FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18hr ago
Also (...mostly...) correct.
...I guess the logic there is that a crisis hits, and the army has to pick sides? That's not a wildly implausible outcome, I suppose, but note how all action still routes through the state.
I just think you're going a bit far when Mr. Brexit is making a credible bid for prime minister, and you're calling it an "intra-Blue conflict".
Have you seen the clips where Farage categorically rejects the idea of mass deportations? He seems to be all-in on the idea that Conservatives have to find a way to convince the immigrants to vote for them, undergoing whatever self-modification would be necessary to gain immigrant votes. Alternatively, his claim that no one has done more than him to suppress the "far right".
There was a time when people would have laughed at the idea of calling George W Bush a Blue. But he is in fact a Blue, and was a Blue in the past as well, even if lesser polarization made that difficult to see. Him endorsing the democrats over Trump is in fact him being consistent to his tribal nature. Farage seems similar to me.
Society has been built on a lot of things for the entirety of its existence and right down to the then-present day, until people started to realise that it was wrong.
This would be a good argument if it came with evidence that people had, in fact, realized that it was wrong in some generalized fashion, as opposed to realizing it was wrong exclusively in the context of when they were on the bad end of the consequences.
I do not like the wokists' excesses either; that's why I came here!
A lot of people don't like a lot of things, and yet those things persist.
To the extent that the excesses of woke have been pushed back, they have been pushed back by tribal identity and tribal warfare. Vibes, papers and essays accomplished nothing; re-electing Trump accomplished much more. Opinions are irrelevant, what matters is what people are actually willing to do.
Because many (of at least the central examples of) hate crimes have two parts: the direct victimisation of one or a few individuals (e. g. a Black person beaten after registering to vote), and the threat to thousands or millions of others (other Black people deciding whether they ought to register to vote).
you are describing the pathway from the individual to the collective. You cannot actually quantify the collective impact of a crime against a black person in any meaningful way. Hate Crime laws do not attempt a rigorous analysis of the individual impacts; they simply assume collective impact and proceed from that assumption. And modulo some quibblings about strategy and focus, they are correct to do so: Collectives exist, matter, and must be managed if complex society is to continue existing. Naive atomic individualism is a delusion that cannot be sustained in the real world.
Which, if you are referring to Dresden and Tokyo, I do not condone. (If we hadn't done so, we could've added charges for Coventry to the Nuremberg Trials.)
Whether you condone it or not, our society clearly has condoned it, and will continue to condone it in the future. Your disapproval is a personal quirk, not a reflection of the moral structure by which our society maintains itself.
Well, first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.
"The poor will always be with you." Reality intrudes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
I believe a man that his marriage is happy as much as I believe a hostage saying that his captors treat him excellently.
Is it conceivable that evidence could convince you otherwise, or is this belief axiomatic?
Sort of. In terms of who gets listed in the 'factors leading to' paragraph in the history texts, it is reasonable to list $GROUP did $THING. In terms of who ought to suffer Consequences, one has a duty to make finer distinctions...
And yet, our society has been built on a sharply limited willingness to make such finer distinctions, in both war and peace, for the entirety of its existence and right down to the present day. I observe that such fine distinctions have been remarkably rare when it seemed desirable to coordinate consequences against my tribe for its perceived misdeeds. We've had affirmative action for generations. We've had hate-crime laws for generations. We've firebombed cities in wartime, we've bombed weddings in the present day. Justice has been apportioned in collective terms for generations, and routinely still is.
it is not appropriate to blame or ostracize an individual liberal for the murder of Mr Kirk if the liberal in question did not, after said murder, continue to call for violence against 'Nazis' without being clear which right-wing figures do and, more importantly, do not fall under that label.
