FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
I always deeply resented the sort of "wisdom" you're describing, and that hasn't really changed. I resent the fact that our political establishment has insulated itself from any form of legal accountability, and one of the reasons I continue to support Trump is because I want the contrast as stark as possible. Prior to Trump, one could claim that the insulation from legal consequences was at least impartial, because both sides enjoyed it. Now we see that both sides enjoyed it because they were part of the establishment, not because the system was actually impartial. The common knowledge is useful for coordinating defiance to that establishment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Judging by precedent, studiously ignoring them seems to be a popular option.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
They are literally tracking all the online purchases of people buying 3d printers, checking them against social media and reports by leftist informants, and raiding people at 3am.
Could you provide a source for this? I like to keep abreast of current developments on this front.
In any case, what do they do if you have a 3d printer and no social media?
Thinking about "revolution" is insane with the kind of tyranny you're facing.
I suppose that depends rather heavily on how you expect a revolution to work. Some are easier to execute than others.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Certainly they are not.
Certainly they are. The guns are never, ever going to go away. Registration is not going to happen. Confiscation is not going to happen. They're still trying to go after the manufacturers and dealers, but DIY manufacturing gets easier and more accessible every year, and we're well past the point where this process can be stopped or even meaningfully slowed. Enforcement on any of this, whether against the gun culture or against criminals, is a complete joke.
Meanwhile, the Gun Culture has learned to actively erode existing laws through malicious compliance and technological innovation, and are doing an excellent job of radicalizing the community as a whole to reject the legitimacy of gun control laws. The Fudds are all but extinct, and the people who replaced them are moving from "I lost them in a boating accident" to "I didn't lose shit." I am pretty sure I'm going to see the NFA die in my lifetime, one way or the other. Concealed Carry continues to steadily expand. And as fantastic as all that is, we've barely started on the low-hanging fruit. There's beautiful avenues of practical lawfare/tech development just lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up and thus further beclown state and federal laws.
Yes, it's easier for the blues to violate the letter and the spirit of the laws they don't like, thanks to their stranglehold on institutional support. But it is not only possible to do as they have done, it is inevitable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The above-mentioned merchants, "merchants" being shorthand for industrious citizens of all descriptions. The people who make, build, grow, fix, plan, engineer, coordinate, invest and so on. Those people need an impartial system of law once what they build reaches a certain level of complexity, but the law exists to reduce friction between those building society. It certainly does not build society itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
For a standard prison, no it isn't. Prisoners can communicate with the outside world and file lawsuits, to give two pertinent differences.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
It has failed?
Yes, the educational system has failed. It has never delivered the results it was built to deliver. Increasingly, it cannot deliver even the lesser results it used to provide. Its funds have massively increased without any measurable improvement in outcomes, but with a massive increase in partisan benefits for Blue Tribe, who have used them to secure nakedly partisan political advantages, and to abuse people like me without recourse.
What does yours look like?
It looks like a large and increasing portion of my tax dollars being delivered to people who hate me, and who openly break the law seeking to harm me. I see no reason why that should be an acceptable state of affairs. You can happy-clap as much as you like, the culture war is real and continues to accelerate, and it will come for you soon enough no matter how far and fast you run.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
You want me to believe you can defeat the Federal government? I'll believe it the day you've actually done it. You want to convince me we can win a civil war? I'll buy it when you've actually fought and won it.
And until then, you'll insist that we shouldn't try, no? Every time we face a fight, you'll argue we should surrender rather than commit to it. Every time we win a fight, you'll argue we should surrender rather than capitalize on it. How is your position distinguishable from an argument that Reds can't coordinate, and that is a good thing? You are fully committed to the position that Reds can't coordinate, and that we shouldn't coordinate, and you've precommitted to that position regardless of any evidence short of absolute victory.
And what will need to come to pass, to convince you that escalation will fail?
