Blues do, I am not willing to tolerate. The toleration shown for these things by Blues, whether grassroots or general population or leadership or elites, I am likewise not willing to tolerate. To the extent that you and other blues or moderates are willing to tolerate these things, I think it is reasonable to point out why that stance is likely to be a bad idea long-term, for obvious reasons of basic human nature.
glad to no longer need to mouth Trumps retarded lies in order to stay in the good graces of his sycophants.
Specific, deliberate Blue lies sparked the BLM movement and killed eight thousand Black Americans in a couple years, and they'll absolutely do it again. Specific, deliberate Blue lies have destroyed our educational system, ruining the best opportunity millions of American children of all races (but particularly blacks) might have had at a better life trajectory, and they will absolutely keep right on doing it indefinitely. They will never stop telling these lies, or the many other similar lies that form the foundation of the Progressive project. They will never learn, they will never repent, they will just keep right on ruining everything they touch so long as their access to other people's resources are maintained. The Cornell Seven are one of the most recent examples; basic object permanence should have prevented the entire episode, but that is not a capability Blues as a social collective possess.
I understand that you and others here have strong negative views on Donald Trump and his supporters. I understand that you believe these opinions to be well-founded. I do not want to discourage you or others in any way from expressing them. What I do want you to understand is that my attitude toward Blue Tribe is, as best as I am able to determine, derived from a solid factual foundation. I will not do you the disservice of pretending as though your disgust with Trump or even MAGA is some sort of elaborate misunderstanding based on fictions and rumor. You might do me a similar courtesy. Politicians who do not appear to disgust you have talked about how seeing my children murdered would be a good thing, and people very much like you looked the other way, or cheered. Politicians who do not appear to disgust you have allowed masked men armed with loaded rifles to take over public spaces and shoot at people, while ordering the police to stand down, and people like you looked the other way, or cheered. And on, and on, and on, and on. These are things I know for a fact you will either allow or are, at best, utterly powerless to prevent. That knowledge has serious consequences.
@aqouta too, why not.
Immigration amnesty, multiple million new voters who vote ~70% democrat. Game over. This has been a publicly stated policy objective of the Democratic party for at least two decades.
Broad-spectrum debanking and lawfare against political organization by Red Tribe, systematically crush all remaining Red Tribe institutions, "Disinformation controls" shut down conservative communication, common-knowledge production and grassroots organization. Game Over. This has been a publicly-stated policy objective for at least a decade, and was actively being implemented a few short years ago.
The democrats haven't even chosen a nominee yet and you already think whoever is nominated will overthrow the republic and constitution?
No plausible democratic nominee would oppose either of the above plans. They're all on record enthusiastically supporting these policies, and other similar policies with a similar terminus.
Further, the Game Over isn't gated by Blue Tribe setting up camps or whatever. The Game Over hits when when a sufficient number of Americans lose faith in the political process to begin earnestly pursuing alternatives that the reaction becomes self-sustaining. We've been watching norms collapse and institutions blow out for well over a decade; at some point, there aren't enough remaining to hold what's left of America together; we're an accretion that hasn't been hit hard enough yet to scatter.
This is a conversation we can have in advance. You can, in this moment, extrapolate out potential events and ask yourself how you expect your tribe to react, how you expect the other tribe to react, what basis this model is based on, how it plays out given previous history. You can do this in a way where it delivers you a comforting story about everything working out, and even that is useful: just ask yourself what the discontinuity is to get us from our current trajectory to the one you want to believe in.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
The tl;dr is that the median voter thinks that politicians have a "fix all the problems without raising taxes or hurting anyone sympathetic" button right in front of them which they are not pressing...
- "Fix all the problems" - observably exists for a variety of issues.
- "Without raising taxes" - observably exists for a variety of issues.
- "Without hurting anyone sympathetic" - this is the pinch point. But once the attention focuses here, you see that "considered sympathetic" is itself a free variable; you can coordinate the addition or removal of sympathy from "anyone", at scale and without apparent limit. There's good arguments being made from both sides that sympathy has been misallocated, and that this misallocation is, in fact, a serious obstacle to making things much better than they are. Policy starvation being what it is, people demand solutions, those solutions will route through the path of least resistance... and politics becomes, necessarily, an exercise in cruelty.