It appears to me that most liberals fail that test, but leave that aside. Why should I even bother to disagree with this statement, as opposed to simply selectively quoting it verbatim when the shoe is on the other foot? I readily agree that it will be highly inappropriate to discuss any concept of Red Tribe's collective responsibility for the hypothetical future murder or abuse of Blue Tribers. I readily agree that the correct response to such attempts is a retreat into a fog of abstractions. In the meantime, it's very important that we take Online Radicalism and Stochastic Terrorism very seriously, and provide accountability to those who foment hate and extremism, so long as all definitions used in this process are mine and mine alone. If that seems like a bad system to you (and it should), you probably should have won the fight against Blue's attempts at full-spectrum social dominance. But neither you nor others won that fight; to the limited extent it was won, it was won by people like me, who burned most of our principles to make it happen. If on the other hand you considered their push for full-spectrum social dominance distasteful and gauche but ultimately acceptable, it seems to me that the correct response is to invite you to consider my tribe's pursuit of dominance in a similar manner.
...Or to speak more plainly, it's not even that you're wrong, it's just that you are incapable of drawing these distinctions fairly, much less enforcing them on society as a whole. Your principles may or may not be wrong, but they are certainly irrelevant because they have never and will never be implemented in the real world. What is, is.
Your statement:
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.
...indicates that you recognize that some ideological differences are marginal, and assert that some are significant. I am asking you why the Anarchists belong in the "significant differences" category while the Trotskyists do not, given that both Trotskyists and Anarchists followed what appear to me to be identical trajectories in the defining example of communist revolution.
If you want to map meaningful ideological differences, you first need to establish that they exist and are significant. Did Trotsky break with Stalin because their ideological models were incompatible and a dispassionate pursuit of sociopolitical truth through a rigorous Rawlsian veil of ignorance led them to tragically incompatible conclusions and thus to lethal conflict? Or was it a simple matter of it not being possible to share absolute power?
I would argue that ideology can matter in some instances. There are people who opposed both Communist Russia and Fascist Germany, and the Anarchists, and the Trotskyists, for consistent ideological reasons.
Then there are people who broke with the Nazis or the Soviets only because the leopard started eating their face in particular. The fact that a lot of these people were still carrying water for the Khmer Rouge or the Maoists in the 1970s indicates to me that it's not really about ideological details as such. If your ideology is based around the idea of unrestrained and unaccountable wielding of absolute power to secure good things and remove bad things, and that any negative consequences apparently caused by such wielding are either imaginary or the fault of counter-revolutionary forces that your ideology bears no responsibility for, as Enlightenment thought observably has for hundreds of years, then searching for deeper ideological motivations is hallucinatory. You seem to recognize this for Trotsky. Why is Kropotkin different?
I don't think that's fair. The European Red Tribe isn't going to look the same as the American one, and while the hard right has it's gripes with Farage, they aren't that different from the American hard right's gripes with the Republicans.
To give two examples, it doesn't seem to me that there's a European analogue to the Christian Right or to Gun Culture in terms of relatively-large, cohesive and politically-powerful subcultures. It seems to me that this is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, a distinct, cohesive, organized Red Tribe is the reason America is such an outlier politically from the European political scene. On the other hand, it means polarization and thus tribal conflict gets much worse, because legible structure makes coordinating large-scale, serious meanness much easier. And in America, the coordinated meanness is much further along the escalation spiral: we're actually trying to do mass deportations now, and Blues are actually coordinating terrorism to fight back against those efforts.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor. This is a risky bet, but the risk seems rational and acceptable to me, given their situation. However, a dominant variable in that calculation is that they don't really have much of a choice, because they have no legible path to victory other than that provided by electoral politics.
In America, by contrast, I'm willing to accept the left's electoral victory, for certain definitions of "accept" that do not preclude their leaders and agents being murdered by people on my side, in much the way they have been willing to "accept" my electoral wins, modulo murders of my leaders and agents by people on their side. That doesn't change the fact that if such murders happen to them, they are not going to accept it as I have, and instead are going to escalate to the limits of their capability, or the fact that I will support unlimited escalation in return. Electoral Politics is still plan A in both the European and American contexts, but American politics has a legible plan B, and both tribes having been in a degenerate orbit toward it for at least a decade now.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
What is the limit? How low can the republicans sink while the base stays loyal?