Nothing. I believe that escalation against tyranny is self-justifying, regardless of outcome. If our fate is destruction, that is acceptable; we should fight for what is right regardless. If that fight provokes greater reprisals on the part of the tyrants, that is all the more reason to fight harder. Their tyranny is fundamentally illegitimate, and it is axiomatically good to fight them. Nor is it obvious why your preferred plan of suicide would be preferable; we're dead either way, aren't we? In that eventuality, if we're dead listening to you and dead listening to me, at least my way we go down fighting, which seems deeply preferable. If you think otherwise, you are free to follow your own counsel, but it's worth pointing out that there is no rational reason to prefer your policy, even if you are correct in how things will go.
Until you actually go to war, I'll keep on saying you're all talk, and it's all empty saber-rattling.
"there is no point where you'll actually go to war" is a reasonable prediction, and it's true that the only way to disprove it is to actually go to war. I do not think proving you wrong in an internet debate is a victory worth killing and dying over, so I'll refrain for now, and your prediction will continue to be plausible.
What is not plausible is your prediction that Red Tribe can't coordinate defiance short of violence, when it is in fact, observably, coordinating defiance short of violence, and at considerable scale. You and @The_Nybbler have been proven wrong on that score. You can retreat to the prediction that defiance won't work, to which I reply that time will tell.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
If that defiance doesn't keep escalating like you predict, but instead does "all fizzle out," and Red Tribe mostly backs down like Nybbler and I predict, what will you say then?
I'll say that you were right that non-violent defiance wouldn't work, and that we should escalate. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul" remains true. It also remains true that keeping one's soul does not appear to require pacifism. Belief in God cuts both ways: it means we see no reason to pursue victory at any cost, but it also means some of those "costs" are in fact acceptable. Faith in God does not preclude prosecuting war, nor inflicting the harms of war. There are no "horrors to come"; pain and death are the inevitable lot of all men, always have been and always will be.
knowing their can be no real victory in this world anyway, and the only reward to be sought is in the next life, which is why all atheists are Leftists by definition, right? (Again, this is from Hlynka.)
You've mangled the argument rather badly, but sure, close enough for purposes of this discussion. If Blue Tribe hegemony is destroyed, that will not in fact solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Destroying the Third Reich didn't solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Neither did grinding down the Soviet Union. Both were still the right thing to do, and worth the costs required to do them. In the latter case, Von Nuemann was wrong; beating the Soviet Union was not worth a nuclear exchange. We probably should have paid more than we did, but a full-blown nuclear war was not worth it to stop a tyranny that was, in fact, already doomed.
If the defiance accelerates and grows, are you and @TheNybbler going to admit you were wrong?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it.
Speak for yourself. Maybe that is the way you are. Maybe that is the way the people around you are. It is not the way I am, and it is not the way the people around me are. There's a decent argument that Rittenhouse single-handedly ended the Floyd riots, and he survived the Blues' attempts to crush him for it, and the attempts to crush him appear to me to have been costly for the Blues. They attempted to crush Kavanaugh, and failed. Gun owners refuse to comply with state and federal laws, and they get away with it. This is exactly the sort of coordination you and @The_Nybbler consistently claim doesn't exist, because you are both so black-pilled that you refuse to accept contrary evidence.
Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable.
Abbott defying Biden on the border requires significant organization. Gun owners refusing to comply with registration requires coordination. But in fact, you are fundamentally wrong about the level of coordination required to destroy our present society. The amount of organization required is effectively zero. It can be done with individuals alone.
Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Red Tribers coordinate on all sorts of things, from defying law to purging the Republican party.
As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities are a significant part of why I think small bands of hicks with rifles have a better chance than you allow. To my knowledge, they never did find the guys who shot up that substation, and that is an example of an attack that can be effectively carried out by one person alone.
In any case, no, I am not talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).
This is what I don't get. If we've already lost and the best thing we can do is to kill ourselves and spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come, why are the horrors to come horrors? You don't appear to believe in God, so once you're dead that's it, and none of this actually matters in the end. Even fighting, it really is not that hard to make sure you aren't taken alive, and then the horror is over. If you're right, we fight and they crush us, and this is worse... why? We're already doomed, no? What benefit is derived from quiet surrender? You already hate your life and want to die; how does surrendering to the blues improve any part of your situation? Why do you care about this question at all?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Your enemy holds the bureaucracy.