I'm currently trying to decide what I want to buy and/or build. A CMMG banshee 9mm AR with FRT and suppressor is up there on the list, but I'm also really tempted to buy a cheap 5.56 bolt action used, and get the barrel swapped to 9mm with an integrated suppressor. more engineering would be needed to make it magazine-fed, but it seems like it'd make a pretty nice de lisle-alike. I also want to try building my own takedown .22, either based on the AR-7 or on the marlin or ruger takedown guns.
looking at the options, though, it's hard to see why it's worth going to the manual actions or single-shots when semi-autos are so cheap. I have a fascination with cheap guns, and one of the things I'm curious about is if you could use a .22 or 9mm adapter, or even just an AR barrel, to rework one of those cheap $50 turkish single-shot 12-gauges into an integrally-suppressed single shot, using the shotgun barrel as the outer wall of the suppressor. Or maybe see what you could do with a high-point 9mm carbine; those guns are actually cheap cheap. if you're paying $3-400 for even a used manual-action rifle and then reworking it to a pistol caliber, it's only a couple hundred more for a high-capacity AR, and actually less for the cheaper options.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
They will never, ever get them back. They didn't get 18-inch barrel restrictions back when they fucked up and lost it. They didn't get braces or bump-stocks back when those leaked through. They haven't gotten FRTs back. They won't get SBRs or suppressors back either. If they are smart, they'll recognize the fait accompli and just let it go. If they're not smart, my guess is you see another round of Red State defiance the way you did with the border, and likely worse if they double-down.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Any system which says killing is generally wrong.
So... the Amish? I'm not Amish, and I'm pretty sure you're not Amish. America has never been ruled by such a system. No European, and indeed no Asian or African or South-American or Australian or Middle-Eastern nation I'm aware of has ever been ruled by such a system. I understand that hypothetical moral systems meeting this definition exist, and I understand that particular religious or philosophical communities exist attempting to follow such systems; these latter universally exist within much larger, far more complex systems which work the other way.
In a time before prisons one could say that less killing was likely to happen overall if murderers were executed in a timely fashion. However this is not timely or necessary under that standard since the prison prevents him from killing anyone else.
Prisons are for crimes that don't merit execution; those prisoners would be better off without having to cohabitate with the murderous. Prisons obviously do not prevent murder, and I am not buying arguments that this is due to lack of interest in preventing prison murder.
So was famine and many other maladies until recently.
I can point to complex societies without famine. You cannot point to complex societies without hierarchy.
Evidence required. With one caveat, I am not anti-hierarchy, I am anti state.
What is your definition of hierarchy? Can you point me to a real-world, actual example of a large-scale, complex, hierarchical non-state-run society?
Yes it is better because it is less territorial and violent.
It is often said that the police are just the largest gang. In a comparison between the police of a city and the non-police gangs, which do we observe being less territorial and less violent? Which do we observe normal citizens preferring to live under? We recently ran an experiment with drastically reducing or eliminating policing; does it seem to you that the results of this experiment supported the idea that policing was more violent and more territorial than non-policing?
Charlie Kirk was murdered by a private individual for political ends. Bryan Malinowski was, in my view, murdered by the federal government, likewise for political ends. I consider both murders serious problems. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Kirk's murder is a much more serious problem and a much harder problem to solve than Malinowski's. In the case of Malinowski, there is a legible off-switch to the murder machine, even if it's difficult to access and operate. In Kirk's case, there is no off switch and the threat is essentially unbounded.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
People need to see it happen, and they need to understand that this is not something they can overcome with language games and infinite isolated demands for rigor.
I do not think this will help deter anyone. It will not deter a single jihadist. It will hardly deter any normal criminal -- the ones who don't have the stomach for it will simply not watch.
What part of the sentence you quoted do you think was referring to jihadists or normal criminals?
You are arguing public perception. I am also arguing public perception. I believe that execution of murderers is good and proper. I believe, both in this matter and in many, many others, that attempting to reach accommodation with those of incompatible values has been an obvious chronic failure, and the proper path forward is to do what I and others like me perceive to be correct, with little to no regard for how this is perceived by the outgroup. We should offer the public a concrete alternative to the Blue Tribe consensus, not in terms of theory but in terms of actual practice, so that our way and their way can be directly compared. The outgroup does not grant consideration to our moral positions, and we should cease to grant consideration to theirs. the alternative is to be led by the nose in a game of "optics" designed from the ground up to be unwinnable; "only do things that Blue Tribe bigots won't hiss slurs at you for" is a recipe for paralytic abdication.