This current situation still appears better than the previous baseline.
Americans should do what the British are doing by abandoning the torries en mass
I would disagree. The UK can afford that better than we can because they are not as polarized; their current situation is a conflict within the local Blue Tribe analogue, with no significant Red Tribe to speak of. This lowers the pressure significantly, and allows maneuvers that are probably not survivable in our context.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.
Why not? Were anarchists not a core constituency of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution? Do Anarchists now not trace their lineage back to ideological progenitors who failed the Bolshevik test, just the same as the rest of the trotskyists and socialists and communists?
The truth, I think, is that the ideology is not and has never been load-bearing. Observably, where ideology has imposed unacceptable real-world tradeoffs, the overwhelming majority of leftist ideologues have ditched the ideology rather than accepting the losses. Ideology is a means to an end, nothing more.
Do collectives exist?
Can collectives do bad things?
If the answer to those two questions is "yes", then collective blame is a necessary concept.
If the answer to either of those questions is "no", then humanity and its history is rendered incoherent. What is war, without the concept of a collective? What is the Civil Rights era, without the concept of a collective? What is Womens' Rights? What is Communism? What is Islam? Christianity? Judaism, political parties, economic classes, modes of government, etc, etc?
If the answer changes depending on what is personally convenient to one on a moment-by-moment basis, then one is a liar.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
But much, much better than The Count of Monte Crisco.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
You did not believe Trump could win a second term, and argued vociferously that all was lost years ago. Is all more, less, or about the same lost as it was in 2024?
In any case, you have already concluded that I am a liar, and I have already concluded that you are incapable of being anything other than tiresome or dangerous, and that I prefer you tiresome.
But by responding straightforwardly and honestly, one can at least claim to hold principles instead of having to admit that they're calculating tribalists who make decisions based on tribal allegiances rather than principles.
What penalties do you observe for being a calculating tribalist who makes decisions based on tribal allegiance rather than principles? Do you observe these consequences to be uniformly applied? If I argue that being such a calculating tribalist is the correct response to the current situation, what would your counter-argument be?
And moving up a level, a tribe that accepts or even encourages its leaders to submit to such tribalism has to admit that it's a tribe that is merely trying to beat the Enemy because they're the Enemy, rather than following principles that they believe the government and society at large should follow.
By no means.
"Principles" are another way of saying "rules". To the extent that we use the term "rules", we use it to refer to legible rules. But it is not possible to construct a perfect, legible ruleset that covers all situations and contingencies, such that human judgement is obviated by a flowchart.
The point of society is to promote good things and suppress bad things. Values-coherence allows people to do this under generalizable rules which rely on those coherent values for grounding. When values are mutually-incoherent, this is no longer possible, and attempts at sticking to generalizable rules is signing up for exploitation without meaningful limits.
My perception is that the fact that there was even a single random blue-haired leftist who, when confronted with such a slogan, hemmed and hawed about dog whistles instead of straightforwardly and honestly answering, "OF COURSE it's okay to be white! I want white people to feel perfectly okay being white, and the principles and policies that I am (we are) pushing doesn't conflict with that in any way, so much so that if you or anyone else believes - incorrectly - that such a conflict exists, I will actively help you resolve that conflict, by crushing whatever might be making white people suspect that such a phrase is wrong" placed another chink in the armor that tribe was wearing.
How did this chink in the armor manifest, in your view? Obviously not only did a single activist do this, but it was the default response for Blue Tribe as a whole, with any dissent being exceedingly marginal and fringe.
People talk (foolishly, in my opinion) about Woke being dead. It is obvious to me that Woke did not "die" because principled moderates put it back in a box, but because Red Tribe burned many of its own principles to go all-in on tribal warfare, and turned out to have better terrain for it than the Blues. The moderates had more than a decade to fight, and in that time they accomplished nothing significant, fielded no champions, won no battles outside the context of Red Tribe treating the culture war as a war.
