FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22hr 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
22hr 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
23hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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?
Given the facts of the matter up to the morning after, which I think you would agree ought to be the cut-off point, I do not think you or others can define a clear standard of behavior that would a) keep one on the correct side of the dirtbag line, and b) be even roughly compatible with the sex-positive liberalism that has ruled us all since the 60s.
The working definition of "slut" is one question. Whether this particular woman is a slut is a second question. A third question is whether we collectively are capable of object-permanence. We have been here before. Jackie's story, Mattress Girl, the Dear Colleague Letter, Believe All Women, TeamHarpies, Duke Lacrosse, the decade-plus abuse of Title IX, affirmative consent baked into state law... This isn't a conversation we could potentially have in advance, it's a conversation we as a society already had, in exhaustive detail. What the fuck are we doing here?
...I would rather this not be a tribal thing, but how is it not a tribal thing? "Woke 1 was so crazy, lol," so what is this?
Can you argue that even now, there's anything resembling a legible public consensus that group sex or gangbangs or whatever label we're applying here makes one "a dirtbag", such that these guys should have known going in how their behavior would be perceived? I'm not opposed to shaming everyone involved, hell, I'm all for it! But notably, that isn't happening, and I don't believe even now that any sort of actual standard is being set here. People are calling these guys rapists, and I see no reason to believe that they could have anticipated that label being applied to them given the choices they made. No one of any prominence is actually out there saying publicly that if you participate in a gangbang, society will collectively coordinate the ruin of your career and prospects. I think that would be a pretty good rule, but it needs to actually be a rule that people have a chance to internalize, not an ad-hoc result arrived at by lying about the particulars of a given incident!
As-is, the woman in this case appears to me to have the worst behavior, by far. She appears to have been a willing participant in the activities from beginning to end, and then tried to convert it into rape charges when she was shamed to a limited degree for her behavior. That is wildly unjust. I would prefer not to join either of the teams you mentioned, but I do not think there is a reasonable way to engage with the facts and the general social consensus without either endorsing injustice or coming down hard on this woman's behavior. If the answer is "Men need to be at permanent, severe, unilateral legal risk in all sexual encounters, and also we need to lie about this fact and its consequences forever", well, I don't think that's going to be a winning pitch going forward, but it would at least be honest, and therefore preferable to what I'm currently seeing.
At some point, some women in some situations are going to need to take an L, and the rest of us need to be okay with that.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
From which bills did the priors originate from?
They didn't originate from bills, but from my understanding of AI safety discourse, the version of that discourse being presented by the lab leadership, their calls for regulation, their market position, and the general way they've been generating "scary" AI incidents that don't seem organic and do seem to bolster their calls for "regulation".
Openai and Anthropic have both published blueprint suggestions that explicitly exempt anyone doing training runs below 10^25 FLOP earn less than $500M in AI revenue or spend less than $1B a year on AI R&D.
...how is this not a moat?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
what is an a16z type person?
More generally, I have a fairly embedded prior that the AI companies are in fact actively attempting to secure a regulatory moat, wherein they are the only companies legally permitted to provide AI services. Actions they've taken, particularly the "rogue" hacks, appear to me to fit this model quite well.
Am I being lied to? which bills are supposed to disprove this prior, and why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Cow Question
With the caveat that I do not follow Aella directly and am getting the gist third-hand, in the course of organizing prostitution-based social activities, she had prospective attendees fill out one of her sexuality questionnaires, with one of the questions being whether the attendees would prefer intimate relations with a live cow or a dead one.
I'd like to take a moment to comment on a bit of controversy below.
With the AI safety discourse escaping containment and what might be described as the cold light of day falling across Yudkowski's forlorn-hope coalition and its personalities and practices, we are treated to an actual test of how the Rationalist movement has done at systematizing winning, particularly in the subcategory of allocating weirdness points. From where I'm sitting, it doesn't seem they've done especially well. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, but it seems like arguing for "AI safety" you don't actually know how to secure via tools you absolutely can't be trusted to wield probably would be easier if you weren't also having to explain Aella and Slutcon and reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.
Scott Alexander, apparently feeling the pinch, decided to put his oar in:
Oh, you're worried about a Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult? You're scandalized that they consort with prostitutes? You think their message of compassion for everyone threatens normal bonds of family, community, and nation? Should we throw you a party? Should we invite Pontius Pilate?
This is certainly one of the defenses of all time. Alexander has always been witty, and I get the feeling, possibly mistaken, that he kinda swung for the fences on this one. "Kolmogrov Complicity" and "no one actually cares about monogomy" pretty much put a cap on my ability to respect his opinions, but he's had a tough road, even if much of his own making. Let him rest.
Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme, and that discourse has continued here on the Motte, in this thread. Several commenters spoke up in support of Scott's argument, and I think it might be best to address them collectively:
To those of you who thought Scott's argument was in some way a reasonable one, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of you either participated in or at least had a reasonable familiarity with the Atheist internet wars. Can any of you recall a single time in that era when you heard of a prominent Conservative Christian caught in a sex scandal, where you saw it argued in good faith that actually, getting caught with a hooker was fine, because Jesus also associated with prostitutes? Can you claim to me, with a straight face, that you would consider this, then or now, a reasonable defense of a Conservative Christian influencer attending an orgy? Why do you think that is?
It's one thing to argue that Christian rules are stupid. That's understandable from non-Christians, though it's kind of neat how the logic convolutes in cases like the Cornell 7. And it's understandable for non-Christians to heap scorn on Christians who fail to live up to Christian standards, and even to then scorn all Christians for having such standards. It's not charitable, and it certainly isn't rational or principled, but humans inevitably human. When the argument is that behavior that Christians find deplorable, behavior that Christians police other Christians over, behavior that non-Christians scorn Christians for engaging in when they're caught doing so, is actually comparable to the behavior of Christ, it's time to examine the question of what further discourse is actually expected to achieve.