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet. The Bureaucracy tried to put Rittenhouse in a cell for the rest of his life, and he's a free man. The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
They hold the media.
The media are losing their influence, and in many cases their ability to even keep their doors open due to their entire business model going extinct.
They hold the vast majority of the corporations.
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
They hold Federal law enforcement and state law enforcement in many states.
And yet, those agencies can and have been successfully defied, and they can and have fought and lost.
And of course all big city law enforcement
And those cities continue to decay.
They don't actually have a plan. They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect. We are currently organizing that defection, and it is delivering tangible results. Your predictions have been consistent for some time, and increasingly they are being falsified by the actual outcomes. Your prediction was that Abbott would not be able to defy Biden on the border, but he did. Your prediction, I think, would be that Republicans would "compromise" and vote for the border bill, but we didn't. Resistance is not costless, but the costs can and are being borne.
Your tribe has paths for exit but no paths for entrance -- you may birth more young people but they end up rejecting you under the influence of the institutions.
Time will tell.
And most of your tribe respects all of those institutions despite their obvious capture.
Too much of my tribe does, it's true, but less and less each day, and the more we push resistance, the more obvious the problems with the system become and the less my tribe respects it.
When Trump is duly convicted in New York Kangaroo Court, a large number of your people will say "Well, the jury had more information than I do, so he must be guilty" or similar rationalizations to trust the institutions.
This is a prediction. Let's see how it goes.
Because the very idea that the institutions are utterly corrupt and should be defied is anti-conservative.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that Conservatism is on the way out. Again, Abbott and DeSantis seem to be going for open defiance. The gun culture is definately going for open defiance. Trump's supporters are going for open defiance. Maybe you're right and it will all fizzle out, but that does not appear to me to be the trajectory we're on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
We are not the imperial Japanese, and the Blues are not 1940s America. Should the Russian Whites have surrendered meekly to the Reds? My read is no, but again, our situation isn't Whites vs Reds either. We are actually in a much better situation, against a much less ruthless enemy. We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally. There is no rational basis for despair in the current situation.
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it.
The Reds I see around me are evidently capable of considerable coordination. You should at least consider the possibility that your personal experiences do not generalize.
They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply.
Your opinion is that I am a liar, because I have repeatedly stated that I believe that "2nd Amendment solutions" are both a possible and practical solution to the current situation, without providing details of how that would work. I've stated that I prefer being called a liar to providing those details, annoying as it is, because I'm still hoping the current push for peaceful defiance will work. But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government. I think you badly underestimate both the chances both of the hicks actually trying this and the possible effectiveness of the strategy if they do, but I believe I've stated a number of times that my understanding of "2nd Amendment solutions" does not consist of Red Tribers, singly or in numbers, fighting the government with their personal collections of small-arms. If that was the scenario I was expecting, I would be significantly less confident in success, though still not as pessimistic as you. But that is not, in fact, the scenario I think is likely, and my assessment of that scenario is not the source of my confidence. If the Blues find a genie that magically un-exists all guns in America, it would not materially change my estimate of our chances for overthrowing Blue Tribe. The Second Amendment and the firearms it is intended to protect are much, much more valuable as a coordination mechanism than for pure tactical advantage. The tactical advantages come from other vectors, vectors which neither you nor most others appear to have grasped. I think this is a good thing, because we might still be able to unwind this mess before people like you stumble across them, a whole lot of people die, and the lights probably go out for the forseeable future.
And the part I can't figure out is, what your actual position is. Let's say you're right about everything. I'm lying, and we have no chance. You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Not the current crop of Bureaucrats, certainly.
Bureaucrats do not create society or wealth. They are a necessary evil to keep the peace and prosperity that productive people build, and the "necessary" part assumes that they are not corrupt.
Our Bureaucrats are deeply, irredeemably corrupt. They are not necessary, only evil.
One of those options is to coordinate the withdrawal of consent from and the subsequent dissolution of the current system. It's a pretty good option, in my view, and apparently a lot of other Americans agree.