Trump will not last forever. A large portion of the Republican elite very clearly want to wash their hands of him and go back to the way things used to be. That is not an acceptable solution to Red Tribe, though, and every success we have had at securing our values has come from refusing to accept this exact sort of "moderation".
"It's okay to be white" was effective because Blues really do believe that it is not okay to be white. They could not allow themselves to let it stand.
"Stand if you disavow fascism" is effective not because Republicans won't stand, but because many of them will, not because they are notably less fascist than those who remain seated in any objective sense, but because they want the people making the demand to be nicer to them. In doing so, they weaken my tribe, and I hold them in contempt for doing so.
The basic fact is that at the object level, it is not the case that Blues have a problem with people being white in the same way that Reds have a problem with Fascism. The actual difference in tribal attitude and inclination cannot be handwaved, and while it is obvious that it cannot be agreed upon either, the current situation does not require agreement for things to proceed along their current trajectory. Speaking in broad generalities, it appears to me that Reds are not fascist to any significant degree, but Blues are actually quite racist against white people. Perhaps this perception is wrong, but if it is not wrong then it makes no sense to demand symmetrical responses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
The article I linked is a list of holders for the office of high priest. The last entry vacated his office in 70 AD.
Near as I can tell, there is no valid priesthood and there has not been one for nearly two millennia. There are, if the genealogical records are correct, people who satisfy the genealogical requirement to be a priest, but IIRC genealogy is not the only requirement, and there are a bunch of rituals and structures that are required as well, but are not now possible because the infrastructure is gone.
As an outside observer, it does not appear to me that the Law is being kept, or indeed that keeping the law is in any way possible. Obviously, Jewish opinion differs sharply, and that is their right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
As we've discussed at some length, I think they are badly mistaken in this assessment.
If Red Tribe needs the approval of the press to secure political victory, political victory is no longer a viable option and we will need to find alternative paths to securing our values. We have plenty of evidence of what results from cooperation, conciliation, compromise and capitulation to Blue Tribe. There is no road forward there.
Blues and "moderates" act as though if Trump could just be disposed of, all this ferment will go away. But the reality is that Trump is the moderate, mild voice of peace. If he fails, we will escalate until either we are destroyed or until we find a way to get the outcomes we consider necessary. Trump is an expression of the wicked problem of apportioning political power in a values-incoherent society, and not the progenitor of that problem nor meaningfully in control of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I were a Republican representative, I'd have no issue standing to such a question because i don't self-identify as a fascist.
I don't self-identify as a fascist either, but the label has been abused to the point that it is self-defeating to cooperate with its continued use.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
my point is that believing a people are "chosen" isn't an argument for giving them whatever they want. What if they behaved badly to the God who chose them, and thus are being punished by him?
C'mon.
Wikipedia's article on the subject appears roughly two thousand years out of date, if you have information I do not. A quick search indicates claims that some group has announced that they've appointed a new "high priest" recently, but gives no indication why I should consider this appointment religiously valid.
Also, Jewish prayers refer to the sacrifices in the Temple even if actual sacrifices are not possible.
Why would references to non-existent temple sacrifices in a non-existent temple satisfy the requirements of a Covenant that explicitly specified actual sacrifices in an actual tabernacle/temple? For that matter, why haven't they just fabricated a tabernacle? Not that this would be valid either, given the absence of the ark and the spirit of God seated upon it, but it would at least be a step in the correct direction, no?
I'm sure committed Jews have many answers to such questions, but I am not a committed Jew, and I am not required to believe as they do. My understanding is that the old Covenant was broken irrevocably with the destruction of the temple and the end of covenant practice in AD 70. If modern Jews disagree, that is between them and God. Meanwhile, the new Covenant I believe I enjoy with God has a number of requirements, but none command political support for a Jewish nation. This is all slop-millenarianism nonsense.