I do not perceive public execution of a traitorous mass-murderer to be shameful. I do not care if he is in a wheelchair; why should I? His powerlessness is not in question here, this is an execution of a condemned prisoner, not an honorable duel. I do not perceive a valid moral argument against execution of violent criminals, much less murderers, still less mass-murderers, and am entirely comfortable with a debate over the consequences of this approach versus the status quo. I think it is better to force Blues to burn resources attempting to shame us for doing what we perceive to be correct, than to do things we perceive to be wrong in the false hope that they will not shame us, thus granting them further power without contest. I perceive the latter strategy to have resulted in vast ruin, while the former strategy has delivered more victories in a shorter timeframe than any within my tribe dreamed possible. If you believe that this will in some way offend the normies, feel free to explain why widespread celebration of actual lawless murder in numerous previous and quite recent cases has not offended the normies even more.
With a public execution, most of the public in favor of it will decide that as long as it happens, they do not need to see it done.
What evidence leads you to believe this is the case? I think they do need to see it done. I think seeing it done, and the national conversation that follows, will have a significant positive effect on the state of our nation. Certainly I will be drawing comparisons to the reaction to this execution and to previous lawless murders. The disparity in reaction is obvious and instructive.
And MAGA will obviously turn this into a media circus.
Should we discuss media circuses, and what they tell us about the people generating them? I do not perceive a shortage of actual, past-tense media circuses with which we might contextualize the hypothetical media circus you are predicting, nor is such an analysis one I expect to get the worst end of. It seems to me that your post above was exceedingly uncharitable; if you want to talk about media circuses and their effect on public opinion, why not reach for the rich context readily available? I think it unlikely that MAGA is going to turn this execution into more of a media circus than Blues did the murders of Kirk and Thompson, or the Lindsey Clancy saga, or the attempted assassinations of Trump, or the death of George Floyd and so on and on and on. Is it somehow worse to have a media circus over the execution of a traitorous murderer than it is over the murder of a law-abiding businessman or a milquetoast political activist or a multiple-felon drug addict ODing in police custody because he swallowed his stash? Or is this a Russell's conjugation thing: my social movement, your media circus, his shameless propaganda? Do these questions seem unreasonable to you, and if so, why?
Still, I concede that attacking MAGA over what I think they might want to do was bad on my part. I am confident there will be enough for me to criticize after their circus without me having to speculate what the distasteful particulars might be beforehand.
Fair enough. Let's pick it up when the facts are in.
TL;DR - you are appealing to an image of social norms that seem entirely fictional to me, based on direct observation of the real world. I decline to be swayed by such fictions, and I think confronting them head-on is straightforwardly better than attempting compromise with them. The idea that there is some sort of stable, respectable social consensus that must be respected or accounted for is entirely unsupportable, and it is better to actually have the argument here and now than to allow appeals to this fictional consensus to pass unchallenged.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
The government is bad and is not justified in the morally wrong things that it does.
Morally wrong things not being justified morally is a tautology. Under what moral system is execution of murderers wrong?
There is no evidence that we need a government at all
Government is an irreducible constant in all human society at any scale. Cooperation requires coordination requires hierarchy.
And all excuses made about retribution and desert are quite hypocritical as soon as you dissolve the silly magic of the thin tinpot badge that separates member of the state from human being.
Let's suppose we abolish the state. Do you like it better if individual families coordinate retribution against those who kill their members? Killing the egregiously guilty is an emergent property of human nature, not the state. The state's contribution is to add rules and safeguards to keep this behavior within bounds. You appear to be teeing up objections to prisons as well, but the existing state is already well-past the point of sustainability in terms of restraining the human instinct toward retribution. Remove the state and you will see much, much, much more retributive killing, not less.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
If you haven't seen em,
LGTM is a pop banger.
An AI Took Over This Music Video - more of a polemic, but I find it haunting.
That second one, Youtube served me after listening to the first one a bunch of times. The first one was sent to me by a buddy who's strongly anti-AI. And while passing it to another friend, he passed me back a third one by a completely different artist. This stuff's everywhere it seems.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
+1 on the AI music. I've being doing a bunch of work in the evenings to this playlist, particularly the third track, cockpit lights. It's not complicated, it's not some revelatory masterpiece. It just works for me, I groove to it.