The standard Blue tactic is to isolate a situation and then drown it in "process". That doesn't seem to be working so hot any more. What else you got?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The mistake was allowing there to be "federal money" in the first place. The mistake was cooperation in good faith.
But in any case, no, it isn't crazy to accept taxpayer money and "expect to make your own rules". The federal money had a purpose: to fund education of youth. It should be available to any ruleset that can accomplish that purpose. "education" should not have been redefined according to partisan Blue ends, and the rampant failure of Blue educational systems to actually achieve that end should be a dealbreaker. Instead, the money that was allocated to a purported common purpose has effectively been embezzled. The common purpose is not achieved, and instead the money ends up funding a large class of Blue activists and propagandists.
But by all means, continue your blind appeals to processes that have evidently failed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Very few private educational institutions don't receive federal funding. Private means private-run, not exclusively-privately-funded, because we built a gigantic money pipeline for "our" "education system" back when people were still foolish enough to believe that resources could be shared.
If we try and you're wrong, then we win. If we try and you're right, then this creates common knowledge of the problem, which is useful for coordinating further escalation, which creates opportunities for an eventual win.
What's the alternative? If we don't fight, we definately lose. What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing? What's the outcome you're actually attempting to avoid, and how do your prescriptions actually lead to avoiding it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Nor should he be. When the Senate assassinates Caeser, it's bad news all around. When the Senate fails to assassinate Caeser...
But I think it's also good to minimize governing by the elastic clause as much as possible.
I'd agree with that. But suppose we want to allow people to respond to warnings, even to push back on them and explain why they think they're in the right, but we don't want people to outright defy warnings.
"respond", "pushback", and "defy" are all subjective terms. If we nail down a definition for them, we can just recapitulate this conversation again, about whether or not people were "defiant", or merely "pushing back".
If a mod says "you are breaking the rules, stop it," and the reply is "You aren't the boss of me, I'm gonna keep doing it", I don't think most people are surprised if the response is "okay, we'll cut to the chase and just give you a ban then." That doesn't seem to require a lot of elasticity. We give warnings because we want people to modify their behavior without having to ban them. We give limited-duration bans because we want people to modify their behavior without perma-banning them. If someone straight-up tells us that they aren't modifying their behavior based on the current response, escalation seems like a reasonable alternative.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Another way to engage with it might be, "if SpaceX fails in the future, where do we expect 'overregulation' to rank on the scale of expected causes?"
I would rank it pretty high.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
"Don't be egregiously obnoxious" covers both, I think.
No matter how careful we are, someone's going to come up with a way to be annoying, in a way that technically follows the rules. If we were to write a rule saying "don't do this thing", they would bend the rule to be as broad as possible, then complain that we're not enforcing it properly.
The goal of this community is not, however, slavish adherence to rules. It's discussion. And if this means we need to use our human judgement to make calls, then that's exactly what we will do.
There are people who think that every rule should be absolutely objective, to the point where our job could be done by a robot. I will point out that no legal system in history has ever worked this way and that if you think we can do better than the entire human race working on it for five thousand years, then I invite you to submit a proposal on how it will work.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Why is that certain?
Nothing is certain, but I'd say it's a very good bet. I'm pretty sure getting the public to comply with a draft requires more social trust than, in the words of the economist, "getting credit cards to work".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
That would be my rough assessment as well.
Blue Tribe excels at soft control, but that does not translate into hard control. They win when they can isolate a situation and then drown it in "process". You can't isolate a draft; it's everywhere and all at once. Likewise for firearms confiscation, or even firearms registration for that matter, or arresting state governors.
...You appear to be making the above argument about "oopsies" in this case. But of course, the agency in question has an absolutely horrifying history of previous "oopsies". @gattsuru covers a small selection of recent cases, and as he mentions, those aren't even top-ten contenders.
The FBI has been a deeply corrupt institution since the day of its founding. We actually know quite a few details about the sort of leader Hoover was, and the sort of organization he built. We know how that organization operated six decades ago, five, four, three. And then, somehow, the magical trustworthiness always appears for the current agency whose behavior we can only incompletely analyze, so they always get the benefit not only of the doubt, but of willful ignorance.
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