Yahweh is not synonymous with Jews. Yahweh frequently demonstrates his supremacy by cursing and punishing the Jews, according to the Jews' own scriptures. As for the Christian perspective, "We must obey God rather than men", told to the Jewish authorities by the fathers of the Church. Nor, IIRC, did the early Christians defend Jerusalem from the Romans, and there's a solid argument that they were following Jesus's instructions when they declined to do so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
In Genesis God promises Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse".
Yes. How does this promise to Abraham overwrite the numerous subsequent and far more detailed formal covenants God makes with the Israelites throughout the rest of the Old Testament? It is you and Mike Huckabee who are not taking the text seriously. Those of us who do are not greatly troubled by this notion, and have not been for centuries.
Carlson says "Oh I, uh, don't curse Israel because Gold told me not too, I just don't think Netanyahu is a real Jew or Israel is the Israel mentioned by God."
There is no particular reason to believe that post-sack-of-Jerusalem Judiasm is a valid continuation of the previous religion. There is likewise no particular reason to believe that the modern state of Israel is in any metaphysical sense the valid successor to the ancient state of Israel. The temple is gone. The Ark is gone. The Altar is gone. There are no sacrifices any more. There are, as far as I'm aware, no priests. No holy-of-holies, and so on. You are attempting to justify a scriptural interpretation that holds up one verse and shoves down a thousand other verses, as though this one verse were the entirety of the bible. This is a very bad way to do scriptural interpretation, but again, your interest does not appear to be in accurately understanding the will of God or even the text as a literary document, but exclusively pushing your monomaniacal agenda.
He is pigeon-holed into this anti-semitic canards that don't get to the truth of it: that is hostile foreign propaganda-myth, it's not true.
So he's stupid for believing his sort of anti-semitism when really he should prefer your sort of antisemitism? Have fun with that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, serious belief in Christianity does not require one to be a Zionist. The prominence of Christian Zionism is a historical fluke emerging from a confluence of social factors, it has largely run its course, and it will not, I think, be coming back in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Leviticus 26 is Yahweh telling the jews that if they fail to obey him, he will punish them grievously. Your model is that worship of Yahweh requires worship of the jews, but Leviticus 26 demonstrates that Yahweh himself states that the Jews suffering under a curse is part of his will. Why should I as a Christian commit to protecting Israel if God himself has stated it is his will that they not be protected?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
You don't need to go into new law/old law. the old law itself is incompatible with SS's claims.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
The most unfortunate part is that what you call the "strawman" of Christian Zionism is actually the only internally coherent position a Christian can hold...
This is an absurd statement on multiple levels.
As a bare existence proof, it's notable that most of the history of Christianity as a religion, it has not exhibited anything approaching the strawman behavior you are claiming is required for internal consistency.
In terms of actual theology, your claim appears flatly incompatible with the 26th chapter of Leviticus, as well as many, many, many other passages. You do not actually know what you are talking about even a little. You are hostile toward jews and you want everyone else to be more hostile toward jews; you say whatever you think will nudge those listening in the direction of greater hostility.
I meant in the sense that I'm neither a lower class Indonesian or a lower class white British man so I don't have a direct dog in the race.
One notes that it is possible to be interested in axes of identity other than class, and judging by your comment history it seems clear that you pretty clearly adhere to such interests, between a thin veneer of self-interested line-go-up markets cheerleading.
No reason why Amelia in the UK who has a job making and serving mediocre coffee should get paid any more than Mehmet making and serving mediocre coffee in Ankara.
Is Indonesia as wealthy per-capita as the UK? Is the wealth of Indonesia roughly equivalent in terms of concentration within the population? That would at least potentially be two reasons why Amelia should be paid more than Mehmet.
As one of those observers, and as someone strongly opposed to the previous foreign policy consensus, imagine the counterfactual world, where the US military was not in good shape, and we only found out about it after committing to a serious, high-stakes war with China, of the sort that has been generally assumed we were going to have within a decade.
One of the few silver linings to this whole debacle is getting an objective picture of our actual capabilities against a fairly serious opponent.
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