More and more of my regular music listening is AI generated now, to the point that I think it's probably been 90%+ in the last two months.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Even for pro death penalty people, I do not think there is a bigger point in making the execution public.
Execution is the proper and just disposition of some crimes, of which this is one. It is not a shameful event to be hidden away in a cellar, it is a demonstration that our society possesses the moral conviction to see that justice is done. People need to see it happen, and they need to understand that this is not something they can overcome with language games and infinite isolated demands for rigor. Further, this method is better than many others, certainly better than pseudo-medicalizations like lethal injection or fossilized techno-futurism like the electric chair or gas chamber. It is proper that this person should be killed, and so we kill them with our standard killing tools.
But then why go for something as tame as a firing squad? Where is the suspense, the thrill?
If you are wondering why your opponents, who you have modelled as cartoonishly evil, are not acting cartoonishly evil, maybe it's because your model is wrong? Maybe you should revise your model, rather than detailing all the ways their actual behavior could diverge less from your imagination's paintings of how awful they could be?
I have watched Blues publicly celebrate lawless murder of innocents, many, many times. Would you appreciate it if I wrote a post like this about something Blues hadn't done, but I could imagine them doing?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Disqualify everyone who thinks more about pussy than x-risk and you’ll be left only with the scheming eunuchs.
Sounds like a win. When have the scheming eunuchs ever led us wrong?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
-C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age (1948)
There's an upper limit on how concerned Christians are supposed to be about physical survival.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.
Can you give some examples where the "more" would diverge meaningfully from the "sheer destructive power"? What's an example of a "mature civilization" with minimal destructive potential? The Amish?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
I'm actually a moderate fan of the guy he's mocking, but yeah, pretty much this. There's already discourse around indie devs trying to build a following by posting video of their in-development projects to social media, and some prompter scoops their game mechanics and hits market shortly thereafter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.
We don't have a working, common understanding of what is right. Like, at all. The social cohesion is gone. The common values are gone. The common history is gone. The good will, good faith, brotherhood, all gone. You are an alien to me. Who is "we", Kemosabe?
I understand the historical context of the sorts of appeals that you are making here, but it's an organic process, not an incantation, and organic things perish.
We move away from defined-by-birth absolutely-no-exceptions-closed-to-new-entrants societies, and towards a more universalist ethics, or
There is no universalist ethics available; this is not how humans work, it is not how humans have ever worked, it is not how humans are ever going to work. Even Christianity cannot accomplish this: from the crooked timber &etc.
We condemn our posterity to endless who's-in-who's-out conflict and a grim dark future in which there is only war.
Alternatively, we fight for a while and then have peace for a while, as we've done many times before. "History Continues" seems like a pretty viable third option, your declarations to the contrary.
This was the case sixty-two years and one month ago, and it remains true today.
They failed sixty-two years and one month ago, and in all the intervening years, and it turns out that the resources burned on these attempts were scarce and could not be fully replaced, notable among them social cohesion. This is sort of the problem of running a system on vibes and zero accountability: sooner or later, reality intrudes, and when it does you're down all the resources spent on vibin'.
You are not being 'replaced' just because people exist near you while being of more distant blood-relation than you are used to.
Of course not. It's the part where people who do not share your values assemble a coalition that wins the vote, and then uses the power of the state to shut you out of political power long-term, deprives you of equal protection under the law, and then uses explicit or implicit state power to dance on your head. The problem is that once the "people exist near you while being of more distant blood-relation than you are used to" is accomplished, the rest of this sequence can happen without any good options available to arrest the process cleanly and with minimal chaos.
Do you understand that while in one sense anything can be voted on, there is another sense in which some things aren't up for a vote? Or do you believe that Democracy is a universal solvent to all the contentions of mankind, and that any human conflict can simply be resolved by voting on it? If by importing multiple millions of foreigners in a relatively short timeframe has the result of putting things up for a vote in the first sense that aren't up for a vote in the second, what do you suppose happens next?
I don't believe this, and I don't understand why you would claim it. Undocumented immigration is illegal. Affirmative action is illegal. Weed smoking is illegal, or was until very recently. The Constitution itself offers ironclad protections to free speech and the right to keep and bear arms, in a purely hypothetical way that has no actual impact anywhere Blues win political power.
Laws that can't and won't be enforced should not be referenced as reassurance that the things the law bans aren't a problem worth worrying about. Show me the people in jail for breaking the law, and then we can talk.
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