Scott's argument is a contemptable language game. I do not believe Scott nor anyone else is actually confused about any of the particulars here. Jesus did indeed associate with prostitutes; he did not partake of their services, nor did he employ them on their backs for horizontal forms of evangelism-by-the-hour. Christians' moral objections to Aella's activities and to the Yudkowskiites' exploitation of them for tactical advantage are straightforward and unimpeachable from within the Christian frame. There are no meaningful parallels here to the life or ministry of Jesus Christ, and implying otherwise is merely a demonstration that Scott and those agreeing with him are willing to say pretty much anything if they perceive tactical utility in doing so.
I do not accept that the Yudkowskiites or the "Effective Altruism" movement they have parasitized are offering a "message of compassion" any more than Aella or her cohort would accept that I am motivated by genuine concern for their welfare and eudaemonia, no matter how (sincerely!) I might argue that this was the case; we do not share anything remotely resembling coherent values, and it seems to me that one of the prerequisites to even attempting communication across that divide is to refrain from this sort of chicanery. My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed, and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid, together with some fairly-good short-term misery amelioration of questionable sustainability and a lot of intelligent, sensitive humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare.
There's likely more to say, but why bother when people can simply pretend to not understand?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
What I'm asking for is more recognition from others that free speech must ultimately involve trade-offs which different countries are handling in different ways, and less chimping out from certain people (not you @KMC) about how America is glorious land of Free Speech and England/Europe is a contemptible tyranny.
I'm split here. On the one hand, I consider the concept of "Free Speech" to be about as thoroughly discredited as a theoretical construct can possibly be.
On the other hand, it seems to me that Speech is in fact significantly freer in all the ways I value in the US than it is in Europe, and further than to the extent that speech continues to be free in ways I value in Europe, it is heavily dependent on material and ideological support from America to maintain itself. It seems to me that speech-hostile-from-my-perspective European and American governments have repeatedly recognized this reality and taken serious steps to attack American speech as a necessary step to stronger speech controls in their own areas.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
given that the farmer is now publicly embarrassing them by contradicting the official account and reporting that the government hasn't contacted them for a witness statement, I'd say probably no.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I have a backlog of replies from @FCfromSSC and others that deserve thoughtful responses but my emotions have cooled and I don't really want to get into more arguments this second.
I'd definitely be interested in them if you ever wish to continue the thread. My replies this time around were prompted at least partially by your comments on the subject some months ago. These things take time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
do you know of any publicly-accessible scrapes of the old subreddit?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Hobbyist gun-owners face gun-abolition threats from Dems precisely because 2nd amendment nuts oppose sensible limitations on mentally ill and untrained gun-owners.
Name a sensible limitation on mentally-ill and untrained owners.
Read Lamentations or the Prophets sometime, or the last five chapters of Judges. Or if the New Testament is preferred, Jesus cleansing the temple is overdone as a reference, but there's no shortage of other examples in the gospels ("brood of vipers", sons of satan) from Christ himself, or if you prefer something a bit more visceral, there's always the Whore of Babylon.
Your observation fits me as well, I think. On the Red side, there is a pervasive sense that things are very bad and probably going to get a lot worse, and that very likely it is not going to be possible to do anything about it. It's acutely frustrating from the Christian perspective because, as many of us see it, Christianity and the Christians in it have been trying to accommodate the secular world for quite some time now, trying to find some way to fit the secular image of what Christians are supposed to be, and at this point it seems pretty clear that this was never going to be possible and many of the compromises we made appear to have been foolish in the extreme. On the one hand, this world is not our home, and so the amount that the present decline can matter to us ought to be sharply limited. On the other hand, we do have to live through it, and it does seem quite woeful.
When I was young, I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. When I got into my teens and started grappling with theological questions seriously, all the social push was toward Liberalism; we looked at the previous generation, and we asked, "isn't this too rigid and hidebound, too legalistic, too dogmatic?" We looked at a structure that claimed it was the one correct way to be a Christian, and we asked, "Is it really plausible that the codified rules of this one group of churches in late-90s southern America is the only way to follow Christ?"
Looking back, that question was dishonest in several ways, but none of us noticed at the time, and we, for lack of a better term, declined to harden into the shape the previous generation sketched out for us. If all humans fail, sin, go astray, then no church has ever been what Jesus wanted us to be. If we presume that at least some Christians are doing the job that Jesus laid out for us, then it follows that the job does not require perfection, and further that there must be a channel of acceptable Christianity, not a single line. And so we, well to the conservative side, opened up to the idea that those further out from us might nonetheless also be Christians attempting to follow Christ to the best of their knowledge and ability. Despite the questionable starting point, it seems to me that this was a good conclusion to arrive at.
Coming back to the church after some years away, though, I noticed that this logic only ever ran one way. It was always applied from a "conservative" position toward "liberal" positions, but I noticed how neither I myself nor anyone around me ever ran this logic the other way, to the people more conservative than ourselves, whether in the previous generation or throughout history. We were open to considering the idea of a looser Christianity being valid, but not a tighter one. We entertained the idea that the Unitary Universalists might be in some way valid Christians, but never the Westboro Baptist Church. I get why the secular world might prefer it to work this way, but it's not clear to me why, from a Christian perspective, drawing the boundaries much too tight ought to be considered a worse failure than drawing them much too loose. If Christianity is a channel, and perhaps even a wide channel, why suppose that the center of that channel is the midpoint between modern liberal and conservative Christians, rather than somewhere like the midpoint of all Christians since Christ? Should one argue that the only true understanding of Christian love, charity, etc is the one from some particular tribal slice of post-2000s American Christianity?
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.
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